Fallen

Fallen Read Online Free PDF

Book: Fallen Read Online Free PDF
Author: Christina Skye
it.

     
    Maddie didn’t walk with any particular plan in mind. She was savoring the sheer novelty and energy of London at night. Buses roared past and it began to rain.
    She would have liked to stop for coffee, but she didn’t have any cash, as Teague had so helpfully pointed out. No credit card either.
    She shoved her hands into her pocket, shivering in the damp air. London was colder than DC. As the temperature began to fall, the number of people on the streets thinned. She walked on in the night, listening to distant car horns and sirens, feeling her steps merge into the rhythm of the city at night.
    Across the street she saw an ornate metal gate above a high stone wall. The metal designs were intricate and very old, and for some reason they called to her. She had nothing else to do anyway.
    A hint of fog drifted through the trees beyond the gate, and Maddie’s eyes froze. The gray waves poured over the old stones, almost transparent.
    And it was normal fog, Maddie noted. Only dampness and precipitation. Not the other kind of fog, the kind that left her white faced and shaking.
    She crossed the street, admiring the stone carvings of ornate roses mounted on some kind of old shield. Heraldic, isn’t that what it was called? More of that Medieval stuff. That made Maddie remember the weird question Teague had asked her about the Crusades. What did the Crusades have to do with national security?
    The night was silent and she slowed her steps, reaching up to trace the intricate petals of a stone rose. Some kind of a figure was carved above the rose, she saw. An animal? A man?
    In the darkness it was impossible to tell.
    Fog curled around her hand, veiling the wall, and Maddie drifted into an odd reverie. There were no sounds of footsteps or people nearby. She felt no sense of danger as the fog parted for a moment and she looked down a long row of ancient trees, where neat gravel paths wound past old metal benches. Ornate clay planters held lush roses that spilled across the ground, perfuming the cool air. Maddie meant to keep walking, to turn around and find her way back to the crowded, noisy streets near the hotel.
    But she couldn’t. The shadows, silky and deep, called to some forgotten memory. She climbed the old cobblestones and walked into the shadows.
    She had walked for three minutes before she realized this was no park. It was a beautifully tended graveyard. There was just enough light from the streetlights behind her to pick out the inscription on a nearby headstone
    Emma Weatherstone. Beloved wife. Devoted mother.
    Maddie leaned closer, trying to make out the date. 1620? Was that possible? Could this place be almost four centuries old?
    Then the words vanished, swallowed up in a fresh wave of fog. Too late, Maddie realized this was not like the other fog.
    This was the cold signal, the dark warning that came from her nightmares.
    There was no other way to describe it. Maddie had lived with these strange bursts of intuition since she was four. The fog came without reason or warning, a cold blurring that began at the edge of her vision and slowly crept closer, blanketing her senses in a warning of death.
    The fog had never once been wrong.
    She turned and would have run back toward the entrance, but the fog was worse there, moving over the ground in a dense wall like an iceberg, headed straight toward her.
    In growing panic she swung around and scanned the paths that led deeper into the darkness. On an instinct, she pulled off her boots and shoved them under her arm. So her steps would be muffled. Wincing as the cold bit at her feet, she ran over the uneven stones. Her toe struck an uneven stone, but she couldn’t stop. The fog was billowing up, more dense than she had ever seen it. No longer gray, its white restless fingers held ugly flecks of black.
    Maddie’s heart pounded. She ran along a grassy slope toward a small ridge that overlooked the path. Below her the fog lapped higher, nipping at her feet.
    At the
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