Read Online Hellsbane Hereafter by Paige Cuccaro - Free Book Online

sleeves up to his elbows and opened the first two buttons at his neck, showing a smooth patch of male chest, with his tie in a loose knot. I liked the rumpled businessman look: five o’clock shadow, fitted dress slacks, a shine on his black, Italian shoes, and he knew it.
    “Tell me his name.” Eli ignored my quip. “I’m not going to do anything. I just want to know who it was. Who attacked you?”
    I wasn’t sure I believed him. Eli had been acting strange, getting angry, jealous even, like the way he was with Marax. Before his fall, Eli’s maintained an unflappable demeanor. Now, he behaved like a suspicious boyfriend more often than not and picked arguments that had more to do with pride than anything else. Eli never used to be prideful. Crap.
    How had he even found out? Then I remembered, despite my ability to close my mind to the Fallen/demon collective, everyone else loyal to Jukar was jacked in, like a twenty-four-seven mental Skype. Fallen could close themselves off, but demon and gibborim didn’t have that kind of power. Markus and Lee had ratted me out, not that they could help it.
    I shrugged, trying to set his suspicion at ease, and dropped my purse on the eighteenth-century refurbished chair just inside the archway to the living room. “I don’t know. He didn’t leave a business card.”
    Eli had been alive for…ever. Okay, probably not forever, but longer than I could wrap my brain around. He knew a lot of angels and had—or at least used to have—a lot of friends. And most of them blamed me for his fall. Rightfully so. It was my fault. Eli didn’t agree.
    It drove him batshit crazy when anyone said otherwise. I knew it would crush him if he found out one of his friends had actually tried to kill me for it. So far that hadn’t happened. But whatever his reasons, I couldn’t risk that Azazel might have been one of Eli’s friends.
    “Tell me his name.”
    “It doesn’t matter,” I said.
    “Answer me, woman.” His sharp tone made me flinch, and I watched him reel in his anger. He exhaled, then started again. “Do not force me to ask Markus or Lee.”
    His mouth cut a flat line across his face, his pale blue eyes fixed on me. He was a fallen angel, but Eli still indulged in a tiny bit of denial, thinking that sharing his mind with demons was too distasteful. Gibborim weren’t as bad, and if I didn’t give him an answer, he’d probably find it in Markus’s thoughts rather than Lee’s.
    I sighed. “I told you, it doesn’t matter who it was. It’s over. I’m alive. Besides, it didn’t have anything to do with you and me.”
    The anger seething beneath his surface eased, lifting the tight lines of his face. He raised his chin. “Then what?”
    “Oh, didn’t you hear?” I held my out arms in a grand gesture. “I’m the harbinger of humanity’s doom.”
    Eli’s dark brows creased, and he looked away, unamused and unsurprised. Shit. He had heard. His jaw clenched, and I could see him fighting to leash another unwanted flash of anger.
    I slumped into the chair, crunching whatever was in my purse. “ Oh God… ”
    His gaze focused on me, softening by small measures. “I’m sorry for my temper. The gossip is meaningless. Idle speculation. To hell with all of them. You’re an anomaly. Something that has never existed before. It’s normal to fear the unknown, to predict peril or salvation to explain it.”
    I knew on some level he was right, but I couldn’t get around the fact that twice in the same day I’d been told I was destined for something evil. “What if it’s true? What if I end up ruining everything somehow and hurting the people I love? What if I am evil?”
    Eli suddenly stood in front of me, pulling me to my feet. “You are not evil, Emma Jane. You cannot be. Evil is not a thing, it’s intent, it’s action. You haven’t an ounce of wicked intent in your body, and your actions are always for the greater good of those involved.”
    “Not always.” I met his