All Hallows Night (Night Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

have depicted them to be. But uninterrupted they didn’t usually go around leaving disfigured corpses in their wake. If they were gonna eat ya, trust me, there’d be nothing left. Sort of like lions in the wild, they didn’t kill for fun.
    I flipped through the pictures of bodies, most of them with limbs missing and heads cracked open, brains oozing out of them, reminding me a little of a mealy watermelon, except more putrid-looking.
    I’d seen worse.
    Lifting a brow, I flipped to a particularly gruesome image of a desiccated corpse, maybe in his fifties. I had to judge that strictly off the liver marks on his hands. His head was gone—there was only a neck, a torso, two arms, and one leg. None of it attached, however. The rib cavity had been cracked open and two of the ribs had clearly been gnawed on.
    “Lovely.” I slipped the picture back into the folder. “They’re getting a little sloppy though, aren’t they? Not usually their style.”
    “Mm.” Grace nodded and smoothed her silvery-white flyaways.
    She obviously wasn’t in the mood to make small talk, and honestly, neither was I. This was straining the limits of my patience. “Orders?”
    Shaking her head, her gaze turned back to me. What was making her so damned distracted? Stretching my senses, I listened for the not so obvious. Last time I’d been to one of Grace’s safe houses, I’d failed to note the portal to Hell she kept hidden in her bedroom. Clues like that would have spared Kemen his life, would have made me realize who my true enemy was.
    I wasn’t making that same mistake again.
    It was a common misconception that the entrance to Hell was coated in fire. Not true. Hell was cold. Bitterly, brutally cold. The type of cold that sank into your lungs like a parasite and froze you from the inside out.
    I’d experienced that type of cold only once in my life, but ever since Pestilence infected me, my body was acting weird. Because the next time I’d come across the portal, I’d felt nothing. Not a buzz or flicker of awareness. That same nothing was what I was feeling now. I got the feeling that I could no longer sense it because Pestilence had been a full-blooded lower-caste demon who wouldn’t register Hell as anything other than home, permanently nullifying my ability to feel for it.
    Jutting my jaw, I realized I should have asked Luc to attach the infrared. We’d discovered that pure-blooded demons—Lower Caste and High Caste, or LCDs and HCDs—and the Nephilim transmitted color on a different spectrum and that tiny black box had also picked up an anomalous marker when I’d walked into Grace’s home. In hindsight we figured out that what it had actually picked up was the gateway.
    If I hadn’t been so freaking determined to get away from Luc this afternoon, I might have thought this through sooner rather than later.
    “Aye.” She nodded and then shook herself like a dog coming back to its senses. “The zombies. Hives rarely stay put in any one place too long, it’s how they have successfully managed to remain hidden in big towns. But the circumference of their movements has been fairly consistent. The very final picture is an aerial shot of the Sierra Madre range.”
    Yanking the picture out, I studied the overhead and widespread shot of rugged peaks and winding valleys dotted over with shrubs and trees.
    “They are somewhere within the red circle.” Her fingers fluttered in the direction of the picture.
    “Grace, our carnival is parked at least a day’s travel from this area.” My impatience was clearly evident.
    Her look was bland as she said, “Dora, you know Mexico like the back of your hand. It is nothing for you to work the carnival at night and search out the network of caves during the day.”
    My nostrils flared at the implication. “Alone? That’s what you’re saying, right?”
    Did she think I had stupid tattooed on my head? Did she really think for a second that I would just blindly walk into another trap?