Angel Tormented (The Louisiangel Series Book 3) Read Free Page B

disheveled hair
from my face, I desperately tried to work out where I was.
    “Jeez, Angel!” a familiar voice cried. “Will
you calm down?”
    My gaze settled on Veronica, her hands on
her hips. Her gray eyes glaring at me as though I was wrong for reacting the
way I had. “Veronica!” I yelled. “What the hell are you doing?”
    “We needed to get you here,” she shrugged.
    My mouth fell open. “And that required
being bundled into the back of a van?”
    “You’re here, aren’t you?” Garret asked,
appearing behind me. He was nursing his nose and while I couldn’t see any blood
coming from under his hands, I took a sliver of satisfaction at that.
    Garret, like Veronica – and all the other
cherubs – looked around sixteen… Sixteen, with black hair and too much
eyeliner. Unlike their stereotypes, they were pretty terrifying when armed.
Actually, they were pretty terrifying when they weren't armed. While I
considered Veronica a friend, I barely knew the others, though I sincerely
doubted that would have prevented the glare I was receiving from Garret.
    I took a deep breath and tried to calm
myself. “I'm glad you're all safe. We've been wondering where you have been.”
    “You're telling me Michael has noticed we're
gone?” Garret asked, his eyes clouded with disbelief.
    I slowly shook my head, not wanting to
lie. “It's probably more that he's had the same meal three times last week.”
    “I told you Angel would be the one keeping
things running!” Veronica suddenly declared, making me jump. She turned to
Garret and held her hand out.
    Garret pulled something out of his pocket
and handed it over, all the while looking like he was sucking on the bitterest
of lemons. “I bet the place is barely holding it together,” he grumbled.
    That was a pretty accurate assumption but
I was still pissed at him, so I kept my lips sealed. “Why am I here?” I asked. “And
why did it involve kidnapping?”
    “Oh stop being melodramatic,” Veronica
said, dismissing the statement with a wave of her hand. “I'm sorry you had to
be blindfolded.” I was fairly confident she hadn't been one of my kidnappers. “We
wanted to show you around the new place,” she informed me with a dramatic
flourish of her other arm.
    I looked around: the new place was a dump.
We were standing in the center of an enormous room, but, judging from the
various piles of rubble and what looked like a dozen or so different types of
flooring, this was several rooms knocked into the one. I glanced back at
Veronica. She looked proud.
    “I like what you’re doing with the place,”
I offered weakly, trying to find something in there that I could compliment and
sound genuine. With the mismatched furniture which looked like it had been left
in here when the building had been abandoned, I was struggling.
    And then I happened to glance out the
window. “Holy crap,” I muttered, taking several paces closer. From here, I
could clearly see a familiar curve of a river, a large barge passing by a riverboat.
I turned, looking out in another direction, spotting the twin cantilever
bridges that made up the Crescent City Connection. We were still in New
Orleans.
    There weren’t many buildings that would
afford this view, but I wasn’t given enough time to be able to try and work out
where I was to know which one I was in. A pair of hands landed on my shoulder
and jerked me around. “Hey!” I objected, glaring at Garret. “If you didn’t want
me to know where you are, maybe you shouldn’t have let me look out of the
window, you moron.”
    “We didn’t bring you here to fight,”
Veronica cried, stepping in front of Garret.
    I took a deep breath, bringing my focus to
her. “Then why did you bring me here?” I asked through gritted teeth, unable to
rid the frustration from me completely.
    Veronica looked at the various other
cherubim in the room. “Disappear,” she instructed them. One by one, they all
did as she requested, until it was just her