Through the Veil Read Online Free PDF

scream of denial.Clenching his jaw, he drew the rifle from over his shoulder and leveled it at the Jorniak demon that was still feasting in the middle of the death and devastation.
    Lee lifted her hand and the pure silver energy that flowed from it was the same as the beam that shot out of the laser pulsing from Kalen’s plasma rifle. Like most men, Kalen couldn’t control the energy of the land, although he could sense it. It never ceased to amaze him how easily Lee could call that energy to her hands. She carried weapons—all his soldiers did—but she rarely needed them. Lee was a weapon.
    The Jorniak demon screamed, the hissing quality of his death scream making their skin crawl, while the stench of his blood made their eyes water. Jorniaks never really stank, unless they bled. Once they bled, the smell of them was enough to make a grown man’s eyes water and his stomach rebel.
    “Did you have to kill him so fast? He could have been useful,” Dais muttered from behind Kalen. From the corner of his eye, Kalen saw his lieutenant crouching over one of the fallen.
    Lee’s bolt had killed him. Kalen’s pulsar blast had gone through one of the thing’s three lungs, enough to hurt him, enough to keep him from running very far. Dais had taught Kalen well and Kalen liked to ask questions.
    But Lee . . . well, her anger sometimes got the better of her. Eh, maybe actually leading the army wasn’t the wisest course of action for her. She acted first, asked questions later. She was a dangerous piece of work, true, but she had little use for talking to the demons.
    Kalen had learned the value of asking questions.
    But he understood why she had destroyed the thing. This small unit had been basically a hospital on wheels. A few soldiers, but most of the dead had been healers, the deirons who used the elusive healing magicks and the medics, untalented but skilled people who relied on science to bring a person back to health. They had been harmless, all of them. Healers had little use for fighting unless they were threatened.
    “He killed them all, Kalen.”
    With harsh, jerking motions, he shoved his plasma rifle into the harness at his back. Fury and grief burned inside him and he wanted to howl out his rage to the night sky. But at the low, rough sound of her voice, he turned to look at her, a fist closing around his heart. There were tears sparkling in her cerulean eyes.
    She blinked them away before they could fall, but still the sight of them was like a punch to his already battered system. Lee never cried. “Damn it, how much longer do we have to keep doing this?” she demanded, her voice shaking and hoarse with barely suppressed emotion.
    Kalen cupped his hand over her neck, drawing her against him, his body jumping to life as her sleek curves came into contact with his tensed muscles. “Until we win, darlin’. Until we win,” he replied. Or until they kill all of us . The words hung between them, unsaid, but understood.
    It made no sense. The brutality of the demon attacks had increased over the past decade with an intensity that sickened and scared all of them. There had been a time when the Anqarians had policed the demons themselves. It had only made sense—they used Ishtan as their breeding ground, so they wouldn’t want it totally decimated.
    But lately, it was as though Anqar didn’t give a bloody damn. Not that Kalen wanted to go back to simply evading slaving expeditions or fighting to free the females before it was too late, but this sudden reversal made little sense.
    “And when will we?” Lee asked. But she didn’t seem to expect an answer, and that was just as well. Kalen had no desire to lie to her simply to comfort her, but from where he stood, their future looked grim.
    A shudder wracked her body and then she sighed. The soft sound was broken in the middle by a weird little hitching hiccup. He gritted his teeth as he felt the soft push of her breasts against his chest, the smooth plane of her