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

landscape to reflect the strength and beauty of the nation's capital.
One day winter had bleached the city to monochrome with gray skies and dirty streaks of snow. He had awakened the next to find the world altered with neatly planted sod and bright blossoms as if the president had dictated a memo and declared winter officially over.
To all appearances, he had.
But from Roman's vantage in the afterlife, the park was still steeped in drowsy shades of gray, as if the president's memo hadn't yet made it off his assistant's desk. The grass and the blossoms were there; Roman just couldn't see the colors.
Only black. White. Shades of gray.
Like the woman herself. Roman only knew she was alive because she ran after her dog. He couldn't sense the life pulsing through her veins. He couldn't feel the warmth of her skin if he touched her. He couldn't feel the breeze whipping hair around her face.
He couldn't feel anything at all.
Such was death. No tactile senses. No connection to humanity. He could see the scene playing out before him, but couldn't affect it, or be affected by it. The passage between life and death separated the existences absolutely. He now resided in the afterlife.
Turning his attention back to the woman, he watched as she made a mad dash for her dog, which placed her directly in the path of a bicycle rider who swerved to avoid her.
"Sorry," she yelled over her shoulder.
Her dog, a mixed breed that was an interesting combination of rottweiler and something smaller. . . beagle, maybe, bounded toward the ducks Inilling around the pond's edge.



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"Oodles Marie!" she demanded, her tone a fierce mix of horror and frustration. "Come. Now!"
Oodles Marie hurtled toward the ducks, gaining momentum like a bowling ball about to break pin formation.
With keen internal radar, the ducks launched into flight with a frenzy of squawking leaps and flapping wings. They landed in the water with rapid-fire splashes as if someone had rained automatic gunfire over the pond.
As the dog sprang off the ground to follow, the woman made an athletic leap for the leash. She caught it in mid-air and jerked the dog to a stop. The dog landed on all fours but bounded up as if on springs, ready to go again at the ducks. Now the owner had control.
She stood frozen on the edge of the pond with the leash clutched in a death grip, her eyes tightly shut, chest rising and falling on rapid breaths. All striking signs of physical life from a woman who wasn't.
Well, that wasn't entirely true. The woman dressed in neat jeans and a hooded sweatshirt was alive enough. But she'd unwittingly become the living host for the dead soul that had taken up residence inside her.
Roman had seen portraits of Nina before and knew her to be an exquisitely beautiful woman with honeyed hair and gold-flecked eyes. The woman clutching her dog was attractive in an earthy way, but very different from his target with her waving brown hair and dark eyes. She was a shade too thin, a shade too anxious, and the effect combined to make her look tired.
One body. T\vo women.
Good thing Roman enjoyed challenges. He had a mission to accomplish and only select pieces of intelligence

about a situation that resembled a puzzle scattered across life and the afterlife. The success of his mission depended upon a woman who didn't remember she was dead.
A very good thing he liked challenges.
Roman honestly hadn't given much thought to what would happen after death. Since he hadn't planned on dying any time soon, he'd been content with the explanations taught at the Jesuit academy he'd attended in his youth.
But now that he'd experienced the event firsthand, he knew he would have never even come close to guessing the truth.
Souls went to heaven or hell. Or they repented and moved on to the threshold. That's what he'd always heard, but now he knew things weren't quite so clear cut. Some souls took longer to accept death and wound up lingering in the passage between life and death.
But for those who lingered, the passage created a different level of existence. Lingering souls still retained an echo of their humanity, which allowed them to use the passage as a place to shift between the living world and the afterlife. This made the passage attractive to demons that would abuse the privilege. And plunged a willing Roman into the middle of a conflict to pursue a woman who didn't remember she was dead.
A beautiful woman who was uniquely talented and critical to winning this battle between good and evil.
And Roman would know, as he'd spent every moment since his death learning about her.
He observed two men coming toward him, crossing a path without slowing for runners who approached at collision speed. They were clearly unconcerned by the

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commotion happening in a realm no longer theirs and moved at an effortless pace, out of sync with the surrounding activity, a stride that propelled them forward yet didn't appear to involve flexing muscle or effort.
These were the men who could help him retrieve Nina.
Roman wondered if he would eventually move as these men did. Effortless. Not a glide exactly, yet a sinuous motion that appeared to be a hallmark of the long dead, as if physical memory had been forgotten and only thought powered their progress.