Finale by Becca Fitzpatrick Read Free Book Online Page A

weight of what was going on hadn’t hit yet, leaving me more outraged than frightened. No answer came, but I heard the steady breathing of two nearby individuals. Those two, plus the driver, meant three of them. Against one of me.
    My arms had been twisted behind my back, pinned together by what felt like a tow chain. My ankles were secured by a similar heavy-duty chain. I was stretched out on my stomach, the bag still over my head, my nose pushed into the roomy floor of the van. I tried to rock onto my side but felt as though my shoulder joint would tear from its socket. I screamed out in frustration and received a swift kick in the thigh.
    “Keep it down,” a male voice growled.
    We drove for a long time. Forty-five minutes, maybe. My mind jumped in too many directions to keep track accurately. Could I escape? How? Outrun them? No. Outwit them? Maybe. And then there was Patch. He would know I’d been taken. He’d track my cell phone to the street outside Pete’s Locker Room, but how would he know where to go from there?
    At first the van stopped repeatedly for stoplights, but eventually the road cleared. The van climbed higher, weaving back and forth on switchbacks, which made me believe we were moving into the remote, hilly areas far outside of town. Sweat trickled beneath my shirt, and I couldn’t seem to force a single deep breath. Each inhalation came shallow, panic clamping my chest.
    The tires popped over gravel, steadily rolling uphill, until at last the engine died. My captors unchained my feet, dragged me outside and through a door, and yanked the bag off my head.
    I was right; there were three of them. Two males, one female. They’d brought me to a log cabin, and they rechained my arms to a decorative wooden post that ran from the main level up to the tie beams at the ceiling. No lights, but that may have well been because the power had been shut off. Furniture was sparse, and covered in white sheets. The air couldn’t have been more than a degree or two warmer than outside, telling me the furnace wasn’t on. Whoever the cabin belonged to had closed up for winter.
    “Don’t bother screaming,” the bulkiest of them told me. “There isn’t another warm body around for miles.” He hid behind a cowboy hat and sunglasses, but Knglm there his precaution was unnecessary; I was positive I’d never seen him before. My heightened sixth sense identified all three as Nephilim. But what they wanted from me . . . I didn’t have a clue.
    I jerked against the chains, but other than producing a weak grinding sound, they didn’t budge.
    “If you were a
real
Nephil, you’d be able to break out of the chains,” the Nephil in the cowboy hat snarled. He seemed to be the spokesman for the other two, who hung back, limiting their communication with me to glares of disgust.
    “What do you want?” I repeated icily.
    Cowboy Hat’s mouth curled into a sneer. “I want to know how a little princess like yourself thinks she can pull off a Nephilim revolution.”
    I held his hateful gaze, wishing I could fling the truth in his face. There wasn’t going to be a revolution. Once Cheshvan started in less than two days, he and his friends
would
be possessed by fallen angels. Hank Millar had had the easy part: filling their heads with notions of rebellion and freedom. And now I was left to work the actual miracle.
    And I wasn’t going to.
    “I looked into you,” Cowboy Hat said, pacing in front of me. “I asked around and found out you’re dating Patch Cipriano, a fallen angel. How’s that relationship working out for you?”
    I swallowed discreetly. “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to.” I knew the danger I faced if my relationship with Patch were found out. I’d been careful, but it was starting to look like not careful enough. “But I ended things with Patch,” I lied. “Whatever we had is in the past. I know where my loyalties lie. As soon as I became a Nephil—”
    He thrust his face in mine.