Blood Cursed (Rogue Angel) Read Online Free Page B

she had to split her focus between the navigational screen and the gravel road. Oaks that looked centuries old lined one side of the road. In the distance red-dirt mountains once mined for copper, zinc and iron stood out against the pale blue sky. Hills and mountains surrounded the city, the northern border of which butted up against Poland.
    Riding with the top down in the fresh summer air, Annja was glad she’d applied sunscreen before setting out this morning. The sun wasn’t bright but it was going to get hot and she knew she’d burn even if it clouded over.
    According to her research, this area that curved the edge of Chrastava used to be a mining center in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. After the mines were abandoned toward the eighteenth century, they began manufacturing textiles. Principally Germanic from then on, after the world wars, the area was then inhabited by the Czech and other Slavic nationalities.
    Luke was familiar with the local dialects, fortunately, because Annja only knew a few words in Romanian.
    The sky was quickly growing overcast. Odd. Annja had checked the forecast from the car rental site and there had been no rain expected for the entire week.
    She imagined the inhabitants of this area weren’t too pleased with heavy rains. Flooding earlier in the spring had unearthed the area where Luke was digging. He’d been contacted by the local authorities after hikers had found bones sticking out of the thick, compacted mud and had thought they’d stumbled on a murder site. The authorities had figured out that it was instead an unmarked burial site, and attributed it to the Gypsies that had been traveling and setting up camp in the area for centuries. After giving the site a good three months to dry out and acquiring a small stipend and permission from the London University, Luke’s team had started to dig.
    Annja hadn’t noticed much of the scenery last night during the train ride from Berlin, so she drove slowly now, taking it all in. She’d been too tired and annoyed that her surprise visit to Garin Braden hadn’t been greeted with the pleased and practiced charm she had expected. Ah, well. She and Garin tended to rub each other the wrong way more often than not, although they worked alongside each other well enough when bullets were flying and quick, defensive reaction was required.
    Admittedly, her favorite situation.
    Life was meant to be experienced, and if that served up an extra helping of peril, then sign Annja Creed up for the full package. Nothing felt better than surfing the crest of life, fists up and teeth bared.
    So she was an adrenaline junkie. There were worse addictions. And since taking possession of Joan of Arc’s sword, she’d met more challenges than most would in a single lifetime.
    She still didn’t understand why she had somehow been chosen as the one to make the long-dead saint’s sword whole. All Annja knew was that as soon as she touched the shattered pieces Roux had painstakingly collected over the centuries, the sword was in her hand, as sharp a weapon as it had ever been for Joan.
    And when she let go of the hilt, the sword—now very clearly her sword—seemingly disappeared into thin air. But she knew it returned to where it waited until she drew it again. The otherwhere, she called the holding place, for lack of a better name.
    Ever since she’d first held the sword aloft, Annja hadn’t needed to search out adventure...it had come to her. And as keeper of Joan of Arc’s sword, she had no choice but to wield the weapon in defense of the innocent and the wronged.
    Pulling onto a winding rutted gravel road, she navigated through a grove of giant beech trees frosted with graying bark before emerging into a clearing that looked out across a vast field of blue lavender. The dig site hugged the edge of a forest, and the land dropped abruptly to the lavender field where flooding had appeared to sheer off the hillside.
    Pulling up, she scoped out the setup.