Read Online Heaven and Hellsbane by Paige Cuccaro - Free Book Online

questioning—questions we couldn’t answer without being committed afterward.
    “You know the victim?” Mike asked anyway.
    Eli didn’t answer at first, his gaze stuck on the dark blankets as though he could still see the headless body of the illorum underneath. Finally he said, “No. I didn’t know him.”
    “You sure?” Mike asked, straightening his shoulders, his stern expression telling me he’d shifted back into full-on cop mode. “What was that you said before? Mathew?”
    “Thank you,” Eli said, his expression emotionless. His attention slowly shifted from the covered body to the cop in front of him. “I said thank you…for considering the boy’s family. It’s very noble of you.”
    Mike flinched, the compliment knocking him off his game and bringing a quick blush to warm the color of his cheeks. “Yeah, well y’know, it’s standard procedure. Just the right thing to do.”
    “Absolutely,” I said. “You guys do an awesome job. Listen, we need to get going. Eli’s about to miss his flight.”
    Mike’s brows jumped high under the bill of his hat. “Oh, right. Yeah. Have a good trip, man. Emma, you want me to pass any messages to Dan when I go back to the hospital?”
    I shook my head. “Just tell him I’ll see him later.”
    “You bet,” Mike said, waving before he turned to go back to work.
    “Emma Jane,” Eli said suddenly, his voice edged with dread.
    “What?” But with my next breath I didn’t need his answer. The rancid odor of rotting eggs filled my lungs, clogging the back of my throat, telling me all I needed to know. I tried not to breathe through my nose but it didn’t do any good. The stench was already inside me, seeping into my pores. “A demon.”
    “He’s near.”
    I scanned the crowd. I’d never get used to the fact that no one, except illorum and magisters, could sense the nauseating reek of brimstone. A demon could stand nose to nose with a man and he’d never know it. Eli said the stench was from spending so much time in the abyss. Brimstone was what kept them trapped there.
    Unfortunately, except for the odor, I couldn’t tell demons from humans either—not unless they shifted into their red-skinned, horned-head, claw-handed form. Which they didn’t do if they could help it. Even though they were stronger in their natural form, running around looking like the biblical devil himself didn’t generally help one blend in—and demons were all about blending in.
    I studied a face and then the next, but every set of eyes was fixed on the bloody scene before us. I’d nearly given up when, just as I looked away, a set of bright violet eyes flicked to me. “Got ’im.”
    He was a sandy-blond, six-foot-three, stack of muscled hotness and the second our eyes met he turned and walked the other way, snaking through the crowd in the opposite direction. I moved to go after him and felt Eli follow behind me.
    I spun around and stopped him with a hand on his chest. “Hey. Where are you going?”
    “There’s a good chance he’s the demon behind the attacks,” Eli said. “I will not allow you to face him alone.”
    “I know he might be the guy—and that’s why you’re not getting anywhere near him. If he is , then both of us going after him is exactly what he wants. They’re collecting angelic swords, Eli, and killing magisters to get them. You could be walking right into a trap.”
    The man standing next to us had dropped the pretense and stared openly, listening to our conversation.
    I huffed and grabbed Eli’s wrist. “C’mere.”
    We zigzagged our way out of the crowd and went to the other side of the wide concourse hallway, putting twenty feet or more between us and the back of the crowd. A cheery, ten-foot-tall woman in a smart suit dress smiled over us from the enormous lighted sign for First Bank.
    The light from the sign cast us in a blue glow that made the lines from Eli’s somber, worried expression seem all the deeper. “I don’t give a damn