A_Taste_of_Decadence_ARE

by Blake_Harte_Quinn_Ryan_Rylon

  A few raindrops fell from the sky before turning to a slight mist. The other angels who were at a lower altitude flew to the safety of their homes, the rain beginning to weigh heavy on their wings. Only the strongest could fly in anything more than mist, another reason they didn’t live on clouds, as most humans seemed to believe. One flight through a dense cloud could be dangerous; the moisture seeped into their feathers and threatened to drag the angel down. Without sufficient muscular back strength, the angel would plummet.

  Most didn’t. Despite the vast strength they possessed, angels were weak in some respects.

  “Are you going to stand there in the rain and watch others while everything falls around you, or are you going to fix this?” Ambrose’s deep voice cut through his thoughts, and Shade turned toward him.

  Tall with white blond hair pulled back from his pale face in a braid, with white, almost crystal wings, Ambrose was the light to Shade’s dark. Yet, the colors masked the personality, for where Shade saw the humor and light in some things, his best friend was the dark, the edge to the blade. Shade, too, held his own fury; he just didn’t show it as often.

  Dangerous and agile, his mentor had taught him everything he knew. Shade lowered his head in shame. He’d failed.

  “You didn’t fail, Shade,” Ambrose whispered.

  “I didn’t say that aloud.” Ambrose was always doing that. He was practically a mind reader

  “You didn’t have to. We all leave trails of angel dust. You are no different from others except that you leave greater quantities. It’s not something to be shameful of.”

  “I beg to differ.”

  “It’s only different this time because it got into the hands of a human. I’m worried how it got there, which is why I was in the room when you came in.”

  Intrigued, Shade lifted his head. “What are you saying?”

  Ambrose shrugged. “I don’t know yet. Something just seems off to me, but I will work on finding out.”

  “Okay, what else do you know?”

  “Only that the dust may be in the hands of a woman.”

  “A woman?” Interesting.

  * * * *

  The motorcycle vibrated beneath Shade as he pulled off the side of the road and parked. The rain pelted him, the cold seeping into his bones, but he shrugged it off. He was in northern Washington, and this seemed to be the norm in terms of weather.

  He lifted his leg and got off the bike, ignoring the stares of the women around him. They watched him stroll, his powerful legs leading to long strides. He’d tucked his wings into the slits in his back to hide the fact he was an angel, but he couldn’t hide his face or the fact that women seemed to fawn over it.

  It had been a long time since he had a woman, not since that jaguar shifter a century or two before on a night of deep depression and loneliness. But the heat, claws, and desperation had served to fill only a physical need that left him even lonelier than before. From that moment on, he left his carnal needs up to his hand. Before the jaguar, it had been even longer, but he didn’t want to think about her. The one he’d lost. She was long since gone.

  Shade walked into a nearby café, the smells of baked goods and coffee filling his nose. He ordered a small coffee then went back to sit at a table near the window so he could watch those who passed by. A male pixie, in human form, walked in front of the window and nodded toward him. There were so many supernatural beings hidden from view in the world that Shade couldn’t even count them.

  All humans were diluted forms of supernaturals. For millennia, the supernaturals had bred with one another and mixed the species until, finally, their powers had dwindled in most, and they stopped believing in things that came out of fairy tales. Those with so little non-human blood running their veins that they seemed ordinary were now called humans, although each had at least something beyond human lying dormant in their DNA.

  Council did not identify the name of the human who collected the dust, but Ambrose told Shade it was about to be in the hands of a woman who lived and worked nearby. Her name was Lily.

  Who was this Lily? Shade wanted to get a look at her. She had the answers. She possessed the reason behind his shame: his blue dust.

  A woman with expressive emerald-green eyes passed by the window; a slight smile graced her face, and she had those side-swoopy bangs women loved so much. She was of average height and held delicious curves. He looked over every inch of her—a small waist, large, perfect breasts to fit his palms, slightly wide hips that would serve well when he gripped them, and sexy legs beneath the hem of her brown coat…

  Lily.

  That had to be her. He didn’t know how he knew, but he was sure of it.

  His groin tightened.

  She was human. Not a lick of anything else came from her. Yet, why did he want her so from just a look? He’d never looked at a human this way before. Why now? Was it because she might be the one who held his dust?

  Lily stopped under the awning right in front of the window, careful of where she stepped—odd—and brushed the hair out of her eyes, before smiling at a passerby. She was radiant. Absolutely gorgeous. Shade held back a groan and shifted uncomfortably in his seat when she bit into her lip. She smiled again then walked to what must have been her car, got in, and left before Shade even thought to stand.

  Some warrior he was, completely frozen in shock by his reaction to her. He was, however, unrepentant. He didn’t want to follow her today anyway. A town small as this would know of Lily and aide him in his research. If the supernaturals were revealed, chaos would rain. Humans could feel threatened, start wars, do untold atrocities when they met with what they didn’t know and therefore feared. If the supernaturals felt threatened…Shade didn’t want to think about that. He had to know more before he did anything.

  So many questions flashed through his mind. Who was she? Why did she have his dust? What would she do if she discovered his secret?

  Most importantly, he wondered if she was single and how she would look underneath him, blushing in ecstasy.

  Shade shook his head, dispelling those annoying thoughts. He’d find out what he needed to about Lily, get his dust, and save the entirety of the supernatural world. Maybe along the way he’d learn a little more about a pretty brunette whose very presence threatened to make his wings stretch to the sky.

  Yep. Easy for a warrior angel such as himself.

  Chapter 2

  Lily Banner hated her job. Hated it. There was nothing worse than being on the bottom of the totem pole and knowing there was nowhere to go but down. Was that even possible?

  She blew her bangs from her face in frustration. It was late in the day, way past her usual time off. She desperately wanted to go home, but work was never ending. Every day seemed to drag a little bit more of her soul out of her body. God, she hated her job, and it wasn’t as if the work she did meant anything. She had a chemistry degree, but she didn’t do anything with it. Not being at the top of the class, she really couldn’t have gone on to graduate school and made anything of herself. Frankly, she had no interest in pursuing higher education. School had been a chore, and it made her feel like she was nothing. So, now she was just a lab tech at a soils testing lab for a company she hated. For a boss she hated.

  Oh, yeah. For a man. Lily rolled her eyes and held back a snort. Why on earth had she changed her life for a man, particularly for a man like Bryce? Wasn’t she supposed to be a strong new age woman? Apparently, not so much.

  Bryce, her ex-fiancé, was a cheating asshat. He now lived with Miss Fake Boobs and their three bratty kids.

  Lily sighed. Whatever. She was over the whole thing. She really was.

  She straightened the stack of folders on her desk for the third time. They just couldn’t get straight enough. Though the lab was clean, it still didn’t feel clean enough for her. Still, she organized everything on her desk at precise angles, and there wasn’t a lick of dust on any surface around her. That was workable.

  Her entire system had been
blown several days before. It still irked her.

  “Lily, I have something for you.” Her boss, Glenn, had strode to her desk, his permanent smirk on his face. At the age of forty-three, his body looked a decade older with thinning hair and an increasing waist. He always smelled of sweat and greasy burritos.

  He wanted her and wasn’t afraid to make it known.

  She’d held back a shudder as she always had at the errant thought of those greasy hands groping her.

  Not in this lifetime. Or the next.

  “Do a run on this.” He’d thrown a sealed, clear pack containing a vile on her desk.

  She’d winced as it hit the wood hardtop, leaving a line she’d have to clean later. The plastic knocked her stack of papers askew, and she quickly picked up the package and ordered her desk again. God, how she hated that man. About as much as she hated messes.

  “Sure, I can do that. What type do you want on it?” She’d picked it up and peered through the plastic. The vials contained some kind of blue dust, but she couldn’t really determine anymore than that just from a site analysis. “Do you want a liquid or solid?”

  “Don’t alter it. No liquid, just a solid.”

  Lily had nodded. That made sense. If they didn’t know what it was, there was no use trying to dissolve the sample in a solvent and cause a reaction, because, if she tried to do that, it might destroy it or cause an explosion. “I’ll do a proton and maybe a carbon on it then. The 400 will be open soon once I spin down the current sample, and I can to the proton first.” The proton NMR was the easiest one to do and would help identify what was in it.

  Glenn had waved away her words. “Fine, fine. Whatever. Just get it done. ASAP.” He turned on his heel and walked away without another word.

  The nerve of the guy. Didn’t he know it wasn’t a simple plug and chug system? That she had to go through tons of work before she could even set up the probe? Then when she got the results, she had to go through the analysis to see if the peaks could tell her something about the composition of the sample and what exactly was in it. Lily shook her head. Of course he didn’t know. When was the last time he’d done anything concerning chemistry?

  Regular work, however, had taken precedence, and now, several days later, Lily was finally getting around to analyzing the substance. That is, if she had time before she had to leave.

  She grabbed the package and walked to the lab. She opened it and took out the vial then went about cataloguing it into the system. Now that she could get a closer look, she held it to her eyes. Were those flecks of silver and black in the blue? What the heck was this stuff? It didn’t look like chalk and there wasn’t much out there in terms of silicates and ceramics that were naturally blue. Maybe it was a synthetic. That would make her job that much harder since it then would be a man-made substance and really difficult to figure out.

  She shrugged. No use in worrying too much about it now. She spun down the sample currently in the NMR, saved the data to the backup hard drive, and shut down the system. With a quick look at the clock, she cursed because she was running late. Well, late for her. She still had time, but she always liked to be early. She walked back to her desk and locked the new sample in her desk. Any work would have to wait until tomorrow, or else she knew she’d be stuck in the lab until after midnight for sure. She’d just get it done tomorrow.

  Lily blew the hair from her eyes and bit her lip. She hated putting things off for the next day again, but there wasn’t really a choice. Glenn wanted things done immediately. He didn’t understand that each run took hours. She wanted to leave now, but she still had a couple more things to do. With a sigh, she sat back down at her desk and re-opened a program file she’d been working on and began an analysis of a previous sample. It seemed never ending.

  At twenty-seven, she’d never thought she’d be where she was. She always thought she’d be married with children at this point in her life, but that wasn’t a possibility considering she couldn’t remember the last time she had a date. She wasn’t ugly; she knew that, but, apparently, she wasn’t suited to anyone’s taste. Her medium-length, chestnut brown-hair had natural highlights, and she’d just trimmed the swoopy bangs she loved so much. Her pale skin didn’t have many freckles since she was such a homebody. As a kid, she’d been afraid of sunburns. She wasn’t skinny, but she wasn’t overweight either. Just a nice average woman with curves.

  That was what she was. Average. Average looks, average intelligence and an average life. She wanted something more. Something, anything, to fight back the loneliness. Sure, she had a family, if you could call it that. There was a dad she never talked to and who was on a second honeymoon with his fourth wife. He said he was trying to rekindle the magic, but everyone involved knew it was only a matter of time before that faded away and he found Mrs. Number Five. She had a mom who was more passive-aggressive than the mom from the television sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond. She liked to belittle Lily and her choices every time she had a chance. But, other than that, Lily was alone.

  No, that wasn’t true. She had her non-blood family: her six girlfriends. They were her family of choice. They were seven women of different ages and professions who came together at least once a week to celebrate their lives, even if sometimes there didn’t seem to be much to celebrate. They’d all met at their favorite bar, Dante’s Circle, over the years and ended up being best friends. In fact, she was meeting them tonight, so she had to get moving.

  “Hey, Lily, why are you still here?” Thad, the other lab tech on her floor, came up and hitched a hip on her desk. She held her breath but didn’t say anything as he moved her pens. His eyes widened, and he moved back then straightened them.

  “Sorry about that. I know how you get,” he teased.

  She flushed and shook her head. “It’s fine. Really. I hate being a dork.”

  “You’re not a dork. You just like order. Nothing wrong with that.” He smiled, and his face lit up as if he wanted something.

  Oh, no.

  “So, Lily, you want to go grab a bite to eat tonight?”

  She looked up at the younger man and tried not to groan. His dishwater-brown hair fell in his eyes like those skater boys, and he still hadn’t filled out his lanky body with muscle. He was only working here before he went off to graduate school. At twenty-one, he still had his life ahead of him. She felt old and worn out, and not at all interested in a romantic relationship with him.

  “Sorry, Thad, I can’t. I’m meeting the girls for drinks, but thanks anyway. Maybe another time.” Or never.

  Disappointment filled his eyes, but he kept a smile on his face.

  Oh, God, I’ve just kicked a puppy.

  “It’s okay. I understand. Well, I’m on my way out. Make sure you don’t stay too late. I don’t like you being here all alone. Do you want me to wait for you and walk you to your car?”

  He was just so cute. In that ‘little brother’ way.

  Lily shook her head. “I won’t be long, so you don’t need to wait for me. I’ll be fine. I promise. I have my whistle and pepper spray.” The town was relatively safe, but it never hurt to be prepared.

  Thad grinned and tilted his head. “Okay, then. If you don’t really need me. Good night, and be safe. Have fun with the girls.”

  “Thanks. Have a good night.”

  With a wave, he walked out, and Lily shook her head. He really was kind of cute, but not for her, and way too young.

  Lily glanced at the clock again. Okay, she had about twenty minutes before she really had to go. She didn’t have time to go home to change, so what she had on would have to suffice. It was just a drink with the girls. Something she desperately needed.

  Her fingers flying across the keyboard, she worked at fitting peaks and labeling what she could. Before she knew it, her twenty minutes were up, and her head hurt. She really needed that drink. Sighing, she shut down her computer and packed up her purse. She straightened everything one last time and made sure her drawers were locked. With one last thought
to that odd blue dust—if not tomorrow, then Monday, for sure—she shrugged and walked to her car.

  Outside the wind howled and rain began to fall as thunder rumbled in the distance. Oh, great, a storm. She brushed her bangs out of her face. Should she just go home? Was being out tonight worth the aggravation? Her back ached and her head throbbed, and a bubble bath sounded divine. But, after her lonely thoughts during the day, she really needed to be with her friends. Decision made, she ran through the rain and unlocked her car door. Once inside, she shivered and turned the car and heater on to warm herself.

  Yep. She really needed that drink…and maybe a dark, handsome stranger.

  A giggle escaped, and she shook her head. Well, maybe just that drink.

  * * * *

  Striker paced in his room. Shade had been gone for two days after the human woman. The warrior hadn’t reached the council for updates or help as of yet, and Striker was getting annoyed.

  With a huff, he turned again, his brown wings dragging on the floor. He hated the damn things. They were boring. Average. Angels of every caliber had better-looking wings than him, but he at least held the power where most didn’t. Other than his fellow council members, he was in charge, and if enough things went his way, and if his plan stayed on track, then he would be above the other members soon.

  That thought brought an ease in his shoulders, and the tension he’d held since the dark warrior angel had walked into the council chambers faded away. He hated being relegated to a group of leaders. He wanted all the power. He wanted to rise above his average looks and reign supreme, and he would.

  He’d been close—so close—before. Once, long ago, during the Angelic Wars. He’d led his armies and reveled in it, though that part of his past remained in secrecy. He couldn’t let the other angels know that he’d been the masked angel behind the greatest army that spread fear and instigated rebellion. No, that wouldn’t do at all. The current council—sans him—had fought and used their warrior angels to bring down Striker’s army. But that had been a calculated move on his part; at least that’s what he told himself. He let his second-in-command take the fall. The other angel had lost his wings—and his head—for the act.