by Hannah Jayne
He was an angel—of the fallen sort—with sky-blue eyes and hair the color of dark chocolate, swirling in wondrous, luxurious curls over his forehead, snaking over ears just perfect for nibbling. He had the high cheekbones and feather-long lashes that women would do naughty things for, and the square jaw and puckered pink lips that could do naughty things. His build was fairly slight but wrought with wiry, rock-hard muscles that made his jeans look mouthwateringly comfortable, and stretched out the chest and arms of his T-shirts mercilessly.
“What the hell—why are you—” I fluttered and floundered, splashing bits of cucumber melon–scented fluff, chocolate pieces, and bathwater all around. Alex just grinned that familiar half-smile that I found so annoyingly erotic; he crossed his arms and relaxed against my towel rack, clearly enjoying my spastic discomfort. That angered me even more so I worked to get my panicked breathing under control. Alex and I had shared some steamy moments and every glance or touch of his skin electrified me. This moment was no exception—but he was bad news. Fallen angels always are. And his whole disappearing/reappearing thing really got on my last nerve.
And then I realized I was naked.
I sunk lower into the water, pushing the bubbles over my girly bits and glowering at Alex who looked at me, that obnoxious, adorable half-smile still playing on his lips. He helped himself to a cookie.
“What are you doing here?” I snapped.
He chewed thoughtfully. “I needed to talk to you.”
“I have a phone. Or an e-mail address. Or, hell, a carrier pigeon. Do you always have to show up in the bathroom ?”
“I needed your undivided attention.”
I raised an annoyed brow. “Or you needed a naked-lady fix. And did you lose your ability to knock along with your wings?”
He grinned, took a swig from my wineglass. “Ooh.” His blue eyes looked up, raked the ceiling. “Is that an oh-eight? It’s buttery.”
“Get out!” I screamed, pointing a sopping, bubble-laden arm at the bathroom door. “I’m not going to talk to you while I’m naked.”
Alex’s grin widened. “So you are naked ... ?”
“I’m in the bathtub,” I snarled. “What did you expect?” I was sitting forward now and vaguely aware of the cool air touching my breasts. I hunkered down in the water again. “You’re a pervert.”
Alex shrugged, finished my wine, and poured himself some more. “Hey, I’m no angel.”
I rolled my eyes and snatched my wineglass out of his hand. “Get out.”
Alex’s eyes went puppy-dog round. “I still need to talk to you.”
I held my ground, though it wasn’t easy; my heart—with its sudden, mile-a-minute beat—was betraying me. “And I still need you to get out.”
“Can I have another cookie?”
That did it.
“Out!”
Once Alex was safely on the other side of the bathroom door I slipped out of the tub, hastily dried off, and wrapped myself in my sky-blue bathrobe. I flounced my hair a bit and patted my cheeks, hoping to get a semblance of that innocent-girl pink in my cheeks; instead I had the bright red imprint of my own hands. I swiped on some Sugar Kiss lip gloss in hopes that sexy, glossy lips would detract from my cheeks. I was tightening the belt and padding into the kitchen when I was treated to a view of Alex’s rump poking out of my fridge.
“Can I help you with something?” I asked his butt.
Alex backed out of the fridge, frowning. “There’s nothing in here to eat. Are there any more Pinwheels?”
I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “No. I threw them away.” Threw them down my throat was more like it.
I nudged Alex aside and peered into the fridge, coming out with a half loaf of cracked-wheat bread and a stack of Polaroid-thin cheese slices. “Grilled cheese?”
“Tres gourmet.”
“You’d better believe it.”
Alex handed me a frying pan and got to work buttering the bread.
I slowly peeled a piece of cheese, careful to keep my eyes away from Alex, lest my bathrobe fall off or I find myself climbing him like a stepladder. “So, what are you doing here anyway? I mean here, here.” I pointed with a spatula to the floor. “In this realm. In my kitchen.”
Alex peeled the filmy cellophane from a piece of cheese and crumpled it in his hand, popping the cheese ball in his mouth.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Make yourself at home.”
Alex gave me a sarcastic smile and snagged a couple of beers from the fridge. He opened them both, then handed one over, clinked mine, and took a long pull. I did the same.
“Can’t a guy just pop in to talk to a friend?”
The word friend sent my hackles up, but I pretended it was from a draft and tightened the belt on my robe.
“A guy could. You couldn’t.”
Alex shrugged, smiled, and remained quiet.
“Okay, what do you want to talk about?”
Alex wasted no time. He put down his beer and looked at me, cobalt eyes piercing and suddenly serious. I pretended not to notice. “I need your help,” he said simply.
I raised my eyebrows. “Is that so?”
“Remember when I told you about the Vessel?”
“The Vessel of Souls? The one that got you banned from Heaven? Stripped of your wings? That Vessel?”
Alex pursed his lips in annoyance. “Are you through?”
I sniffed. “I guess. What about it?”
“I need to find it.”
“I know that. But why now? And why do you suddenly need me to help?”
Alex let out a long sigh. “The Vessel of Souls houses all human souls that are in limbo. If the fallen angels get their hands on it they can take over everything: the angelic plane, the human plane—even the Underworld. We need to keep the Vessel out of the hands of the fallen.”
I looked at Alex. “You’re fallen. Why should I help you get it?”
“You know that if I can restore the balance of the planes and get the Vessel back, I can get my wings restored. I’m not going to jeopardize that ... again.”
I picked up the spatula again, used it to peek underneath my sandwich. “And you need me why?”
Alex raised his eyebrows expectantly and I flipped the sandwich, sighing. “Because the Vessel is charmed,” I said, answering my own question.
“Even the angelic plane uses magic. They like to hide things in plain sight.”
“Really?”
Alex nodded and took a swig from his bottle. “Yeah. Last I heard the Holy Grail was actually a tanning bed in Manhattan Beach.”
I narrowed my eyes at Alex’s little-boy grin. “Really, Lawson. You’re the only one I know who will be able to see through the charm.”
Along with my superior pizza-eating and state-reciting powers, I am also magically immune. My grandmother was a seer, my mother was a mind-melder, and my specialty? Nothing. In a good way. Nothing magical can be used on me. Veils, charms, spells, happy endings—anything that could be conjured, wanded, or abracadab-raed was lost on me. The magical immunity helped working in the Underworld. The occasional fire-breathing dragon singe or High witch explosion rolled off me like water off a duck’s back. Warlocks couldn’t use glamour spells to make me fall in love with them and give them extra magiks freedoms or process their paperwork any faster, and I could share a cup of coffee with Medusa and stay perfectly, humanly pink.
I flipped the second sandwich onto a plate and handed it to Alex.
“Okay,” I said. “Where do we start?”
Chapter Two
I was sprawled on the couch, eating the peanut-butter part of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when I heard the lock tumble and Nina walked in, dropping her shoulder bag in a heap. Vlad loped in behind her, his shoulders slumped in his black velvet sport coat, earbuds securely clipped in his ears, iPod turned up so loud we could hear the white-noise whir of his music.
“Turn that crap down!” Nina snarled.
Vlad rolled his eyes and snatched hi
s laptop from the kitchen table, then slunk off to the fire escape.
Nina wagged her head as she looked after him, then rubbed her temples. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do with him.” Though Vlad was technically one hundred and thirteen, he was forever sixteen.
He poked his head back into the living room and eyed Nina and me. “Do we have any of that AB negative left?”
Moody, grunty, hungry sixteen.
“Check the fridge,” Nina said to Vlad without taking her eyes off me. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said to me with a frown.
Nina was my coworker, my roommate, and my very best friend. She was ballerina slim and elegantly tall, with waist-length gorgeous black hair that tumbled over her defined shoulders and highlighted her deep, coal-black eyes. She was the kind of friend I could tell anything to, the kind of girl who always took your side, would stay up nights sharing secrets with you.
And also, she was dead.
Well, undead.
Nina was a one hundred and sixty-eight-year-old vampire and had the pale complexion, penchant for type O neg, and the pointed incisors to prove it.
She was born—the first time—in 1842 and as a twenty-nine-year-old party-girl heiress, she climbed out her bedroom window one night to meet a dark-eyed stranger. Three days and two punctured arteries later, she caused the massacre of the Elpistones army. That was a long time ago and her bloodlust had long ago subsided, being replaced by an insatiable urge for high-end couture. Tonight she was wearing a vintage Guy Laroche cocktail dress with a pair of nosebleed-high leather boots, paired with an Old Navy hoodie and a felt cloche hat. She looked like a page out of Vogue; in the same outfit, I would have looked like a college kid on laundry day.
“No ghosts,” I said, still studying my sandwich. “Alex.”
Nina sat down with a start on the coffee table. “Alex Grace?” She whipped her head around. “Where is he? Is he here now? I want to kick that son of a bitch’s—” She paused. “Unless you’re back together, then we should all go out and get drinks.” She grinned, her small fangs pressing against her bloodstained lips.
I clicked off the TV. “He wants my help.”
Nina’s eyebrows shot up. “Another mystery? Ooh, I want in.” She clapped her hands. “What’s going on now? Murder? Mayhem? General mystical unruliness?”
“Heaven stuff.”
“Boo.” Nina cocked her head, considering. “Well, I guess that could be fun. So, where’s Alex now?”
I shrugged. “Wherever angels go when they’re not here. Or, back to the police station. I don’t know.”
Being a fallen angel came with all sorts of otherworld perks, but it didn’t come with a paycheck. To keep himself in cloud pillows and ambrosia (okay, beer and pizza), Alex kept his bank account padded with occasional work with the San Francisco Police Department. To them he was an undercover FBI field agent whose long disappearances were chalked up to hush-hush cases in the field; to me he was just annoyingly undependable.
Currently, San Francisco was Alex’s home base. His paychecks and credit card bills went to an apartment he kept in the Richmond district; I happened to notice the address on a piece of mail that was inadvertently left in my apartment (after it fell out of Alex’s office). When I happened to drive by the Turk Street address, I found it was an empty storefront with newspaper-covered windows and a heap of Target ads and Safeway circulars jammed in the mail slot. I hadn’t gotten around to asking Alex about his fake address—mainly because he never asked me if I’d stolen any of his mail.
“I just don’t know if I want to get involved,” I said.
At one time I had considered Alex and my dead/undead relationship passionate and romantically star-crossed; now I considered it hopelessly dead-end.
Mostly.
There was something about his sexy half-smile, his lush, pink-tinged lips, and my dating drought that made me swoon in a way that brought a blush to my cheeks, a tingle to my nether regions, and made me deeply consider the benefit of one-night stands.
I readjusted myself on the couch and tried to remind myself that losing Alex the first time was gut-wrenchingly, Lifetime-television bad. I didn’t know if I could—or wanted to—go through it again.
Nina cocked her head, picked a glob of jelly off the lapel of my bathrobe. “You mean because you’re so busy here.”
I tried to glare. “I mean I’m not sure if I want to get involved with Alex again. The last year has been so ...” I let the word trail off and tried to avoid Nina’s annoyed stare as self-pity ballooned in my chest.
“The last year has been so what? Ordinary? You may not have been hung up by your ankles lately, but you’ve also managed to watch the entire seven seasons of The Golden Girls multiple times. And”—Nina held up a single index f inger—“you’ve alphabetized our spice rack. Twice. If that’s not a body calling out for a little extracurricular activity, I don’t know what is.”
I remained unconvinced—and gun shy. I had fallen hook, line, and sinker for Alex’s baby blues once, and after a few steamy scenes he disappeared for six months without a word. When I finally got over the heartbreak and stopped listening to mopey love songs, Alex popped back into my life—this time, with bad news.
“It’s not like the relationship is going to go anywhere. He wants to go—” I paused, looking for the right word. “Back.” I sighed miserably. “Last I heard Heaven-to-Earth long-distance relationships didn’t ever pan out too well.”
“So it’s destined to be a dead-end relationship?”
I nodded.
“Even more reason to jump in with both feet and no panties on!”
I licked some peanut butter off my index finger and blew out a tortured sigh. “Why even bother if you know a relationship is doomed from the get-go? It’s just asking for heartbreak.”
“And a few steamy months of hot, sweaty monkey love.”
I raised my eyebrows.
Nina stuck out her tongue. “Oh, come on. All my relationships are doomed. Or damned. Besides, just working with the guy isn’t going to get you all hot and bothered. Is it?”
I avoided Nina’s gaze but couldn’t avoid the telltale blush that crept over my cheeks.
“Slut!” I eyed Nina’s gleeful face and she rolled her eyes. “Really, Sophie. What’s there to be worried about? He’s a lovely specimen of manhood; you’re a museum-quality specimen of undersexed womanhood. Don’t they say—what is it?—better to have gotten a little and lost, than never to have gotten a little at all.”
“Poetic.”
Nina poked her foot in between the couch cushion and wiggled her toes underneath my backside. “Whew. Just checking. Wanted to make sure you and the couch weren’t sharing a bloodline. Ooh, that reminds me, I’m hungry.”
I swatted Nina’s foot away and stood up. “You suck.”
“It’s what we do.” She grinned. “So we’re helping?”
I pursed my lips. “He’s coming over tomorrow night.”
I watched as Nina’s libido-meter went up to her ears. “We’ll have to go to Victoria’s Secret at lunch.”
“It’s purely a business meeting,” I said. And then, with a quick lick of my lips, “For now.”
Nina grinned and socked me in the shoulder. “That’s my slutty friend.”
I rolled my eyes and Nina prattled on. “We need to get all our excitement in while we can. This is just between you and me, but I heard that the new UDA management will be in place soon.”
“Hey! That was supposed to be between me and Lorraine !”
Nina tugged her ear “Vampire perk. It’s not like I can turn off the supersonic hearing.”
I glared and she relented. “Okay, fine. Just between you and me and Lorraine. And Vlad. And the operations staff. And I guess some of the VERMers. Anyway, I’m going to find out everything I can about this new management guy. I have worked too long and too hard to let some new demon come in and tell me how to do my job.”
I grinned, both at Nina’
s stern determination and her belief that she worked either long or hard.
The next morning I was out the door before Nina came home from her night out. I hurried to my favorite Philz Coffee and let the scent of roasted beans and caffeine wash over me when I pulled open the door. By the time I got to the front of the line, the warm, comforting feeling of coffee and croissants was replaced by the eerie feeling that I was being watched.
While most women would get the “someone’s watching me” feeling and scan the room for the hot barista or the well-dressed businessman giving her the eye, this was my life, which meant my first reaction was to search for a fire-breathing dragon, homicidal vamp wannabe, or a three-foot-high troll hell-bent on making me his wife. Oddly enough, it was none of the above. The staff and clientele of Philz was above-ground normal—dog walkers with rolls of plastic poop bags sticking out of their pockets, pseudo-exercise gurus in track suits and pristine Coach sneakers, businessmen with slick striped ties and impeccable hair. No one seemed to be paying me any mind, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling. My whole body hummed with an uncomfortable awareness, and when the barista asked again to take my order I jumped, then bit my lip and offered him a shy smile.
“Sorry, I just ...”
The barista seemed far more interested in the blond woman behind me so I forwent the explanation and ordered my coffee, then offered him a crumpled bill. I shuffled to the end of the bar and waited for my drink, the awkward, uncomfortable feeling not waning.
“Customer service is really not his strong point,” the guy beside me said, nudging his head of ash-blond hair toward the barista.
I jumped, and the guy grinned, his smile wide and comforting. “Tell me you’re getting a decaf,” he said, his English accent clipping his words.
I felt a blush creep over my cheeks. “I’m sorry, I guess I’m a little jumpy. And it’s a vanilla latte, full caff, so ...”