Captive Soul Read Online Free PDF

escape.
    Damn me .
    Strada had gotten away. Duncan had gotten better. John Cole was gone forever to wherever spirits went after their bodies died.
    I looked in that demon’s eyes, and they were John Cole’s. The demon spoke to me in John Cole’s voice .
    And it had to have been a trick. A brilliant move on Strada’s part to save his demon ass.
    But the way he looked, the way he smelled, that voice …
    Camille wanted to pound her head on the ground.
    The man who’d been following her tonight, she did know him. But she couldn’t, because he couldn’t possibly have been there. Camille was as sure of that as she was of the skyscraper lights, her earlier sense of being followed, and the fact that she shouldn’t be patrolling alone.
    Camille didn’t have a clue what else to do, so she curled up on the grass and hugged her knees to her chest.
    The man who’d been following her tonight couldn’t have been there, because that man—the one man she had ever really, truly, deeply touched, even if only for one literally shining moment inside a shimmering golden cloud of madness—had died a year ago.
    And Camille had just let Strada, leader of the Rakshasa demons, play her all over again.

(  2  )
    Jesus, but seeing that woman up close and personal again felt like torture.
    He kept moving, through Central Park, around Central Park, because he didn’t know what else to do. John Cole—on the inside, even if the outside was not what anybody might expect—got far enough away from her that he thought he could keep himself from following her as she headed home. Then he dropped onto a bench on Balcony Bridge because one place was as good as another.
    He leaned forward and let his head hang toward his knees, but that didn’t block his view of the darkened walkway at his feet. In the strange night lighting, it seemed like a cracked stone slab, and his mind flashed on the entrance to that godforsaken temple in the mountains of Afghanistan near Kabul, which he and others had explored during the war. The scorch marks. The heat fissures.
    Looks like it got cooked . That’s what he’d said to one of the ten men from Recon who went with him and the contingent of Vatican priests. Then, to his commander, Jack Blackmore, in lower tones, What the hell are we doing here, Blackjack? What are all these high-level priests doing here? They won’t tell me anything, and I’m supposed to be one of them .
    Standing orders . Blackjack had eyed the big stone door with its burn marks, top to bottom. Twilight made the rock look like it was still on fire. In the distance in the big valley around the temple, John saw shadows and more stones. The ruins of an ancient village? More like a city.
    We’ve had a description of this place since we hit the ground , Blackjack had added. Straight from military intelligence. They left details on what to do if we found it . After another few seconds, Blackjack said, I think the orders are old. Like, passed down for decades. Maybe centuries .
    Great . John remembered thinking that. Old orders about some ancient temple. That can’t be good .
    Blackjack had pulled out then, taking half of Recon with him to seal the valley and deploying the rest to form a perimeter around the temple. John’s instructions were simple enough: get the priests into the temple, let them do whatever it was they had to do, then get them back out again. Recon would escort them back to the valley’s mouth, then they’d all beat it back to camp before they got their asses shot off.
    Only it hadn’t quite worked out that way.
    Stop .
    Leave it alone .
    John refused to let the tension in his neck and shoulders get worse. He wouldn’t let the memories roll over him again, not here, not now. Too many years and too many miles ago, not that he’d ever get the war or the Valley of the Gods out of his mind and heart, no matter how far and how fast he ran, and no matter how much he tried to atone.
    Camille—she was like that, too. Lodged