Read The Immortals for Free Online Page B

Nobody stopped to help her.
    And then, as dreams so often do, it got even weirder because she was suddenly standing in a different part of the city, in front of a large platform, and the crowd around her was even larger, louder, more sinister. Anna had only a moment to realize what the stage in front of her was used for as the swooshing metallic blade reflected the sunlight into her eyes. Anna flinched and wanted to turn away as the man on the stage lifted the bloody head to the roar of the crowd, but the people pressing against her trying to get a better view wouldn’t let her walk away from this grisly scene. They were already bringing another man on stage, his arms tied behind his back. The blade lifted into place again as they shoved the condemned man onto the block, and Anna squeezed her eyes shut.
    As she did, she heard a musical ringing. A strange, anachronistic sound, yet another thing out of place in her odd time-traveling dreams, and she looked around her, trying to place the pleasant noise among the throng pushing toward the guillotine, wanting to get a better view of the newly decapitated head but that sound … Anna couldn’t place it, but she knew that sound. She looked around the fevered crowd for it, but couldn’t find anything that would make such a lovely bell noise amidst the chaos in this square.
    Anna’s eyes slowly opened in her bedroom in Baton Rouge. The cries of the French crowd were quickly dissipating as she oriented herself, realizing she had been dreaming, she wasn’t in Paris, and her phone was ringing. She groggily picked it up and glanced at the screen. Jeremy. Why the hell was he calling her at 6:14 in the morning? No one should call at 6:14 in the morning. Or before a person has had the chance to consume at least two cups of coffee. That’s just common sense. She answered it anyway.
    “Anna, turn on the news,” Jeremy told her.
    The remnants of her sleepy haze vanished. No more French dream, no more fantasies of coffee. She grabbed the remote and turned on the television, flipping channels until she found the local news station.
    “Oh my God,” she breathed. The reporter was outside one of the plants in Addis where a huge explosion over night had caused a cascade of fires. They suspected at least twelve employees were killed, over twenty had been taken to nearby hospitals and three were still unaccounted for. She knew it wasn’t true as soon as the words escaped her lips but it was like listening to someone else speak, not herself, “It could have been a coincidence.”
    Jeremy didn’t answer her right away. She wasn’t the first person he’d had to talk to about this and he was probably exhausted. “Colin’s the one who called me. About an hour ago. He didn’t think it was a coincidence. The explosion happened exactly one hour after we missed our deadline.” Jeremy exhaled slowly, a tired, weary, stressful breath. “And I got a call last night from Father David. Said a woman came in to see him claiming she was being harassed by a demon. So we need to go check this out.”
    Of course. Because when Hell has you on its Hit List, following around crazy people was exactly the kind of thing Anna wanted to do. She made plans to meet him later that day so they could see if any of this woman’s story might be true – but more often than not, people were either genuinely crazy or just blamed demons or Hell or something like that for doing stuff they knew they shouldn’t be doing.
    By that afternoon, Anna was standing outside a small strip mall where the woman worked in a nail salon, with Jeremy and Colin looking decidedly uncomfortable with the idea of having to go in there, and Dylan looking decidedly bored with the whole thing. Anna thought it was completely ridiculous that Jeremy had brought three other hunters along with him to investigate one far-fetched claim of demon-stalking but the email and last night’s tragedy at the plant in Addis had everyone on edge.
    “Fine,”