Fallen Angels 06 - Immortal by J.R. Ward Read Free Book Online

Victorian Orientals had been threadbare and unraveling.
    Now? As he entered the sitting room, the velvets on the sofas, the silk of the drapes, the molding around the bookcases and the tops of the varnished tables were all pristine—as if he’d walked into a carefully preserved museum piece of life in the late eighteen hundreds. The same was true of that kitchen they hung out in¸ the forties-era appliances suddenly working like a collection of brand-new GEs, the Formica gleaming showroom-fresh. Upstairs was the same deal, too, all the lace in the privacy curtains and the girlie bedspreads magically filling their own holes and fixing their frays. Creepy shit—at first he’d assumed it was because someone, not him, was cleaning stuff. But no Dyson job could restitch a rug, repair the hem of a chair, replaster a wall.
    There was so much else to worry about, though.
    As he breathed in, the lingering stench of smoke sharpened the air, and he looked to the hearth. The charred detritus in and around the burned logs looked like paper, as if someone had tried to burn up an old set of encyclopedias. But nah, it wasn’t that. The shit was the remains of all the sheeting that had been draped over the old furniture. Sissy had been the one who dragged everything over to the fireplace and lit the match.
    Can you say
Phhhhhu-mp!
    The smoke damage had charred the walls around the hearth, and that forty-by-twenty-foot rug, even though it was doing the Oriental carpet version of Botox with the anti-aging, had been toasted but good in a semi-circle.
    They’d probably lost their security deposit, thanks to her.
    And hell, maybe Jim had a point. If Sissy was already lighting things up … this recon trip Jim was about to head off into wasn’t going to help her mellow out.
    “And why did you tell her?” Jim demanded from the doorway. “What the fuck is that all about?”
    “Tell her about what?”
    “About Devina and me.”
    Ad turned around. “I didn’t—”
    “Bullshit.”
    Ad leaned forward even though his hips let out a holler. “Let me make this perfectly clear—I didn’t say one goddamn thing about you and Devina. You think I want to make this situation worse than it already is?”
    Jim stalked into the room, going all caged-animal as he paced around. “Then how did she know—”
    “Here it is.”
    As Sissy came in with the book, Jim froze and just stared at her—and in the strained silence, the only thing that came to Ad’s mind was … why the fuck couldn’t the bunch of them, at least once, have something go their way. Because the math was looking really bad at the moment: Jim had clearly not said anything about his demon lover. And Ad might be an asshole, but he knew every word that had come out of his own mouth, and he sure as shit hadn’t spilled.
    There was only one other source of that knowledge.
    “Now, are you going to tell me about Purgatory,” Sissy said. “Or are you two going to try to get through these stereo instructions on your own?”
    Jim let off a fantastic string of curses that did nothing to share any information, but did suggest that inanimate objects were in imminent danger of getting thrown.
    When the savior finally went quiet, Ad found himself wanting to rub his face with a piece of sandpaper. ’Cause that would be less painful than all this bullshit.
    Clearly, the pulpit was his and no one else’s. “Okay, so we have a boss—”
    “God,” Sissy cut in.
    “No. Although the Creator is a huge part of everything.” Well, duh on that one. “And Jim’s bright idea is to go and bring him back.”
    “He’s dead? I thought we were all immortal.”
    Hadn’t he come in here to sit down? He picked a sofa and sank into it with all the grace of a knapsack falling off a counter. “Our boss is no longer in existence, how about that.”
    “So there is a way out of here? Like, this life—or whatever it is.”
    “No.” He thought of Eddie, but decided, given Sissy’s too-intense