Heaven and Hellsbane Read Online Free PDF Page A

know they can’t interfere in the battles between illorum and the Fallen by healing her or anything like that. But they could’ve comforted her. They could’ve eased her pain.” I pushed past him angrily and jogged back to the girl. She was still out cold. The cauliflower swelling from the brimstone under her wounds had gone down, but she was still pretty bad off.
    Before I could look up again, Eli was kneeling next to me. “The nephilim, even after they’ve picked up the sword, are…corrupted in the eyes of seraphim. They are still…unclean. A seraph wouldn’t even touch this illorum’s mind to discover how it was possible for someone, or something, to kill one of its own. And trust me, Emma Jane, they are in a panic over the mystery.”
    I stroked the girl’s face. She was just a kid. “You’re saying they wouldn’t ease her pain because…because they didn’t believe she deserved the kindness? They wouldn’t comfort her because she wasn’t a pure human?”
    “Yes.”
    “Aye,” someone said from behind us. “They’re a holy bunch of arses, they are.”
    I looked up at the familiar sound of a thick Irish accent and into the bright green eyes of the oldest illorum I knew. “Liam McGregor.”
    At fifty-six, the man still looked a young twenty-five—the age he’d been when he was marked. He was about as mature as a sixteen-year-old and thanks to his five foot nothing frame and kinky, orangish-red hair, he reminded me of an X-rated leprechaun.
    “How’ve ya been, lassie? Lookin’ mighty fine, I must say.”
    Just then the ambulance pulled up at the end of the alley, lights flashing, blinking off the walls with a kind of strobe effect. Our reunion was put on hold while the attendants saw to the injured girl and the police, who had pulled in behind the ambulance, asked the three of us a million questions twice over.
    Thanks to Dan, I knew most of the cops in Pittsburgh, so Officer Mike Rizzo and his partner, Larry Weinbaum, were more surprised to see me than I was to see them.
    “Emma, what are you doing here?” Mike asked. His compact, powerhouse body made me think he could’ve been on the same high school wrestling team as Dan. You could tell Mike was Italian just by looking at him. With his black hair cut short on a wide, sharp-boned face, he looked like an extra off the set of The Godfather . The right turn of his nose didn’t help much. The tough guy never had it set right after a break. “You okay?”
    I nodded, stepping out of the way of the attendants wheeling the battered illorum toward the waiting ambulance. “I’m fine. I was the one who found the girl. Called it in.”
    “You know her?” Larry asked, stepping up beside Mike. Physically, Larry was Mike’s opposite—tall and lean, more swimmer than wrestler. His hair was a few shades lighter than Mike’s and an inch or so longer. He wore glasses, dark frames with silver accents, on a very large beak-like nose that Dan said made him insecure with women.
    “No, ya gom,” Liam said. “She just found the bird bleedin’ on the ground there and did her moral duty, is all.”
    Mike narrowed his eyes on the frizzy-haired Irishman. “And you are?”
    He flashed a wide, boyish smile and bowed. “Liam McGregor, at your service.”
    Such a creepy, little freak.
    Mike jotted a note on his pad, nodding. “So you were with Emma when she discovered the girl?”
    “Aye,” Liam answered at the same time that I said, “No.”
    Larry laughed, but a shadow of doubt flickered behind his eyes. “Which is it?”
    The two cops shifted their attention back and forth between us, their brows shooting high when Liam slipped his arm around my waist.
    “Aye. Yes. Out paintin’ the town together we were.” Liam puffed his chest, stretched his five-foot frame to its fullest, and let his smile turn lecherous, brows bobbing.
    “Really?” Mike said.
    “Dan’s okay with this?” Larry asked.
    “No. We weren’t…I mean, Liam’s just—”
    “My