Betrayal (The Divine, Book Two) Read Free

her voice concerned. It snapped me out of my useless introspection.
    “Memories,” I said at last. “I’ve tried to fight them, but I can’t escape. I’m tired of trying.”  
    Charis had known what would happen. She had known because she had gone through it. Maybe it had taken her almost two hundred years, but she wasn’t me. I had never handled it well. I tried so hard to handle it, but I was drowning. I knew the knowledge she was waiting for me to find would be my salvation. It had to be.
    “There’s something else I need,” I said, shaking off the heaviness. “Your database.”
    Rachel looked back at her computer monitor. “My database? What for?”
    Whispers and hope. My search for information had brought me to Shanghai, China, where I had spoken to a minor fiend who also happened to be one of the Asian archfiend’s top spies. He had told me of the whispers. That the angels were passing encrypted messages through the most benign pathways. That not all of the angels knew about it. I suspected that Rachel’s charity’s financial transactions might be one of their transports.  
    “Research,” I said.  
    She looked back at me. “Let me help you,” she said. “I know I don’t understand what you’re going through, but you need someone to ground you.”
    “No,” I replied. “You can’t help me like that now that the balance is steady. Even if you could, if you did you would fall. I know how old you really are. You wouldn’t survive.” I reached into a pocket and pulled out a thumb drive. I handed it to her. “Please, just copy your database to the drive.”

CHAPTER TWO

    I walked out of the Taylor building through the front door, a loaded USB drive tucked away in my leather jacket’s inside pocket. I slipped across the street and looked up towards the top of the building, expecting to see Rachel standing at the window, waiting for me to step out into the night. She wasn’t there. Unexpected, but not surprising.
    I had been holding two bases of operation for the last five years. The first was the hidden excavation beneath the Statue of Liberty, where Rebecca had once lived. The second was my original room near the top of the Belmont Hotel. Rachel had spent months of her life trying to talk me into moving to a different location - she had gone so far as to offer me the penthouse of one of the residential towers her corporation owned. It had been tempting in the beginning, but what kind of mortal comforts did I need? I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat. I didn’t even void. I was a ghost with mass and kinetic energy.  
    The Belmont was familiar, and I could still feel the charge in the air from the night I had spent learning swordplay with Josette. I didn’t know if it was real, or my memories making it real. Either way I didn’t care. It was comfortable. The Statue... Everything about the Statue oozed Rebecca, right down to the bottle of perfume she had kept in the nightstand drawer next to her bed. I didn’t sit there and sniff it or anything as forlorn as that. What I had done was study her books, study the runes, and keep up the hope that one of these days I’d go down there and she’d be there waiting. Waiting to explain what she had done, and why. It was almost as big of a mystery to me as Charis’ words.  
    “Survival,” she had said. It could mean so many things. I had thought she had allied with me because I was her best shot at it. Obviously, I had been wrong.
    I had been too sensitive. I had cared too much, too quickly. I had gotten burned by mortal fire, burned by hellfire, burned by trust. You couldn’t fight the Divine and care about anything. The alternative was to suffer pain and loss over, and over, and over again. When it was one of the only things that could hurt you, feelings became the enemy. Like I said, I liked to lie to myself.
    I felt a slight pressure in my head and a tingle that floated down my spine towards the place that I identified as my soul’s cage. I