Angel Unleashed

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  His thoughts turned to another dilemma. Would a successful quest mean she’d fly away? Ascend to wherever she came from, leaving him here to fight on, alone?

  He wasn’t sure he could forget her. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. Not now. Not after...

  “Avery. I need to understand what happened to you. Only then can I take away some of your pain. Only in sharing can we solve this puzzle of our unexpected attraction. Why won’t you trust me?”

  An answer came to him on the wind, or in his mind, as if she had heard him.

  “Trust is not for this world we find ourselves in. It has played no part in my existence here.”

  Avery had answered, proving they remained connected. That was enough for the time being. It wasn’t everything on his wish list, but it would have to do.

  Veering to the east, Rhys picked up his pace. Avery was somewhere up ahead. Not too far away. The bond that had snapped into place between them allowed him to almost see her. Her scent, carried by the night air, drove him on.

  Tuning in to those things, Rhys allowed some of the power he kept suppressed to rise to the surface. As that power sparked, his nerves fired up with a white-hot surge. Beckoned forward, some of his outer layers began to peel back, shedding the semblance he had, out of necessity, taken as his own. He might need an extra kick of power when he found her.

  The sensation of freeing his real countenance, letting out what had so long been hidden, was exhilarating. Muscles rippled. The crack of his spine made his sigils whine.

  Bit by bit, Rhys unchained what lay at his core, unveiling the special creature that had cheated Death so long ago. One of the chosen few who had sipped from a golden chalice with his final mortal breath—a chalice that had captured the blood of a holy man on a cross.

  The mortal Rhys had been born again anew. Not an angel like Avery, but half man and half something else that had no name, other than one, to explain the phenomenon.

  Blood Knight.

  He was a holy warrior fighting on the side of right and defending those in need. And what could be more right than helping an angel in distress?

  “Don’t you see?” Rhys asked aloud. “You and the place you come from are the very things I have fought for all this time. I am on your side, Avery.”

  Breathing came easier now that his lungs had expanded. Old scars that had been carefully concealed began to reappear, crossing his torso as if made by the merciless lashes of an invisible whip. Sight cleared, bringing into focus the way the air ahead of him glittered with tiny obsidian particles that were Avery’s personal stamp on the night.

  “Have you left a trail for me to follow, despite your arguments to the contrary?” He sent the thought to her.

  “Without trust,” he said through the fangs that had dropped in honor of this chase, “we have nothing.”

  Swear to God, he thought he heard Avery’s soft, muffled cry of protest in response to that statement.

  Chapter 14

  On top of a trash receptacle seven alleys over from where she’d left Rhys, Avery crouched on her haunches. Even at this distance, she heard Rhys’s comments, plain as day. The dangerous thing she’d feared had happened. Sexual antics had sealed them closer together, threatening the rest of her ability to disappear. Behind the beating of her own heart, she heard his. The light in his veins beckoned to her with a pull that set her teeth on edge.

  Morning was coming on the heels of one of the longest nights she had endured. Streaks of crimson backed the clouds over her head and were welcome, along with the quiet that had settled over this part of London.

  The beasts were gone. The Shade she sought would be hiding, but she’d used that as an excuse to get away from Rhys. Just far enough to breathe.

  Rhys would find her any minute. He had offered her shelter, and she had run away. Rhys had offered his help with her quest, and she had run from him due to her tumultuous feelings for the gorgeous Blood Knight.

  God, yes. She had feelings for him. Her kindred soul.

  Stomach in knots, she waited for him to find her. The new tattoos only stung slightly from the abuse she had taken after receiving them when she moved her shoulders. Hurts on the inside clung as if they had talons.

  No longer good, like you, she wanted to tell Rhys. I have made others pay for what happened in my past. I had planned to make you and your blood brothers pay.

  And now. Well, now she was screwed. A centuries-old vendetta had been sacked simply by meeting Rhys face-to-face. Old vows of payback, always edging a precipice where this man was concerned, had been shattered after going groin to groin with him. An appropriate second tattoo would be to have the word sucker inked on her forehead so that everyone she encountered could see it.

  Not a very angelic thought. But Avery’s angelness had long ago begun to pale, along with the color of her skin.

  Her head snapped up.

  Rhys was closer, his imminent appearance as certain as the dawn. And here she sat, feeling much too needy, too earthly.

  She needed shelter and a safe place to rest. She prayed for rain or a decent shower to wash away the tentacles of Rhys’s rich, masculine scent. That scent damned her, coated her from her face to her ankles. The magnificent hardness of what hung between his thighs haunted her still.

  One night in his presence had changed everything. Rhys and his outlandish allure. On that floor, she had wished, not for her lost wings, but for time to stop. One of God’s angelic emissaries had succumbed to the pleasures granted to the mortal species populating the Earth. Sex and long, deep, lingering kisses had been the province of humans lucky enough to experience such things. Until tonight.

  She had been too long among the mortals, and her time was nearly up. This was her last chance, her final chance to become whole again. Rhys couldn’t do that for her, in the end.

  No place to go. No way to escape, Rhys.

  I’ve done the unthinkable, and it’s too late to correct the mistake.

  What other option do I have but to wait for you, without leaving London altogether? If I were to leave without my wings, like the color of my skin, I will eventually fade out of existence. There will be nothing left of me. I used to welcome that thought... And then there was you.

  Moist air stirred with the Blood Knight’s approach. Avery’s hands curled into fists. Speaking was tough.

  “Bravo. You found me,” she said.

  “The sun soon rises,” he observed, taking a wide stance and playing the chivalry card by failing to mention the body-numbing stumbling block she had hit him with just minutes before.

  “Angels don’t fry like vampires do,” she reminded him.

  “Still, you must be tired.”

  Avery nodded. Tired was an understatement.

  “You didn’t run far,” he noted.

  She let that comment go unaddressed.

  “And you led me right to you—purposefully, I think,” he added.

  Yes, she supposed she had done that again. Covering her tracks completely was out of the question after they had coupled in such a fierce, gutsy way.

  His next question also avoided mention of what had happened between them. “Do angels eat?”

  It took seconds for Avery to follow the mundane direction of this conversation.

  “On occasion,” she said, eyeing Rhys warily, waiting for a punchline.

  “Would this be one of those times if I knew where to take you for food?” he asked.

  The big bad Knight was being uncommonly tender in dealing with her when her list of wants didn’t include sustenance at the moment, but something far more wicked and much too telling about her state of mind to say out loud.

  You. More of you is all the sustenance I require.

  “Back to the cop-wolf’s lair?” she asked, shaking her head to dislodge the sheer madne
ss of skirting the real issues at stake here. She knew he wanted to ask her about what an angel was doing on Earth, and how she had gotten here. Unspoken thoughts trailed every lull in their stilted conversation.

  It was, though, too early to share secrets.

  Rhys nodded. “Crane keeps the place well stocked. Wolves are perpetually hungry. Fast metabolisms, and all that. St. John’s apartment is the safest place in this city for us to rest. Besides, you don’t actually intend to walk around London looking like that, do you?”

  “Like what?” Avery challenged before realizing she had forgotten to put on her clothes. Rhys’s gaze had let her off the hook about that by never once straying from her face.

  “I’ll wait,” he said, “if you’d like to accompany me and start over.”

  Damn straight she’d like to start over, and either shore up her skill at avoiding this Knight or restart the clock twenty minutes ago in that abandoned building.

  Her current wish was for a big bed in Rhys’s blood brother’s penthouse, where they could replay on a continual loop their incredible sexual exploration.

  Her core thrummed with that last thought. Taut muscles twitched. This Blood Knight had taken her to new heights of passion. He had shown her what sex could and should be like between two consenting beings who feasted on sensation. Back there, in Rhys’s arms, she had nearly lost touch with missions and vows.

  “Well,” he said. “You can come along or not. This time, I won’t press the point. What happens next is entirely up to you. If you truly don’t want my help, I will withdraw the offer I made and back off. I will leave you alone.”

  “You’ll leave me alone because you now trust me?” Avery queried.

  “Because if you want that, it’s the right thing to do.”

  That said, he turned and walked away, leaving her to stare at the sheer grace and beauty of the way he accomplished such a simple move. All that molded muscle was working in concert. There was fluidity in his long limbs and in the way his golden-brown hair brushed his collar.

  Rhys’s golden allure had never been stronger than it was right then. Avery’s breath caught. She closed her eyes. Something was definitely wrong with her for so badly wanting more light, passion, comfort. For wanting love.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s try again.”

  He paused, without turning around or acknowledging her remark, before walking on.

  Hopping from her perch, Avery slid her arms into her jacket, pulled on her pants and boots, ditched her torn shirt in the Dumpster and started after him. This was a new beginning. A fresh start to an old tale. Hatred of Rhys’s kind had grayed, replaced by lust, respect and a secret love that had, at long last, twisted her heart into submission.

  She loved him, and she wasn’t entirely sure what to do with that.

  Rhys didn’t wait for her to catch up, and Avery didn’t try to, fearing that if she got close to him now, the dirty sidewalk would be the place of their next sexual tryst. Willpower had dimmed, along with her list of promises, and the future was up for grabs.

  Quite possibly, and in the span of a few short hours, her soul, along with her direction, had been transformed.

  Quite possibly, she wasn’t going to go forward alone.

  “I liked it,” she heard Rhys mutter. “Each and every damn second.”

  Hearing that confession, Avery’s heart, so rarely buoyant, danced.

  * * *

  Rhys didn’t have to look at Avery to know she was sleeping. He instinctively knew this. The tension between them had eased. At last, he could breathe.

  She had rested for two days straight, as if dead to the world she’d found herself in. With her eyes closed, she seemed almost peaceful. Even then, however, her fists were curled. Was that due to old pains? Hurts so deep, only Avery could feel them?

  What would finding her wings do? Could they be reattached to her back? He had begun to ache for her and rolled his shoulders.

  Lying beside her wouldn’t have been right or welcome, he supposed. By closing her eyes, she was showing she trusted him. He didn’t plan on breaking that trust anytime soon, however much he wanted to be with her.

  So he studied her from his place by the windows, afraid that if he closed his eyes, he’d wake to find her gone. Rest was overrated anyway, and he’d had more than his share over the centuries.

  Now and then, when he drifted off to sleep, his thoughts spiraled back to the past and to the castle where he’d taken his last breath as a mortal man. Incredibly, after so many years had passed, that image often still troubled him. This new pale-faced addition to his routine also troubled him in a similar way, as though the two things were attempting to make a connection in the recesses of his mind.

  He could almost see Avery in his past, dim, hazy and in the distance. The sense of familiarity came back in waves.

  Connection with an angel was absurd, surely? Other than one of his Makers and a sorceress with far-reaching predictions, there had been no women at Castle Broceliande. Certainly there had been no heavenly female. In his long tenure on Earth, he had never encountered a being like Avery.

  She’d said she thought she had been meant to find him, and that together they could accomplish what she’d set out to do. Maybe she was right about that. He wanted to be a part of it.

  However, proper reasoning, Rhys found, wasn’t working when so many thoughts and memories plagued him. His attention on the sleeping angel intensified. He wondered if there might be another reason for her appearance, one that involved rescuing his soul from its long, endless span.

  He didn’t like being in the dark, or confused. It wasn’t like him to be so restless when there were so many years ahead of him to wade through.

  “Maybe you can hear me,” he said to the slender form curled up on the furniture.

  When she didn’t stir, he kept talking. “None of this explains my attraction to you. Cravings are not part of my pattern, and yet I can hardly look away. I find you so very difficult to resist.”

  In sleep, the warrior side of this angel was no longer evident. She looked vulnerable and had curled in on herself, as if the pain she carried had become too much to bear. That pain was here in the room and tangible. Like a twang of overextended nerves, his own body shared the fire running through Avery’s lithe body. And it was bad. It was terrible, and it was her secret.

  Drawn to her automatically and for no real reason other than their unprecedented mutual physical attraction, he glided a hand over her, inches above her body, careful not to touch her, searching Avery’s aura for an explanation.

  She did stir then. Her big eyes opened. “Need peace,” she whispered. “Give me that.”

  Rhys nodded.

  Backing away slowly, he returned to the bank of windows that were tinted so the rising sun only lightened the room a little. Although he could easily tolerate daylight, just as Avery said she could, sunlight had become merely a luxury. A remembrance and a dream.

  But she...this angel...was a reminder of how far things had fallen from the norm. She shouldn’t have been here in the land of mortals. Hell, neither should he.

  “Perhaps that’s at the root of our bond?” he wondered aloud. “Two misplaced immortal souls trespassing in the world of men.”

  That was as close as he could get without delving deeper into Avery’s situation. In order to learn more about what was driving her, he had to earn more of her trust.

  Hungering for her, longing for their limbs to tangle and their bodies to join, Rhys quieted his anxious desire for Avery with a smile and a brush of his fingers through his hair. The smile dissolved when she made a sound in her sleep. Just a faint cry that matched a sound Rhys was sure he had heard before.

  Equally strong and pitifully plaintive, her muffled cry took him again to Avery’s side. Her eyes were shut tight. Her fingers clutche
d at the pillow she rested her head on. Shoulders, so recently tattooed and covered with her worn black leather jacket, quaked slightly. For her, also, dreams offered no respite from reality.

  She looked small on that couch, and helpless, when she was neither of those things. Rhys kept himself from enfolding her in his arms. Avery didn’t want that and he was a fool for wanting it so badly.

  Long white lashes fluttered. Milky-white strands of straight, silky hair draped over the dark cushions as if the contents of a glass had spilled. The reed-thin body Rhys was observing shuddered once. All of that served to widen the cracks in his formerly unreachable, unbreakable heart.

  How long did he stand there, observing her?

  In this apartment, there was no real way to tell how far the sun had risen over the world outside. That world lay beyond the tinted, tempered glass, and beyond Rhys’s notice. Fatigue hadn’t overcome him. As usual, he felt strong, and stronger yet in his determination to help the creature on that couch.

  Morning came and went. Afternoon shadows were there and gone. When the darkness of another new night returned, Avery finally opened her eyes.

  Those blue eyes met his, blinked once, opened wider. She said, “I suppose this is what you do. Stand guard.” Breathy, sleepy voice. No hint of the cry he’d heard her utter.

  “I choose my...” he began.

  “Prey?” she finished for him without sitting up.

  “As far as prey goes, would you say you qualify?” he asked.

  “Not in the least.”

  “Then who in their right mind would assume you needed a Guardian, unless you asked for it?”

  “And now that I have asked?”

  “I’m all yours.”

  What he’d said had disturbed Avery in some way. A crease appeared on her brow. Tiny networks of fine lines spread from the outer corners of her eyes. Sleep hadn’t completely replenished Avery’s energy. She hadn’t rested enough, and wouldn’t want him to comment about it.

  Her gaze shifted to the windows.

  “Where do we start on this search of yours? Without enlisting the guidance of a Shade,” Rhys asked.