Angel Unleashed

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  Listening to the sounds of retreating footsteps, Avery again studied the street, feeling sick and exhilarated at the same time. Angels detested closed spaces and she was going to have to go deep into the earth to get what she wanted...a move that would take her steps closer to the burning pit-fires of hell.

  Rhys hadn’t followed, wasn’t here beside her. She was sorry she’d had to ditch him. Yet, because the Blood Knights never went back on their promises or lost their intended prey, Avery figured she had fewer than five minutes, if she was lucky, to find a way into those caverns, as nasty as they sounded. She couldn’t afford the distractions Rhys provided if she hoped to maintain her focus.

  Rhys...

  If I don’t come out, please find what’s left and send me home.

  That thought wasn’t voiced aloud. Some things were, by their very nature, too personal, even for lovers whose past created a bond between them that was holding fast.

  “It’s best to cut our ties now, before...”

  Her statement dangled, unfinished. She reverted to thoughts, wondering how tuned in Rhys actually was, and if he would understand her current dilemma.

  “Without my wings, I am not very much stronger than you are. I must be whole again so I can succeed in accomplishing the task assigned to me, however long that takes. You, of all beings, know the power of a promise.”

  She caught and held a breath that no longer contained Rhys’s musky, masculine scent, and her heart sank. Had he let her go, believing that’s what she wanted?

  “I can’t involve you further or take a chance on hurting you, when lingering longer in this world than necessary is not to be my fate.”

  She needed more air and couldn’t seem to find it.

  “My goal is to take from you and your brethren the very item you have protected all this time. The item you were created to protect and that aided in your transformation.”

  She hadn’t pressed the link directly into his mind. It was time to get on with this next part of her mission.

  “Now or never,” she muttered.

  There was no wind on the street to cool her feverish face as she searched for an internet café. Finding a way into those underground tunnels was the new puzzle to solve. She was opposed to computers, as well as most modern technology, but nonetheless had to have computer access to find the entrance to the tunnels. There were twenty miles of them, the guy on the street had said.

  Barring internet access, she’d have to start digging.

  Squeezing her eyes shut helped to internalize the struggle she had hoped to avoid. A Blood Knight lay at the core of the struggle she was experiencing, and he had once again taken something from her.

  Her heart.

  * * *

  In an eerie reboot of the déjà-vu moment when he had first seen Avery in the alley, Rhys silently observed her on the street below his perch.

  I still have a few tricks of my own, he mused. And I can read your intentions loud and clear, angel.

  Most of the people who had lived in London for some time knew about the tunnels. As soon as Avery had looked at the ground, he realized what kind of information she had gleaned from the guy in the trench coat.

  He had eavesdropped on their conversation, jealous of the man’s closeness to her. His jaw was tight now with the strain of holding himself back from jumping down there.

  The messages he was sending to her were working. Mind bending was a gift he had long ago perfected. In utilizing this gift, Avery didn’t see him or sense him. He could observe her without being noticed, angry she would try to outdistance what they felt for each other.

  “You have come for the Grail, and that is the province of my brothers.”

  While he understood the Grail would be the safest among her kind, removed from the Earth and its many temptations, Avery had been put through hell in order to find it, and that hell was ongoing. Something was in her way, successfully blocking her mission. Which side was it?

  “Who took your wings?” he whispered, thinking hard. “Who would do such a thing?”

  Reason suggested a few scenarios, and none of them were good.

  Had someone known Avery was after the Grail, and taken her wings to make sure she didn’t succeed?

  How could anyone purposefully harm such a beautiful creature who was also part of the heavenly host? A violent act like that would have to be executed by an evil entity powerful enough to trap an immortal warrior maiden who was here on a golden mission.

  True, there was plenty of evil in the world. But only a handful of possibilities capable of something like that came to his mind. Whoever had done this to her had taken her wings and the Grail, so the Grail had to be the central focus. And after that, his Makers had found the holy relic and charged their Knights to protect it.

  Hadn’t they?

  Jerked bolt upright by the surprise of the sudden flow of insight and a needling sensation that swept across his sigils, Rhys stood.

  Avery had made him wonder how his Makers had gotten hold of the Grail. Either in words or in thought, she had posed that question. Or had he imagined it?

  Questions arose, one after the other, in rapid succession.

  How the hell had those who dwelled at Castle Broceliande kept that relic if an angel was hot on its trail?

  Why wouldn’t they have handed over the Grail to Heaven’s emissary instead of creating seven Knights to hide it?

  She had told him she had found the Grail early on...the same relic his Makers had kept submerged in the fountain at the center of Broceliande’s magnificent midnight gardens.

  Rhys stared down at her.

  She had said the wings were cut from her back. How had that kind of atrocity fit in with her Grail Quest?

  The fact staring him in the face was that she could have taken the item she sought from that fountain while it rested at Broceliande so long ago, if in fact she had found it there...unless she had been detained and de-winged, held hostage, kept from her quest by the kind of creatures who knew both how to do that and what they had in their midst.

  Shock came swiftly to him with that realization, striking hard, tilting his stance. Avery had mentioned his Makers because she had met them. She hadn’t taken the Grail away from them because his Makers hadn’t wanted Avery to have it.

  Christ, she had laid the foundation for his understanding of the problem, and he hadn’t made the connection. How could he? Castle Broceliande had been the growing grounds for all of this—him, her and the Knights’ original Grail Quest.

  His goddamn Makers had done this.

  They had to be the monsters responsible for grounding Avery.

  With bile in his throat and a chill brought on by pieces of the puzzle snapping into place, Rhys began his descent to the street below.

  Chapter 18

  Not used to being caught unaware, Avery stumbled back when Rhys landed beside her. Ready to protest his latest stealth trick, she hesitated when he held up a hand.

  “Why didn’t you just tell me?” he demanded.

  Chills passed over her.

  “You were there?” he asked before she could rally. “We aren’t rumors to you. You knew about the Blood Knights because you also had been to the castle?”

  She nodded, catching on to the reason for the stern look on Rhys’s face. He had figured out some pieces of this strange story and was processing that information.

  “I was there,” she said.

  Just as strong as Rhys, Avery didn’t have to face him like this. She didn’t have to allow him to put his hands on her or push her backward, away from any stray onlookers that might have been lurking. But she did allow it. What she couldn’t have escaped from was the hurt in Rhys’s eyes. The showdown between them had arrived with very bad timing.

  “Did you give the Grail to the
Makers or did they take it from you, Avery?”

  The crux of this whole ordeal was coming to light here on the street above the tunnels she had to get to. Rhys was waiting for the speech she dreaded making.

  “The Grail was my mission. Once it was in my possession, I would not have offered it to anyone,” she said.

  “So they took it from you.” It wasn’t a question. “I wonder how they managed to do that when you were so strong, and if you were on the side of right.”

  The hand that agitatedly pushed his hair back also dragged down the side of his face. His eyes closed for a beat of time in which Avery’s heart continued to pound.

  “And all this time...” His remark took effort. “All this time, I thought our Makers were the good guys.”

  Avery failed to find the energy to address that statement. This is what she had waited centuries for, and also what she lately had feared after meeting Rhys in the flesh. He would now go deep inside the story to ferret out details of that time, pondering whether his existence as an immortal had been based on treachery and deceit.

  “Did they also take your wings?” His tone was dangerously hushed, barely controlled.

  She could not lie. Didn’t dare. Not now. She felt sick enough.

  “Look how you turned out,” she said, instead of replying to the question he had asked. “All of you. Seven good things came from what happened so long ago. That’s something, but isn’t enough to deter me from fulfilling my obligations.”

  His gaze was intense.

  “Maybe your brothers will be glad to be rid of the Grail,” Avery continued. “No one in the world, even if looking for it, will never be able to lay their hands on such an important relic. Its powers won’t be used again. The Blood Knights will be free of its curse.”

  Its curse to bestow immortality.

  “The Makers were to take their own lives after sending us into the world as Guardians of that holy relic,” Rhys said. “The seven of us were to be their replacements. The new Guardians of the Grail. Tell me if that turned out to be true, and if we were fighting on the correct side.”

  Avery hesitated a few seconds too long. In that time gap, Rhys read the reply she would have made, had she been willing to say it.

  His tension transferred to her. Avery choked more words out of a constricted throat.

  “You’ve never been back there, Rhys? It didn’t occur to you to check on the Makers’ pledges, visit that place or follow up?”

  Shaking his head didn’t lessen the palpable tension in the air. “Never. None of us returned.”

  “Because you didn’t care for your new role, or because you knew in your soul that things weren’t actually what they seemed?”

  “Because...” He started over. “One life ended there, and another, more unnatural, one began. I embraced my Quest wholeheartedly, seeing the need to do so. I still embrace it. But I didn’t want to see those tall, white, windowless towers of stone, or the strange night-blooming roses that I can smell to this day. I had no desire to go back there.”

  “You trusted them,” Avery said.

  “I suppose we all did. What other option did we have, with what was at stake?”

  Avery wondered if he’d want to find that castle after this conversation. If Rhys were to learn the truth about the world’s first vampires, the three unearthly, beautiful creatures of Castle Broceliande that called themselves Makers because they had made seven more creatures like themselves, the golden Grail Quest might seem like a much darker pledge.

  Rhys’s Makers had been powerful, deadly beings whose fault had been their ignorance of what might happen if their captive angel got loose and brought that castle down around them. But she had not killed the Makers. They had disappeared, along with her wings.

  “Something else kept me from returning,” Rhys said, eyes glazing as he thought back. “Hints of memory I can’t quite recall surround that time. Sounds I’ve been unable to process.”

  As he eased her to the wall behind her with his hands on her shoulders, Avery’s breath whooshed with a sound of immense sadness over the timing of this confrontation and the way Rhys was connecting the past to the news she had shared. His ideas, the promises he had made and his memories of that time were clashing. His breathing was harsh.

  Avery let him go over things while her internal clock ticked away passing seconds as if there weren’t many seconds left. Her back stung. The fake wings were motionless now.

  She stifled a groan.

  When Rhys’s focus returned, he brought his face close to hers. He was searching her features, hoping to spark that elusive memory. He was looking for the truth.

  “Like you, I cannot lie,” she whispered to him. “You understand that.”

  He looked away, then back. Artfully chiseled features whitened as his eyes again found hers. “Is it you I hear in my dreams, Avery? Do you haunt me?”

  She sensed he had more to say.

  “Is it your cry that trespasses on my memory from time to time? Was yours the sound that has evaded explanations for what I might or might not have heard in that castle garden?”

  Avery blinked slowly. No escape. No way out. For the second time in her long life span, she found herself trapped by one of Castle Broceliande’s immortals. The difference here was that, like his six blood brothers, Rhys, though as dangerous as any powerful being could be, had a heart of gold.

  His Makers had unknowingly done themselves a disservice by capturing her. The difference between Rhys and his Makers was that Rhys and the other six Blood Knights also had her blood in their veins.

  One small infusion of light had made all the difference between the actions and intentions of Rhys’s Makers and the Knights they had sent into the world. His Makers had not counted on that. What they had planned for was full control of the Grail’s magic through a six-pack of immortal fighting machines. Rhys, aka Perceval, Lancelot, Galahad and the other Blood Knights.

  The thought of what she had to do next was what haunted her. Encourage Rhys to let all of this go? Could she have let it go, in his place?

  No.

  “Did they do this, Avery?” Warm hands tugged her closer to him, then slid up her back heading for the scarred spot that ached not only for what had been removed, but also for the immortal breathing life into what remained.

  Soft lips moved against hers when Rhys spoke again. “This dreadful, unthinkable thing was their doing?”

  Do not tell him everything, her mind pleaded.

  Save something for last.

  That was sound advice, if she were to manage to take it. In Rhys de Troyes she had met her match, and she had from the start imagined a moment like this one. She had longed for contact with him with every fiber of her being.

  When his mouth landed on hers, moving over her lips with the slightest puff of air...

  When his palms worked their way up her spine slowly, agonizingly, from bone to bone, heading toward the two deep grooves he was in some way connected to...

  As he held her tightly to his taut chest, the world began to spin on the sidelines...and his question rang in her ears...

  “Is it you I hear in my dreams? Do you haunt me, Avery?”

  She breathed words into him, regretting it too late.

  “Yes. It was me.”

  * * *

  Rhys found Avery’s lips rigid at first. She was as shocked as he was by his response to the knowledge he had just uncovered.

  Shocking, yes. Disturbing.

  What she had told him so far went against everything he had held up as truth. And now...now, he had to fight that knowledge. He had to wrestle with the demons inside him that had been created and manipulated by what? Creatures that might have had something entirely different in mind by hiding the Grail from the rest of the world? Creatures whose ulterior motives now,
even so far in the future, had to be questioned?

  Avery’s pain rested on the foundation of that truth. He saw that now. The loss of her wings was tied to the time of his creation. And all he wanted to do was kiss away Avery’s past. Taste the truth. Grasp the rest of the story she seemed to be on intimate terms with.

  Her cry, in that blasted garden, was the sound he had imagined he’d heard. God, would he next ask her what had caused it or how his Makers had accomplished their treacherous act?

  Would he ask how she could be standing here today, after centuries had passed, with her mouth and her body tight against one of the souls who might have most benefited from her capture and possible incarceration?

  Hell, Avery! Maybe you were right when you said I might not want to know much of this.

  You told me I might not want to help you once I knew the truth of your past.

  But you were wrong.

  Christ, angel. You were wrong.

  Her lips parted, as if she had heard his thoughts. It was entirely possible she had. In the kiss lay the proof of the bond they had formed. The fact that they hungered for each other despite events that had taken place in a time relegated to distant memory momentarily took precedence over everything else.

  Hunger and desire ruled here. Nothing else mattered to Rhys except this one, seemingly unending kiss that had to end eventually.

  What Avery had told him would suffice for now, and only served to encourage him to help her. He hadn’t heard it all. Darkness rode in the unspoken details. Nevertheless, he had heard enough to share Avery’s deep ache for her losses and to accept some of the guilt for what had happened to her.

  Locked together in a shadowed corner of this London street, Avery’s mouth accepted his as if this were a battle to be fought. In this particular battle, no one would emerge the winner. By kissing her like this, Rhys’s blood oaths strengthened. He was a Grail Guardian, and an angel had come to relieve the Knights of duty. She wanted to take that relic home.