Roaring Blood (Demon-Hearted Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

here. Fast,” he said. And then he cut the line.
    I shut the flip-phone and stashed it away in my pocket, looking down at the cake on the table mournfully. “What's the big rush?” I wondered aloud, stepping into my shoes and seeking out my keys. A short drive in the Corvette sounded mighty agreeable. It was after sunset, and if I stuck to the side roads I could speed there like a bullet train without garnering too much attention.
    Amundsen was going to be there, too. Since signing on with the Veiled Order, I'd seen less and less of him. This whole Demon-Heart thing had been set into motion thanks to him; if he hadn't sent me out to an abandoned house to retrieve a little curio then I would never have been killed by witches. I'd learned a little more about him in the past few weeks; mainly that he served two functions in the organization. First off, he handled all kinds of administrative work at HQ, toiling on behalf of the senior leadership... whoever they were. Second, he was the guy in charge of the small army the Veiled Order had under its control. In Detroit alone, there were at least one or two hundred guys directly under the Order's employ, and he was the one who ordered them around. If Kubo and I needed a helicopter to scope out a location ahead of time, or wanted an armed escort, Amundsen was the guy who set it up. What were we doing in a meeting with him, though?
    Hopping into the driver's seat, I queued up a Stooges album, Fun House , on the car stereo. The evening was warm and soggy; there'd been scattered showers throughout the day, and they still asserted themselves in the form of an omnipresent vapor that made it a little hard to breathe. I turned the AC knob all the way to its maximum setting and idled in the parking lot till the interior of the car had cooled down.
    Bobbing my head to “Down On The Street”, I pulled out of my spot.
    When the apartment complex was out of view, I really let it rip and tore down the street like a cheetah towards HQ.
    ***
    Pulling through the black gates and shuffling through the unusually crowded parking lot, I pounded on the metal exterior door and was admitted at once. I couldn't remember the last time I saw the HQ building so packed this late.
    Guess Kubo wasn't joshing me. This could be something big.
    The attendant at the desk waved me on towards a hallway nestled just beyond the elevator banks. I knew several large conference rooms to dwell there, and I wasn't one step past the elevators when I heard the swell of many voices in heated discussion. I didn't even have to ask where to go; following the sound of the crowd, I stepped into the nearest conference room and found it packed. Standing room only. Kubo and Amundsen were at the front of the room, and both caught sight of me at the same moment. Suddenly, a hush stole over the assembly.
    Don't get me wrong, I love the limelight. But when everyone in the room suddenly goes quiet at your entrance and just stares, well, it's enough to make even a demon shy.
    “'Sup,” I said, crossing my arms and leaning against the wall. Every eye on the room was on me just then. Some of them I recognized; Kubo and Amundsen, of course. Joe was sitting near the front, and he gave me a little wave. The rest, though, were all Veiled Order commandos.
    Up to this point I hadn't worked a whole lot with the Veiled Order's troopers. I mean, I didn't even know what to call them. Stormtroopers? Soldiers? They were the big dudes in all black, the same ones that'd stormed the witch's sabbath when Agatha and her cronies had killed me out in Flint. After we'd taken down the coven they'd stormed the old church and collected us from the scene, too. Aside from that, all of my interactions with them had been kind of icy.
    The gazes that dissected me from all around the room were, on the whole, rather hostile. These guys looked at me like I was covered in dog shit, their noses crinkling with barely-veiled disgust. Some of them muttered curses at