Heaven and Hellsbane Read Online Free PDF Page B

guy.” I shook my head.
    §
    Muzak droned innocuously through elevator speakers while everything inside me screamed for me to run, to find a deep, dark hole somewhere and hide…forever. The emotion wasn’t mine, but that didn’t make it feel any less real.
    I was tracking the girl, the illorum from the alley, inside Children’s Hospital by following her bone-chilling fear so powerful it threatened to choke out my own reality. Fighting the impulse wasn’t easy, and neither was reasoning with my brain that the emotions weren’t mine. My heart raced like a caged bird despite my effort. Every muscle in my body tensed, spring-loaded, ready to flee.
    The elevator dinged and the doors slid open. The moment I stepped into the hall I knew which room was hers.
    “A little conspicuous, don’t you think?” I said.
    Eli glanced down the hall toward the clutch of angels gathered around the hospital room door. “Unlike magisters, seraphim do not reside on this plane. They are spirit only and therefore humans can’t see them unless the seraphim wish it and cross over.”
    “Seriously?” There were ten men at least, all of them tall like Eli, lean, with the same broad shoulders and stern face he sometimes wore when he was deep in thought. Like a men’s choir, they were all dressed in suits that were close enough in color and style to make them seem similar, but on closer inspection no two were exactly alike. In shades of white, gray, and black—the fabric melded to their bodies perfectly, like skin, as though they’d been born wearing them. Maybe they had.
    They were all sublimely handsome with long hair past the smalls of their backs. Butter yellows, steel grays, honey browns, and midnight blues, the colors so rich they seemed both supernatural and completely normal at once.
    The girl’s fear was still a prickling sensation at the back of my skull. But the nearer I came to the angelic mob, the more their warm thrum of power pulsed through me.
    Like stepping from a bitter cold rain into warm bathwater, my muscles relaxed, my heart slowed. Their power enveloped me, washing away even the faint sense of fear, of vulnerability that comes with being alive. My head fuzzed, drunk on the heady comfort of their power. The light scent of fresh meadows drenched in sunshine filled my lungs.
    A nurse walked through the group from the other side and as she passed, the angels popped out of her way and back again. She didn’t look up from her metal clipboard, her pen hand jotting notes as she walked. But her lips curled in a soft, satisfied smile—her eyes fluttering closed for a moment until she’d passed through the cloud of their power.
    I swallowed hard, fighting the urge to curl up on the floor and let myself drown in that soothing sensation. “What are they doing here?”
    “Waiting for you,” Eli said.
    We walked past them, zigzagging through the crowd until we reached the door. They didn’t move for me. Eli pushed open the room door, and I stepped through without a word to the waiting angels. Not that they would’ve spoken to me anyway.
    The instant I crossed the threshold, goose bumps rippled over my skin and dread chilled through me like the scratch of bony fingers all over my body. My stomach knotted—my heart a frantic pulse in my chest. I clenched my teeth, fisting my hands, trying to deny a sudden, smothering sense of despair swamping through me…swamping through the girl. For whatever reason the soothing effect of the hallway angels didn’t reach through the walls of this room. Or was it being purposely blocked?
    The small, private room was even more crowded than the hall. Another fifteen angelic men crammed shoulder to shoulder around the hospital bed, making a wall of their bodies that blocked my view of the girl. Each angel was as beautiful and powerful as the ones in the hall.
    But it was the one perched on the narrow frame at the foot of her bed that commanded the room and my attention.
    “Fraciel, you cannot