Phoenix Contract: Part Two (Fallen Angel Watchers) Read Online Free Page A

but he remained, huge and looming, the visage straight from her nightmares. The Grim Reaper wore long black robes, the uniform of his ghastly office. The cloaked figure bent over Father Matthew’s hospital bed, obscuring her view of the priest. Had he come to collect Matthew’s soul?
    “No!” Aiden cried, infusing her voice with the power to command Death. She bolted out of the chair she’d been sleeping in and landed upright in a defiant stance. She took a bold stride, ready to challenge the spectral apparition.
    “No?” Death’s voice was husky and dulcet and decidedly familiar. Magnus. The reaper turned, only he wasn’t Death after all. The robes, open in the front, revealed a man clad in a black shirt and pants. The cowl of his leather cloak hung forward, creating folds of loose material that concealed his face.
    “What are you doing here?” Aiden demanded. Suddenly, she was coldly furious, anger covering her fear.
    “Just checking to see how Matthew’s doing,” he said, his voice laden with stress and pain.
    Had she been imagining things? Dreaming? She questioned her own reality and wondered at her sanity but found no easy answers. Aiden stared at him hard as if to perceive past the cowl of the draped hood.
    Under her gaze, he stirred, and one of his hands gripped the metal frame at the bottom of the bed. The leather gloves creaked under the pressure of his tightening grip. “What?” His discernable effort to sound normal failed.
    “Are you hurt?” Aiden asked, hating the stab of sympathy stirring in her breast.
    “I’m—”
    She could almost read the thoughts forming in his mind, so clear and eloquent his hesitation. He reconsidered at the last second. Without speaking, he stripped away the glove and revealed a hand burnt almost beyond recognition of a human extremity.
    She gasped. Blackened and cracked, the outer skin formed jagged edges over the inner tissue that was bright and red like raw meat, oozing fluids. Along the back of his hand, a network of fine white bones peeked through where the flesh had been burnt away entirely.
    “What happened? I-is...” She shuddered so hard her teeth rattled. “Is the rest of you like that ?”
    “Yes, more or less. I managed to protect my eyes,” he said, his tone distant and detached, as if they were discussing the weather.
    To Aiden’s immense relief, he put the glove back on. Profoundly disturbed, she didn’t bother to temper her language. “What the hell happened?”
    “I’m severely allergic to sunlight,” he stated. “It’s lethal in the right doses.”
    A weak tremor wracked Aiden, and she nervously eyed his cloaked form, imagining the gruesome burnt flesh it concealed. “How is it that you’re still alive?” she asked in a shuddering voice.
    Magnus cocked his head, causing a slight movement around the fringe of his cowl. She could feel his eyes cutting into her. Then, he shrugged as if the mystery of his continued existence defied explanation.
    “How’s your throat?” His hand made a small gesture toward her neck.
    “It hurts a little, but it only took three stitches,” Aiden said, her own hand rising reflexively to cover her injury. She was damned lucky to have survived a vampire bite and even luckier that she hadn’t consumed any of Daniel’s blood. With vampires, it was all about blood, and she could’ve been turned into one all too easily. Just like Daniel had planned.
    The very thought made her ill, and she automatically sought to conceal her reaction from this stranger. “Do you need a doctor?”
    Abruptly, Magnus turned toward the doorway. “Someone’s coming.”
    The sound of the knob being turned caused Aiden to whirl. The door opened, and a man in his late fifties entered. He wore pale green scrubs beneath a white jacket and had a stethoscope looped around his neck. He greeted her with a friendly smile. “Hello.”
    He stopped, looking like he wanted to say something more, perhaps to comment on her bewilderment, or