Betrayal (The Divine, Book Two) Read Free Page A

couldn’t help but smile. I sat down cross-legged in the center of the street, ignoring the cars that swerved smoothly around me.  
    “I’m here Sarah,” I said, opening myself up to the connection.  
    “Hey, Landon,” Sarah said, her voice clear in my mind.  
    She had changed so much since the first time we had met, when she had helped me find the answers I didn’t even know I was seeking. She had been a child then, but never just a child. She was a true diuscrucis, the only one in existence, born of the non-consensual union between a demon and an angel. The angel was Josette. The demon was Gervais, her brother, an archfiend operating out of Paris, France. I had never confronted him for fear of revealing Sarah. That didn’t mean I didn’t know where he was.
    Josette had asked me to protect her. Sarah herself had named me protector before I had even known it would come to be. Could she see the future? She said she couldn’t, but she was the one person who could lie to me. If she could, she never let on.  
    “What’s up kiddo?” I asked.  
    The only time I could feel my soul breathing was when Sarah connected to me. I was her protector, and I would never let her see me sweat, never let her see what my world had become.  
    “Just checking up on you. When are you coming by to do some more of that ninja training of yours?” she said.  
    Her voice was light, cheerful. So unlike how she had been the first time we had met. Knowing she was safe had allowed her to grow, to blossom, and to live as though she were almost normal. She was still residing underground with the other Awake, but she went to High School, had mortal friends, and even mortal crushes. Nobody in the world knew she was different except me, though she needed to be more careful about not revealing her ability to See.  
    I reached into my pocket and touched the USB drive. “I’m doing great sweets,” I said, pushing my mental voice up an octave to sound more chipper than I felt. “Maybe tomorrow night? I’m on my way back to the Belmont to do some research.”
    I had spent hundreds of hours over the last three years teaching Sarah everything I... no, her mother knew about fighting. I found a certain measure of comfort in being able to give her something of Josette’s that she could hold on to, even if she didn’t know, or at least didn’t say she knew, where that particular skillset had come from.
    Her laughter boomed in my head. “You’re sitting in the middle of traffic,” she said. “Do you have to do that?”
    It was one of the differences between a directly descended diuscrucis and a facsimile like me. She knew exactly where I was, all of the time. All she had to do was think about me, and she could See me. I couldn’t do the same, but I knew it brought her great comfort to always know where I was.  
    “To be honest, I hadn’t even thought about it,” I admitted, getting back to my feet and finishing my trip across the road. I had become so accustomed to the mortal world circulating around me, at times I almost forgot it even existed. “How was school today?”
    “It’s always an adventure,” she said. “Katie Winslow and her gang tried to prank me again by swapping my Coke for a can of urine. Somehow it ended up on Katie’s head. Just because they think I’m blind doesn’t mean I have no sense of smell.”
    I laughed. A rarity these days, unheard of unless I was talking to Sarah. She had gotten into a couple of scrapes with the school princess already, mainly owing to her perceived disability and the complete lack of imaginative mischief that stemmed from it. She had always gotten the upper hand, and her payback was well measured and deserved.
    “What did the principal say?” I asked.  
    She laughed again. “He said I should have made her drink it. I’m not the only one she tries to torment, I’m just the only one who fights back.”
    “I’m sure you’d love nothing more than to put your foot up her ass,”