Dark Destiny (Dark Sentinel #1) - Lexxie Couper Page 0,36
biddy finally spouted something of significance, instead of the usual cryptic mumbo-jumbo she’d been known for before her unexplained disappearance?
She reread the line, trying to garner more information.
Nothing.
“Okay then,” she muttered, turning her attention to the paragraph before it. “Crap.” Nothing relating to or referencing Ven or Patrick at all. Just forty or so sentences carrying on about the relationship between seraphim and archangels and how they interacted with virgins in mankind’s sixteenth century.
The next ten paragraphs after the tantalizing line were the same. The last Fate really seemed to be hung up on the sex lives of the upper-order angels, describing their mating rituals in great detail and an awful lot of very purple prose.
She huffed into her fringe. It was as if the line about Ven just popped out of nowhere. Which, when it came down to it, was totally on-form for the last Fate. The last Fate was known for sprouting rubbish most of the time peppered with the very occasional factual revelation.
She read the rest of Of Men and Demon word by word, hoping there might be something else.
There wasn’t. Damn it.
“All right, next book.”
The next book had nothing. Neither did the next. Or the next. The Deities alone knew how many books later, and she was beginning to get well and truly pissed off. Nothing. Nothing! Just a waste of time, an even bigger headache, and an entirely rational desire to strangle just about every author in the Realm. Once she’d put them back together after tearing them apart the first time, that was.
She threw the latest disappointment aside and glared blankly into the empty fireplace. “Fuck.”
There were ten books left on the shelves. Ten tomes containing the sum total recorded knowledge of the Realm and the humankind.
Scrunching up her face, Fred conjured the thinnest into her hand—Death and Lust in the Time of Genesis. She cocked an eyebrow. A book dedicated to her? She grinned. This could be, if nothing else, entertaining.
The first chapter was dedicated to her antics before the Deities intervened. She chuckled. The author—Anonymous, of all things—seemed to have taken quite a few liberties with the facts. Half of what they’d attributed to her after the Creation she had nothing to do with. To believe the author’s account, she’d been a right psychotic bitch.
Making a mental note to discover who “anonymous” was later on, she continued reading. The rest of the book read like a trashy human gossip mag. Hearsay and conjecture making up most of the word count, with the odd illustration—mostly of her morbid cloak-and-scythe persona—thrown in for good measure. Nothing entertaining or illuminating at all. Not even in the footnotes, of which there were plenty.
Damn, damn, damn.
She slammed the book closed…just as a line leapt out from the pages.
The Cure shall face the Disease o—
“Shit.”
A tingle shot up her spine and she jerked the book open, frustration eating at her. Damn it, what page had she been on?
“Somewhere near the back of the book, Fred,” she muttered, fanning the pages. “Opposite an illustration of you and the other Horsemen.” Yes, that was right. She’d curled her lip at the way the artist had depicted her—all dead and gross and male.
She whipped through the book, searching for the illustration. Where was it?
“Ah, there.” Her pulse burst into furious life. Tenth page from the last.
With a quick scowl at the hideous artwork—For Pete’s sake, male?—she read through the page of text opposite it, looking for the line that had caught her eye.
Yadda, yadda, yadda, blah, blah, blah. The Cure shall face the Disease on the shifting dunes and the end shall begin and the beginning shall end. Blah, blah, bl—
Her stare locked on to the disconnected sentence.
She read it again.
The Cure shall face the Disease on the shifting dunes and the end shall begin and the beginning shall end.
What did it mean? It wasn’t written in the snarky past tense, adjective-heavy style of the rest of the book, nor was it obsessing about her so-called achievements an eon ago, and it bore no relation to anything else written before or after it.
She gnawed on her bottom lip. Who the hell was Anonymous? Another Fate? One of the earlier sages now long gone?
She studied the words again. What did they mean?
The Cure. Nope. Nothing.
The Disease. Pestilence. Had to be. He’d never taken a human name, considering himself far too superior to do so, but referred to himself often as the Disease, usually with self-absorbed arrogance.