Michael Read Free Page A

blushed. It felt good, but it too was just slightly off kilter.
    “I’ll leave you to it?”
    I nodded.
    He stood and I feared something again for the first time. I feared being alone. He turned to go, walking for the door and the long hall in the impossibly enormous house.
    “But don’t go too far!” I shouted.
    He gave me a confused look. “I won’t. I need to go find Kim, though.”
    “Okay.”
    “K. Be safe. No more drowning.”
    This time I let him see me roll my eyes. “Hey. You too.” I gave him a little “I’ve got my eye on you” gesture and then he left.
    I was alone.

CHAPTER III
     
    MICHAEL WALKED OUT OF her bedroom questioning his sanity. Am I losing it? Airel’s back and I’m off on some Good Samaritan mission five minutes later? He didn’t want to let her out of his sight.
    His feet nevertheless kept going, away, out, taking him farther and farther away from the one person he felt now—and strongly—he couldn’t live without.
    The real kicker was that what he was about to do was right inside his wheelhouse: tracking. Because of the job he used to have with James, every demonic memory, every kill, every tactic, every savage act—all of it—was there for the showing and telling in his mind. He had to admit, it had made his “training” in the Brotherhood easy and swift; almost a joke. These things had become second nature, and quickly; maybe because of the fact that Stanley was the Seer, maybe not.
    But Airel was like ice that had taken up lodging in the stone of his heart. Love was the spark that would cause that potentially life-giving moisture to warm and expand and shatter all of him. She could wreck him with a glance. He knew it because he felt it.
    It was bizarre: being only eighteen, yet having instant access to time immemorial through the daguerreotype of James’s thoughts. It was a demonic and evil perspective of things. He knew that he would have to turn and face what he had done. The demonic pathways in his mind caused him to possess a kind of twisted life experience that made certain things quite clear.
    Airel.
    She had changed everything. He never saw her coming. One day he was just tracking, shadowing like he was shadowing Kim even now, and then he was falling for one of those whom he had been taught were nothing but a plague to be eradicated.
    Even with all that, his instincts were telling him there wasn’t much chance for the two of them. There’s not much chance for anything, really. How can I ever go back? He couldn’t. There were some things that couldn’t be undone.
    Except death? That was still totally crazy, and he wondered what it was that had made it work. Was it the book? The pen? He took more steps, consciously avoiding the next thought building in the back of his conscience. El? Sworn enemy.
    “Crap,” he said, walking out of the enormous house onto the porch. It seemed like only minutes ago, he had been having breakfast with her. And Kreios…. But that was a different world.
    So where did Kreios go?
    More questions, and lots of them.
    He walked on with them for a time, down the steps.
    “Where’s Kim?” He looked around.
    He was on the floor of the great valley again. Only moments ago he had carried the lifeless body of his true love…right across these very steps. True love? Do I know what that is?
    He shook his head, trying to clear up his thinking. “All right. Where is she?” He looked around for signs in the grass, on the path, skillfully processing divots and pebbles and skids and filing them against the database of his demonically shared memories. “Come on, Kim. Where are you?” He kept walking.
    Down the path he went, following thousands of years of inherited instinct and looking for something more solid. A bent blade of grass…a broken twig…even a partial footprint. But there was nothing that said Kim .
    At length he found himself breaking out into the clear area at the top of the cliff. If he was looking for signs of activity, here