True Angel
Curse of the Othersiders Novel
Jessica Lynch
Copyright © 2021 by Jessica Lynch
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover by Jessica Lynch
Contents
Foreword
1. Morning, Cameron
2. The invisible secretary
3. Don’t forget the ice
4. Two sins out of seven
5. The Smurf scandal
6. Power of suggestion
7. Someone’s got a crush
8. It’s only a day away
9. Every date ends with a kiss
10. Try harder
11. Like a Ken doll
12. Minus two-tenths
13. Five star reviews
14. Armed with a phone
15. Link Shaw: Advice Guru
16. Inevitable
17. Breathing in sync
18. Hellhounds or guns?
19. You already have mine
20. Lightning strikes
21. Oh? Oh…
22. Good
Epilogue
Pre-Order Now
Pre-Order Now
Stay in Touch
About the Author
Also by Jessica Lynch
Foreword
Thank you for checking out True Angel, the first novel in the Curse of the Othersiders series!
Just in case you didn’t know already, this series is a companion/spin-off to my PNR series, Claws Clause. Instead of having shifters, vampires, and ghosts as the heroes, I’m introducing the Othersiders: winged heroes who can eventually become angels or demons, depending on their actions. Right now, when you meet Camiel, he’s working toward earning his halo—the goal of his entire existence—and he’ll do anything to get it.
Then he meets his heroine and, suddenly, he’s looking at a very long life with a whole new perspective.
Like in the Claw Clause series of books, Avery is Cam’s fated mate but, of course, it’s not going to be as easy as that. Especially since Avery is worried about finding her sister…
If you want to get an idea of what happened to Avery’s sister, Heather, before this book, I have a prequel short available now: Ain’t No Angel. And if you want to learn more about this alternate universe where Paras live alongside humans and fated mates exist, you can start with Mates (currently free on most platforms, or when you sign up for my newsletter) or Hungry Like a Wolf featuring Maddox Wolfe and his human heroine.
And, as a small note, while the hero is a fallen angel—also known as an Othersider in this universe—and his abilities are based on Biblical angels, religion doesn’t play a prominent part in this series on purpose. There’s the up above instead of Heaven, the down below instead of Hell, with the mortal plane stuck smack-dab in the middle (and, yeah, that’s definitely Purgatory). Poor Camiel just wants to be good, even though meeting his soulmate means that, deep down, he really, really wants to be bad.
Thank you again for checking this out, and I hope you enjoy!
xoxo,
Jessica
1
Morning, Cameron
The crosswalk was empty.
One booted foot braced against the brick wall at his back, arms crossed over his chest, Camiel eyed the road in front of him all while pointedly trying to ignore the cat sitting primly on her haunches next to the boot still planted on the sidewalk.
This time of day, foot traffic was light. The early morning rush was a memory, and though it should pick up around lunchtime in a few hours, he still watched as a steady stream of cars pulled up to the intersection, waited for red to turn green, and continued on their journey toward downtown Grayson.
Most of them were too wrapped up in their own lives to notice him. A handful honked their horns, waving selflessly, inviting him to stroll in front of their cars as if they were doing him a favor. As if they thought he was waiting to cross himself. Nope.
There were more than a couple who stopped to coo at the black-and-white cat near his feet. Like usual, they pss-pss-pss’d at Dina, but she didn’t deign to react to any of their—ahem—catcalls. Why would she? Her reason for living on this plane was standing next to her, and until Cam gave up and headed inside again, she would sit and wait and only react if some silly mortal was foolish enough to try to pet her.
He knew that Dina thought he was wasting his time. And maybe he was. But after being assigned to each other more than seven decades ago, his auditor had learned when the hard-headed Cam was willing to accept her criticisms or when she’d be better off lecturing the brick wall behind him.
His morning trips to haunt the corner of Main and 3rd was one of those times.
While he waited, his back itched. A strange sensation, he felt it in the space between his shoulder blades. Though he wasn’t sure what was setting him off, he knew exactly what it meant: his wings wanted out.
He gritted his teeth and held them off. It wasn’t only because he wanted to keep his beloved synthetic leather jacket—decades ago, he saved a good amount of points choosing that over the real stuff—from tearing to shreds, but also because he was standing in the middle of Grayson’s main thoroughfare. Sure, it was a “mixed town” full of mortals and paranormals both, but it was one thing to know that any soul you met might be… different. It was another entirely to march down the street with the full span of his midnight black wings on display.
No matter how many times he tried to explain that he wasn’t a demon but an Othersider working his way toward becoming a true angel, the mortals didn’t get it. So what if he didn’t have a pair of horns jutting out of his brow? He didn’t have a halo, either, and even Cam had to admit that the inky black of his wings didn’t do him any favors. White wings. What he wouldn’t have done to be a rare Othersider with white wings. But he wasn’t, and since there was no reason for him to take flight, he kept his wings tucked inside of his “human” form, just in case.
His wings weren’t the only things that were bothering him. The tips of his fingers were tingling, his nose twitching as his senses seemed to go into overdrive. Something was coming—or someone. Some soul. It was a chilly sort of certainty that had his tousled black hair flowing in an eerily wind-free morning.
Cam lowered his foot just as Dina swiveled her head to look at him.
“Camiel.” The voice that came out of Dina was female, crisp and clear, with a hint of an uppercrust British accent. “Are you finally ready to go inside?”
“Give me five, Di. It’s early. Some soul might still be interested in a good samaritan offering aid.”
A sniff, followed by an annoyed twitch of her whiskers. “Do I have to remind you that guiding humans across the street is barely worth half a point?”
“No. And that just means I’ll be out here again tomorrow,” Cam muttered, leaning around the corner, searching… searching for what? He didn’t know. The niggling itch was only growing more annoying. The side street was just as empty as Main, though, and he tried to shrug it off before glancing back at Dina. “Every point counts.”
She lifted a paw, licked it, then brushed one of her triangle-shaped ears. “If you insist.”
There was no insisting. Only fact. And, as Cam’s auditor, Dina should know that better than any soul.
It was the ancient being’s role to audit every thought, every ac
tion, every minute of Cam’s current existence to decide what his eventual fate would be. There was a target for every Othersider. A goal. Get enough points and you earned yourself a trip up above, plus a halo and all of the powers that came with it. Struggle and, when the time came, you were dropped down below with a pair of demon horns and a prayer. Except it was the down below where not even a prayer could help you.
And since Othersiders were basically immortal, no soul knew when that time would come. Either death would finally claim him or the other side would, and Cam needed to make sure he had enough points when that happened.
All Cam wanted was his halo. He wanted out of this weighted existence where he had to measure every little thing he did, hoping that the good pile was bigger than the bad. And if that meant he had to help little old ladies across the street and refrain from stealing candy from a baby, that’s exactly what he would do if it meant he’d get his ticket to the big time even sooner.
When a quick glance around revealed that no other soul was close by, he turned back in time to catch his auditor flicking the tip of her tail, the only clue that she was done with their morning routine.
He followed the thin, snake-like tail as it flicked back and forth. To anyone driving past, she looked like his pet. His faithful companion. Only another Othersider could understand her and know her for what she was.
That was the point, too.
An auditor’s celestial form was the stuff of nightmares. Cam knew that true angels were no prize—the whole 360 degree sense, ability to combine, and, oh yeah, thousands of eyes thing was something to look forward to all right—but the auditors took it one step further. The day that Dina was first assigned to him, she came to him in a vision before popping up at his side. All these years later, he still remembered what she looked like. As if someone had taken a dark-skinned cyclops, tossed it into a blender, hit frappé a couple of times, then thrown in lightning and thunderclouds and a shining disco ball for good measure. Even the memory made him queasy.
On Earth, though, on the mortal plane, the auditors appeared as cats.
Go figure.
Cam himself could pass for a mortal so long as he kept his wings tucked inside. He had dark eyes, dark hair, and a human face. Two arms. Two legs. Two eyes, which was a relief because of, yeah, the whole thousands of eyes thing. He didn’t glow, not like a true angel could, and his teeth were nice and straight. Not a single demonic point in sight.
And he’d looked exactly the same for seven decades, just like Dina had.
If it hadn’t been for the big reveal more than fifty years ago—the moment when paranormals were forced to admit their existence to the rest of the world’s population—Cam would’ve had to keep on moving, hopping from place to place whenever the mortals seemed to notice that he didn’t age. Now that the mortals were aware that their neighbors might sprout fangs, shift into beasts, or be an immortal creature from another plane instead of just Joe Schmoe from down the street, his lack of aging was one more clue that he was a Para. Throw in the wings and how fast he could fly and it was pretty obvious.
Not that he showed off when he could help it. Pride was a bitch of a sin, for one thing, and he wasn’t so sure that the Grayson locals would be willing to accept his help if they knew for sure that he was an Othersider. The Claws Clause—Ordinance 7304, otherwise known as the Bond Laws that laid out all of the rules Paras had to follow lest they end up in a magic-free prison known as the Cage—was proof that fifty years wasn’t enough to put the mortals at ease. Throw in more than two millennia of teachings and there was more the mortals got wrong about his race than they got right.
Because, yeah, there was definitely way less made known about his kind of Para than most, mainly because the auditors worked hard to keep it that way. First, by referring to them as Othersiders instead of the Fallen; a play on the fact that, while the Fallen were trapped on Earth, they were left on the “other side” of the celestial planes. And, later, by working hard to rehabilitate the mortals’ idea of what an “angel” really was.
So true angels became sanitized: cherubic cheeks, fluffy white wings, blonde curls, the whole she-bang. Demons? Red skin, pointed tails, and a fiery pitchfork. By concealing his wings, Cam could hide what kind of Para he was. Even so, no soul would take a look at the dark Cam and think he came straight from up above.
If mortals knew that Othersiders struggled every day of their existence with choosing between good and bad, black and white, right and wrong just as much as the mortals did—if not even more—then it wouldn’t be long before they treated every Othersider as Lucifer reborn.
But Cam wasn’t Lucifer. He was Camiel and nothing was going to stop him from returning to the up above again.
And if he had to help a thousand mortals walk across the busy intersection, then he would, no matter how much Dina thought he was being ridiculous.
It was a decades-old argument between the two of them. As his auditor, Dina knew his exact point tally down to the decimal, even if there was no way of guessing what number he needed to hit until he did or until his time in the mortal plane was over and he was stuck with whatever total he had. At any moment he could be called back, his life audited. At barely seven decades, he figured he had plenty more to go, but it never hurt to be in the black instead of the red. And, as Dina constantly reminded him, nickel-and-diming his points wouldn’t add up as quickly as if he performed big, selfless acts of good.
Because that was the thing. Cam knew all too well that the points really only added up when he was being good for the sake of it, not because he knew that he’d get a halo out of it in the end. His self-centered motivations were holding him back which was exactly why, when he wasn’t on a job, he filled his free time with do-gooder acts like these.
Besides, he had to keep busy. If he didn’t? Well, there was a reason why most Othersiders were added to the ranks down below instead of sipping champagne up above. Just like there was a reason he was considered one of the Fallen who was forced to live alongside the same mortals that tested him every moment of every day.
The curse.
Not even taking the curse of Othersiders into account, Cam knew that true angels weren’t created as “good”. Actually, some weren’t good at all. They could be bloodthirsty, fierce, and cruel as easily as angelic, pious, and beatific. But for one of the Fallen to become a true angel? They had to be a saint on Earth.
Cam was trying, but even he knew when he was being stubborn. And wouldn’t you know it? Stubborn pricks lost points.
Ugh.
His cheeks were aching. He hadn’t even realized that he’d sucked in a breath, glaring at the empty crosswalk in front of him. They were tingling a bit, too, as the itch in his back traveled all the way down to the curve of his ass. He stamped his foot, shaking it off, scowling when the discomfort lingered.
Another peek around the corner. Nothing. Which he couldn’t understand because, relying on his limited sense of the space around him, he couldn’t help but think that some soul was close by—close by and possibly looking for him.
Weird.
“Know what? You’re right.” He jerked his head at Dina. “Come on. I’ve got donuts inside.”
Her glowing yellow-green eyes sparkled at the d-word. Immediately, the cat was on all fours, trotting down Main. “Chocolate frosted?”
“Would I get any other?”
“Not if you know better.”
True. From the outside, it might seem as if Dina was a neighborhood stray keeping him company, but that was just part of the disguise; a holdover from before the mortals knew about their kind. When they were first assigned together, the auditor and her Fallen, they were co-workers, with Dina the all-knowing, all-seeing auditor who could tell Cam how many points he lost by something as simple as forgetting to put the toilet seat down…
…point seven since Dina refused to use a litter box and she slipped and fell into the toilet, soaking her entire back half before she could scrabble out again…
&n
bsp; …and he was happy with that. Over the last seven decades, they were as close as they could possibly be even if they weren’t attached at the hip—and not just because, as his auditor, she had the ability to add and subtract his points even when she was off doing her own thing. Still, Cam never for a minute forgot that Dina was really his boss.
And if his boss wanted chocolate frosted donuts? He’d make sure she’d have them.
As he hurried his step to catch up to Dina, the door in front of him opened. A torrent of heat slammed into him a split second before the svelte blonde mortal stepped out onto the sidewalk.
He might not have a super sniffer like the shifters and the vamps do, but Othersiders were able to tap into some of the senses that belonged to true angels. For their own protection, picking up on a mortal’s attraction—and, like Mindy Ruger, their open lust—was one of the tricks in Cam’s bag.
Mindy owned the nail salon a few stores down from Cam’s place. Ever since she opened last year, she’d been trying to catch his attention. For just as long, Cam hoped to avoid her. Sometimes it was easy. And, sometimes, she draped herself in her doorway and batted her long lashes at him before he could dash right by her.
“Morning, Cameron,” she purred in greeting.
He didn’t correct her. If she wanted to believe that Cam was short for Cameron instead of Camiel, that was fine with him. And if he got a bit of a kick at watching her seem so proud when she was obviously wrong… yeah. There went another couple of points for being petty.
True Angel: a Fallen Angel romance (Curse of the Othersiders Book 1) Page 1