Ash & Flame: Season One Read Online Free PDF Page A

welcome."
    Ren took her hand. "Name's Ren." He let go of her hand and motioned towards Emma. "And sleeping beauty over there is my daughter, Emma."
    "Yes, I've met her already." Anne looked over her shoulder at Emma. "Such a sweet little girl."
    Ren couldn't mistake the hint of sadness in her eyes. He knew what it meant, so he let the question on his tongue drop. Wouldn't do him or her any good to ask it.
    Instead he grabbed one of the fillets off the plate, pulling a piece of meat from the lean strip, and took a bite. He couldn't help the contented sigh that escaped his lips at the taste of it. It'd been a long time since he'd had fresh fish.
    He almost considered waking Emma to eat, but she looked so peaceful that he decided he'd let her snooze a little bit longer.
    "So," he said around another mouthful. "You're pretty much the first smiling face I've seen in months. So how about you tell me where we are?"
    "That depends," Anne said. She leaned back against the wall, crossing her arms over her chest. "Where are you from?"
    "Where I'm from?" Just names now, those old places, ruined shells where people used to live. And the big city? It wasn't even worth mentioning. Ren worried that if he even thought about his old home, the hideous, unnatural things that now took up residence there might hear him.
    The visions of the city imploding on itself, the cracks of the earth, the eruptions as St. Louis fell into the flames of Hell, would always haunt him. He shuddered at the image in his mind of the ruins and the twisted spires that rose up out of the city's remains to lay claim to this little corner of Hell.
    They'd called it the Hellfont. Home to the demonic, and the warped humanity that served them, and its touch spread over everything like maggots on rotting meat.
    He set the half-eaten fillet down on the plate. He wasn't all that hungry anymore.
    "I'm from up north." Where he was from no longer existed. Up north was as close as it got.
    "Well, you're in Haven now."
    Haven . Ren had heard Kevin tell him earlier, but it hadn't really registered, not until now. All those rumors, the running, the searching, and it had taken a stroke of luck to find it. A stroke of bad luck, the demons catching up with him and Emma. Only he hadn't found Haven, it had found him somehow.
    Anne smiled. "I take it you've heard of it?"
    "Yeah, I’ve heard of it," Ren said, nodding. "Heard of it so much that me and Em spent the better part of the summer looking for it."
    What he hadn't heard of were demons with fancy names, or assholes wielding fiery swords.
    Emma rolled over and yawned, her eyes still closed. She stretched her arms over her head, and her nostrils flared. She'd probably caught the smell of food.
    "From what I heard, you were lucky they found you when they did," Anne said. "We don't see too many survivors anymore."
    "And who's we? I haven't been able to get out much the past couple of days," Ren said. "My barometer before you was Kevin. And I'll be honest, that bar was set pretty low."
    Anne laughed at that.
    "Look, Kevin is wound up pretty tight at the best of times. He feels responsible for all of us here—"
    "Is that how he got that magical sword of his?"
    "No." Anne shook her head. "No, Kevin proved himself, and the Malakhi blessed him with a holy weapon."
    "You're all going to have to stop throwing these words at me." Ren threw his hands up, like Anne was a speeding freight train, and he was trying to slow her down before she ran him over. "What the fuck is a Malakhi?"
    Anne frowned. "An angel."
    "You can't just call an angel an angel , can you?" Ren tried to keep the growing frustration from his voice. He knew from the look on Anne's face that he'd failed. "And this Malakhi gave Kevin, a regular old human, a flaming sword? What did he do?"
    He had so many questions he wanted to ask. What was an angel doing here, among humans? How many lived here? How had they survived, living so close to the malignant shadow of the Hellfont?
    "Come."