Blood Redemption (Angel's Edge #3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

shrugged my consent, but began to pull away again when Jack snatched up my hand. “Look, I need to be touching you when we actually travel between dreams.” He sounded as if what he was proposing was the most natural thing in the world.
    I slipped my hand back in his, and tried to keep up with his easy loping stride.
    “What are those lights scattered around?” I asked, wondering if it was possible to trip in the ether. If it was, I was sure it was going to happen to me.
    Jack pulled me a little faster. When I squeezed his hand in protest, he reluctantly slowed again.
    “Those are what I’m trying to show you,” he said, bright and eager as a seven-year-old at his birthday party. “Those are other people’s dreams. Come on, sometimes you can catch a glimpse from the surface, so you don’t have to actually enter the dream.” He nodded to the patch of light closest to us. “You’ll see,” he promised smugly.
    As we drew closer to the glow, I saw that it was more a collection of images than an actual light. I stopped when Jack did, and watched the procession of pictures. A greenish lake shimmered in the setting sun. It vanished, followed quickly by a kindly, smiling old man. He was sitting beside a young boy who couldn’t be more than eight or nine; they were fishing together. It seemed like a sweet dream. “How can we tell which one of them is asleep?” I asked.
    “There’s no real way to know without stepping into the dream itself,” he said. “It could be either of them, or it could be someone else entirely. There’s no way to tell for sure, and I doubt you want to spend the time to find out right now.”
    “No, I want to get to Whitfield,” I insisted, for what felt like the millionth time that day. Jack began pulling me behind him again.
    I noticed something new in the ether, something that could have been easily overlooked. Not far from the bright bubble of the dream we had just seen, hovered what looked like a dark storm cloud. The colors were just a little deeper than the eternal twilight of Belial’s kingdom, and they writhed like living things. “What
is
that?” I demanded, involuntarily jerking myself free of Jack’s restraining grip.
    “Oh.” His face fell. “I was hoping we wouldn’t see one of those. Someone’s having a nightmare.” He squinted. “A bad one, by the looks of it.”
    Intrigued, I inched closer. A figure lay huddled along a short bench made of wooden planks. Long hair fell free from the hood of a tightly wrapped cloak; probably a girl. The cloak appeared to be the only blanket she had. The walls dripped with water and slime; a single guttering candle served as the lone light in the room. The candle did nothing for the corners of the room, which writhed with shadows and flickering images. The girl cried out from her bench as one of the shadows formed into a creature almost as tall as the low ceiling. Red eyes pierced the black and fangs dripped with some kind of venom. It stayed confined to the shadows, not venturing near the weak circle of light surrounding the girl, who began crying at its appearance.
    It was a pitiful, thin kind of cry like the girl had already had all the tears wrung from her and was struggling to come up with more. She sat up and pushed herself as close to the wall as she could, fixated on the horrible dream monster.
    That was when I recognized her.
    “Hey!” I said, shock warring with anger. “That’s the girl who brought the Hellhounds. Caroline Bedford! That’s the girl who set me up and maybe burned down my town, too!”
    Jack’s reaction surprised me. He stared at the unfolding nightmare. “I wish I could do something to stop it,” he murmured. “God knows she’s suffered enough.”
    I said nothing, torn between pity for the child I now recognized as a fellow Nephilim, and anger at her former actions. But even through my anger, I couldn’t stand to see a child tormented. “Why don’t you, then?” I asked softly.
    “Because she