Read Solatium (Emanations, an urban fantasy series Book 2) for Free Online Page B

that he was still really mad at me.
    I understood why. From his point of view, his wife had vanished. Then his sister, his only remaining family, had picked that moment — the moment he desperately needed her help — to flip out and leave town, destination unknown. He’d spent the four years since our mother died looking out for me, and he’d done it despite Justine pretty much hating me. But when the time came to return the favor, I split. And I hadn’t even been able to offer a reasonable explanation for where I was going or why, since “unable to leave New York due to enslavement by godlike otherworldly being” was a no-go.
    Yeah, I understood why he was pissed. I just hadn’t expected him to stay pissed for quite so long. Ben was my only family. I missed him.
    I finished drying between my toes and began pulling on my clothes. Over by the mirror, Justine turned on the blow-dryer and began the long process of making that hairstyle Jennifer Aniston had in the mid-’90s. Justine had been wearing her hair that way since before she could drive. Funny how some people’s fashion sense gets frozen at a certain moment in time and stays that way forever.
    Not a problem for me — I had no fashion sense. Jeans, sneakers, and a ponytail were my look of choice. Unfortunately, life in Cordus’s world demanded at least “business casual” most of the time. It was a drag.
    But not as much of a drag as spending time with Justine. I felt responsible for her and tried to see her every day, but it sure wasn’t something I looked forward to. She reminded me of Ben and the girls and of the life I’d lost. Plus, she’d never been nice to me.
    Justine had grown up around the corner from me, so I’d always sort of known her. When I was eight and she was a freshman in high school, she’d babysat for me a few times. I don’t remember much about her at that age. A few years later, she’d started going out with Ben. She got pregnant, and they got married.
    You’d think I’d have developed a good relationship with a sister-in-law who wasn’t all that much older than me, but it just didn’t work that way. She seemed to dislike me from the get-go. I never could figure out why.
    Anyway, a few months ago I’d found out she was actually some weird kind of Second, one who could shape-shift so fully that even Nolanders and other Seconds couldn’t tell she wasn’t human. Apparently, she’d stolen some kind of super-weapon from another S-Em power, Limu, and had come to Dorf to hide out. When Limu got wind of where she was, he sent a bounty hunter after her. That started the chain of events that revealed my maybe-not-human-after-all status and brought me here. And her, too — Cordus wasn’t letting her go until he figured out what Limu was up to.
    I slid my feet into a semi-comfortable pair of brown suede heels and straightened up. Justine was still blow-drying, intent on the task at hand. She was sucking in her upper lip, something she only did when she was concentrating.
    I still had trouble accepting she was a Second, much less a mythical one, and a daring thief, to boot. Intellectually, I knew it was true. I mean, I’d seen what was apparently her true shape — a bunch of floating blue balls. But emotionally, it still felt unreal. “Petty, shallow small-town sister-in-law” and “legendary, inhuman hero of the Second Emanation, a god to the gods,” were the mental equivalent of matter and anti-matter: I couldn’t put them together.
    At any rate, making Justine my gym buddy had been a good idea. When I was exercising, I didn’t think about all that stuff so much. Plus, we worked out hard enough that we couldn’t really talk. Perfect.
    And it made for great workouts. When I’d first come to the estate, Gwen had been in charge of my fitness training, and it had been brutal. Not because Gwen was that rough on me, I realized later, but because I’d been pretty out of shape. That was changing fast, though — Justine was a