Sword's Blessing Read Free Page A

kept walking past the hotel without looking up again. “I don’t know. We’ll keep an eye out for them at dinner.”
    Samantha nodded. “It’d be great if it were coincidence. We just shook that task force, what, a week ago?”
    “Yeah.” Eli shrugged and then took her by the waist, kissing her neck. “You know, we’ve got some time before dinner…”
    “Uh huh...” Samantha said. She walked a pair of fingers up down his arm, which snaked around her torso. “And I was going to get a bath.”
    “Company?”
    “Can you make the bath big enough?” she asked with a grin.
    Eli beamed and held out a hand. “I can give it a try.”
    Life with a Damned did have its perks.
    * * * *
    “I think they’ve figured out that we’re here.” Armand murmured as they turned into a coffee shop across from the hotel where Samantha and Eli were staying. “I swear I felt him.”
    “Calm down.” Gisselle said softly, patting his arm as they sat down. “Eli isn’t like most Damned. You read the report.”
    He shook his head. “I’m not sure I believe it.”
    “Neither am I. They still haven’t told us why Eli turned against his orders for Samantha’s sake, nor why Cyrene is after them.”
    “Cyrene!” Armand bolted upright “Where did you hear that?”
    “It’s in an obscurely related file.” Giselle sat back, pursing her lips as she flipped open a folder. Golden sunlight caught in her dark, soft waves, illuminating them in silhouette. Armand had to blink. He’d known her all his life and Giselle’s beauty still caught him by surprise at least once a day. Her hair, her bright eyes, the way her fingers idly curved open and shut as she read. If he blinked right he’d be able to see her wings. Blinding ivory feathers which glowed with their own divine light, adding to the sun. She was poetry. Sometimes he wondered if he’d ascended of his own volition or just to follow her. They said such a thing was impossible. He wasn’t sure.
    She was also easily distracted by reading rather than doing, so he nudged her foot. “And?”
    “Hold on, I’m reading.”
    “You’re always reading, Gis.”
    “Only because you don’t, ‘Mand.” She smirked without looking up at him and Armand sighed. She had him there. He waited, and eventually she closed the file again, shaking her head. “Yeah. Says Cyrene and Eli have a history. Apparently Cyrene tricked Eli into becoming a Damned. They say that’s why he did it, to keep Samantha out of Cyrene’s hands. And that may be true…”
    “Except it can’t be everything.” Armand frowned “Cyrene is old. Way too old to bother with small potatoes like Eli and Samantha.”
    “Exactly. Have you heard much about Cyrene?”
    “Actually, yeah.” She tilted her head. Armand felt a flash of triumph. It was rare he knew more about a subject than she did. His face fell, though. “She was in Chicago.”
    Giselle’s eyes flicked up, studying his face. “She killed your cohorts?”
    “Yeah.” Armand looked away. “It was ugly.”
    “Terrible.” She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering even in the sunlight.
    Armand sipped at his coffee, making sure she didn’t shiver any more. He was better at taking human form than she was. It made her cold, even many years after their ascension. “I’m not kidding. Cyrene is something like four, five thousand years old at least.”
    “But…” Gisselle frowned. “How isn’t she a Lucifer, or just swimming in souls? With so much time shouldn’t she be a greater legend like Beelzebub?”
    “Normally yeah. As far as intel’s been able to tell though, she never recovered from the madness. She’s unbalanced, makes mistakes, underestimates threats. Her souls keep being sapped by the Lucifers, or they just slip away like she can’t keep them. They don’t have an exact reason why.”
    “Then how’s she alive?” Gisselle’s eyebrows knit tightly, considering. “The Damned are too bestial to keep her alive with a weakness like