by Myers, AJ
Tyler sighed, his eyes drifting back to the snow beyond the glass next to us. Finally, though, he admitted, “I’m not.”
“Why?” I asked, really confused.
“Because Lark is one of them,” he said, not really telling me anything. When I frowned up at him, he sighed again. “He knows me very well and has for a long time. Let’s just say I’m not really in the mood to hear ‘I told you so’.”
“I told you so?” I repeated, arching an eyebrow. “Why would he say that?”
“Because of you.”
Oh, hell. We were back to that. And, for some reason, I didn’t think Tyler was going to let me brush him off again. So when Blake came crashing through the door like a rhino on crack, I could have kissed him.
“Bad news, guys,” he said, ignoring Kim’s shriek of surprise as his noisy arrival jarred her awake. “Ms. Cantrell is gone.”
“Gone?” Tyler snapped, springing to his feet. “What the bloody hell do you mean she’s gone?”
“As in, not here,” Blake snapped back, sounding tired and irritated. “You know? Like she escaped?”
“Damn,” I muttered, already headed for the door.
I marched down the stairs and into the elevator, mumbling every expletive I knew under my breath. I ignored the eyes that followed my foulmouthed progress down the hall of the hospital ward like they weren’t even there. When I reached the room Ms. Cantrell had been in, it was to find Skippy and Grams interrogating the guard who’d been on duty.
The poor guy—one of Mikhail’s, believe it or not—had no idea what happened. He said one minute he was sitting there, trying to ignore Ms. Cantrell, and the next he was waking up with his head throbbing and she was gone. Grams was sure he’d been hexed, but we couldn’t figure out how that had happened, either.
How had she hexed someone with no powers?
Ms. Cantrell’s disappearing act was just the first incident of the Morning From Hell. An hour after that, Blake and another one of Mikhail’s guys went at it because he grabbed Kim’s ass when she was walking by. Nathan and Mikhail broke them up before anyone died, but it was becoming very obvious that tempers were wearing thin. Mikhail dragged his guy out, looking none too pleased, and Grams and Mrs. Val gave Blake hell for being so childish.
I thought that was a bit harsh. If he had grabbed my ass, Nathan would have put the sexually-harassing little creep through the wall. Blake had just scorched him a little. In my opinion, he’d had it coming.
And then, just when it looked like everything was about to calm down, I got in a fist fight with an archangel.
Yeah, I know. Only me…
I totally blame Tyler. Why? Because Tyler called the fallen angels in without telling them everything—everything meaning the fact that the place was crawling with the undead who, oddly enough, they don’t like. Because Tyler hadn’t told me that it might be best if Kim and I kept our distance because they were going to throw a fit about our little chemistry experiment—which he also hadn’t bothered to tell them about.
Like I said, it was all Tyler’s fault!
Okay, so it wasn’t like I intentionally set out to brawl with an angel. In fact, everything was fine at first. Everyone present, including me, took a collective breath of relief when they arrived. I mean, if you’re going into battle you can’t get any better than having a couple of archangels fighting on your side, fallen or otherwise.
The female angel, the one who refused to fight, was a really pretty, really tiny, brunette with a sweet calming voice. She was the only one of the three of them who didn’t seem to mind the vampires. Her name was Erin, and she and Ainsley hit it off immediately. By noon they were inseparable—a fact that had Zan grumbling about the lack of privacy in our current quarters. He was so preaching to the choir on that one. I hadn’t seen Nathan alone for more than ten seconds since Mikhail had arrived.
The archangels, Ryan and Lark, were even bigger than Nathan and Mikhail. Seriously, these guys were huge. Like Tyler, they were both beautiful in their own unique way. Ryan was golden-haired and blue-eyed with the same deeply bronzed skin as Tyler. Lark was a soft-spoken black guy with no hair and the deepest brown eyes. You could have fallen into them and drowned.
Kim and I were so busy with all the other drama going on that we didn’t even get to meet the two archangels until after lunch. We probably wouldn’t have gotten to meet them then if they hadn’t been coming down the hall as we were leaving the kitchen with our seventh cup of coffee of the day.
They didn’t make the best first impression. They were talking in low, unhappy voices as they walked down the hall and something one of them said caught my attention. At first, I couldn’t believe it, but then, the big, golden-haired egomaniac that was doing most of the grumbling said something I just couldn’t dismiss. I felt my temper start to rise when I realized they were muttering about being surrounded by ‘bloodsucking cockroaches’ and calling in ‘exterminators’.
“Excuse me?” I snapped, stopping and blocking the door so they couldn’t go through. “What did you just say?”
“Oh, goody,” Ryan grumbled, giving me a disdainful look, “First vampires, now demon wannabes. When I find Jordan, I’m going to wring his neck. He said we were coming to help people, not parasites. Do they breed the damned around here?”
“Depends,” I told him coldly. “Do they breed jackasses where you come from?”
“Em, let it go,” Kim hissed next to me, trying to pull me away from the giant in front of me. “Come on, it’s not worth it! You’re going to lose your temper, then everyone is going to know about you!”
“I don’t think she is a darkling, Ryan.” Lark studied me closely, looking more confused by the second. “There is a demonic taint to her, true, but it is not predominant.” Hell, that was news to me. Then, I was a walking science experiment, so I really couldn’t say he was wrong, either. “I’ve never seen anything like her, to be perfectly honest. She has amazing power, like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. If I didn’t know better, I would say she’s some kind of Nephilim. And so is the other one, only her blood is much more diluted. The power I sense in her is bandraoi through and through, only slightly enhanced by an infusion of our blood.”
Slightly enhanced? Oh, they had no idea. I was never going to forget that door flying across the room, or the look on Kim’s face afterwards. If that was considered only being slightly enhanced, I was probably the equivalent of a volcano with hair.
“Nice detective work, boys,” I told them, smiling at Ryan and making a point to flash my glowing eyes in his direction. “Congratulations! You’re both right! Tell them what they’ve won, Kim!”
“You are a darkling!” Ryan growled, giving me a disgusted look.
“And you are a jackass,” I growled back. “Now, if you’ll excuse us—”
“But, you feel like Nephilim,” Lark interrupted me, his eyes narrowed suspiciously.
“Yeah, I’m that, too,” I told him. “Oh, and a bandraoi. I guess you could just think of me as supernatural soup.”
“And where did you come by our blood, little one?” Lark asked on a sigh. Yeah, like he didn’t already know. The resigned look on his face pretty much said he had a damn good idea, anyway.
“Transfusion,” I told him, shrugging.
“That’s what I was afraid you were going to say,” he groaned, flicking another resigned glance at his big-headed friend.
Ryan looked like he was about to explode. He was breathing heavily and his nostrils were flaring out like an angry bull. His face was red and growing redder by the second. He sucked in a deep breath, but it didn’t seem to help much. His skin was turning kind of a mottled purple color and the vein in his temple looked like it was about to burst. The next time he opened his mouth, he didn’t suck in a breath, he let out the one he was already holding in a bellow of outrage.
“Jordan!” he roared, never taking his eyes off me.
“What’s the matter, big boy?” I taunted, ignoring the fact that
Kim was pulling on my arm like she was trying to remove it. “You’re looking a little upset. Now, what has your panties in a twist, I wonder.”
He reached for me, and I reacted on instinct. I was tired, stressed out, and fed up with arrogant jerk-offs thinking they were better than me. Kim jumped back away from me just before I burst into flames. Only, there was something wrong with them. Instead of the beautiful golden flames I was used to, they were pearly white and had the same iridescent shimmer as the aura around Tyler—and they were twice as hot.
The paint on the wall behind me bubbled immediately and started running down the walls in thick glops. Ryan jumped back like I was about to explode. And, for all I knew, I just might.
“Em! What the hell…?” I turned to find Tyler standing a few feet away, his eyes wide and his jaw slack with shock.
“You tell me!” I yelled, waving my hands around. The archangels backed up quickly, apparently afraid of me. “What happened to my pretty gold flames? I want them back, Tyler! Right now!”
“That’s the least of your problems,” Kim snorted, choking on a laugh.
“What?”
Just then I caught sight of myself in the mirror across the hall and felt my temper move out of the human realm and right into the astral plane. Not only were my flames all pearly white, I had a beautiful, gossamer-looking pair of wings.
I looked like a damn psychotic fairy! I was going to kill Tyler Jordan with my bare hands!
When I turned back to look at him, Tyler started backing up quick…really quick.
Like, angel warp speed quick.
“Now, Em,” he said, still running backwards as I started toward him. “Em, you have to calm down, beautiful.”
“Calm down? I have wings, Tyler!” I shrieked hysterically.
We were drawing quite a crowd as I stalked him down the hall. People were sticking their heads out of doors and over the stair banister, and the end of the hall was filling up fast. Most of them were staring at me in rapt fascination. One girl, one of the survivors from the blitz, even snapped a picture of me with her cell phone. I gave her less than five minutes before I would be posted all over Facebook, and, if she was getting video, YouTube.
I could already see the caption: Psycho fairy kills angel in fit of rage.
Sanity started to return when I saw a group of Mikhail’s people had started to gather at the end of the hall, and I wanted to groan when I saw how they were all staring at me. Kellum was standing at the front of the group, a panicked expression on his handsome face, shaking his head frantically at me.
I immediately called my ghosts to me, hoping to mask myself from Mikhail himself, but it was too late for that. Our eyes met as Mikhail shoved Kellum out of his way so he could get a good look at me and I felt my chest tighten in dread. When he tore his eyes from mine and let them sweep over me from head to toe, I knew my collectible status had just been upgraded. I wasn’t vintage Barbie material anymore.
I had just become the winged version of the Hope diamond.
“I didn’t know that was going to happen, beautiful,” Tyler said, changing tactics suddenly and stopping in the middle of the hall. Not smart. I was so busy staring over his shoulder at the hungry look on Mikhail’s face that I almost ran into him. “I told you it wasn’t an exact science, Em. If it makes you feel any better, they’re really spectacular!”
“I hate you, Tyler Jordan!” I hissed, glaring at him.
To my surprise, he just smiled at me and nodded to someone over my shoulder. I was immediately doused in water so cold that I gasped as my lungs froze in mid-motion. The flames around me went out and I turned, soaking wet and furious, to find Grams and Mrs. Val standing behind me with buckets. At Grams’ warning look, I immediately clamped my lips shut against the words on my tongue that were just dying to come out.
“That does seem to be effective,” Grams said casually to Mrs. Val. “We really must speak to Skipper about his lack of fire extinguishers, though. That would have been a much more efficient way of handling the situation.”
“Or you could just dispose of the life-sucking, fire-breathing little fairy,” Ryan grumbled. When Kim called up a ball of brilliant white Witch Fire and started bouncing it from hand to hand, he backed up again. “It was just a suggestion! Jeez! You witches are so sensitive.”
Without even thinking about what I was doing, I whirled around and hit him as hard as I could. I was just as shocked as everyone else when he flew through the kitchen doorway and all the way across the room. He smashed into the stone fireplace with enough impact to shake the whole building, leaving a crater the exact shape of his body in the cinderblock.
Breathing hard, I turned to face the silently watching crowd. No one even seemed to be breathing. I didn’t care. I was done. If they wanted to be afraid of me, they could. If they wanted to take Goldilocks’ advice, they could try. No matter what, though, I was completely and totally finished putting up with other people’s crap, be they angel, witch, demon, vampire or human.
“Wonderful,” Lark sighed, breaking the silence, as he watched his fellow angel moan and groan. “What am I supposed to do with him now?”
“You could scrape up the hotheaded, steroid-popping pansy and put him where he belongs,” I grumbled.
Ryan tried to get to his feet and fell back with another groan, making the hole in the fireplace even bigger. I smiled smugly. Skippy was going to have my head, but it had been worth it to put a couple of holes in Ryan’s over inflated ego.
“And where might that be?” Lark asked, grinning like he was looking forward to hearing my answer.
“I assume Skippy has a dumpster around here somewhere,” I suggested as I walked away. “I’m sure he’ll feel right at home.”
Lark’s deep, rich laughter followed me down the hall, and I found myself really smiling for a second.
It wasn’t until I started shivering again that I realized I hadn’t dismissed my ghosts. I decided in the end to keep them around a little longer, just until I was sure I wasn’t going to flip out again. By the time I reached the room Kim and I were sharing, I was regretting that decision. My teeth were chattering like a pair of windup teeth in a toy store. My nose was frozen again, and my clothes felt like they were forming a permanent frozen bond to my skin.
I stripped out of my wet clothes and changed into warm, dry ones. I considered calling Nathan, but then decided that was just another fight in the making. When he found out about the show I’d just put on in front of Mikhail and his entire team, he was probably going to strangle me. And there wasn’t a chance in hell that he wasn’t going to hear about that spectacle. In fact, it seemed like the only people who hadn’t seen me go all psycho-fairy were Nathan, Skippy, and Blaire.
Once I was dry again, I forced myself to walk over to the bed. I was so drained that just pulling back the blankets took all the energy I had left. Crawling under them, I curled up in a little, shivering ball and tried to focus myself.
I had almost found my happy place when I heard the door open behind me. Assuming it was Kim coming to check on me, I started to turn over, forcing myself to smile. A smile that froze on my face when, with a little whoosh of air, a dart embedded itself in the side of my neck. It was followed in quick succession by three more; one in my thigh, one in my shoulder, and one between my shoulder blades. I pulled the dart out of my neck and looked at it, my vision starting to blur. It was similar to a tranquilizer dart, but the substance inside was acid green rather than clear.
I tried to roll over so I could see who had shot me, but it was too late. All I saw was a blurry figure in a hooded cloak before the gray fog that had been steadily spreading across my vision finally blinded me completely. I felt a sensation like I was falling and tried to catch myself, but there was nothing there to hold on to. And then, I felt nothing. I saw nothing. I heard nothing.
And finally, as I’m sure you can guess, there was nothing.
Chapter 36: Connections
They don’t have a classificat
ion for you, a deep, wonderfully comforting voice whispered in the back of my mind.
I groaned, wishing it would shut up. Oh, my head hurt! I felt like somebody was stomping on it in a steady rhythm that would either kill me or leave me with permanent brain damage. I couldn’t think through it. All I could do was lay there and wait—hope, actually—to die.
“Ember? Ember, are you awake, child?”
I knew that voice, but I couldn’t reach it through the sickening pounding. I tried to crack my eyes open just a little, just to see if getting a visual would help me put a name to the voice, but I immediately closed them again when bright light hit my pupils and ratcheted up the pounding to a sickening level.
Bastian and Tyler, that other voice whispered again. Tyler…messing with your DNA…
“Miss Blaylock!” the voice outside of my head snapped, her voice full of authority. “Pull yourself together! We’re in very serious trouble here!”
I recognized that voice immediately as it lashed over me. There was a reason I should have been angry at her, but I couldn’t remember what it was. She had done something, something terrible. No. No, it hadn’t been her. Or was it? And did it really matter? No, all that mattered was the pain.
“Please, Ember,” Ms. Cantrell whispered, sounding close to tears. “I know it hurts, but you have to try to push through it. The sooner you get up and move, the faster it will wear off. Come on, dear. You can do it. If anyone can, it’s you.”
No, I really didn’t think I wanted to. It was better if I just laid there and died. Yeah, that would be so much better.
Power could be limitless.
I focused on that gentle voice, letting it take the edge off the pain. My father’s voice. How could I have not known my own father’s voice? What the hell had they shot me with?
I moaned and tried to pull away when a shaking hand latched onto my arm and tried to tug me to a sitting position. I was too weak, though, and she finally got me up and propped against something cold and hard behind me. The movement caused my stomach to lurch, and I clenched my teeth against the flood of nausea that followed.