Dark Time: Mortal Path Read Online Free PDF

her awareness.
    Something was chipping away at centuries of indifference to the fate of her targets, bringing back scenes from her past.
    She went back to her village at night a few years after becoming Ageless. She didn’t go to see if Nathan had taken up with another woman, or to see Patience and George enjoying their married life and sweet child. She went to the cemetery. As powerful as she’d become, the sight of the small gravestone felled her and she crawled on her knees and kissed it. Constanta, it said. If Nathan had done nothing for Susannah in her time of greatest need, at least he’d claimed his daughter’s corpse, given the baby the name they’d agreed on, and insisted that Constanta have a rightful burial.
    Susannah sagged a little. The memory was as visceral as a punch to the stomach.
    “I’m ready,” Ledger said.
    His words jarred her into the present.
    There was an old pickup truck parked behind the farmhouse. A few minutes later, the two of them were on the road.
    Susannah felt almost giddy. She’d found a loophole in Rabishu’s orders and used it to save a life—and it felt good. The demon’s next assignment would be locked down tight with no wiggle room, but for now, it was plus one for the Black Ghost.

Chapter Four
1955
    S usannah strolled through the summertime exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s work at the Musée du Louvre.
    The multilingual crowd chattered, some offering their interpretations of the paintings, some gossiping about Picasso’s mistress, who appeared as Madame Z among the paintings. Children brought “for the culture” swarmed in a second layer below the adults’ heads, like lizards scampering through the understory of a rain forest.
    Susannah listened in on conversations in a dozen languages and studied the great man’s paintings.
    She loved the museum, beginning with her first experience of it in 1810, at the marriage of Napoléon and Marie-Edwarde, his second wife.
    Susannah had come to the Louvre every year to study and keep up on cultural trends. Since the Smithsonian Institution had come into existence, in the mid 1800s, she went there for intensive study, too, alternating years with the Louvre. It was an odd feeling to see objects that had been part of her daily life show up in the Smithsonian’s American History Museum, including a table that bore her name carved into the top by her husband’s hand. She added other museums to her travels, in London, Cairo, Madrid, St.
    Petersburg, wherever the great collections settled.
    A visit to Paris usually lifted her spirits. By day she visited familiar attractions; at night she walked the streets of Paris, taking the pulse of the city. Frenchmen came up to her, boldly asking for her company, and if she declined, they tipped their hats to her and left to try their luck elsewhere.
    Leaving the Picasso exhibit, Susanna found an unoccupied bench in a niche at the end of a hall.
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    Here, in a building where the elusive peace she craved seemed closer than elsewhere, she wanted time to think.
    On the surface, her life was ideal. Wealthy, beautiful, intelligent, sensuous, secure from physical harm, she could and did travel the world, living high, leaving a trail of lovers who never touched her heart.
    Except that someone else died so I could cheat death. Many someones. I’m living the way I do by dancing on their graves.
    Taken as a package, the skills Rabishu gave her and the ones she’d acquired resulted in a tremendous
    — okay, unfair —advantage over human opponents. Her assassination targets never stood a chance. In the early days, that had made it easy for her to objectify her targets. But Ledger hadn’t been an object.
    Neither had a target— victim —of an earlier assignment who remained vivid in her mind.
    She let herself sink into the memories of Loon Lake, the place that had broken the bands imprisoning her heart.
    A long time ago now, over thirty-five years…

    S usannah had been in the