He watched her silently until she turned and went down the stairs. When
she reached the bed, she pulled her wings inside her back and curled
up under the covers.
***
Hadrian pulled back the fabric curtains on the bed and tied them to the posts
then propped himself on top of the blankets on the other side. He
took the remote control from the drawer in the night table and
flicked the screen on.
He ignored the way Angeline tensed when he sat beside her, and then he
tried to ignore the way she shifted closer, hesitant at first as if
afraid he’d push her away, then leaning fully against him. He felt
her eyes on him.
“Are you going with me tomorrow night?”
“Do you want me to?”
Was she playing him? Was this some new game for her? He knew she still
wanted him. He could smell it on her. Was this her way of trying to
be with him? It was so different from the woman who’d turned him.
Or had it been? Hadn’t there always been a sweetness to her, a shy
deference? Wasn’t that what had attracted him from the beginning?
What if her domineering had been the facade? What if this was the real
her? And if it was, had it been trained into her by her sadistic
sire? Had it been fine-tuned by those obedient robots in Heaven?
“I won’t make that decision for you. I don’t like or trust Anthony.
I know you can handle yourself, but it’s up to you.”
“Do you think he’ll pardon you?”
“It’s hard to tell with him. It could be a trap.”
“Then I need to go. I should guard you, at least.”
“I’ll give you the address and time before you leave.”
He flipped through the channels until he found a news program. Maybe he
should have been watching the news. The screen showed riots and fires
and looting. It would seem like your typical civil unrest, except
that the fires were too targeted. He turned up the volume. A
plastic-looking Barbie doll of a woman stood with a fake smile on her
face as she read from a teleprompter.
“This grisly scene has repeated itself all across the country. The fires
are believed to be intentional arson attacks on vampire resting
places.”
It was still surreal to hear a human talk about it so matter-of-factly.
The vampires had kept their secret successfully from the human race
for centuries. All it had taken was the right set of crazy
circumstances for the story to unravel in front of human eyes.
He went to another channel. This scene took place at night. Humans
screamed and ran down the streets while vampires chased them down and
slaughtered them in full view of the camera. Priests chanted and
threw holy water, but the vampires were only briefly deterred before
setting upon the priests.
It was gruesome.
“Why are they doing this?” Angeline asked.
“Maybe they’re tired of hiding.” Human or vampire, people could be
shockingly predictable. He couldn’t tell her he’d counted on this
happening to destabilize Anthony’s reign.
Every station carried the same stories. The president had called a state of
emergency and was holding a live press conference.
“We’ve been in talks with some of our own kind who can only be described as
witches. They’ve offered to align themselves with us in the fight
against the monsters. We don’t know why these monsters have become
so openly aggressive, but we do not negotiate with terrorists. In
addition to magic, I want to assure the people of this great nation
that we, and the other world leaders are bringing in the
highest-level military technology to discover these creatures’
weaknesses, as well as weapons to end this conflict, now.”
Great. Hadrian knew exactly why Anthony was so interested in Angeline. With
all the chaos, his baby daughter would be in more danger than usual.
And maybe not even from the rest of the world, but from his own kind.
The vampires were itching to kill her. To let that abomination live… If
Anthony weren’t the vampire king, she’d already be dead. It
wasn’t natural. Vampires weren’t supposed to have babies. But
placing a vampire claim on a human had created the one-in-a-million
opportunity for this weak, frail being to be created. She had all the
weaknesses of a vampire and none of the strengths, unless she was
immortal, which they wouldn’t know for a while. Still, her odds of
surviving long with so much stacked against her weren’t good.
If Angeline protected Anthony’s child, Hadrian had no doubt the pardon
would be genuine. Either way, he had to take the risk unless he
wanted to be holed up in the church forever. With the arson reports,
even his church might not be safe for long. The wards wouldn’t keep
the building safe from fire, and the odds of getting a magic user to
come up with a ward that could protect it were long.
His dark angel had gone back to sleep. Hadrian tried not to let the way
her small body curled around him affect him. She still might be
playing him somehow. If she’d been shoplifting, she hadn’t become
perfect and innocent upon elevation. And If she wasn’t playing him?
It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t allow himself to want her beyond
the blood. It would be a disaster to give her that much power again.
Chapter Five
Angeline brushed past Rodolfo and scurried to get into prayer circle. Kurt
gave her
that look
again. She tried to ignore him, but his
hand trailed down her bare arm, his gaze burning through her as if he
might throw her down on the soft grass and have his carnal way with
her. Given where they were and who else was there, even the thought
was scandalizing.
“What are you doing to yourself?” he asked. “Something is definitely
different.” He couldn’t seem to stop touching her and stroked her
arm as if she were a soft rabbit he’d discovered and wanted to take
home as a pet.
A couple of the other angels noticed as well. The females gave her
surly looks, but the males… they definitely found her more
interesting than normal. This time, Angeline didn’t just flush and
try to brush it off. This time she was scared. Feeding Hadrian caused
them to react to her differently. And the effect was only growing
stronger each time he fed. They’d figure it out.
It wasn’t as if she could avoid Heaven forever and never come back.
She had to make the hard choice. They’d find her out if she didn’t.
She swallowed back anguish at the thought of never seeing Hadrian
again. She shouldn’t care if he forgave her. And maybe she didn’t.
Maybe she’d only wanted his arms wrapped around her, the illusion
that somehow their history could be made right—and the glimmer of
what could have been if she hadn’t screwed it up so badly the first
time.
“Your hair smells like sunshine.” Kurt invaded her personal space, enough
to catch a whiff of her hair.
“Sunshine doesn’t have a smell,” she said, trying to keep things light.
“Oh, it definitely does. And you smell like it.” He moved even closer,
his voice lowering to a whisper. “The things you’re making me
want right now… I’ve never wanted and never thought I could
want.”
Being in the warrior class, Kurt was created, not elevated. He’d started
out as an angel and had never had the experience or the desire of
human lust, or any other kind of lust. But he seemed to be having it
now. She wanted to move to another part of the circle, but given the
nasty looks from the others, it wouldn’t be much of an escape plan.
“I-I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she sputtered, managing
to free her arm from his grasp.
“Oh, I think you know. You’re elevated, not created. You know. Weren’t
you a vampire before? Aren’t they pretty… sexual?”
She blushed as images of her time as a vampire flooded her mind. That was
a mild way to put it, yes. Though it was hard to separate her sire
out from the simple state of being a vampire.
“Kurt, think about what you’re saying. Perhaps some magic is affecting
your mind.” Even she knew she was grasping at straws.
He laughed. “Only you.”
Rodolfo interrupted the awkward seduction mission. When she took Kurt’s
hand in the circle, it burned. His thumb brushed over her skin, as if
he just couldn’t help himself. As if he couldn’t
not
touch
her.
Why couldn’t Father Hadrian be this way? Sure, he’d taken to her
blood like it was a mystical drug, and maybe it was. But he looked at
her fully naked in an assessing way, as if cataloging a piece of art.
Either he had saintly levels of self-control, or he didn’t want her
that way. It wasn’t as if she expected Hadrian to ever want her
after what she’d done and what they both knew she’d been planning
to do to him, but it was still hard being near him, particularly when
the last body inside hers, had been his.
But Heaven didn’t know what to do with even the smallest bit of
carnality inside it.
When they prayed and raised the energy, it was harder this time. It felt…
off somehow. And she knew it was her fault. She’d thrown everything
off. If she stayed away from Father Hadrian, would all this go away?
Would she be pure again and fit for this plane? Or had he tainted her
forever when he’d taken her blood?
Could she somehow wash his bite off? She didn’t want to wash it off. She
wished instead that she could wear his mark on her throat visibly.
Part of her wanted everyone to know. Even now, she wanted to be in
the basement of the church with him. She wanted his fangs in her
throat. She wanted to feel that particular sting, that bit of pain
that was far more exciting and intoxicating than it should be. That
intimacy that shouldn’t exist between them and seemed only possible
to exist between them in that way.
Being elevated hadn’t changed her, not in the deepest places. The marks
Linus had left were too deep and had gone on too long. Becoming an
angel had only repressed it, repressed her. It would have been better
to come back human, all her memories shattered and scattered into the
wind. But inside Father Hadrian’s darkened church, everything felt
somehow right again. It felt safe and warm.
“Angeline?” Rodolfo’s biting voice cut off her thought trail, and she looked up
guiltily at him. Her lack of focus on top of everything else would
only make prayer raising harder.
“Y-yes, sir?” she squeaked.
Everyone but her had dropped the hands they were holding and looked at her
with accusative disgust. She quickly extracted her hand from the
angel on the other side of her, and Kurt—who proved to be more
difficult. Kurt was the only one smiling at her, but it was more like
a wolf who had found a lone rabbit eating a clover in a field. It
wasn’t a “Let’s grab some coffee later,” smile.
Rodolfo watched her with that judgmental assessment. It was the look he’d
given her the day before, only this time the disgust was palpable. It
rolled off of him like gathering storm clouds just before the rain.
Oh God, he knew. Her hand went to her throat involuntarily to cover a
mark that wasn’t there. But Father Hadrian had marked her. He’d
marked her soul.
“Please remove yourself from the circle, but stay. I need to speak with you
when we’re finished.”
There were murmurs among the other angels in the group as she extracted
herself from the circle and moved back a few yards. She sat on the
lush green grass beside the stream that fed into the pure crystal
lake. A baby deer approached her, tentatively, as if he wasn’t sure
she was safe. Great, even their menagerie of wildlife felt the
change.
She absently ran her fingers through the fawn’s soft coat
as she watched the angels raise the ball of light with their prayers.
This time, it appeared effortless. She watched wings pop out around
the circle like a crowd doing
the wave
at a baseball game. And
then the euphoria from the light as they soaked in the power. It went
on for ages, years, eternities. Then they laid down and stretched out
in the grass, riding the high.
Maybe angels didn’t need sex. The way the light felt when it touched
their wings was pleasurable, if not isolating and lonely. What angels
lacked was love and intimacy and connection and touching someone else
outside a prayer circle.
Kurt glanced over at her from his position lying in the grass, that look
still on his face. Whatever joy and pleasure he’d just experienced,
there could be no doubt of what he still wanted from her.
The fawn raised his head from her lap, struggled to stand, then scampered
off as Rodolfo approached, that stern look in his eyes, as if the
euphoria from the light absorption hadn’t affected him at all—like
he couldn’t become drunk on the power of it like the others. He
couldn’t be distracted from his mission.
He reached down to help her stand. “We need to have a serious
conversation in my office.”
The other angels watched and whispered among themselves. It was rare to
have a good scandal up in Heaven, but they seemed hungry for it, that
gleam in their eyes not unlike a vampire’s blood lust.
Without a word, she followed Rodolfo down rolling hills, past some chattering
birds, and down a few golden streets until they reached an area that
looked like a small town. It was where some of the higher-up angels
and the angelic council conducted various business and where
assignments and orders ultimately landed after the man upstairs had
delivered them via messenger angel.
Rodolfo’s office was the center building, made of pure silver. It looked dark
and imposing even though the reflectiveness would have blinded anyone
but an angelic being.
“Sit.”
She tentatively took a plush powder blue chair that looked like what Miss
Muffet must have sat upon. Rodolfo took the more sturdy-looking
high-backed chair on the other side of a glass desk. There was a
large window behind him with a view of the lake and some trees. A few
angels were already poking around back there.
The senior angel waved a hand without looking behind him and blinds
closed over the glass. It darkened the room considerably, making it
seem even more ominous.