Deidre's Death (#2, Rhyn Eternal) Read Online Free PDF Page B

never cried as a goddess. Ever. Why was
she crying? There were too many emotions for her to identify them,
but one of them – or all of them? – caused the tears. Frustrated,
she realized she wasn’t able to control whatever it was.
    Gabriel left. The door closed behind him.
Her Gabriel was gone.
    The pain settling into her was of a
different kind. It had no physical source, but it hurt her
physically nonetheless. She was hardly able to draw a deep breath
through her tight chest. A new emotion formed. It felt much like
dread. She rested back on the bed and cried.
    The tears stopped of their own accord after
a while, and the calm of her mind brought back her focus.
    She gave up her power, her domain, and her
entire life for this opportunity. She didn’t factor Gabriel’s
transition into Death into the equation. She didn’t factor her
transition into a human, either. The overload of emotions, the
inability to read Gabriel’s mind to find out what he thought, so
she knew what to say or do.
    How did she win him, if she had to guess
what he was thinking? How did she win him, if she wasn’t able to
control the human feelings?
    Trust? As a goddess, she had no need for
those around her to trust her. They feared her, and this was what
kept them in check.
    Gabriel didn’t trust her. This made her hurt
more. After all their years together, he didn’t trust that she
would do what she had to in order for them to be together.

     
     

Chapter Three

     
    The night before, he’d left his dying mate,
praying he was able to save her life. This morning, he left a
perfectly healthy woman – who looked like his mate and wore the
Immortal mating tattoo – and yet was distinctly different.
    Gabriel was still reeling from the sudden,
inexplicable changes in his mate and the admittance by Deidre that
she had made a deal with Darkyn. Maybe he should’ve felt it. He
noticed something … missing the night before, soon after he left
her. The instinct was nothing more than a tiny warmth at the edge
of his mind. He barely noticed it was gone until this morning, when
it abruptly reappeared. He was able to sense her presence once more
without knowing she’d been gone from his reach for an entire
night.
    What if she was in danger? What if Darkyn
hadn’t let her go? If he noticed her absence soon after it
occurred, would he have been able to follow and stop her deal with
Darkyn?
    Right now, the only thing that made much
sense was killing shit.
    Gabriel hacked at the demon before him then
straightened. Chest heaving, he gazed around the meat locker to
assess how many bodies were present. Immortals and death-dealers
battled the remaining demons at the warehouse-sized storage
facility where the demons had been gathering the human dead.
    There were hundreds of them. He sheathed his
weapons, grim at the discovery. Rather than taking souls and
risking a run-in with him or his dealers, the demons snatched the
dead or killed whomever they wanted and brought them here, where
they’d have more time for soul extraction.
    “Clear!” one of the Immortals shouted from
the far end.
    “All good,” Landon, Gabriel’s
second-in-command, told him.
    “Count and collect,” Gabriel ordered.
    Landon issued the orders through the mind
message system. Gabriel moved through the meat locker, unaffected
by the cold after the half hour battle.
    “Fifty four dead demons, three hundred dead
mortals,” Landon reported after a few minutes. “Fifteen dead
Immortals, three dead dealers.”
    “Damn.” Gabriel’s attention was caught on a
faint green glow on a table in the middle of the stacks of dead
bodies. He crossed to it and saw a shallow bowl filled with water.
The glowing green gems on the bottom were souls the demons had
extracted. “This isn’t three hundred souls. Maybe twenty.” He
lifted a small soul-tracking device off the table, a round compass
whose edges were lined with symbols from a dead language too old
for him to read.
    “They’re picking