Shadows and Sorcery: A Collection of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels

by Adkins, Heather Marie

  At least let me come and assist you.

  “You can’t even stand without searing pain,” I pointed out. “And don’t try to pretend I’m wrong. You whined all the way to the garden to pee earlier.”

  He narrowed his red eyes. Thank you for pointing out my weaknesses.

  “Lighten up.” I ruffled his ears and dropped a kiss to his head. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

  This time, I took my bow and the back holster for carrying it, plus a second, not-as-sharp knife. I fully intended to get my fucking knife back.

  Even though I hadn’t managed to follow Whitman home the day before, I had a possible home address on him. It wasn’t a guarantee, considering how many demons lived under the radar in the Barrens, but it was at least a start.

  Flying wasn’t an easy feat in the rain. Not because I couldn’t do it, but because water falling from the sky cut the shit out of my eyes at forty miles per hour. So I walked, sticking to the shadows, dodging the downpour by remaining beneath overhangs and against the sides of tall buildings.

  I was well on my way across the city when the demon mark flared painfully.

  I stopped short, hissing as I turned over my hand. Cobalt's seal burned red on the tender inner skin of my wrist.

  “Fucking great,” I snapped to no one. I shook out my wrist, letting the rain fall on the mark. It didn’t make the seal go away, but it help ease the burn.

  I turned around, abandoning my journey towards Whitman.

  The boss had summoned me.

  * * *

  The street in front of the council’s office had flooded beneath the deluge, which gave me a sick kind of pleasure. If the flood reached the offices, they’d have damage. And God help me but any damage to the council meant a song in my heart.

  I took the stairs two at a time, and shoved open the doors to Cobalt’s quarters. Blonde bimbo startled, knocking over her mug.

  “He’s in a meeting!” she snapped, grabbing a box of tissues to quell the waterfall of coffee.

  “You have lipstick on your teeth,” I lied, then let myself in to Cobalt’s inner sanctum, smirking as bimbo immediately leapt for the compact mirror in her purse.

  Cobalt had the phone between an ear and his shoulder as he typed at the computer. He held up a finger to silence me before I could speak.

  “Mmhm, yes. That’s as I expected. And we have no lead on their whereabouts?” He paused, then sighed. “Right. Well, keep looking. One of my assassins is here for a debriefing, so I have to go. Thanks, Luke.” Cobalt hung up the phone, then leaned back in his chair and eyed me. “It took you twenty minutes to get here.”

  “I’m sorry, am I meant to be at your beck and call?” I plopped into the chair in front of his desk.

  “You are, and your timeliness is non-negotiable. If I summon you, I expect you to be here within minutes.”

  “I don’t even live that close.”

  “Be late again and I’ll make you live here,” Cobalt snarled.

  I rolled my eyes. “Why am I back here two days in a row?”

  “Another job.” He tossed a folder on the desk. “Human, this time, so you can’t bitch about their powers.”

  I made no move to pick up the folder. “I’m not even done with the last mark.”

  “Since when do you take more than a single day to do your job?”

  “This guy is slippery,” I snapped. “He knew I was following him and he attacked me.”

  “Spunds like the perfect time to have killed him.”

  “He took my knife.”

  Cobalt leaned back in his chair, face stony. “I’m hearing that you’re incompetent and need to be replaced.”

  “You know damn well that’s a lie,” I snapped. “I bring in more kills than any other asshole working for you. Melinda Cantrell takes a week just to assassinate one person. I take two days once in two hundred years, and suddenly I’m replaceable?”

  “Melinda Cantrell doesn’t bitch about every last aspect of the job.”

  “Because she’s an idiot!”

  “Just finish your job, Azrael. And move on to the next. That’s what we pay you to do.”

  I snatched the folder off his desk as I stood. “I deserve a promotion.”

  “How about we let you live another day and call it even?”

  I couldn’t stand the smug look on his face. He had me dead to rights. He always did. I saluted him with a middle finger, then stormed out of his office.

  Tiny’s Wild Hunt storms still raged outside the soundproof walls of the council building. I shoved the folder inside my jacket and yanked up the hood, then set back out on the route to Whitman’s possible home address.

  If I was being honest with myself, I didn’t have any desire to kill Whitman. I usually kept a firm wall in place regarding marks. That wall allowed me to objectify them. I couldn’t feel guilt if they weren’t living beings – or so I justified it.

  When Whitman had slammed me against the bricks last night, he’d effectively smashed the wall. We’d made eye contact. We’d bantered. We’d bumped uglies, though there were clothes in the way, of course.

  He was no longer a non-entity.

  Which made my job way harder than if he’d just been able to shoot flame from his eyes.

  5

  My plan - had it not been monsooning on the Barrens - had been to perch on a building and spy for Whitman’s return home from work.

  Any roof in this weather was likely to drown me or toss me off on a strong breeze. So I scouted for a protected ledge, somewhere uninhabited but easy to access—if you had wings.

  I chose a small balcony on a four-story office building, getting there via wings but making sure the inside was empty before I made myself at home.

  I sat on the railing, letting my legs dangle over the street below. The balcony above stair stepped out, affording me a decent amount of protection from the rain.

  I was staring off into the distance, lost in irritation over Cobalt’s callous dismissal, when someone plopped down on the ledge beside me.

  “Come here often?” Whitman asked.

  I barely managed to contain how much he had startled me. I recovered and looked back out over the street. “I like the view.”

  “Ah yes.” Whitman sucked in a breath and pointed out over the city. “The meatpacking district and its plethora of unappetizing smells, flanked by a portal to hell and one of ten Starbucks in a twenty block radius. Great view.”

  I laughed. I didn’t even fight the urge. Fuck me.

  “Come to kill me?” he asked.

  “I’m supposed to.”

  “But are you?”

  I sucked on my teeth, pausing just long enough to make him squirm. “I haven’t decided.”

  “What happens if you don’t?”

  I shrugged. “No clue. I’ve never not completed a job.”

  “What’s giving you pause?” Whitman asked. He kicked his feet over the edge of the building. “One good shove and the deed is done.”

  “So you aren’t made of steel like you are of stealth?”

  “Princess, I’m not made of stealth. You just don’t blend in well.”

  I shot him an irritated glare. “I’m four stories up on a private balcony. This is less about my lack of blending in and more about your superhuman power to know where I am at all times.”

  He leaned back on his palms and grinned. “Maybe it’s my special power.”

  “No, your special power is being a pain in my ass.”

  Fucking banter. I hadn’t had good banter in a hundred years. Maybe more. Tiny could be sarcastic in his own way, but he was a soul as old as time itself, so banter wasn’t his strong suit.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Whitman said.

  I glanced over. “What question?”

  “Why haven’t you killed me yet?”

  “I’m taking my time.”

  “Bullshit,” Whitman replied. “You don’t want to kill me. And I think you don’t want to kill anybody.”<
br />
  “What the fuck do you know?”

  “I know things. Like you’re not an assassin for the Black Council because you want to be. They drafted you into service after the Fall.”

  I blinked at him. He looked awful smug for his “knowing things.” Pushing him off the balcony was starting to seem like a great idea.

  “It isn’t giant leap that an angel doesn’t actually want to kill on behalf of the demon assholes who run our city,” I pointed out.

  He ignored me. “Before the Fall, you were Azrael, Angel of Death.”

  “Again, not really a secret. You already called me on it yesterday. My giant black wings give me away.”

  Whitman grinned. “No, you do well hiding them. It’s your aura that gives you away.”

  “I’m still Azrael, Angel of Death, you know.”

  “Not the same as it was on the other side of the living though. Right?”

  “You’re guessing.”

  “Things get skewed here,” Whitman said simply. “I have a theory. If you want to hear it.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  He grinned. “No.”

  “Then by all means.” I swept a hand out in welcome.

  “Demons were never meant to be on earth. Neither were angels.”

  “If this is your big theory, it’s lame.”

  “Hear me out. Hell operates on a different level. So does heaven. When the barriers fell and you ended up here, did you notice the sudden muffling of all your senses?”

  I inclined my head. “I did.”

  “We left one wavelength – a stronger one – for here. But it wasn’t just the metaphysical level that changed. Something went off-kilter. Our new reality was like a familiar photo someone had Photoshopped moderately impossible changes onto and tried to pass as the original. Thus why I think your divine duties probably don’t match up here.”

  “It’s an interesting theory."

  “It’s more like fact than a theory, but I’ll take the compliment.”

  We fell silent for another moment. The sun was sinking over the horizon, casting the city in a pall of brilliant amber. I wondered what the fuck I was doing there, sitting beside a demon on a balcony railing in the twilight.

  Whitman spoke again. “Do you really want to keep living this way?”

  “If there was another choice, I wouldn’t. But there isn’t another choice. I work for the Black Council so they let me live. Otherwise, I’d be on the other side of their assassins. One of my own peers would be sent to kill me.”

  “There could be another way,” Whitman said, his voice low as if there were anyone around to hear him.

  I scoffed. “Right. Sure. The demons have their claws in so tightly that the human race is going extinct. It would take more than a handful of rebels to change that.”

  “Tell me, though—have you noticed an abnormal amount of demons on your hit list lately?”

  It took everything in me not to react to his statement. “What’s your point?”

  “You want to hear me out on another theory?”

  “Or I could just kill you and move on with my life.” I swiped at him, but he was ready for me. He barreled into my side and we pitched backwards, landing harmlessly on the concrete floor of the roof.

  I couldn’t even fucking attack this guy correctly.

  I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t want to hurt Whitman. Maybe I stopped short of viciousness because I didn’t want him to die. Maybe I liked him. Maybe I thought he was pretty cool. Maybe that’s what kept me from reaching for my shitty knife.

  We rolled across the roof, arms and legs wildly akimbo. I hit a pipe, back first, and Whitman slammed into me, out bodies melding.

  “Do you really want to do this?” he asked, his fingers digging into my hip bone as we lay splayed against the pipe.

  “No,” I said with an awkward shrug. “But I want to live. I’m terrified of death.”

  He laughed. “The angel of death is scared of death?”

  I shoved at him to push him off me. “Prophecy stated I would be the last living being on earth. I would strike names from the book of life and death until there were no more names to strike. But prophecy didn’t tell me what happened to me. Do I live? Do I die? Do I just fade into nothingness? These are the things that keep me awake at night.”

  I couldn’t believe I’d word vomited my biggest fear onto the demon, but there we were.

  “Who says you have to die?” Whitman asked. “There’s plenty of need for a strong woman to survive. You don’t need to murder me to live.”

  “Uh, I do actually. My job is to take out anyone who isn’t approved by the Black Council.”

  “Which is everyone.”

  “Not my problem,” I said with a shrug.

  “This isn’t a safe world, and it damn sure isn’t a democracy,” Whitman said. He backed away and sat up to gaze at me. “How long you been running for the Black Council?”

  “Two hundred years. Give or take.”

  “Do I even want to know how many people you’ve killed?”

  “I’m the angel of death,” I said wryly. “Killing is part of the job description.”

  He grinned and rested his hands on his knees. “I honestly expected someone different.”

  “What, a five-foot-nothing blonde haired, blue eyed babe can’t be the incarnation of death itself?”

  “Forgive me, but if I were to guess you an angel of anything, it would be an angel of sex.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Mr. Whitman. Are you hitting on me?”

  “If I were?”

  Desire snaked through my body. I’d be lying if I denied loving the feel of his body against mine yesterday. Whitman was all angular planes and hard muscles.

  Contrary to his assessment of my looks, I was much more acquainted with death than I was with sex. Partners were slim picking in the Barrens.

  “Okay so riddle me this, pretty boy. The book. You told me not to strike any names. Why? The book has been striking names on its own for two hundred years.”

  “We have a theory.”

  “Jesus!” I scoffed. “Do you have a theory for everything? And who the hell is ‘we’?”

  “I’ll get there. This particular theory is if you stop striking names, nobody dies.”

  “But that’s not true. People die everyday, and I have nothing to do with it.”

  “Ah, but you seal the deal by striking through after the fact. Correct?”

  “How do you know that?” I snapped.

  “We have eyes everywhere. Even on you, princess.”

  “There’s that ‘we’ again.” I rolled my eyes, but I felt like we were about to break through. That feeling in the city of something culminating, the number of demon hits… Could Whitman know what was happening in the Barrens? “So what, you think if I stop crossing out the dead, they’ll, what, come back to life?”

  “That part is still up for debate,” Whitman said carefully. “But I want you to do something. Come with me Friday night to an assembly.”

  “What kind of assembly?”

  He caught my gaze, his face stoic. “The kind of assembly that could get us all on the Black Council’s hit list.”

  * * *

  Hi, there! Thanks so much for reading. Due to unfortunate circumstances in my personal life, I was unable to complete this book on time for the release of this boxed set. But never fear! You are eligible for a FREE copy of the finalized book, coming in just a few short weeks. Visit http://heathermarieadkins.com/angelofdeath to fill out the form!

  About the Author

  http://www.heathermarieadkinsauthor.com

  HEATHER MARIE ADKINS writes too much but still too little. She also has too many cats, not enough tequila, and a torrid love affair with procrastination.

  She is the USA Today bestselling author of numerous novels, including: Stalked by Night, His Haunting Kiss, Mother of All, and Wiccan Wars.

  Heather lives in southern Indiana with a sarcastic cop who is entirely too depen
dent on puns. When she’s not plotting her next story or herding felines, she’s researching for her upcoming podcast, Spirits & Spells.

  www.heathermarieadkins.com

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