by Michele Hauf
“I know that vampire,” he muttered over her shoulder. “He’s warded against angels.”
“Seems a lot of them are.”
“Not all of them. We’ve taken out unwarded vamps. And who is to say if he’s warded against demons?”
“How to determine which ones have wards and which do not?” Pyx said. “Probably the leaders. Let’s get him out of here. See if he’s got minions.”
“I do like to slay minions.”
He clasped her hand and led her from the dance floor. While she wanted to walk beside him, to catch up and even surpass him, Pyx decided it would look better if the vampire saw the angel leading her out. Maybe the vamp would even think she was the muse.
Cooper kicked open the exit door. They entered the night with hands clasped and Pyx hugged up next to him. Just to make things look good. Certainly not because the shim of his sleeve across her bare arm tingled wickedly and made her weigh the benefits of slaying vamps against the thrill of more kisses.
Or was that the thrill of slaying vamps and the benefits of kisses? Certainly kissing was more thrilling than slaying.
The club parking lot opened to a narrow alleyway, but she didn’t want to take out any vampires so close to the building, in case an innocent walked out. And Cooper’s method of annihilating vampires was rather messy.
“I know you’re using me,” he said as they crossed the lot, hands swinging.
So what else was new? “You’re using me.”
“So we understand it’s not real affection, then.” He drew her hand up to press at his mouth.
Affection? Did he mean between them? Was the angel developing feelings toward her? No, couldn’t be.
Pyx tugged her hand out of his, away from the allure of his kiss. “Nope, just a game.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.” Seriously? Why had it been necessary to confirm what had been so obvious?
Angels didn’t fall in love any more than demons did. Unless she’d been assigned to slay a broken one. Had the man landed on his head after his Fall? It was possible because his utter lack of interest in finding his muse was just wrong. And since when did angels kiss demons?
You kissed him back.
“There’s a couple on the rooftop,” Cooper said over his shoulder to her. Then he leaped and landed on the roof of a brick-sided building.
Happy to abandon her mutinous thoughts about kissing, Pyx followed, landing beside him.
Cooper pressed a hand to her hip, to keep her behind him. She did not like to be stifled, and peeked around his shoulder. Three vampires flashed stiletto grins at her. Behind her, the vamp from the club had matched their leap. Now he pulled out a length of chain from his jacket and swung it over his head.
Pyx pulled out the wooden stake tucked in her boot and swung around, prepared to connect with flesh and blood. The vampire dodged and waggled an admonishing finger at her.
Cooper flicked a throwing star. It landed in one vampire in the skull above his ear. The vamp grabbed the razor-edged star and yelped as it cut open his palm.
“Nice one,” Pyx said. She kicked high to heel a vamp in the jaw. “But watch this!”
Her head still angled downward from the kick, palms to asphalt, she pushed off and flipped high into the air, landing on another vamp’s shoulder with her thighs. She squeezed but that wasn’t going to take out an immortal bloodsucker. Lunging forward over its head, she plunged the stake into his chest, and somersaulted to land on both feet. Behind her the air filled with vamp ash. The smell of that stuff was like burnt, rotting meat.
“Not bad—”
“Cooper, watch out!”
He had been aiming for the vampire wielding the chain in front of him, and didn’t see the vamp who leaped for his back and clung like a monkey. The vampire slammed a gun barrel against Cooper’s back.
The angel shouted viciously. His arms and legs snapped out from his body, shaking, as if touched by a Taser.
The decoy vampire laughed and turned right into Pyx’s space. She shoved a stake in his heart.
Cooper let out a biting string of mortal oaths. His body shuddered as if pinned in midair. He struggled, fighting the weird effects of whatever had been done to him.
The vampire who’d been on Cooper’s back lunged for Pyx. She booted him in the chest. He dropped the gun and landed against the brick wall with a thud. Stake held ready to stab, she was about to take him out when Cooper’s painful cry stopped her.
“I will not relent,” another vampire said to Cooper, whom Pyx had not turned to look at yet. “I want a name, buddy. I’ll return when you’re not sporting a demon on your arm.”
Cooper’s growl was unnatural and glassy. Something wasn’t right.
Turning about, Pyx’s stake hand dropped to her side. Her mouth may have dropped open, too, but only momentarily.
Cooper wasn’t in human form.
The angel had shifted. Whether purposefully or as a result of the strange attack, Pyx couldn’t know. He shook his glass head as if trying to shake off a daze.
The vampire who had spoken ran down the alleyway. She let him go.
There were more important things to concern her right now. She slapped her hip, but the dagger wasn’t there.
Now was her chance! So what if the muse wasn’t around. She didn’t need one. The angel had assumed the form in which he could be slain.
Pyx frantically scanned the rooftop, but couldn’t locate the dagger.
The angel moaned, and let out a high-pitched shriek. It resembled no earthly sound. He could blast out mortal eardrums, and eventually their brains, if he continued—but he did not.
Pyx stared at the shifted creature and forgot about Joe.
Magnificent was a poor word to describe Cooper in his half-shifted form. The man’s shirt had torn away and his chest had become hard, solid blue glass, which flexed remarkably like liquid ice. To touch him in this form would invite a chill no creature could withstand. It wouldn’t kill her, but it would freeze her solid.
Within the blue glass, Pyx saw the red heart. All angels had glass hearts. Not glass as mortals would define it; this particular angel was formed of ineffable substance that resembled glass.
All angels were different; some were fashioned from metal, wood, mist, razors, paper. Their structure was related to the craft each angel possessed and had taught the world upon their fall.
The creature standing before her looked like Cooper, but his face was glass and where his hair should be a vapory substance clouded about his skull.
But the most spectacular sight was the wings stretching out thirty, maybe even forty feet behind him. A pseudo-peacock’s array ruffled out from between his shoulders. No feathers. Angels did not do feathers until the final death. Instead, the illusion of feathers designed of what looked like stained glass shivered and moved with the air as if weightless. Titanium, blue, silver, emerald and violet glass glistened under the streetlights and cast lasers of color across the brick walls.
“Pyx?” His voice shuddered in a bell-like tone. He slapped a glass palm to his chest and the skin rippled as if flesh to flesh.
“You are an incredible sight,” she said, and then caught a lump in her throat.
A lift of his brow, cocky—even in half form the angel was still a Casanova—made Pyx realize what she just said.
“I mean, your wings. They’re…gorgeous. Why did you shift?”
“Wasn’t on purpose.” He suddenly fell to his knees and bowed, catching his palms on the asphalt. His wings swept the air beyond the roof of the three-story building to his right. “Shot me…with something. In the back. Like…electricity running through me. Couldn’t help it.”
“Yes. The vampire had a gun.”
Pyx scanned the ground and sighted a small silver gun. She grabbed it. It was more an injection gun with an empty glass cartridge barrel than something that fired bullets.
And where had Joe gone?
“I think they injected you with—”
&n
bsp; The piercing cry sounded again. Pyx winced and covered her ears.
She turned to find the wings gone and Cooper had resumed his mortal costume. His lower half hadn’t shifted so he wore jeans, though his boots lay beside his bare feet. His chest heaved, flexing the muscles.
He looked up at her, huffing and exhausted from the shift. “Injected me? I felt it at my lower back. Take a look.”
She crawled over to him and noticed Joe lying not two feet away from the angel’s feet.
“What do you see?”
A missed opportunity.
The chance to prove herself had been stolen by her misplaced wonder. For now. She would have another chance, and next time, she would not be distracted by the angel’s beauty.
Pyx bent over him, but didn’t see any marks on his flesh. “The light here is bad. Can you flash?”
“Of course I can. I’m not an invalid.”
“I mean, so we can go home and take a better look. Come on.” She swept up Joe and holstered the dagger, patting it once. Next time, for sure. “Whatever the vamps are up to, I want to figure this out.”
Missed opportunity or some kind of weird angel worship? She’d been utterly aghast at the beauty of his form. Sinistari did not admire the Fallen.
You’re not going to fail again, Pyx.
But had she already accepted the failure?
Cooper put a shaking arm across her shoulders and together they flashed.
Bruce had never seen a shifted angel. Not unless it had been a painting. In the moment when he’d clung to the Fallen’s back, it had freaked him out. He wasn’t sure the GPS had been injected correctly. It had been designed to go into the mortal flesh the angel wore when on earth.
Why had it shifted? Was it because of the injection? Weird.
He tapped the receiver. Static buzzed.
“This had better work.”
Chapter 8
“You’ve been quiet since we left the rooftop.”
Cooper turned on the light in the bedroom with a flicking gesture. Pyx lingered in the doublewide doorway between the two rooms. The pocket doors were shoved inside the walls.
He shrugged and rubbed the back of his neck. “Just didn’t expect to shift in front of you.”
The involuntary shift had felt weird, as if he’d stripped naked before Pyx. Normally stripping naked for a woman would have felt great. As well, it would have been a powerful, sexual thing.
Shifting to half form had exposed a side of himself he didn’t wish anyone to see. On the rooftop he had felt shamed, and remnants of that shame still shivered across his mortal skin.
He’d revealed himself to Pyx.
And now he wondered what she had thought in that moment as she’d stared up at his angelic half form. Had it offended her? Had it appealed to her? She was a demon; she could have only felt the urge to shove a blade into his heart. Yet he wished now she had seen beyond that urge and into him. The real him.
And why did it bother him what she thought of him? Did he have feelings for her?
Maybe.
No. She wanted to slay him!
Yet he wanted to connect with Pyx in a way he felt was not all right. They were two alike in this world. They should cleave together instead of trying to kill one another. But it hurt his brain right now to try and sort out this emotional stuff.
“That gun they used delivered some kind of electrical charge to shock my system.”
“Here it is.” Pyx handed him the weapon she’d claimed from the rooftop.
He examined the small injection gun. The barrel was glass or some kind of Lucite and he suspected whatever had been put in him was still there. “It set me off and I couldn’t control the shift.”
“That’s the first time I’ve seen an angel in half form,” Pyx said.
“You didn’t slay any of my kind before the flood?”
She shook her head. “I was summoned to slay a Fallen but a week before the flood. Never did track that bastard down before the waters came.”
“Lots of Sinistari survived the flood,” Cooper noted.
“Yeah? Doesn’t that figure. Pyxion the Other is always getting the short end of the stick. I got sent Beneath as the flood waters covered the land. Other Sinistari were Beneath. You can’t imagine the razzing I got from them.”
“Because you didn’t complete your task?”
“You got it.”
Cooper had only walked the earth a short time before the flood had come to sweep away him and his Fallen brethren and imprison them in the Ninth Void as punishment for falling. But he’d always thought all the Sinistari had been allowed to walk the earth following.
“I thought I heard about some great Sinistari warrior,” he said, “who stole hundreds of thousands of souls from the Fallen he had slain and tallied quite the number of kills.”
“Ashuriel the Black.” Pyx punched a fist in her palm. “He’s no longer the great one though. He accepted his own mortal soul months ago after an angel kill. And get this, it was because he was in love with a mortal woman. Yuck. I hate saying that word.”
“Ah.” He knew what word troubled her. “Love will get you every time.”
“Not me.”
“Even the mightiest are not immune to love’s seduction.”
The scent of her drew him, but he stopped himself from approaching her. He sensed she wasn’t putting two and two together. That men and women could fall in love, have feelings for one another, even if they were not of this realm. Even one who was slightly confused about her sexual nature.
“So if you were unable to slay a Fallen,” Cooper asked, “does that mean you’ve no souls?”
“Nope.” She pounded a fist over her heart, where the Sinistari interred stolen souls. “Not a one.”
When the Sinistari slayed an angel they interred all the souls that angel had stolen by teaching the mortals the arts into its black heart.
Which meant, no psychopomp would be interested in Pyx. The vampire had won that round. Damn.
How to open her eyes to what was happening right here between the two of them? Or was it just him? No, he sensed some burgeoning emotion from her. A desire to connect that must be driving her insane, for her mission was not to connect but to kill.
Did he want to make it hard for her? Making her job easy meant surrendering. That, he would never do.
“Let me take a look,” Pyx said. “See what we’re working with here.”
Cooper’s shirt had been torn away during the shift. Her fingers probed along his spine and he stood straighter. It wasn’t a gentle touch, more clinical. Still, he liked the feeling of their connection. Even if she wasn’t into it.
“Lower,” he said. “Can you see a mark of entry?”
“No. Skin’s flawless. You heal quickly, as I would expect.”
“Not as fast as I once did. There must be a bruise.”
“Maybe. It’s discolored.” She pressed a fingernail into his flesh. “Right about here?”
“Yes. Have Joe help you.”
“What? You want me to…?”
“Yes, damn it, cut into the flesh. There’s something in there. I can feel it rubbing against bone. Whatever a vampire wants inside me is not something I want to remain.”
She tugged out the dagger from her combat boot. Cooper roamed his gaze up her long, slender legs made for running, or wrapping about his waist. Oh, sexy siren in black silk and shitkicking boots. “Your dress is ripped.”
One copper brow arched over her kaleidoscope eye. She tugged the tear and it revealed skin to the top of her thigh. “Yeah, maybe hunting vamps in silk wasn’t such a good idea after all.”
“I like it.” He fingered the black fabric that hung before her thigh.
“Hands off, horny angel. Lie down.”
“Ah? You want me prone and facing down?” He spread out his arms. “Helpless to whatever devious pleasures you decide to employ?”
“Whatever I do to you, it will be devious.” She tapped his shoulder with the tip
of Joe. “Not so sure about the pleasurable part though.”
“I can mix pleasure and pain. You up for it?”
Her brow arched higher, a thin arabesque of deliciousness Cooper wanted to lick. But she was all business. “Turn over. You want pain, you got it.”
Cooper let out a groan as the blade cut through his mortal skin. He would not discount the pain for the mortal experience, though. She cut in the area where he felt the intrusion.
“Go deep. To the bone,” he said around a wince.
“Yeah, yeah. Masochist.” He felt her fingertip prod his insides.
For some reason it didn’t hurt after the initial cut, but instead made him wonder at the demon touching him so deeply. She was inside of him. Tenderly. Cautiously. A man she labeled enemy. Yet right now he trusted her.
The mortal air had surely toasted his better judgment.
“So your wings,” she said, still probing about, “they were like stained glass, or something. But I suspect not so fragile.”
“Ineffable.” He cupped a fist under his chin and closed his eyes to the now tender touch.
“I understand each angel is unique.”
“In relation to the skill we master. I was a craftsman of glass. Despite popular belief, we did not fall simply to mate with mortal females. Some of us sought to teach mortals the arts. I taught them artistry in colored glass.”
“Deemed a sin at the time.”
“Yes, all artistic endeavors and crafts were. But not so much now, eh? I knew I was doing right at the time. Look at all the beauty in the mortal realm. Every stained-glass window you see is because of me.”
“I also understand when an angel taught mortals the creative arts, that mortal’s soul was ransomed upon his death to the angel.”
“Yes, unfortunately. Because the mortal had sinned in the eyes of his peers so his soul could not rise to Above with death, but it was not destined for Beneath either.” Cooper propped his chin on a fist. “You ever wonder who decides what is sin and what is not? Some cultures believe eating certain kinds of meat a sin, others do not. So who is the ultimate judge of a sin? Not who you would expect.”
“Him?”
“Not at all. A mortal’s sin is judged by his peers, which is such a shame.”