"Jeanie London - Retrieval (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (London Jeanie)

And finally. . . dominion.
He'd made enough good choices during his life to throw off the demons of
death. They grudgingly abandoned the battle for his soul and receded in a
violent hiss of writhing blackness.
The angels left Roman, too, ascending in a luminous cloud of light; until he
thought he'd be left alone in the void.
Then another angel appeared, burning so bright the light seared Roman's
vision, forced him to shield his face. Before he closed his eyes though, he
caught a glimpse of flaming eyes and a radiant sword.
"I am the captain of the angelic warriors, and you have a choice before you,
Roman Barrymore. You can atone in purgatory, the threshold of heaven," the
angel said in an otherworldly voice that swelled with goodness and strength,
and sounded oddly familiar. "Or you can delay eternity and accept a special
task."
Roman wanted to face the owner of that voice, but the light blinded and burned
even through the shield of his raised hands and could he only ask, "What
task?"
"A necessary one," the angelic captain said. ''And a difficult one. A battle
must be fought for the passage between life and death. Someone must rally
forces to fight. . ."



CHAPTER ONE

WAS there any good way to tell a woman she's dead?
Roman Barrymore didn't think so, which left him facing an interesting dilemma.
Once he confirmed the identity of the woman running through the park after her
fugitive dog, he would have to decide how best to break the news.
The woman was Nina de Lacy. In life, she'd been the Lady of Kirkby, a Brit
from a holding near the Welsh border. In death, she was a lost soul, who'd
shifted out of the afterlife back into the living world, where she currently
existed as if alive.
She wasn't.
Roman had come to reconnoiter and formulate a strategy to achieve mission
objective: Retrieval.
Nina couldn't remain in the land of the living. There were any number of
reasons why, but most important to Roman was that only she possessed the skill
necessary to help him win the battle for dominion of the passage.
6

JEANIE LONDON

Convincing her to do that job would be a challenge, no doubt. In the short
weeks since Roman had agreed to rally an army, he'd learned death wasn't any
simpler than life had been. In fact, in some ways, death was proving more
complicated.
There was nothing simple about retrieving Nina.
In life, he'd established a reputation by tackling challenges most people had
considered impossible. While he was uniquely qualified to tackle the obstacles