The Fallen 3 Read Free

comfort.
    “It got bad so fast,” Lori said. Wisps of smoke began to waft from her body.
    “Lori!” Aaron cried as the smoke became darker, thicker, and tongues of flame appeared atop her head like a fiery crown.
    “Mom!”
    He tried to move but couldn’t, some unknown force preventing him from going to her aid. Fire completely engulfed her now, and smoke obscured the kitchen, but Aaron couldn’t look away.
    “So fast,” the blackened skeleton said once more. Sizzling fat ran from its empty eye sockets in a mockery of tears. Her burning fingers still patted Stevie’s hair.
    “It’s going to get worse,” the little boy said unexpectedly, lifting his attention from the train to fix it upon Aaron, his gaze suddenly very much aware. “A lot worse.”
    Then Stevie started to play with his train again.
    As he, too, began to burn.
    Aaron Corbet awoke with a start, and stifled a scream before it could fully escape his lips.
    He blinked repeatedly, his eyes somehow watering from the smoke of the blaze that had consumed his mother and brother.
    “Aaron?”
asked a voice in the semidarkness of the bedroom.
    He turned his head slightly on the pillow, expecting to see his girlfriend, Vilma, but instead he looked into the worried eyes of his dog, Gabriel, who lay on the mattress beside him.
    “Bad dream again?”
the yellow Labrador asked in the gravelly dog voice that Aaron had no difficulty understanding.
    “Yeah,” Aaron said, reaching over to rub the dog’s golden-brown ears. “But I’m all right now,” he lied.
    He was about to ask the dog where Vilma was, but as the murkiness of sleep began to recede, he remembered that she had gone back to Lynn, Massachusetts, to visit her aunt and uncle.
    Aaron wished that she were here with him now; he could have used her arms around him, the warmth of her body pressed against his. Her very presence was enough to chase away any nightmare’s lingering effects.
    While he loved Gabriel, a Labrador retriever was no replacement for a hot girlfriend.
    “Getting up now?”
Gabriel asked, sitting up, his thick muscular tail thumping against the bed.
“Breakfast?”
    “Not yet.” Aaron reached up and gave the dog’s blocky head a final pat, then turned over on his side, pulling the blanket around his ears. “It’s still early. Let’s see if we can grab a few more hours of shut-eye.”
    Gabriel sighed with disappointment but didn’t argue, settling down almost immediately. Aaron listened to the dog’s breathing grow slow and heavy as Gabriel drifted off once more.
    But sleep eluded him.
    He tried to clear his mind, to focus on his dog’s steady snore, but all he could see when he closed his eyes was the vision of his mother and brother in flames, their ominous warning echoing in his ears.
    “It got bad so fast.”
    “It’s going to get worse.”
    “A lot worse.”
    Vilma Santiago opened her eyes to the early morning, thinking that things were the way they used to be, that nothing had changed at all.
    That the past few months had been only a bad dream.
    But, really, it was her old life that seemed like a dream.
    She lay on an air mattress on the floor of her cousin’s bedroom and gazed up at the ceiling, at the cracks in the plaster that had always been the first things she saw when she awakened, when this used to be her room. She remembered all the times she’d lain there, early in the morning, before the rest of the house began to stir, wondering what the day would have in store for her.
    School, homework, chores, making sure her youngercousins weren’t getting into any trouble. She’d never really thought about that life as she’d lived it, believing it all so predictable, so boring and inconsequential.
    If only it could be that way again.
    Vilma quietly rose from her bed, careful not to wake the little raven-haired girl who slept soundly in the bed next to her, wrapped in the Disney Princess bedding she’d received the day before for her seventh birthday. She