Read Anthology.The.Mammoth.Book.of.Angels.And.Demons.2013.Paula.Guran for Free Online Page A

was indeed filled with dismay and resentment. She couldn’t accept this dark aspect of his life because it had all looked so bright to her before, for both of them.
    Avoiding her eyes, he said bitterly, “I know it’s a mess. You have every right to kick me out before you get any more involved.”
    Rose saw the pictures in his aura, some of them concerned with his young sister who went in and out of institutions and, calamitously, in and out of his life. But many showed this boy holding Stephanie’s hand, holding Stephanie, applauding Stephanie from an audience, sitting with Stephanie on the porch of a wooden house amid dark, tall trees somewhere . . .
    Rose looked at Stephanie’s aura. This boy was all over it. Invisible, Rose whispered in Stephanie’s ear, “Stick with him, darling, he loves you and it looks like you love him too.”
    At the same moment she heard a faint echo of very similar words in Stephanie’s mind. The girl looked startled, as if she had heard this too.
    “What?” the boy said, gazing at her with anxious intensity.
    Stephanie said, “Stay in my life. I’ll try to stay in yours.”
    They hugged each other. The boy murmured into her neck, where Rose was accustomed to take her nourishment, “I was so afraid you’d say no, go away and take your problems with you . . .”
    Seeing the shine of tears in the boy’s eyes, Rose felt the remembered sensation of tears in her own. As she watched, their auras slowly wove together, flickering and bleeding colors into each other. This seemed so much more intimate than sex that Rose felt she really ought to leave the two of them alone.
    The Angel was still on the roof, or almost on it, hovering above the parapet.
    Rose said, “She doesn’t need me anymore; she can tell herself what to do as well as I can, probably better.”
    “If she’ll listen,” the Angel said.
    Rose looked down at the moving lights of cars on the street below. “All right,” she said. “I’m ready. How do I get rid of the blood I got from Stephanie this morning?”
    “You mean this?” The Angel’s finger touched Rose’s chest, where a warm red glow beat in the place where her heart would have been. “I can get rid of it for you, but I warn you, it’ll hurt.”
    “Do it,” Rose said, powered by a surging impatience to get on with something of her own for a change, having been so immersed in Stephanie’s raw young life – however long it was now. Time was much harder to divide intelligibly than it had been.
    The Angel’s finger tapped once, harder, and stabbed itself burningly into her breast. There came a swift sensation of what it must feel like to have all the marrow drawn at once from your bones. Rose screamed.
    She opened her eyes and looked down, gasping, at the Angel. Already she was rising like some light, vaned seed on the wind. She saw the Angel point downward at the roof with one glowing, crimson finger. One flick and a stream of bright fire shot down through the shadowy outline of the building and landed – she saw it happen, the borders of her vision were rushing away from her in all directions – in the kitchen sink and ran away down the drain
    Stephanie turned her head slightly and murmured, “What was that? I heard something.”
    The boy kissed her temple. “Nothing.” He gathered her closer and rolled himself on top of her, nuzzling her. What an appetite they had, how exhausting!
    Other voices wove in and out of their murmuring voices. Rose could see and hear the whole city as it slowly sank away below her, a net of lights slung over the dark earth.
    But above her – and she no longer needed to direct her vision to see what was there but saw directly with her mind’s eye – the sky was thick with a massed and threatening darkness that she knew to be God: still waiting, scowling, implacable, for His delayed confrontation with Rose.
    Despite the panic pulsating through her as the inevitable approached, she couldn’t help noticing that there was