A rush of adrenaline pumped into my bloodstream. “I need to go back to my apartment and change, but hell yes, I’m down. Are you?” I eyed the spot on his chest where I’d punctured his heart.
He leapt to his feet from his sitting position on the couch in one powerful, fluid, agile motion. “I need to change too, but I’m as good as new.”
He moved like he was but I still narrowed my eyes at him questioningly.
Heat flickered back at me in his and a different sort of smile slowly crept across his face. This one was wicked and twelve types of scorching. He stepped in front of me then grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. He yanked my body against his and circled his arm around my back to trap me there. “If you don’t believe me,” he whispered into my ear, “I’d be more than happy to prove to you that I’m completely healed and can handle intense physical exertion.”
I swallowed. Loudly. My hormones went all kinds of crazy but I forcibly reigned them back in.
Down girls,
I told them. “That’s alright. I believe you,” I nearly panted from the lack of oxygen getting into my lungs.
He grinned wolfishly then let me go. “I’ll be right back,” he said as he headed into his room. “You’re welcome to join me in here,” he threw over his shoulder before he crossed the threshold.
I forced my ass back onto the couch and ordered my legs to stay put.
Once Chase changed out of the scrubs and into tactical pants, a cotton tee and a leather jacket we took an Uber back to the Sun Dial where his bike was left parked on a street around the corner from it.
Awkward didn’t even begin to describe how it felt when I had to straddle the back of the Ducati in a pencil skirt. I ordered Chase to keep his eyes straight ahead and on the road. He behaved. Mostly.
He waited in the living room while I quickly changed into a pair of tactical pants of my own, boots, and a long-sleeved henley tee.
“Where are we headed?” I asked emerging from my bedroom.
“To Five Points. It’s where I keep spotting them.”
“Spotting or killing?” I asked simply for clarification.
“Spotting for now. You can’t run reconnaissance on dead things. The ones in the city seem to flock to the area at night and I’m curious to know why and what they do when they go there. It’s one place in particular I’ve seen them visiting the last few nights. A club on Peachtree called Fusion.”
I grabbed my boots from where I kept them by the front door and sat down on the couch beside him to lace them up. “Isn’t that the one that caters to people into BDSM? I heard a lot of kinky shit goes down in there.”
Chase shrugged his shoulders. “It’s your city so you’d know better than I do. I haven’t cared to venture inside.”
I finished lacing my boots. “I’m ready whenever you are.”
He stood and I stood with him. “Let’s go then. We don’t have long before dawn. The Brethren like the daemons aren’t generally active for long past sun up.”
We waited across the street from Fusion’s entrance. It was a Friday night in the middle of downtown so we weren’t the only people milling around. It helped us not to stick out like sore thumbs. A guy of average height and a slender build exited the club. When he looked in our direction from across the street, I saw the flash of silver circling his blue eyes. He took off in the opposite direction from us.
“What do they do with their wings?” I asked Chase as we crossed the street to go after him. The Brethren in the restaurant didn’t have a set either. But the one that attacked me definitely did.
“They’re able to retract them into their shoulder blades.”
“How? They’re massive. At least the wings on the one that attacked me were.”
“The hell if I know. But they can.”
Maybe when we interrogated the Brethren we followed, we could slip that question in too. Them being able to do so defied every law of physics I could think of. It left me curious about how they accomplished the feat.
The Brethren turned the corner and we picked up our pace. We waited until he ventured into a section of Five Points that appeared deserted.
“Stay to the shadows and let me handle this,” Chase whispered to me as if he actually needed to say it. He pulled a long curved blade out of the inside of his jacket. He moved quicker than my eyes were able to track. One minute he stood next to me and the next the silver was burrowing into the Brethren’s side. He twisted it and the Brethren growled in pain.
“I am going to rip you apart
Chosen One.
” He hissed the title at Chase like the vilest of curses.
Chase looked at him unmoved by the threat. He twisted the blade then yanked it out of his side. A chuck of flesh, muscle and and tissue came out behind it. The Brethren grunted and Chase shoved the blade in his chest. “The next chunk of you that comes out is your heart unless you answer the questions I’m about to ask truthfully. And we both know that I’ll know if you lie.”
“You may as well kill me now,” The Brethren gritted out.”I don’t talk to filth.”
Chase’s wrist jerked, eliciting a sharp intake of breath from the Brethren. “We’ll see about that.”
The temperature around us warmed about ten degrees and a faint glow outlined Chase’s body. It seemed to flow down the length of his right arm and into the metal. It coalesced into the Brethren’s chest. His face contorted in agony and he ground his top molars against his bottom ones.
“Why are there so many of you migrating to the city?”
The Brethren flashed a set of white teeth that appeared much sharper than they had a moment ago.
The temperature ratcheted up five degrees.
“We were told to come,” he breathed out heavily. Trying to answer the question to avoid the level of his agony increasing without giving up any real information.
It didn’t work. The air warmed a bit more. “By who?” Chase demanded.
“I don’t know.”
Chase smiled without a hint of joy. “Not good enough.”
Sweat broke out along my forehead. I felt the sudden urge to pull my long-sleeved tee over my head.
“Angel fire is lethal to the Fallen. It was specifically created as a means to swiftly exterminate you. For good. If I let it incinerate your heart, your essence won’t just be sent back to hell. It will be incinerated along with your corporeal form.”
The Brethren’s eyes finally widened with fear. “I swear I don’t know who gave the order. Word came from high up and has been trickling down. I’m just a foot soldier who does what he’s told. I’m not important enough to ask questions or for things to be explained to me. But those who are important enough will be at Fusion tomorrow night to celebrate something big that just happened and to talk strategy. It was going to be a closed event but more than a few complained it wouldn’t make for much of a party so now they’re letting humans in too for entertainment purposes.” He looked at Chase pleadingly. “Let me go
Chosen One.
” He said the title with much more deference this time. “I won’t talk. I swear. I could even act as your mole. Your eyes and ears on the inside.”
Chase smiled and it was unlike any other I’d ever seen cross his face. It was devoid of all warmth, all charm, and all light. It was a cruel, frigid, ruthless kind of smile that was more akin to a predator flashing his teeth before he obliterated his prey. “That’s a tempting offer except you said yourself you’re just a foot soldier ignorant of any useful information.”
The glow was no longer faint. It blazed with as much fury as the invisible heat turning the atmosphere around us into a furnace. The Brethren opened his mouth to scream in agony but the sound didn’t make it out before he ignited in blue-white flames. They flickered out just as quickly as they’d appeared. The air immediately cooled. The spot where the Brethren had stood was completely empty except for a pile of ash that the returning wind was already starting to scatter in different directions.
I touched the back of my hand to my mouth, blinking in rapid succession as my brain tried to process that what my eyes witnessed had not been some illusion.
Chase took a step toward me and I instinctively took a step back. He tucked the curved blade away then stilled, holding his hands up in a non-threatening display.
“On my life, Alex, I would never hurt you.”
The phrase
on my life
is what shook me free of the terror, born from a place of innate human survival instincts kicking in, that seized me. If he packed that big of a punch then when I thrust the knife into his heart earlier in the night he could have stopped me long before I ever came near enough to puncture his flesh. Before my hand ever moved into position to do so he could have reduced me to nothing more than a pile of ash like the one being carried away by the wind. But he hadn’t. He’d stood there and allowed my hand to inflict mortal harm on him. So yeah, logically, I knew he would not hurt me and that I had nothing to fear from him but still… the part of me that overrode the rational section of my brain and functioned purely out of self-preservation shrieked at me to get as far away from him as fast as I could.
I inhaled deeply then exhaled slowly. It took repeating the action three times for my heart to begin to slow and my limbs to stop wanting to shake. “When you said you inherited all of the abilities and powers of an Archangel I guess you weren’t kidding.”
I almost asked him what else he could do then decided I’d rather not know.
“The sun is about to come up. Let me take you home?” he asked softly and soothingly. Like I was a frightening animal backed into a corner and he was trying to smooth over my ruffled feathers and get me to come out of it.
“Okay,” I said and shook my head after a beat. “Okay.”
He kept his distance as we walked to his bike. He got on first and didn’t comment when I slid onto the back but left a couple of inches of space in between us. We rode to my apartment in silence. When we got there he cut the engine and jumped off before I did. He spun around and stepped in front of me just as I hopped off the bike. His hands gently grabbed my waist and guided me back to a sitting position. He took a step closer to me, wedging my legs apart and settling his body in between them. His eyes bore into mine.
“Alex,” he spoke softly, almost whispered. “I’m serious. I would never ever do anything to hurt you. I know what you saw freaked you out but you don’t have to be afraid of me. Ever.”
He moved his hands to cup my face then kissed me. Slowly, deeply, thoroughly. My lips parted of their own accord and drank him in. The lack of oxygen starting to make my vision blur and my lungs scream in protest is what finally made me draw back. His hand still cupped my face as sapphire eyes searched mine for understanding and acceptance and maybe something more that I wasn’t yet ready to consider too closely. “Okay?” It was an insistence, and a plea and a demand all rolled into the singular word.
Something in me caved at the open vulnerability in his expression, an aspect of him I’d never seen before. I rested my forehead against his.
“Okay,” I breathed into his mouth because he was kissing me again before I got the word out good.
We made plans to meet the following night and go to Fusion. Neither of us were stupid. The Brethren had only divulged the information about the gathering to lay a trap for us to spring. The Brethren probably thought that he would live. That he would feed Chase the information, then offer to be a snitch as a bargaining tool to escape with his life, only to double cross him by warning the Brethren that he would show up. Unlucky for him, but lucky for us, Chase had killed him and the Brethren at the club the next night would be none the wiser when we showed up pretending to be nothing but a couple of people looking for a good, albeit kinky, time.
“Remember the people that go to Fusion are heavily into BDSM. Wear something appropriate,” he instructed me smiling incorrigibly before leaving me at my door. He winked in response to the light blush creeping into my cheeks.
I folded my arms across my chest and pressed my lips into a thin line. My sneer didn’t deter him from swooping in and smearing it into a smile with another toes-curling kiss that I felt within ever cell of my body.
“Goodnight Alex. I look forward to
seeing
you tomorrow.” He moved his mouth against mine.
I re-pursed my lips together.
As he made his way to the waiting elevator, his smug laughter trailed behind him.
I slept well into the early afternoon. Exhaustion from my extremely busy and late night was only half the reason. I went to sleep thinking about soft kissable male lips locked against mine and the vision followed me into dreamland. I staved off crossing the final line from semi-consciousness into full awareness for as long as possible. Those lips against mine felt so good and in my dreams there was no need to pull back from kissing them.
My phone ringing is what finally forced me awake. I threw the covers back with an annoyed groan blindly groping for it on the nightstand beside the bed.
“Hello,” I croaked into the phone without looking to see who it was,
“Alexandria,” a lofty voice answered back. “Surely you have something more productive to do than sleep until well past noon. If not, there are a few commitments I would be happy to fill your calendar with. Mrs. Monahan could use another member on her committee that handles the yearly fundraiser for the children’s hospital. She asked if you were available just this morning at the country club. Shall I tell her that you are?”
Damnit. Damnit. Damnit. Why was I too lazy to look at the screen before I answered?