Warrior's Angel (The Lost Angels Book 4) (9 page)

There was a beat of heavy, powerful wing against air, and Rhiannon jumped just a little. The beat came again and was joined by another set of wings.
She waited, unmoving and listening, as the massive wings carried the gargoyle males further and further away from the building rooftops above her.

V
ery slowly, as if at any moment something else would go wrong, Rhiannon stood, pushed away from the wall, and stepped out of the shadows.

She took a moment to compose herself, closing her eyes, breathing deeply, and centering her thoughts before she opened them again and peeled off her other glove before stuffing them both into the pocket of her Burberry leather jacket. Her body fell into habit automatically, following procedure even as her mind ran over the night’s events, scraping through them as if
combing a lake for danger spots. She needed to isolate anything that might bring trouble to her door. Or to Mr. Verdigri’s.

Once she’d finger-combed her hair, spritzed on perfume, and unzipped her jacket to reveal another expensive shirt and necklace, Rhiannon looked down at the massive blood stain
and tears in her jeans.

There was no helping that one.
There was nothing she could do, and it was a dead giveaway to trouble. Anyone looking at her would wonder. They would notice. They would remember. And if the fit hit the shan later on, she would come to mind.

She sighed heavily and pulled her cell phone out of her other jacket pocket. She hated doing this. It was like admitting defeat. But sometimes that’s exactly what happened: You were defeated. That was life.

Rhiannon dialed her employer’s number and waited for him to pick up the phone. He did so on the first ring, and before she could say anything, his voice cut in.

“
Rhiannon, are you okay?”

She blinked. It took her a little by surprise. “Yes,” sh
e replied, knowing enough to at least answer the question right away.

“
Where are you?” he demanded next.

“Near t
he corner of third and thirty-third.”

“I’m sending
Frank. Stay where you are and stay out of sight.”

Verdigri hung up, and Rhiannon placed the phone back in her pocket. Then she waited. As she did, she thought of the buildings she’d walked past during the course of her life in New York. There was one, not far from where she now hid, that she’d always marveled at because of its gargoyles.

She couldn’t help but wonder now… did Hotel Bedford’s stone faces and wings and claws and fangs have some sort of bearing on reality? Were those carved figures and the creatures she had just gone up against at all related?

Not that it mattered.

She was in a world of trouble. Things had gone monumentally pear shaped that night, and there was some cleaning up to do.

Rhiannon looked up when a pair of headlights flashed past the alley and she heard tires ride over the bump of the sidewalk. That was her cue. She fled the alley and raced toward the limo at a fast pace. Frank already had the back door open for her. He glanced at her leg, gave her a meaningful look as she climbed in, and then shut the door tight behind her.

First thing was first. She needed to see her boss and determine how much of her botched operation had ended up on film, if any. And then they needed to learn as much as possible about gargoyles – and how to avoid them.

Chapter Eight

“I shouldn’t have sent you out last night.”

Mr. Verdigri stared into the distance, his expression contemplative and remorseful. Rhiannon leaned forward from where she sat across from him at their small round table in the atrium.

“Mr. Verdigri, why would you say that? You had no idea this was going to happen. We didn’t even know gargoyles
existed
until last night.”

He shook his head and met her gaze. “
But I knew something would happen, Rhiannon,” he said, too soft. “I knew because, yesterday was the day….” His voice trailed off and he looked away, suddenly stricken. She could at once tell that he was unable to talk for fear of losing control of his emotions. For fear of breaking down and crying.

Yesterday
was the day
, he’d said. Rhiannon worked the words over in her head and tried to put two and two together.
Yesterday was the day….

T
hen she had it.
Oh my God,
she thought, feeling like a complete and utter fool. Yesterday had been the anniversary of the day, no the
night
, that Verdigri’s daughter had been abducted by the man who would rape and murder her.

Yesterday was a day filled with trauma and regret for her employer.
Every
day was a day filled with trauma and regret. There wasn’t a moment that went by that he didn’t think of his little girl and the evil that befell her. But on that day, of all days, the memory was so much more potent.

And it hadn’
t even crossed her mind until now.

She really had been in her own little world, distracted by her dream, the events of the masquerade gala, and the night that followed. Distracted by the stranger in black with the blue, blue eyes.

“Mr. Verdigri,” she said now, choosing her words carefully as she leaned further forward and placed her hand over his arm to squeeze gently. “Every moment that we wait, sit and do nothing, and allow complacency, another innocent is harmed. Standing up, fighting back, and doing the right thing – this is what your daughter would have wanted. Not just
even
on that day, but
especially
on that day.”

She waited a heartbeat. Two.

Very slowly, her employer turned toward her and once more met her gaze. Little by little, he smiled. Then he nodded, and patted her hand. “You’re a good seed, Miss Dante.”

He often switched back and forth between calling her by her first name and her last. It was usually an indication of changing mood. Which he now proved by taking a deep breath, straightening in his chair, and turning to a number of files that had been left on the table. He grabbed the first one and opened it.

“Now let’s see what my men have managed to learn about these gargoyles of yours.” He perused the contents of the first file while Rhiannon grabbed the second and did the same.

“Well, so far everything here seems to
confirm what I learned tonight,” she said. “They’re secretive to the point of xenophobia. They’re by and large male; I didn’t see any females there, though this could just mean that the females were elsewhere or weren’t expected to do any fighting. They inhabit older buildings, especially buildings with gargoyle markings on them. And they’re pretty much immune to every damn thing under the sun and moon.”

“You say you tried everything?”

“Throwing really large objects at them had some small effect, the way stone can be damaged if it’s slammed into by something big. But other than that, not much made a difference. I even shot one of them.” She shook her head and shrugged, “
Nothing
.”

“Then that wo
uld confirm what it says here. Apparently they are, for all intents and purposes, immortal. They tend to live even longer than vampires.”

“Well….” Rhiannon placed her fingers to her lips and recalled the stone color of the gargoyles’ skin when they took to the skies. “That would make sense if they’re rocks.
Not much lasts longer than rocks.”

“Indeed,” said Mr. Verdigri, which always reminded Rhiannon of
Spock
from the original
Star Trek
.

“They look human once they separate from the building.
Or, at least they chose to tonight.” She took a deep breath, sat back in her chair, and recalled the night step by step. “I arrived at the warehouse at around one a.m., and there was no one around. But I heard something across the street, and I thought it was someone opening a window.”

Of course, it was imperative that Rhiannon never be seen during one of her operations, so she’d hidden in the shadows and looked up, expecting to see someone stick their head out of what looked like a very old and renovated apartment complex, possibly from the 20’s era. “But no one opened a window. Instead….” She felt a little chill of realization when she recalled what she’d seen. “Instead, two men landed on the rooftop. I could see their outlines perfectly against the moonlight. They had massive wings.”

“Mmm. One of the legends in these files claims they can change any part of their body they wish, moving it from flesh to stone as they see fit.”

“Ah,” she nodded
. “That would explain why it hurt so bad when one of them punched me. It felt like I was getting hit with solid rock.” Because she was.

She shook her head and went on. “Well, I must have made some kind of sound, even though I don’t remember doing so. Because they turned around and their eyes were like red search lights. All of a sudden, I had four red
lasers pointed right at me. I knew they’d seen me. And for some reason, I knew I wasn’t supposed to see them.”

“So you ran.”

“No, not at first. I slipped into the warehouse hoping I was wrong about being spotted. But when I started using telekinesis to destroy as much property as I could, I got this strange feeling. Like I was being watched.”

Verdigri made a small sound, part concern and part acknowledgement.

“I stopped and turned fully around to find three men standing against the far wall of the warehouse. Just
standing
there.” She recalled the odd visual of three men standing perfectly stock still, as still as stone, while she threw things around like a tornado. It had brought her to a halt and made her heart skip.

“Then you ran.”

She nodded. “I headed back out the way I went in.” The gargoyles had left the door open, allowing the noise she was making inside the warehouse to reach out into the street. Rhiannon knew right away that she was probably drawing unwanted attention, but it was a secondary thought. Her main concern was getting away from the strange men.

She ran
out through the open door and onto the sidewalk. And that’s when the building across the street morphed before her eyes. She skidded to a stop as shapes separated from its walls. Those shapes grew and took on the forms of living, breathing men.
More
men.

She couldn’t run fast enough to escape them all, and there’d been a fight as the men from the warehouse and the men from the building caged her in
and tore off her mask to expose her. Rhiannon didn’t like being exposed, and she most certainly didn’t like being cornered.

Despite the onlookers, she’d gon
e to town on the creatures, pulling lightning from building clouds, throwing everything from boxes to trash cans to small cars at them, striking out with kicks and punches whenever she could, and at one desperate moment, even pulling her weapon to take a shot at one of the men point-blank. The bullet had made a sound like metal hitting brick and vanished. She tried another, with the same result.

That’s when
she realized she wasn’t going to win this fight. The larger, and hence more draining, telekinetic attacks put a dent in the flow of her attackers, but there were too many gargoyles and she only had so much strength. She needed to concentrate on getting away.

Now t
hat she considered it, she had to admit they could have caused her quite a bit more damage. In fact, they seemed to pull their punches, as if they were merely testing her or attempting to wear her down. Nevertheless, the battle that ensued left her bruised, bleeding, and terrified. The noise they made drew even more people out of their homes, and at some point, Rhiannon realized she had to set the warehouse behind her on fire to destroy any further evidence that might help to lead authorities her way. As soon as she saw the opportunity, she called lightning where she knew it would catch fire, and she ran once more, this time into the night.

T
he men grew wings and flew after her. She’d been forced to stick to the shadows, limiting her escape to alleyways. But in the end… she’d managed to get away.

“Well,
seeing as how it seems you’ll need a bulldozer to defeat these particular creatures, now that we know what to look for, we can do our best to avoid them in the future.”

“
You mean by steering clear of old buildings with faces on them?”

“Every one of them, Rhiannon,” her employer said, and his expression became ver
y serious. “Don’t think I missed the bit in here about the fact that gargoyles never give birth to females.”

Rhiannon swallowed hard and averted her
gaze. She’d actually hoped he had overlooked that part.

“They reproduce by transformi
ng human females into gargoyles,” he continued. “And they can only do this when a female notices them. The ability to
see
them supposedly signals something special. Apparently, humans are incapable of noticing them. To humanity, gargoyles are invisible. Nonexistent. Yet you noticed them. And they noticed you noticing them.”

Rhiannon smiled at his play on words, but her stomach was churning. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“You must be more special than you realize, Miss Dante.”

Rhiannon
didn’t say anything. Mostly because it was already pretty obvious that she was special. She was a goddamned superhero. But to think of herself as something other than human… was too uncomfortable for some reason.

She also didn’t say anything because
she didn’t want to lend credence to what he was hinting at.

“
And they marked you,” he said, nailing her coffin shut.

He picked up his iced tea, took a long drink, and set it back down again. “
I think it would behoove you to not take it for granted that they’re giving up their search for you. I doubt this is over yet. By a long shot.”

Once more, Rhiannon didn’t say anything. Also, because she once more agreed. Which was why she had gone to the trouble of renting an apartment in another part of town.
If someone came for her, she didn’t want them anywhere near Verdigri. He could hold his own against quite a few bad guys. The security in the apartment complex was top notch, and he had guards tucked away everywhere, unseen, unheard, but deadly.

Yet, s
omeone had managed to bypass every bit of it the other night. The stranger in black.

And now there were gargoyles with a vendetta on the loose. Things were getting a little too cozy in this neck of the woods. It was time to draw attention away from Verdigri and his home… and his butterflies.

“Did any information leak out last night?”

“Not that we were able to
find. That we’ve counted so far, fourteen people were awakened by the commotion, six others were already awake and out on the street in that location at that time. It’s Manhattan, after all. However, to our fortune, as of yet we’ve found no phone recorded evidence, and nothing has shown up online. Hopefully you’re in the clear.”

“There were cameras in the warehouse,” she said, “but they were the first to go when I got there. It was the bystanders I was most concerned about.”

Verdigri nodded as if that were the end of it, and then took a deep, tired breath.

“You need to get some sleep,” she said, standing to take her leave of him. “I’ll check in tomorrow afternoon.”

Verdigri met her gaze and deep, emerald green pierced her soul. “Ah yes, you’re heading off to your new apartment now.”

Rhiannon’s brow twitched, but she did her very best not to appear as surprised as she felt. She was aware of her employer’s resourcefulness, after all.

“Not much gets past me, Miss Dante,” he chuckled. “To that end, I know you won’t mind that I have assigned a few of my more trusted employees to keep an eye on you. And of course, Frank is waiting downstairs to take you to your building.”

Now Rhiannon smiled and shook her head. “I bet you even know what my blood pressure and pulse rate are.”

“No,” he said. “You’re too stubborn to have them checked on a regular basis. Otherwise, I would.”