Messenger's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels by Heather Killough-Walden Read Free Book Online Page A

invisible was the only power Daniel possessed, and that apparently wasn’t enough to keep Daniel alive. The General needed a guinea pig—and he’d chosen Daniel for the mortal task.
    However, the General was mistaken. Daniel also had the power of prophecy, of divination: the ability to see into the future.
    He’d always kept this second ability a secret from the General because the power of prophecy wasn’t an easy one to use, no matter how valuable it was. It
hurt
him to use it. Every time he performed a divination, it left him sick and weakened and in vast amounts of agony. No amount of morphine was capable of ridding him of this pain. It was a supernatural suffering, without recourse.
    As long as these side effects were not his own to suffer, Abraxos would not have cared how horrible they were, and he would have forced Daniel to use that power with great frequency to locate the other archesses or supernatural beings. The advantages to knowing your opponent’s next moves before they did were enormous. So Daniel had hidden his prophecy power from his leader, and only his ability to turn himself invisible had been of any use to Abraxos—that was all the General knew Daniel had to offer.
    Several days ago, Daniel had performed a divination. He didn’t normally do so, again because of the pain, but he’d been riddled with a foreboding feeling and wanted to know why. So, he decided to put up with the pain long enough to satisfy the niggling sense that the prophecy was necessary. He performed the divination and had seen within it something wholly disconcerting: the General and his plan to kill Daniel by ingesting all of his blood. The entire scene unfolded before Daniel’s mind, along with the General’s reasons for doing so.
    Whether Abraxos’s plan made sense or not was another question entirely. As far as Daniel was concerned, it was an impossible dream that the Adarians would ever successfully get their hands on even one of the archesses, much less all of them. As far as Daniel was concerned, Abraxos was going mad and that plan alone proved it. But that was beside the point. The General would carry out the worst part of his plan no matter what, and kill Daniel whether the rest of the design made sense or not.
    Daniel wondered whether the General had chosen another Adarian to die in his stead now that Daniel had escaped. Maybe he had—and that soldier was already dead. If that was the case, he wondered who it might be. And he wondered if it had worked. Had Abraxos been capable of absorbing the Adarian’s power?
    If so . . . would he decide he wanted more abilities? Would the General now go after any of the other men for their powers? Where would it stop?
    Daniel knew that he’d been originally singled out by the General because all he seemed to offer was his invisibility. But if Daniel could prove that he had more to offer, it might just ensure that the General never turned on him and decided to take his power as his own. Abraxos would not want to suffer the agony that came with using the divination ability himself, so Daniel highly doubted that his leader would take such a power from him. But the General
would
allow Daniel to live as long as
Daniel
was the one to suffer the pain—and as long as Daniel delivered a prophecy whenever the General wanted him to.
    Even if it promised a life of agony, it was better to Daniel to use his divination ability whenever his leader saw fit rather than face the gruesome death he had foreseen in that terrible glimpse into the future. It was his only hope. He could never leave the Adarians; he could never disappear entirely. He didn’t belong anywhere else and knew of nowhere to go—and it didn’t matter. No matter where Daniel went, the General would find him eventually. There was no escape from him. And the Adarians were the only family Daniel had ever known.
    He had nothing else. This plan had to work.
    All he needed was Juliette Anderson. She was his proof. Other than