Avenger's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels (15 page)

Read Avenger's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels Online

Authors: Heather Killough-Walden

He could protect her from the media—make her invisible to them.
But, as quickly as the thought entered her mind, she roughly shoved it away. “No,” she told herself firmly. “I’ll deal with this myself.” Her mother was right. She needed to nip this in the bud right away. But she wouldn’t go through Christopher’s agent. She would go through the movie star himself.
She imagined he would probably get in touch with her personally before Saturday. She had no way to contact him, after all, so the ball was entirely in his court. And when he did contact her, she would give him a piece of her mind. Best to face things head-on. Right?
No, Ellie. You need to run.
The thought whizzed through her mind like a firefly on a moonless night. It was bright and it was sudden and it was impossible to ignore. It was also probably true. But she ignored it anyway, stood back up, and strode through her apartment toward her bedroom. It was time for a long shower and a dreamless sleep.
 
From his perch outside her bedroom window, the former Angel of Death watched the woman sleep. She was beyond lovely; her eyelashes were so long that they brushed her cheeks. Her hair shimmered in the moonlight, and her smooth skin was pale and perfect.
Her chest rose and fell in slow rhythm. She was under deep.
Azrael had been sent to watch over her after Uriel’s little public display that afternoon. He watched a vein pulse in her neck, blue in the moonlight, inviting in its innocent offer.
Azrael smiled a slow smile and shook his head. Uriel was a very lucky archangel.
CHAPTER SEVEN
 
T
raffic was bad this morning, even for a Tuesday. It took Eleanore a full twenty minutes to get from Frankford to a block from the Starbucks on the corner of University and Eighty-second Street. That was virtually unheard of in a town the size of hers.
Luckily, she had been up early, dreams of Daniels once more rousing her from sleep. So it hadn’t been as difficult as it normally was to shower, get dressed, and hop in the car for a coffee run before opening the store.
That last block before Eleanore was finally able to pull into the lot and join the masses of SUVs and pickup trucks waiting in the drive-through was as slow as Christmas. The light took forever to change; it took so long she actually thought it was broken. The drivers were being rude, not allowing anyone to make left turns. The sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon, and its harsh rays were blinding people who were already squinting from lack of sleep.
It was one of those mornings.
As Eleanore let her MINI Cooper idle in the long line, she rolled up her windows and pressed a few buttons on the CD player. The music poured over and around her and she momentarily closed her eyes.
She’d almost managed to relax when she heard the scream of tires burning on rubber. It was a sudden, terrifying sound that ripped through Eleanore, silencing the music, the hum of her motor, and her own dizzying thoughts. For the second time that week, she felt herself moving in slow motion, weighed down by the dreadful knowledge that bad things were about to happen.
And they did.
The burning scream continued for devastatingly long seconds and was joined by another, second screeching cacophony. Eleanore turned in the thick, molasses air to watch through her window as a pickup truck veered to the left, bumped the curb going way too fast, and then flipped, rolling over a white sedan and then slamming into an SUV in the right lane.
Across the intersection, more cars skidded to unsteady stops, their bumpers crunching, the telephone pole coming down to smash a parked car beneath it.
It all probably happened in the course of seconds. But in Eleanore’s eyes, it looked like lifetimes. Several of them. Births and childhoods and marriages and careers and retirements—there in one instant and gone in the next. It was the kind of accident that people looked on with muted horror because they knew that people had been hurt, and most likely killed.
It was with a strange resignation and a detached awareness that Eleanore realized she’d left her car. She was running across the parking lot and toward the intersection. She couldn’t feel the ground beneath her feet or hear anything past the rush of blood in her ears. Her body moved of its own accord, as if she were trapped in a dream and watching herself from above.
The closest vehicle was the white sedan. Its roof was caved in and the old man behind the wheel was trapped between the metal above him and the seat below him. But Eleanore knew that he was all right. It was an instinctive and natural thing with her. She had always been able to read people for injury and illness. The man was terrified and he’d wet himself. But other than a few scratches from the glass, he was unharmed.
Her sense of unease grew, however, when she vaulted over the hood of the sedan, ignoring the scrapes it caused to her own flesh, and ran to the second vehicle that had been caught in the fray.
The SUV.
“
Oh God. No, no, no, no . . .” She was speaking and barely realized it, hearing her voice from far off—high pitched, desperate, a cry and a sob and a whisper of pleading.
There was a child in the backseat. Very young . . . But the car seat she was in was crushed beneath her, and the door had been shoved into the side of her small, delicate body.
She was unconscious and drenched in blood, as was her father in the front seat. The driver’s side of the entire vehicle had been viciously crumpled inward. She sensed broken ribs and internal bleeding. She sensed concussions and a ruptured organ and a heartbeat that was steadily slowing. Slowing . . .
With a cry of determined alarm, Eleanore reached her arm through the shattered back window, placing her palm against the toddler’s bloodied head. In flashes of pain and disorder, she recognized the injuries within the girl’s body, noting that it was indeed the child’s heart that was giving out. There wasn’t much time.
 
Something was happening up ahead. He could sense it before it went down—a thrumming kind of hum in the air that vibrated his spine and set his teeth on edge. He found himself leaning forward in his seat until Max looked over at him from the opposite seat and frowned.
“Is there something wrong?”
“Yes,” Uriel replied. His green gaze was trained in the far distance, at some point blocks away, where there seemed to be some kind of traffic jam. A crowd was gathering around an SUV.
Awareness shot through him like a bolt of electricity. “Max, it’s Eleanore!”
 
Eleanore was unaware that she was being watched. All around her, people gathered, some calling 911, others pointing, still others using their cell phones to take photographs that would later become grisly accounts of life and death on the streets of Texas.
A few were tending to the relatively uninjured woman in the pickup truck that had initially caused the wreck. The police would later find that she’d been tex-ting when the light had changed; she hadn’t looked up in time to see the cars in front of her slow and stop.
Still other bystanders were trying to calm down the panicking elderly man in the white sedan. But no one came near Eleanore. Instead, they looked on with wide eyes and spoke to one another in hushed tones.
. . . Her hand is glowing.... No, I swear. I’m not shitting you . . .
. . . Holy fuck—is she? She is! She’s healing that little girl!
. . . I swear to Christ, I’m not seeing this; you wouldn’t believe me. . . .
. . . Take a picture!
Eleanore heard none of it, was aware of none of it, and only saw the body beneath her touch and felt the soul that clung to it in desperation. She focused on her little heart first. She willed it to keep beating, promising it that she would give it the blood it needed to keep up the fight. Then she mended the gash in the girl’s liver. Next was the punctured lung; she had to move the ribs back in place and mend them in order to make it work.
As she concentrated, Eleanore grew weak. The wounds were fatal, as they had been for Samuel Lambent. There was so much damage, so very much to make right.
Several seconds and twenty eternities later, she pulled her hand away and slumped against the side of the car. Wearily, she noted the people around her. They were blurred though, half there and half not, less substantial to her than the dying man in the front seat.
The girl’s father.
I won’t let you die. . . .
With renewed determination, Eleanore pushed off of the crumpled metal and turned toward the front of the car once more.
Dad was hanging in there. But he was losing a lot of blood. If she didn’t heal him soon, he would lose too much. Sirens wailed in the distance. But it was such a far, far distance.... Eleanore reached in and placed her right hand over the man’s crushed chest. Ribs were broken. A lung was punctured here, too. Several vertebrae were knocked out of place.
It took her forever to heal him. She felt as if she were shoving a five-hundred-pound boulder up a muddy forty-five-degree-angle slope. Finally, she felt the last rib click into place and the man’s life stabilize beneath her touch.
Her legs gave out from under her then, and the world tipped on its axis. She could hear the people gathered around and understood what they were saying, despite the fact that the sentences were melded together. She could see their faces—dangerous strangers, looming above her and all around her. She knew it was over now.
All of her running. All of her hiding. It would end this morning, on this street. They would come and take her away and drug her up to keep her from fighting, and she would live out the remainder of her life strapped to a hard bed with bleached sheets and the scent of antiseptic in the air.
“Please . . .” She meant to say, “Please don’t take me away,” but her vocal cords gave life to only the one word. It was all they could manage before they, too, gave out.
Had she killed herself? She wondered this, as she closed her eyes against the flood of reality. She’d never saved two lives like this. She’d never healed so many horrible, horrible wounds.
I went too far
, she thought, as she felt strong arms lift her from the pebbly ground and clutch her to a hard chest.
Warmth enveloped her. There was the smell of leather, and there was someone breathing softly against her ear.
“You’re safe, Ellie. Rest. I have you. You’re safe. . . .” Fingers gripped her tight; bands of steel held her firm. She knew she was being moved, and quickly. But she was so exhausted and so far gone that she could no longer keep oblivion at bay.
It won, in the end, that dark nothingness to which the helpless go. Whatever would happen would happen. She could only pray—and sleep.
 
With a surge of mind-blowing possessiveness and protectiveness, Uriel shoved his way through the crowd to his soul mate, who was now lying on her back in the road, her beautiful blue eyes closed against the madness around her.
She had healed the little girl and her father. He knew it as if he had watched it himself. She had been in the right place at the right time and had witnessed the accident. And the archess in her had leapt to the fore in order to protect those who were not as powerful as she was. She drained herself, placing herself in the public eye and in extreme danger in order to save two innocents from certain death. And the people around her repaid her kindness by ogling her, snapping photographs, and filming her on their cell phones.

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