Angel Of Solace by Selene Edwards Read Free Book Online

and became interested in you. I convinced them to make you a priority.”
    “But why? There have to be hundreds of others trying to get away. Why me?”
    Again she resisted the impulse to touch his arm. “The Asurans ask very little of those we help. We don’t free Demons just to turn them into servants. But we do ask that they consider helping others like them, or at the very least helping us one time to repay the debt.”
    “But you wanted something specific from me,” he pressed, the glint of the midday sun reflecting off his eyes.
    “Yes,” she admitted. “I need you. I think you may be the only person who can…fix me.”
    “Fix you?” he asked, tilting his head. “I’m no healer. Surely your powers…”
    “It’s not a matter of healing,” she said, “not exactly. It’s…complicated. It’s probably best to wait until you’ve spoken with the others first.”
    Sariel reached across to him, gently touching his arm, and the spark between them flared. She let her sadness wash over him, but also her resolve. She hadn’t given up hope yet, and it was important he understood that. If she was right about him, he would try to help her.
    At the edges of her mind she could feel the spirit inside her stir, its thoughts slowly seeping into her own, and she remembered how little time she truly had. Soon enough her own thoughts would be little more than a whisper, and the Angel inside her would take her back to the Covenant—or worse, destroy the Asurans and everything they had worked to build. 
    But she wasn’t going to let that happen. One way or another, she was not going to be around for the final throes of the transformation. She only prayed that this man next to her would be her salvation.
    He had to be.

Chapter Three
     
    Her dress was red, her heels were high, and at least two dozen of the gala’s hundred something people were checking her out. It was exactly what they had planned on when designing this whole operation, and it was going as well as they could have hoped.
    But that didn’t mean she had to like it.
    Shyrah Mulare suppressed a frown and finished off the last of her wine. She stood alone at the top of the western staircase inside the Parleia , the largest ballroom/convention center in the district, if not all of Solace. For the next few minutes, her sole purpose here was to draw the attention of as many of the patrons as she could while her associates completed their work in the background. For the previous hour, it had been her job to set all of that up, flirting with the businessmen, entertainers, and politicians in the crowd before perching up here.
    It was not her typical assignment on a mission like this, and it drudged up far too many memories of her past life with the Syndicate. A frown cracked through her carefully controlled expression, and for probably the hundredth time tonight she cursed their precious little Angel for not being here to do this instead.
    It was a foolish sentiment and she knew it. She should have been saving her ire for the heavyset, middle-aged man currently adding a few slices of cheese to his plate some twenty meters below and to the right—Kal Beren, slaver, trafficker, and generally miserable excuse for a human being. He was the entire reason they were here, and his unexpected presence was why they had been forced to change their timetable and do this without Sariel.
    “Security just swept the outer hall,” Corin said into the small communicator stashed inside the clip of her upper earring. “We’re setting up now. The faster you can flush Beren out, the better.”
    “Understood,” acknowledged a second, deeper male voice.
    Shyrah leisurely swept her gaze across the ballroom floor to the tall, dark-skinned man with a distinguished tuft of gray in his short beard and hair. Samuel Kronn, their leader and the man who had insisted they couldn’t wait for Sariel to make their move against Beren, started making his way across the gala floor. He made eye