Broken Wings: Genesis by A. J. Rand Read Free Book Online Page A

I
wanted to ruin the sheets and mattress of my bed. Looking back across the
apartment, I winced at the trail of blood we had left behind. That was going to
involve a bit of scrubbing. I hoped the blood came out of my living room throw
rug.
    The kid was back quick, ripping
open the box and shaking out the plastic curtain as he came. He tossed the box
on the floor and spread the curtain out on the bed. It didn’t cover the whole
surface, but it was enough, as long as we were careful about it. He came back
to help me move the man the rest of the way into the room.
    “I need him sitting up first.” I
told Chaz as we juggled the dead weight between us to the bed. “We need to get
his clothes off so I can see what the problem is.”
    “You got it.”
    A few minutes later, we had the
guy lying face down on the bed in nothing but his briefs. We were both staring
at his back, perplexed.
    “I don’t see––” Chaz started and
then moved in to look closer. I sat down on the bed, just as confused as he
was. Blood was seeping slowly out of the man’s back, but it looked more as
though it were oozing out of his pores in strips. There were no physical wounds
that broke the surface of his skin that would give cause for the bleeding.
    “What’s happening to him, Yesh?”
    I shook my head and leaned closer,
running my hands just above the surface of his skin. “I have no clue. Get me
some wet cloths to clean this up?”
    Chaz was back out of the room in a
flash. He was good that way. He might be annoying sometimes, but he was the
best I could have asked for in an assistant. Especially a self-appointed assistant
I had never asked for in the first place. He kept a cool head in a crisis and
did what I asked without question. It was the in-between times when I couldn’t
always get him to shut up. But I dealt with my issues. It was a small price to
pay for good help.
    The man moaned and turned his head
toward me. His eyes were still glazed with pain. I tried to put on my best face
of reassurance, but I really wasn’t good at it.
    “Hold in there, fella.” I tried
for a smile. My bet was that it looked more like a grimace. “We’ll see what we
can do for you, but I need you to keep still.”
    He stared at me for a long moment
before nodding. Even that small movement seemed to cause him a lot of pain. I
adjusted my position to get closer to his upper back, where the majority of the
blood seemed to seep out of his skin. I heard Chaz in the doorway behind me and
I went to reach without looking for the cloths I knew he would have ready.
    Something caught my eye and I
moved my hand instead toward the neck of the man on the bed. With his face
turned toward me, it had brought a raised mark into view on the right side of
his neck. I looked closer. It appeared to be runes of some kind, but not quite.
The markings looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place them. I frowned,
reaching out to run my fingers over the surface. The man jerked as though
burned and his voice rasped a warning in my ears.
    “Don’t––”
    But it was too late. Blackness
slid across my vision, the room fading away around me.

 

Chapter 7

 
    The sound of the man’s warning was
muffled to my ears, distorted. It sounded far away from wherever I was now. And
wherever I was, I didn’t like it. The terrain had a vague, familiar feel to it.
Damn. It was a dreamscape. Is that why the guy had felt so familiar? Was he the
dream stalker I was after? Morpheus had mentioned separate and distinct
personalities––was that the separation I had felt?
    Somehow the answer didn’t feel
right to me. This was––different. I wasn’t ruling it out, but dream stalkers
were generally cowards in their physical form. They didn’t walk up to a tracker
and bleed at their doorstep. I really didn’t need these kinds of complications
right now.
    I looked across the dreamscape.
The sun was setting as a backdrop to an incredibly delicate, impossibly real
crystalline city. The