by Jenn Stark
“I’ll be back shortly, to escort you out,” he said. “My day shift of personal security has arrived, and I don’t think it would be wise—”
“I’ll remain here,” Finn said, cutting Lester off. The sound of footsteps over plush carpet approached Dana, then moved past her, as if she was one of Lester’s trinkets left on a shelf. There was more murmured conversation, then a door opening and shutting. Okay, then. She needed to plan her next action, and that had to be centered on her getting back to her own office. Max would have a report for her by now. On the security breach. On Finn. On Bartholomew too, if she was lucky. But she had to lie quietly for a few more minutes. They both might have left, of course, but she wasn’t taking any—
“He’s gone,” Finn said.
Dana opened her eyes and glared up at him as he stood a few feet away from her, his expression wary, as well it should be.
“Thanks for the news flash.” She swung her feet around and sat up sharply, gritting her teeth against a sudden pop of pain in her head. “So he doesn’t want anyone seeing you, huh? You planning on committing a crime I should know about?” She found her phone next to her on the couch and thumbed it awake. Instantly, it buzzed in annoyance. No doubt Max had been trying to reach her. Too bad he hadn’t come up and pounded on the door.
“He’s trying to watch us.”
Dana’s adrenaline jacked again as Finn sat beside her, his body far too close to hers on the leather couch. Before she could move away, he placed a hand on her leg.
Dana’s eyes practically crossed at the contact, and her hand went limp. The phone fell to the plush carpet with a gentle thump.
Dear. Holy. God. She no longer needed Finn to dull the pain in her leg, so the force of his touch skittered into her nervous system with nowhere to go and nothing to do but apparently stimulate her adrenaline and endorphin centers. In one split second, she’d become a live wire of sensation, focusing on the heaviness of his hand on her leg.
“He is?” she managed, all too aware of the security cameras whirring in the corners of the room. “Why?”
“We don’t have much time,” Finn said quietly as Dana kept her head down, struggling for breath. “I’ve disabled the cameras, but he’ll become aware of the transmission error in a few short minutes and return immediately. So listen to me. I had believed your…uncle’s enemies would abandon him once the document is delivered. I no longer think that. If it is Bartholomew who is after you, he will want to be sure no one else ever learns what’s in that document. And if he knows what you are, you won’t be safe. What we need to do—”
“Hold on there, Sparky.” Dana’s head came up, all her senses fully back online. “Why won’t I be safe? What’s going on with you and Lester? Tell me. Now.”
A flash of irritation darkened Finn’s beautiful face, but there was resignation there too. If she hadn’t just been drugged by her own uncle, Dana would have laughed. On a need-to-know basis, she pretty much always needed to know, and Finn apparently had finally figured that out. She always had asked way too many questions, but it’d never slowed her down in the end.
It wouldn’t today either. “Sorry. If you’re in a hurry, the fastest way to get me on board is to spill everything.”
“We don’t have—”
“We’ve got thirty seconds. Go.”
With a move so fast she couldn’t process it, Finn reached out and grabbed Dana’s hands, once more flooding her with a jolt of what had to be pure electricity. It wasn’t an entirely relaxing experience. “You feel this?” he demanded. “The circuit of power?”
“Yeah, Taser Hands, I do,” she gritted out. She pulled back, but he didn’t let go.
“You shouldn’t. The fact that you do makes you different from most humans, who would only feel the barest spark unless I forced the matter. Your circuits are wide open.”
“Why?” Dana didn’t think she was going to like the answer to that question.
She was right.
“The short version? You’re a descendent of humans and Fallen angels. Yes, that was a thing,” he said, cutting off her protest. “It’s part of most religious mythology, up to and including Judeo-Christian teachings, which you very well know. What you don’t know is that while most descendants of those pairings were better than average, some were significantly above average.” He shook her hands. “You would be an example of that. Whenever you felt like you didn’t belong, like you were different, whether that was a good or bad thing at the time—well, you were. You are. When you fully access your power, nothing can stop you. For artists, it’s called being in the flow. For great strategists, it’s winning whatever battle you set for yourself. For leaders, it’s rallying the world to your side. For teachers, it’s shining a light where before there was only darkness. For you, it’s that time a thousand. You shouldn’t wonder why you drifted into a security role, Dana. It’s exactly where you should be…only there’s an entire world out there for you to protect.”
“I don’t—you’re wrong. I’ve never been that special,” Dana whispered, blinking rapidly. She hadn’t been either. “I would’ve noticed.”
“You may not have, but others did. Up to and including your uncle. Who should have told you a long time ago.”
She stared at him. “And my mother?”
“Ahh—probably not, actually. But neither of you should beat yourselves up too much for not figuring it out on your own. Funny thing about humans, they tend to believe the worst in themselves and those closest to them, not the best.” His lips twisted. “Probably kept most of your kind alive.”
“There’re more out there like me?” Dana jerked a little straighter as she suddenly made the connection. “Of course there’re more. That’s why you’re here. That’s what’s in the document, isn’t it? These other people. And me too.”
Finn grimaced. “Give the lady a prize,” he said, echoing her own words from last night. “We can discuss the rest later, but right now, we’ve got something more important to fix.” He drew a deep breath, as if fighting his own battle with what he had to say. “You have abilities that I can show you how to access, to help protect yourself—and others too. But you must ask me to show you.” He leaned forward, and though his grip on her hands loosened, she somehow felt more transfixed by the look in his eyes, the gentler touch of his hands on her skin. Her heart started racing, and her skin heated up down to her toes. “That’s kind of how it works between, um, what I am and what you are,” Finn continued. “You have to ask.”
Dana blinked at him through a haze of something that felt an awful lot like desire, but with an urgency to it that made it seem closer to fear. She cleared her throat. I have to ask? That shouldn’t turn her on as much as it did. She should be focusing on her own safety, her seriously twisted family tree, the abilities Finn seemed to think she had…or maybe the whole Ancient Aliens vibe of having a great-grandsomething who had wings. Like that shouldn’t be super creepy or anything.
It wasn’t, somehow. But it should be.
She cleared her throat, trying to focus. “Fine. But we can deal with any threats to me tomorrow. Right now, I need to know more about this list.”
“No, you don’t, dammit. Listen to me.” Moving too quickly for Dana to track, Finn tightened his hold again and pushed her back into the cushions of the couch until she was pressed hard against the soft, expensive leather. An entire constellation of stars seemed to burst inside her at his renewed contact, the twisting roil of her nerves practically vibrating with energy. Finn might not be her kind, exactly, but there was no question they were supposed to fit together, the sum of the two of them far greater than their separate parts.
Finn continued, anger rife in his voice as he leaned over her, reclaiming her focus. “Just because you don’t understand the danger building against you doesn’t mean it isn’t there. You have enemies out there who are not normal humans. You think you can protect yourself from me? Even if you wanted to?”
He pause
d, suddenly reassessing where he was, where she was. He’d stretched her out again on the long couch, and now his body half covered hers, their combined weight sinking into the luxurious cushions. His face flushed with his attempt to control his own emotions, and he pulled himself back, letting her go, but his point had been made. “And especially if you didn’t.”
Dana sucked in a shallow breath, shivering uncontrollably. “Stay off me,” she said, as sternly as she could manage, even as her body cried out for more contact, not less. She was swimming in an open electrical current, craving the pain and pleasure of this full-on connection. And at the very edge of her consciousness, the desire to reach for more beckoned, teasing her with the memory of its seductive power.
No—Yes. No. Her mind hung on to the tiniest thread of coherence, and that thread pounded with fear. Finn’s body against hers wasn’t like any other man’s she’d ever felt. It wasn’t just that he was big or solid. She’d known her share of strong men. She’d felt the weight of their bodies and the heat of their desire. But this was different. This was power and possibility, outrage, and need, and pure, unadulterated energy, so strong it threatened to consume her.
And she wanted it. Badly. Yes.
Finn reeled back as Dana had asked, but he knew that what he had to give couldn’t wait.
“I can make you stronger yet, Dana,” he said, knowing his words sounded hopelessly archaic, but unable to explain more clearly while the panic surged within him. Dana needed the grace, the power that he could give her as a Fallen, and she needed it now. As the daughter of the angels who had walked the earth more than six thousand years ago, she’d be open to that grace in a way few humans would be.
But she had to ask for it. Despite his show of aggression, he couldn’t force it upon her.
“You’re special, Dana. You have a strength within you that can help you survive, succeed, achieve feats you can barely imagine, and protect yourself—above all, you can protect yourself. But you have to know how to trigger this strength. And you have to be able to trigger it in others too. Do you understand?”
“Not even remotely,” she said tightly, glaring at him. Still, there was no denying the shift in her energy. She believed him, or she believed him enough, and she totally accepted his explanations, exactly the way she’d said she would. The answers he’d given her would hold for the moment, and that was all he could ask. “But okay. Do it. Do whatever it is you’re saying you can do.”
Finn swallowed, his own heart banging loud enough to be heard across the veil. He’d never touched a human with the intention of triggering their gifts before, but somehow, he knew what to do.
“You’re sure?” he managed, struggling to refocus.
“Jesus! Yes,” Dana snapped, her own face awash in desire and fear. “Get it over with already.”
Finn shifted, moving closer to her, and Dana didn’t shrink away. He felt his own body surge in reaction, but his jaw was clenched, his breath coming fast. “Pain can serve as a trigger,” he said. “So can danger. So will outrage, if it’s strong enough. Any extremity of emotion can place you in a position to reach into yourself and grab hold of this power that is yours by birth, a place of stillness beyond the storm.” He leaned closer, and Dana hissed a short warning breath. “But first,” he whispered into her ear, his lips grazing the soft, tender skin as she choked out a breath, “you have to endure the storm.”
He shifted, dropping his head to her mouth to kiss her hard, the movement causing Dana to arch upward off the couch and into his body. A wave of heat billowed toward him, and he lifted his head again to meet her wild, crazed eyes, her lips parted from his kiss.
“Reach for it, Dana,” he whispered. “You can. You must.”
“What are you doing?” she gasped, but he only laughed low in his throat, the sound cruel, defiant even to his own ears.
“It’s there, isn’t it?” he purred, leaning down to nuzzle the side of her face, trailing a delicate path of kisses along her jaw, teasing the thin gold hoops at her earlobes. She shuddered beneath him again, her sigh turning into a low moan. “You feel it coming over you, a pressure, a storm of color and sensation. It makes you strong, Dana. It makes you who you are. It’s a power that is yours to claim for your own.”
“You mean lust?” Dana shot back, her words devolving into a groan. “Because that’s pretty much—”
“Not lust. Not exactly.” He met her gaze again, desperate for her to understand, no matter how hard she kept pushing back. “You have to surrender to it, Dana. Let it happen.” There was so much power available to her, so much strength. If he could just get her to reach for it—
Suddenly, she did. She blinked, then stared at him wide-eyed, her gaze filled with awareness and power and something else, something he didn’t recognize, that called out to him with an agony that caught him completely off guard—
Hope.
Wait, what? Hope?
In a flash of awareness that blasted across his circuits, Finn’s own memory was flayed open, revealing images he was sure he’d never seen before and yet…they seemed vaguely familiar. Earth, spinning and twirling beneath him, nothing but streams of endlessly beautiful light, a glorious tapestry of millions of souls whose emotions were a mash-up of joy and pain and sorrow and fear and doubt and exhilaration—and one emotion no angel could ever understand, could ever feel. Because they had no need to feel it, for all that they could recognize it shining forth from the children of God in an endless fire.
Hope.
He gritted his teeth against the agony that pounded through him, trying to focus on Dana as the image winked out as quickly as it’d come, leaving nothing but pain. But it wasn’t fully gone—he could almost remember. Remember! At least that one small fragment. Somehow, Dana had unlocked it within him, had shown him the path. She was even more of a key to his redemption than he realized…one he had to learn how to use in less than fifteen hours, before he lost her forever.
But Dana was shaking her head again, the tenuous hold she had on her belief already fraying. “I don’t—” she said one last time, and true pain fried along Finn’s circuits, frustration boiling through him. He had no choice if she said no…no choice!
Then she leaned forward and kissed him.
In a flash, Finn pulled her to him as if he was sealing both their fates, devouring her, claiming her, his body fusing with hers even through their clothes in a firestorm of heat that battered and swept him along, overflowing his senses. He poured into Dana the energy he knew would galvanize her power, setting her skin, her hair and eyes, bones and muscle, blood and marrow alive with heat and vitality—and, it couldn’t be helped, a mindless, yearning, unending desire.
He drew back from her abruptly, and still she blazed. She stared at him, and he had no idea what she was seeing, but from the wide-eyed shock of her expression, he could only imagine.
“My God,” she gasped. “What are you?” She reached out to him, and Finn pulled back farther, the light jumping between them taking on a raw, needy edge.
He held her out stiffly from him. “You can see me as a Fallen,” he said. His mouth quirked. “Trust me, if you saw me in my other guises, it wouldn’t be as pretty.”
She blinked at him. “Your other—”
“We’ll cover that later. What’s important is that you can see yourself too. How you’ve changed. Look at your hands, your legs. Your body. Claim your reality. You don’t have much time before they return.”
He swung off her, backing away a few steps, and Dana raised her own shaking fingers to her eyes.
Finn knew what she was seeing. Her hands glowed with fire. Not a wasting flame, but white, healing, which he knew would fill her with a strength and purpose beyond anything she would have imagined possible. She looked up, and once again, she seemed to flinch.
“You’re glowing too,” she whispered.
“All part of the package.” He gestured, and only then did she look around the room. The illumina
tion jumped and flashed from many of Lester’s collected objets d’art—the relics, the vases, the statuary, the scrolls and parchments and bits of bone and blood held fast in golden cases. So many of them glowed, the room seemed to light up as if the stars of heaven had been caught and held in place.
“What is this?” she breathed.
“Your birthright.” Finn held up the ancient gold cuff he’d taken from Lester’s collection, covered in glyphs and stylized drawings. “You see the glow?” he asked, and she nodded, transfixed. “That glow shows you all that you are related to as the daughter of a long-ago Nephilim, Light Walker, Watcher, Crosser…so many names, but all the same thing.”
“A Fallen,” she said, clearly trying to wrap her head around the idea.
He nodded, watching her, waiting for her gaze to return to his. “If you’re in your power, the glow you see will also show you what to fear.”
His words seemed to shake her, and the glow dipped a little, ratcheting back. She looked bereft. “It’s weakening,” she said, and he nodded, lifting the bracelet higher.
“Focus on the cuff. It’s the strongest item in this room due to its purpose and the fact that I’m holding it. You should be able to get a sense of its power, even as your connection to me fades.” He tossed the bracelet toward her, and she caught it, the heat obviously searing her fingers so abruptly, she almost dropped it. “But the strength that is your birthright will never fully leave you, Dana. Not anymore. And now that you know it’s within you, you can call it up yourself. However, if you wear that bracelet, your mind and your thoughts will stay your own.” He quirked a smile. “Even from me.”
She blinked, then stared down at the golden cuff in her hands and nodded. As her breath slowed and she steadied herself, the cuff appeared sharper, clearer than anything else in the room, even to Finn’s eyes. As if it was in heavy focus, everything else dimming around it.
“You’ll notice this about people who are—like you,” Finn said. “And those like me, as well.” He looked at her hard. “But in the short term, if you see anyone like me, Dana, especially after today…I suggest you run.”