Wounded Angel (The Earth Angels) (10 page)

Ella watched him dig a fork into the cinnamon roll as if he had a personal grudge against it. “Sounds like he was desperate.”

“That’s one way of putting it. Tell me, Ella. Do you think there are some things in this world that should remain hidden?”

“You’re asking the wrong person.”

“You’re probably the one person on the planet who can answer that question better than anyone. Would it have been for the best if you—or I should say Gabriella Littlefield—had remained hidden forever?”

“Yes.” There was no hesitation. “I wasn’t kidding when I said Charles Rainier killed that naïve person who existed two years ago. Uncovering that part of my life now serves no purpose other than to bring agony to scars I’ve worked unbelievably hard to heal.”

Something crossed his face so quickly an average person might not have been able to identify it. But she was no stranger to pain. “Six months ago, I wasn’t nearly as careful as I was when I decided to take the case of finding you. I told you I went to great lengths to verify that the need to locate you was legitimate, and that’s absolutely true. I made sure you were the legal beneficiary of Claudine Pierpont-Rainier’s Will, and that no one else had a legal leg to stand on when it came to contesting her Will. The final deciding factor in my choosing to find you was that it would be a huge financial benefit for you. It would provide a better quality of life, the kind of life few ever have the luxury of knowing. I figured you deserved it. After going to such pains to make sure this was a legitimate case, I was certain the lesson I’d learned six months ago—the life-and-death lesson that some things should remain hidden—would never come into play.”

“Life and death?” The very sound of it made her teeth want to chatter, so she ground them together instead. “I suppose you’re talking about that man’s kidnapped children? Were you not able to find them?”

“Oh, I found them, all right.”

“That’s good, right?”

“That’s the last thing it was.”

She wondered that the bitterness in his tone didn’t burn his tongue right out of his mouth. “What happened?”

His expression was a masterpiece of self-loathing. “There was a hint of domestic violence in this guy’s background. Nothing huge, as no official charges had ever been brought against him. I thought at the time that whether or not there was any violence in the home, nothing justified the kidnapping of two innocent kids. There were legal ways to go about it, and in my mind the mother had proven just how unfit she was by stealing them away and going on the run.”

“Was she unfit?”

“How can any mother be unfit when she’s trying to get her children away from a monster? Thing is, the monster played by the rules. He had the law on his side, and I never questioned any further than that. I never imagined there are some things in this fucked-up world that are hidden for a reason, and are better off staying hidden forever.”

“But,” she said when it appeared he wouldn’t go on, “you found them.”

“And brought them back for a big family reunion. The man dropped all charges against his wife, insisted it was just an embarrassing miscommunication on his part, and we should go away so they could start being a family again. Twenty-four hours later their house was on fire with four bodies inside. He’d shot them all execution-style, then himself.” He looked to her with eyes that seemed to flay her alive. “By finding what should have remained hidden, I delivered three innocent people to their deaths. And though I don’t have proof, I think I’ve fallen into that same trap with you.”

Chapter Eight

Why wouldn’t she just
listen
?

Nate kept a watchful eye on Ella from across the gym as she guided a heavyset man through his paces on an elliptical, while he pretended to do arm curls on a bench that had a clear view of all the gym’s entrances. If anything suspicious happened he could be across the gym to protect her in under two seconds, thanks to a speed he’d been born with, a speed he didn’t usually use in public. That sort of speed had a tendency to make him look like an inhuman blur, but as of now all bets were off. Though he had no proof, he was sure he’d put a target on Ella’s back. It was now up to him to make sure that target was never hit.

Ella didn’t believe him. Or to put a finer point on it, she wasn’t about to just blindly trust whatever crap that came out of his mouth, and once he’d calmed down he supposed he couldn’t blame her for it. Even if she didn’t have the kind of past that would make most people cower behind foot-thick defensive walls, the fact was they had known each other less than a week, and under false pretenses at that. Maybe he should be relieved she hadn’t called the police on him.

What she didn’t know was that he had already gone to the police. He’d even gone so far as to call up his old captain for a character reference when doubt had crept into the tone of the investigator handling Briella Fields’s terminal allergy to an oncoming train. Absolutely nothing had been concluded in that particular conversation, though in the end Nate suspected he’d come off sounding like a lunatic. Shit. Who knew that he could pull off such a convincing impression of a paranoid ex-cop who’d broken under pressure?

His lip curled in a grimace, and he switched the twenty-five-pound dumbbell to his other hand. He did break, though not in the way his colleagues could ever guess. His meager locating ability had rolled over and died along with the mother and children he’d served up to be killed, and though he knew he should probably be grateful that albatross of a power was gone forever, he missed it. He missed it even though it had been the weakest ever produced in his bloodline, missed it even though it wouldn’t have been able to locate the danger he just knew in his bones was targeting Ella. As crippled as his gift had once been, he missed being useful.

There was nothing useful inside him now. Nothing but a stone-cold certainty he’d somehow brought Ella into the sights of an unknown hunter. It didn’t matter that neither she nor the police believed him, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to wait around her for to wind up dead as validation that he was right. This time around, he would protect that which should have remained hidden.

Without warning his vision went so completely black he thought for a dazed moment the gym’s power had been knocked out. Then a hideous, enervating cold crept like ground fog along his nerves, freezing him from the inside out until he couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Alarm sprinted through him as the disbelieving thought that he might be having a stroke hit him. Then a pale spark glimmered in the darkness, like light reflected on diamonds. His pulse thundered behind his eyes in ever-increasing pain as he focused on that flash until it came into focus—a bright circular light towering impossibly high and reflecting against a glass wall. Was it the moon? Before he could figure it out, movement behind the glass drew him in until he was standing on one side of what seemed to be a giant snow globe, with the faceless giant from his dreams on the other side only an inch or two away.

“
Stop
.” The voice that emanated from the featureless form reverberated in his head until the throb in his eyes was excruciating. “Stop
looking
at me, abomination. I can feel you watching me. I know you are there. I’ve always known.”

Abomination
. Another word for the Nephilim. Nate had never felt much like an abomination, but he decided not to quibble over semantics.

“Of all things, it is your sight I fear the most. I wonder...if I show myself to you, will I no longer be hidden? Will you become blind to me long enough for me to become complete?”

Complete
?
What
...?

Even as Nate’s short-circuiting brain reeled in confusion, the featureless waxwork lifted its arms, spreading its fingers out wide, and a ragged pulse of urgency hit him so intensely it bordered on panic. Holy crap, he didn’t want to look at those fingers. There was something...not right with them. They were spider-thin and stomach-churning in their length, with extra knuckles evident along the backs.

This
is
bad
,
oh
shit
,
this
is
all
sorts
of
bad
...

As he watched in a sickening mix of disgust and horror, eight of the ten multi-knuckled fingers continued to elongate with a terrible wrongness. They twisted and snaked until the tips reached the edges of the glass walls and swelled into humanlike shapes, but there was something off with them as well. Each bodylike growth resembled a desiccated mummy, something that had been sucked dry of all life. “Just two more, abomination. Then I will no longer fear you. I will fear
nothing
.”

The pain in Nate’s head swelled to a frenzied crescendo and with a hiss he squeezed his eyes shut to ward off what had to be his impending death. When he cracked them open again, instead of darkness he saw the gym exactly as he’d left it seconds or hours ago, he couldn’t tell which. Numb, the pain behind his eyes trickling away like water down a drain, he stared without comprehending at the dumbbell still in his hand before jerking his gaze to where he’d last seen Ella. She was still working with her client as if nothing had happened and the world hadn’t become a nightmarish LSD trip.

What
the
freaky
fuck
was
that
?

“Don’t you have a job to get to?”

Dazed, and not sure he wasn’t about to puke his guts out, Nate turned to find the bristle-haired kickboxing sadist—Jacob, Ella called him—glaring at him. For a long moment he tried to prod his brain into gear, and when it finally got going his gaze swung back to Ella. She was what was important now. Whatever the hell just happened to him—an aneurysm or a tumor or whatever that was—it would have to be put on the back burner. No matter what kind of shit storm just uncorked in him, it paled in comparison to whatever stalked Ella now.

“Believe it or not, I’m happy to see you.” After all, it was always good to have another pair of paranoid eyes on the job. Especially since his just went on the fritz.

Jacob snorted. “Oh, really? Why is that?”

“You’re not merely an instructor who knows his way around a punching bag, are you? You’re ex-military or law enforcement of some kind, am I right?” As he spoke, Nate’s attention didn’t waver from Ella’s side of the gym. Still struggling with the last vestiges of near-panic, he couldn’t quite shake the fear that if he looked away, she would vanish in a puff of smoke.

Or a gory puddle of blood.

“Maybe this is true.” Jacob stood at parade rest and stared down his nose at him. “You got a problem with that, little boy?”

Geez
. “I’m hoping you can help me convince Ella to keep her guard up.”

Those bulging eyes went a little crazier. “And why should I do that?”

“Gabriella Littlefield.”

Jacob went still, which was Nate’s only warning. He shot to his feet even as Jacob went for a classic choke hold, his movements smooth and deceptively fast for someone his age. But no matter how well-trained a person was, no mere human could touch Nate if he didn’t want them to. It took less than a second for the two men to find themselves on either side of the weight bench, with Jacob empty-handed and looking surprised while Nate lightly touched the heavy dumbbell to the other man’s vulnerable temple. The rush of air behind the movement of his arm was still making Jacob’s eyes blink, and the message was received loud and clear. Had Nate not stopped his punch, Jacob would have been dead without even knowing what hit him.

“Listen up, because I’m only going to say this once.” Nate kept his tone calm as he nonchalantly dropped his arm to his side before anyone noticed their almost deadly exchange. “I’m an ex-cop who now works in the private sector. I was hired by a law firm to find the unfindable—Gabriella Littlefield—who has come into an inheritance. Unfortunately, of the three people I uncovered as possibly being Gabriella Littlefield, one is dead and the other is missing. I can’t do anything about that, other than tell the authorities all that I know. The one thing I can do is sit on Ella to make sure she stays safe until I get to the bottom of this. I can’t watch her all the time, though, so it would be helpful if you could give me a hand in making sure she keeps breathing.”

“You brought this to her.” The words pushed through the sieve of Jacob’s gritted teeth, and it mirrored the fury Nate directed at himself. “She was done with that life.
Done
. You should hang your head in shame.”

“I’ll be sure to do that when I have the time.” Little did the other man know he was already there, but pity parties were about as useless as the hole he’d almost put in Jacob’s head. “Will you talk to her?”

“You move...differently.”

Seriously, did this man ever give a straight fucking answer? “That’s probably because I’m different from just about everyone you know. That still doesn’t answer my question.”

“I will speak to her, of course, but this is a superfluous action.” Jacob glanced to where Ella was now helping her client off the elliptical, and to Nate’s amazement the older man’s usually psychotic expression turned downright fatherly. “I may not have taught her all there is to know in spotting an enemy—” he bestowed a poisonous look on Nate, “—but life itself has taught her to live moment to moment with her guard up. She is stronger than you know.”

“Being strong doesn’t mean anything if someone’s decided to target you.”

Jacob harrumphed. Nate had no clue if that meant agreement or if he was about to launch another assault for back-talking. “You know Gabriella Littlefield’s story?”

“I was the one who found her coming out of that godforsaken hellhole.”

He’d thought he couldn’t surprise the likes of Jacob, but the other man’s expression proved him wrong. “Then you know she found the strength to do what others only
think
they can do—survive at any cost. This is something that doesn’t just go away, boy. Once realized, this ability becomes a part of your soul. Believe me, I know this all too well.”

Nate didn’t doubt it for a second. “So you’ll help me keep an eye on her?”

“Don’t be stupid. I always watch over her.”

“I could be wrong, though my gut tells me I’m not,” Nate felt compelled to add. If anyone would understand his paranoia, the sadist would. “When Briella Fields went under a train last evening, that could have been just an accident, maybe even a suicide. But the other woman I marked, Gabrielle Litte, didn’t show up for work this morning. That’s a big red flag for me.”

“Gabrielle Litte... Did this woman work at the Wrigley Building?”

Nate’s stomach clenched into an acid-filled knot as his attention snapped back to Jacob. “How did you know that?”

“It was on the news. I heard it before I came in here. It caught my attention because the woman’s name was so close to what Ella’s used to—”

“Heard
what
on the news?”

“This woman, this Gabrielle Litte, was found dead at the bottom of a malfunctioning elevator shaft in the Wrigley Building about an hour ago. They said she worked there, that it was some sort of freak accident—”

“That’s no accident,” Nate growled. Dropping the weight onto its rightful place on a nearby rack, he made a beeline for Ella.

* * *

As she brought her client through the last of his cool-down stretches, Ella watched Jacob and Nate part ways, with Nate heading toward her like a man on a mission. With a quick glance at the wall clock, she handed a towel and water bottle over to her heavily sweating client while trying to warn Nate off with what she hoped was a death-glare.

“You did a great job this time around. Hydrate and stretch for five more minutes, and then you’re done.” With a professional smile, she tilted her head in the direction of a far-off corner. Without missing a step, Nate changed course and headed there, with Ella hot on his heels.

“Look,” she muttered, keeping her voice low the moment they were free of an audience, “I can’t stop you from coming here and staring holes through me while I’m trying to work. I get that you’re worried. I get that you feel you have a job to do and somehow you think I’ve become your responsibility—”

“Gabrielle Litte has been found. She’d dead. On my list of names, you’re the only one left.”

The world seemed to drop out from beneath her feet. She heard a strangled gasp and it took her a second to realize it had come from her. “How? How did she—”

“It doesn’t matter how. Get your stuff and meet me at the front. Jacob and I need to figure out how we’re going to make sure you’re covered until this mess blows over.”

Ella found herself complying without thought, and in less than five minutes she had her warm-up suit on and bug-out duffle bag over her shoulder, and she felt safer with it strapped diagonally over her body. Not that there was any rock-solid proof to Nate’s suspicions. But while one death was an ominous coincidence, two was much more serious. With the Rainier name popping up yet again, she’d be an idiot to simply shrug this off as a mere coincidence.

That thought brought up a question she blurted out the moment she spotted Nate waiting for her in the lobby with Jacob and Phoebe. “Nate, who besides you knew that you’d come up with the names of those two women?”

Nate, who had pulled on dark sweats and had shouldered back into his duster, turned a dangerous scowl her way. “My current employer, Carver Archibald. Before I went to your house this morning I gave his number to the authorities here in Chicago, as well as all the particulars of this case. As far as I know, Archibald was the only person who knew of those three names. They should have remained confidential until I’d had a chance to confirm which one was Gabriella Littlefield. Then Briella Fields winds up under a train.” He glanced at Phoebe. “Ella has the rest of the day off, right?”