Chase the Dark by Annette Marie Read Free Book Online

carefully to her feet and followed suit, her hands shaking. Ash copied her, his eyes glittering like obsidian.
    “Help him, please,” she whispered to the man, jerking her chin at Calder. “He’s going to die.”
    The man, his black uniform marked with the symbols of a prefect—the police force of the daemon community—gave Calder a brief glance. Without changing expression, he gestured to the men behind him.
    “Arrest them.”

CHAPTER 3
    P IPER slumped on the bottom stair in the front foyer and tried to pretend she was calm. She stared at the silver bands of metal around her wrists.
    Lyre fidgeted beside her, standing with his back against the wall and his cuffed hands trapped behind him. Apparently, he was more dangerous than her, so his wrists were behind his back. His eyes darted around the empty space, returning every few seconds to Ash.
    The draconian was leaning against the same wall as Lyre but was slouched in semi-consciousness. If the prefects thought Lyre was dangerous, then they thought Ash was a walking atomic bomb. Not only was he cuffed, but he’d also been collared with a magic-depressor and gagged. It was the former making him so drowsy he couldn’t focus. Shimmers kept rippling over him in random patterns as his dampened magic weakened the glamour that made him look human.
    All daemons were a little—or a lot—paranormal in appearance, but most of them could use magic to disguise themselves. Completely changing their appearance took a huge amount of magic, but they could fool the eyes and the senses with touches of power. The more human-looking they were to start with, the less magic they needed in order to walk around in public. Lyre, for example, didn’t bother changing the color of his unnatural looking hair and eyes because it wasn’t worth the effort.
    Ash, on the other hand, probably needed quite a bit of glamour to pass as human. It must take a lot of magic to keep his appearance as semi-human as it currently was, since he didn’t change his hair even though dark wine-red would be almost impossible to replicate with dye. He probably relied more on a don’t-see projection when he was around humans—a mental aura that made him blend into the background. Humans would simply fail to notice him as long as he didn’t do anything to draw their attention.
    At the moment, Ash was barely managing to keep up his glamour. Piper squinted, trying to make out his real face through the sporadic shimmers. He was human-enough in shape that his face was about the same without glamour but she kind of thought he might have a tail. Daemons were aggressively secretive about their real appearances so she only had a general idea what he might look like underneath the magic. Volunteers to model for textbook illustrations were a little hard to find.
    She couldn’t blame the prefects for taking precautions with Ash—he wasn’t the kind of daemon you wanted ticked off at you—but the prefects were treating all of them like criminals.
    The front door swung open and the sergeant in charge of the prefect team walked in. He was a big man with bigger muscles and an expressionless face that was the result of a missing sense of humor. His flat stare slid over Piper and Lyre to stop on Ash.
    “How’s my uncle?” she demanded, her voice too shrill. “Is he alive?”
    The sergeant shot her an impatient look. “Yes, he’s alive. He was moved to a medical center.”
    “Will he be okay?”
    The man shrugged uncaringly, his gaze moving back to Ash. The door opened again and another prefect came in. He stopped beside the sergeant, looking scrawny and weak-chinned in comparison.
    “Sir, the magic signature is definitely haemon, not daemon.” He jerked a thumb at Ash. “The explosion wasn’t him.”
    Piper’s eyes narrowed to furious slits. “Excuse me, but we already told you the explosion went off while me, Ash, and Lyre were upstairs. Ash wasn’t anywhere near the vault.”
    The sergeant ignored her, but the