by Meg Collett
Michaela turned back to the others behind her. They shifted anxiously, awaiting her orders. “Wait here. Go inside in groups of two. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves. Clark and I will go now. Give us a couple minutes, and if we don’t come right back out, you’ll know it’s safe to go inside. I don’t want all of us to walk inside and be trapped.”
“Let one of us go first then,” Gabriel said, volunteering.
Michaela shook her head. “If the Watchers are too close, they might recognize you.”
“What about you? They’d recognize you, too.”
“Not in this getup. Besides, you have wings to hide.” Michaela saw the worry in Gabriel’s eyes. She leaned over and gave him a quick kiss. “I’ll be fine. This is good.”
Gabriel returned her kiss. “I do like your outfit.” His eyes roamed down her body, warming her skin. “I just wish everyone else wasn’t seeing it.”
“Give it a rest you two.” Clark tugged on Michaela’s arm. “We’ve got shit to do. Take off your coat.”
Michaela obliged. Raphael, Simiel, and Gabriel actually put on coats so they could tuck their wings away. The air was frosty on everyone’s exposed skin, but the adrenaline pumping through their veins kept them warm. Ophaniel neatly folded and stowed away Michaela’s jacket next to a dumpster.
“Hopefully no one will take it,” she said quietly, like the assumed jacket thief might hear her.
“I think the only people around here will be at the party.” Simiel squeezed Ophaniel’s shoulder.
“Ready?” Clark asked Michaela. He looked more than ready. Too ready.
“Are we clear on the plan?” Michaela addressed the Archangels.
“Yeah. There is no plan,” Uriel said. She’d been quiet nearly the whole trip. She was nervous about more than just fighting the Watchers; Zarachiel had refused to stay behind. He stood, silent and hunched, at her shoulder. Fear and anxiety were evident in her eyes and in the way she kept shooting nervous looks in Zarachiel’s direction. Michaela felt sorry for her.
“Exactly.” Clark beckoned for Michaela to follow before he rounded the corner and started down the street. Michaela met Gabriel’s eyes briefly before she followed Clark, jogging to catch up. With every stride, the fur on her boots swished and tickled the tops of her calves.
Michaela fell in step with Clark. “Clark, you know when we get in there…well, we are kind of counting on you to help us out.”
“I’d figured.”
“I’m sorry,” Michaela said, shivering as a gust of cold wind hit her bare skin. “I wish we could be more help, but we can’t risk hurting the humans.”
“I know.”
Clark barely looked at her; all his attention was focused on the loading bay in front of them. Michaela sighed, feeling worried all of a sudden. “You’re sure we can get in?”
“Pretty sure.”
Michaela groaned inwardly. It was too late now anyway. They were close enough to the warehouse that the single guard outside was looking at her with interest. A knowing smile pulled at the corners of his flat mouth. Apparently, he knew the type of girls who dressed like she did.
Clark hopped onto the loading dock with ease. “Hey,” he said to the guard, like they were old friends. Michaela used the crumbling concrete steps so she didn’t flash anybody or rip her shorts.
The guard crossed his thick arms over his chest and regarded Clark like he was yesterday’s trash. After a tense moment, the guard looked away, his eyes warming as they landed on Michaela. “Hello, pretty thing. You come to party?”
Michaela cocked her hip and arched her back. She looked up at the guard from under her eyelashes. “Yes, sir,” she said, using what she hoped was a sexy purr. Clark snorted.
“Maybe you should stay out here and party with me tonight,” the guard suggested. He stepped closer to Michaela and ran the tip of his finger down her bare arm.
“What if I find a nice girl for my friend here, and then I’ll come back out and keep you company?” Michaela felt Clark roll his eyes next to her. Luckily, the guard didn’t see.
“I’ll be waiting.” The guard cleared his throat and lowered his hand from Michaela’s arm. “Do you two understand the rules?”
“We’ve heard bits of gossip,” Clark said.
“The rules will be explained if you’re chosen,” the guard said.
“How will we know if we’re chosen?” Michaela asked, forgetting her sexy tone. She scanned the building, feeling her chest contract with every thump of the music that rattled the loading bay’s large doors on their hinges. The party was in full swing, and Michaela’s stomach twisted with excitement.
The guard laughed at Michaela’s question. It was a humorless, cruel laugh. “Oh, you’ll know.”
12
His answer sent chills down Michaela’s spine. The way the guard leered at her made it apparent that he knew all about the choosing process. She nodded, looking away, hoping she still looked flirtatious.
“Can we go in now?” Clark asked, sounding a bit too impatient. The guard narrowed his eyes.
“I haven’t seen you around before. And I know I would recognize her. Who told you about this place?”
Clark shrugged a shoulder. “We’ve heard things from friends of friends.”
“You’ve heard enough to know what happens.” The guard looked suspicious now. “Why come if you knew?”
Michaela spoke before Clark could. “Why do the others come here? To survive. We want a chance, too.”
She lifted her chin, allowing her eyes to fill with moisture and her lower lip to tremble. The act softened the guard, his eyes sweeping over her once again like he regretted the loss. “Fine. Go in, but I hope you’ll come back out and see me.”
He opened a side door for them. Before he changed his mind, Michaela and Clark ducked inside and into a wall of darkness. Michaela felt the guard’s eyes on her the entire time.
A set of stairs descended into a vibration of music and flashing lights. The door clanged shut behind her. Clark took a deep breath. “Let’s do this.”
“Stay close,” Michaela whispered.
Her heels rang off the metal stairs as they went down. With each limping step, Michaela heard more of the thrumming, thumping music. There were no discernible lyrics, just a beat that reverberated in her body like an echo of her heartbeat. Black lights illuminated symbols on the wall by the stairs. The letter W was written in all different ways until, at the bottom of the stairs, the wall was covered in endless looping letters.
In front of them was the club, and Michaela stood completely stunned as she struggled to take it all in. Hundreds of sweating, dancing human bodies twisted and gyrated in front of her. Their limbs melded together into an endless, infinite web. She had to blink a few times to figure out where one body ended and another began.
Neon light beams bounced all over the place, distracting Michaela and unsettling her unadjusted vision. She blinked a few times and waved at the cloud of dust hovering in the air. She coughed to clear her throat, but Clark inhaled deeply, almost happily, as if he’d finally come to a place he belonged.
The people in front of them glowed, the paint fiery and alive on their bodies. Just as Michaela wondered how they painted their skin, she felt a sting on her shoulder. Surprised, she looked down, expecting to see a trail of blood. Instead, pink paint cascaded down her arm. More stings spread across her body. She looked around for a second before she discovered the cause.
More humans strapped to a harness swung from the ceiling two stories above Michaela’s head. They wore wings like an angel, but nothing else to cover their naked bodies. In their hands were plastic guns loaded with paint. Michaela laughed as Clark smeared a hand print across her face.
“You’re glowing!” he shouted into her ear.
Clark looked like a neon sign blaring into the night sky. He was doused in paint like she was, but it was a lucky break. There would be no way the Watchers could smell her now; she reeked of chemicals.
They threaded their way through the dancing humans who bumped into Michaela on accident or on purpose. Some danced against her, which pushed her into other people. Hands explored her body as she went, fondling and caressing her. She would have felt violated, but everyone was smiling and laughing like they were having the time of their lives.
The music was like a familiar friend now. Her hips swayed of their own accord. She pressed back into people as she passed, answering their calls for her body. Sweat gathered on the back of her neck, pooling into a drop that ran down her spine.
The DJ booth was positioned on a platform at the far end of the warehouse’s basement, where the herd of people was the thickest. The DJ himself wore a horse’s head, which bobbed up and down to the beat of the music and made Michaela laugh. They were in the heart of the rave, as close to the front as they could get. Clark stopped and pulled Michaela against him. She matched her body to his movements, wrapping her arms around his neck and losing herself to the siren call of the music. She liked this wild, crazy beat better than Clark’s classic rock. She let her head fall back as she danced, her arms letting go of Clark and twisting above her head.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Simiel and Ophaniel creeping around the edges of the dancing hive of bodies. They saw her, their eyes lingering for only a moment before they moved on.
Someone pressed himself against Michaela’s back, his hands twining around her stomach. She felt his lips on her neck, his breath in her ear. He said something, but Michaela couldn’t hear. Clark cocked an eyebrow at her and moved away slightly to dance with a petite girl in a fox costume.
Michaela twisted in the man’s arms so that they were face to face. He was tall, lanky, and definitely human. The pupils of his eyes were huge, dilated far beyond normal, and Michaela smelled the musky hint of drugs seeping from his mouth. His hands roamed over her body and groped her ass.
There was no room to get away; the bodies in the middle of the floor were pressed too close together. For a moment, panic flooded through Michaela’s veins. She could knock this guy out with one hit, but she didn’t want to bring attention to herself. She had no clue how the human girls dealt with this sort of invasion.
In her distraction, she didn’t realize the man in front of her was about to kiss her until the second before his lips smashed into hers. Immediately, his tongue pressed into her mouth, forcing her lips to part. His tangy saliva pooled at the back of her throat and gagged her. His hand slid up her side to fist around her breast.
In that appalling moment, Michaela realized two things: the first was that Gabriel, who was very new to the whole sex thing, was very, very good at the whole sex thing. And the second was…Gabriel.
He stood in all his tall, dark glory behind the man sucking on Michaela’s tongue. Lifting his hand as if he was going to tap on the man’s shoulder and ask to cut in, Gabriel pressed a finger into the tender juncture of the man’s neck, making him instantly sag to the floor. Gabriel pressed harder into the pressure point, until the guy was nearly on the floor and completely disengaged from Michaela.
It was quiet and efficient. Gabriel righted the man and set him aside before he made too much of a scene. In the mass of pulsing bodies and underneath the flashing storm of rainbow lights, it was unnoticeable. The man moved away, slightly stunned and confused, but without a backward glance.
Michaela shrugged sheepishly at Gabriel’s blank stare. Because she was looking at his mouth, she was able to read his lips as he spoke. “Don’t kiss anyone else.”
With that, he melted back into the crowd. In a second, Michaela lost sight of him. Then Clark was at her side, dancing and pulling her into him. He rolled his eyes at her, shaking his head.
Clark spun her around, tangling his legs through hers until they were hip to hip. Michaela didn’t know if she had ever felt this much of Clark before. To be so slender and exercise-adverse, his entire body was corded in tight, wiry muscles.
The feel of Clark’s body guiding hers and the overwhelming sensation of the music had Michaela completely dazed. Only when Clark snapped his fingers in front of her face did she pull herself back into reality. Clark gave her look that said, Snap out of it. To further emphasize his point, he pinched the tender underside of her arm.
When she glared, ready to pinch him back, he pointed ever so subtly above their heads. Michaela saw the icy chill in Clark’s eyes and knew. As nonchalantly as she could, she looked up.
There was no ceiling above them besides exposed support beams. The second floor of the warehouse was just open air, but higher up, on the third floor, a walkway ran the interior circumference of the building. Separating the walkway from the open air were cage-like bars. And there, shielded behind the bars, were the Watchers. She counted fifty before she stopped, realizing their entire rank was here. They stalked the walkway like panthers, slipping in and out of the shadows. An errant beam of light illuminated their bodies, making Michaela shiver with repulsion. They looked just as horrendous as she remembered, with their featherless, webbed wings and hollow eyes. Bones protruded beneath their papery skin. Only because she was looking did she notice the humans were being watched. Watched and chosen.
“Are you ready?” Clark shouted, enunciating his words so Michaela could read his lips. She nodded in reply.
Clark pointed over her shoulder. She twisted around to see what he meant. It wasn’t hard to miss. About fifteen feet from where she danced was a vaulted platform above the dancers’ heads. Up there, dancing like their lives depended on it, were a gaggle of women dressed much like herself. They knew what they were doing, rocking their hips and grinding to the beat of the music. As she watched, a muscular man dressed in black tapped on the boot of one blonde bombshell with moves to kill. The guard motioned her off the platform. For a moment, the blonde looked terrified, but then her mask slid in place and she smiled, her expression oozing sex. She tossed her hair over her shoulder as she made her way down the narrow ladder.
“What’s that?” Michaela mouthed looking back at Clark. She knew what had just happened. The blonde girl had surely been chosen. She just didn’t know why Clark was pointing at it. They should follow the blonde, Michaela thought. But the guard had already disappeared.
Clark must not have understood her question, because he pointed at her and shouted, “Bait.”
13
This is so stupid, Michaela thought as her hands closed over the first rung on the ladder. She looked up, her vision filling with the undersides of the scantily clad women dancing on the platform. She couldn’t dance. She couldn’t move like them. She wasn’t sexy.
She was an angel, which meant she was the incarnation of unsexy.
She couldn’t do this.
But a girl was already poking Michaela’s back, indicating she either move up the ladder or move out of the way. Michaela took a deep breath. Clark hadn’t shoved her all the way over here for nothing. She had to at least try.
Unless, of course, her horrible, unsexy dancing drew the attention of the Watchers in a negative way and they recognized her before Michaela and the others could figure out a plan to kill them. The girl behind Michaela jabbed her acrylic nail into Michaela’s kidney.
Before she climbed up, Michaela looked over her shoulder. Her glare was one of her best: withering and condemning. The girl held up her hands in surrender and backed away. With a satisfied smirk, Michaela began her ascent.
She reached the top all too quickly. Emerging onto the platform, she looked around. Nearly ten other girls occupied the small space. Michaela was jostled and ground against, her leg used like a pole. She scanned the crowd below her frantically, looking for any idea of how to move. It’d been easy when she was on the floor, her dance moves obscured by everyone else. People were noticing her frozen form and starting to laugh. She was
n’t moving, and that was drawing attention. Her stomach flipped up her throat, putting her in a chokehold of trembling nerves.
Just then, Gabriel stepped into her line of vision. He was on the other side of the club, hidden beneath the shadow of a beam. She saw his clenched jaw and crossed arms, recognized the bronze hint of his hair. Girls passed by him, brushing their assets against his chest or crotch, but he paid no attention as he watched her. Her throat tightened when he nodded at her, his lips twisting into a wicked grin.
For the moment, her nerves subsided and she smiled tauntingly, tilting her head down and narrowing her eyes at him. She listened to the music, letting it seep into her skin and move her bones. Magically, her hips started to rock again, breaking out of their paralysis.
Her shoulders twisted with the music. Michaela found the steady, almost slow beat to the song and followed it, choosing to not dance fast and quick like the other girls around her. Already, Gabriel’s grin was gone. His face was as tight as his body. With that encouragement, Michaela skimmed her hands up her torso, teasing her fingers across her exposed skin. She twined them up her neck. She wanted to run them through her hair like Gabriel often did, but she couldn’t risk messing up her wig. Her black hair was her hallmark and a sure way for the Watchers to recognize her.
Instead, she ran her hands back down her chest, lingering at her breasts, feeling and pressing against the soft mounds beneath the intricate cording that barely concealed her nipples. Gabriel had straightened off the beam now, his dark eyes flooding with desire.
Michaela had never taunted him before using only her body to turn him on, but she liked the affect she was having on him. She saw how much he wanted her in the tightening of his jeans. She gripped her nipple and tugged, making Gabriel’s body jerk.
She exploited the distance between them, showing him where his hands could be if not for the space separating them. She lost herself to the motions, losing track of time as she moved for Gabriel. She had never felt sexy before; she didn't even think it was possible. But just then, watching Gabriel practically ooze his desire for her, she felt incredibly sexy...and powerful.