Forsaken (The Djinn Wars Book 5) Read Online Free Page A

Her father was a tall man, and he didn’t quite fit on the sofa, his legs slipping down to touch the carpet. His face was flushed and sheened with sweat, his breaths a shallow pant.
    Had she ever seen anyone that ill? Maybe her mother when she was in the last stages of her battle with cancer, but this was an entirely different kind of sickness. Even from a foot away, Madison had felt the waves of fever heat coming from her father’s body.
    Of course she’d grabbed her phone to call 9-1-1, but all she got was a fast busy signal, indicating that the circuits were overloaded. Her entire body tensed at the sound, even as her mind shied away from acknowledging what that busy signal probably meant.
    And then he’d whispered her name.
    “Madison.”
    She’d bent toward him, while at the same time worrying what in the world she was going to do, and whether he was contagious — even as she scolded herself for harboring such a selfish thought — and who she should call now that emergency services didn’t seem to be responding. “Dad?”
    He pointed toward the cell phone she held and shook his head. “No use,” he whispered. His eyes were wide, so wide that she could see the whites all around the irises, even though those whites weren’t really white at all, but choked with angry-looking red veins. “All gone.”
    “What do you mean, ‘all gone’?” she asked, a terror she could barely comprehend beginning to well up in her.
    “Everything,” he said simply, the word barely more than a breath. “Madison….”
    “What, Dad?” Her own voice was nearly as hushed, but that was more because of the tears she could feel rising, choking her vocal chords.
    “Go…shelter.”
    Of course she knew about the shelter. Clay Michaels had treated her family as if they were his, and so he’d told them about the secret bunker twenty feet below the surface of his backyard, the entrance cleverly hidden in the bottom of a gazebo surrounded by roses. When she’d first learned of the shelter, around the time she was sixteen or so, she’d thought Clay was being just a little paranoid — after all, the Cold War was long over — although she’d kept her opinion to herself.
    “I need to get you to a hospital,” she told her father in reply. How she’d manage to do that, she had no idea. Yes, she’d inherited her father’s height, and kept herself in shape by hiking or working out on the elliptical in her apartment when she didn’t have time to get out and about, but that didn’t mean she’d be able to lift a man who was six foot three and weighed around two hundred pounds.
    “No hospitals,” he replied weakly. “Gone. Nothing…go to the shelter.”
    “Dad — ”
    His eyes shut then, and a strange rattle came from his throat. Hearing it, her blood went cold, but she forced herself to reach out and take his wrist, so strangely, frighteningly hot, the skin slick with sweat.
    She couldn’t feel a pulse. Forcing in a breath, she moved her fingers to his throat, praying that she’d be able to feel the stronger beat of his heart there, but there was nothing to feel.
    Nothing. Just as he’d said.
    She knelt there for a long moment, her eyes burning, dry. Somehow she knew if she started to cry, she’d never be able to stop.
    The night was so still. From far off she thought she could hear the wail of a siren, but otherwise, the only thing echoing in her ears was the thudding of her own heart.
    “I’m sorry, Dad,” she said at last. Thinking her failure at getting through to 9-1-1 earlier had to have been a fluke, she tapped the screen on her phone again. This time she didn’t even get that fast, angry busy signal. There was nothing. Dead air.
    She’d wanted to fling the phone at the wall in denial, but she didn’t. Instead, she set it down and forced herself to confront what she must do next.
    No one would be coming to take her father’s body away. She’d climbed the stairs to the second floor, thinking she could fetch