Arise (Book Three in The Arson Saga) by Estevan Vega Read Free Book Online Page B

would once more be the man she had fallen in love with, and fight for her and for their future. Fight, even if she no longer could believe in it. Fight like he had in their youth, when the wonder and terrors of love and life had not grown weary of them.
    The ring on her finger was neither heavy nor light. It just was. Worn metal attached to flesh and bone. But it would stay.
    Kyro finished dragging his finger along the glass. “Wake me in an hour,” he snapped, shutting his eyes and leaning against the window with the words jacked up scribbled inside the fog.

Chapter Six
    Emery lost track of when it was that she had started to shiver. The bloodless winter air somehow managed to creep inside the locked car doors and tightly sealed windows. The car’s interior was so cold that she could see the shadowy outlines of her breath.
    Adam lay so eerily still. No matter how many times she checked for a pulse, none could be felt. She had pressed her ears to his lips several times, only to be met with not even so much as a murmur. Emery thought imaginary needles were being stabbed into her veins, and maybe that was why they had started to turn blue. She brushed her hair away from tired eyes, hating the way each lazy strand sought to capture her face, all sweaty and a tangled mess. She was irritated by how much her scalp itched. Nerves and everything else. Blink after blink, the same grey scene remained, the bitter taste of what had been done, and the consuming horror of the last three months spent in isolation and fear.
    Emery screamed at the top of her lungs, but Adam didn’t even move. She wished like crazy he could pick up the shrill sound of her voice. In the quiet, after she’d beaten the dashboard so hard she thought she’d fractured her wrist, Emery sat, contemplating, trying to wish it all away. Wish that she could return to her childhood, before the moves, before the judgment she endured every time she walked into a church, before her face had turned her into something ugly.
    “I’m lost,” she said with an unusual mix of calm and intensity. “We’re all lost.” Emery’s fingers slid over Adam’s head. He looked like a cancer patient—one with a huge gash on his scalp. She wondered if he was capable of growing hair or if, because of all the tests Salvation had run on him, his body could no longer produce the necessary follicles. What a stupid thing to think about. What difference did something like that make at a time like this?
    She was frozen. Why couldn’t she move? She snorted, wiping aside a tear with the back of her bloodstained hand. She lingered, like some stray animal, left for dead on the side of some road she couldn’t name, in a town she’d never been to, a place that would most likely be destroyed when the wicked men decided to finally initiate the apocalypse on earth.
    For several blinks, she actually imagined it all happening, the end of everything. Like those old movies about nuclear bombs. It seemed so unreal on a silver screen, but through her eyes now, after what Adam had explained to her, words became flesh.
    Her lips felt lonely, and she knew the air had chapped them beyond repair. Emery ground her teeth and turned the key in the ignition, causing the car to come alive with a furious groan. She immediately turned the heat switches on high, thankful for the minute, until she noticed the fuel light flashing the most putrid shade of yellow. How much time did she have before the gas ran out? Would they make it to a station? And even if they did, how would they pay? She laughed, but the situation was anything but funny. What’s more, her mind insisted on using the word they , as if the boy who had saved her from the asylum would miraculously wake.
    Emery put the hazard lights on. “Adam,” she whispered frantically. “Where are you? Come back to me.” If she concentrated hard enough, she could return to his home, before the attack, before the carnage. She relived his fingers stroking her