Taliesin Ascendant (The Children and the Blood) Read Online Free PDF Page A

number six stepped out.
    “Oh, John,” she said, startled. “Are you going somewhere?”
    Harris nodded. “Something came up out east. Not sure how long I’ll be gone, though. Would you mind keeping an eye on the place for me, Mrs. Pulaski?”
    “Of course,” she said pleasantly.
    He lifted the bag and started down the hall.
    “Have a safe trip,” she called after him.
    He didn’t answer. With what he knew he was heading into, there wasn’t much point.
     

Chapter Two
     
    Exhaustion pulled at her as the hours crept by. Unmoving on the sedan’s back seat, she watched farms and grasslands blur endlessly into billboards and nameless towns. Gray clouds drifted by, pierced by intermittent sunbeams. Ignored since the meager meal of canned food the night before, her stomach chewed itself and made her head throb in rhythm with the growl of the tires on the road.
    In the passenger seat, Cornelius pulled out his cell, answering yet another call in a voice too low to hear. A sound of frustration escaped him this time, and numbly, she glanced toward the front.
    He returned the phone to his coat pocket without a word.
    Ashe’s brow furrowed. As she looked back to the window, she caught sight of the driver. With the build of a human mountain and a stone-like visage to match, he was watching her in the rearview mirror.
    Uncomfortable, she turned away.
    Silence fell back over the car. The sun slid along behind the overcast sky while gradually, office parks and automotive stores took the place of farmland again.
    She wondered what she’d say when she saw the council. They’d driven Carter out eight years before, ignoring his warnings about the Blood and writing him off as insane. As far as she knew, nothing had changed since, and the night Carter died, Cornelius had still dismissed everything he’d said as just fantasy.
    But Carter had believed she could change their minds. As a wizard, and as someone whose family had died in an attack by the Blood, he seemed to have thought they’d listen to her where they never had to him.
    And they could protect her. He’d said that too. Right before he called her his queen.
    She grimaced, pushing the memory back into the morass of emotion and nightmare she was desperately trying to ignore. He’d been dying. In all the chaos, she’d probably just misunderstood that part.
    Or something.
    Exhaling, she forced her attention to the highway. Traffic was growing heavier, though the area around the sedan was still relatively clear. Overpasses swept by, bearing signs for roads whose abbreviations she couldn’t understand, and concrete barriers closed in, obscuring all but the peaked rooftops of the houses behind them.
    She looked ahead. Skyscrapers amassed like giants on the horizon, their spires turned misty blue by the smog. The concrete walls around the road vanished, giving way to an enormous steel bridge, and beyond the railing, the murky water blurred with the gray sky.
    At an exit like any other, the two cars left the interstate. Houses clustered around them almost immediately, each building identical in shape with only the faded colors changed. In chain-link fenced yards, children played, while on street corners, teenagers watched the world go by.
    They didn’t seem to notice the sedans sliding past.
    Neighborhoods surrendered to fast food restaurants and check cashing stores, and all the people on the sidewalks looked human, though she knew that didn’t mean anything. Minutes passed, and gradually, the stores dwindled until, at a weathered road by a lonely gas station, the driver turned. Rolling hills swallowed the last vestiges of the city, and in only a few moments, the landscape returned to countryside.
    Miles crept by and then the driver slowed to turn again at a gravel track nearly swallowed by weeds. The road climbed, and her eyes narrowed as they came over the rise.
    In the distance, a warehouse complex sprawled across the landscape, with an enormous factory towering up at