devil 03 - tween hearts fire and devils delight Read Online Free PDF Page B

just do a cyber-lease for a few months until you figure out what you want?”
    I nodded. Whatever.
    Emo left my office to find me a temporary air vehicle and Flick, finally picking up on my mood, sat silently in the chair across from me. I stood up under the weight of his gaze and walked over to the large window behind my desk.
    Outside the window, daylight was sliding into night under a heavy mist. As I peered into the dim distance, my eyes caught the occasional sparkle of light in the mist. My mind flitted from one thing to the next and didn’t really register anything outside the window.
    I felt Flick’s presence beside me at the window but didn’t turn.
    “Can you feel it?”
    I rubbed absently at my wrist and kept my gaze in the distance, my eyes unfocused, deeply held by my thoughts. “Feel what?”
    I heard the rustle of his robes as he shrugged. “The change in the air? Something’s brewing out there. Something big.”
    I turned and focused a questioning gaze on him. “I hadn’t noticed.”
    He shrugged. “I have.”
    I watched him carefully for a few beats and then returned my gaze to the window, seeing the view beyond it with different eyes. The sky was a deep purple color that seemed slightly off. It was entirely cloudless but flashes of lightning pierced it with a regularity that spoke of storms in the distance. Each lightning bolt left behind a kaleidoscope of sparkles as the mist picked up the illumination and played it back in a thousand points of light.
    It was pretty. But it was somehow wrong too.
    Deciding that I was being overly sensitive in a backlash from the adrenaline cocktail I’d just imbibed in the skies above Angel City, I did a mental shrug and turned away from the window. “Well, I need to get back to work. I’ll catch you later.”
    Flick accepted his dismissal behind the usual calm smile. “In His name, Astra.”
    I sat down behind my desk and bent to the work piled on its untidy surface. I heard the small pop that told me he had left and then sat back in my chair, scrubbing a hand down my face wearily. The day’s events had rocked me in ways that I couldn’t begin to explain.
    My brain roiled with thoughts and my heart with emotions that I didn’t have the energy to explore too closely. Something was definitely going on with my sister…something more than just falling in love. And Angel City seemed to be functioning under some kind of black cloud, metaphorically speaking. Magical attacks certainly seemed to be escalating. My thoughts swung to Flick’s melodramatic question from moments before.
    Can you feel it?
    I swung around in my chair and looked beyond the streaked glass to the churning sky above Angel City. Maybe he wasn’t being melodramatic. Maybe something was coming. And whatever it was, its precursors told me it wasn’t going to be good.
    I shivered under a sudden premonition of danger that made me shake my head at my own capacity for melodrama.
    “You’re just being stupid,” I told myself. Then I went back to my work, trying to ignore the low-level hum of intuition that was causing my skin to bubble into gooseflesh.
    Almost without my noticing, my fingers returned to my wrist and resumed rubbing.
     

Chapter Three
    Can You Feel It?
    The Devil walked beside young miss and bade her to attend,
    Our lady acquiesced in form but did his foul intent forefend.
     
    I had thought my injuries from my altercation with the dragon were manageable but, by the next day, despite my attempts at healing them through my own magic, I was still battling a throbbing pain in my head that made me think I should probably see a doctor. And there was the achiness in my wrist that was starting to bother me more and more.
    So I climbed into the small, non-aerodynamic air booger that Emo had leased for me and winced as my butt hit fake, cracked leather. The instrument panel was a nifty fake wood and the glass in my viewing screen wasn’t actually glass but…you guessed it…fake glass,