by Tessa Cole
I gasped and he smiled against my breast.
“Mine,” he growled, his voice low, dangerous, and so damned hot.
His lips returned to mine, capturing my ragged breaths, as his fingers worked inside me. The pleasure built fast, this whole moment fast and ferocious. The attraction between us couldn’t be denied. It felt as fated, more fated than my brand with Gideon. Our desire for each other had nothing to do with a magical connection. It was pure, hot need.
The first tremor of a climax swept through me. I moaned, trying to keep my cry of pleasure in, but I couldn’t, and cried out his name as ecstasy roared through me. He growled again, a noise of pure masculine satisfaction, and held me tight as I rode the wave, my legs wobbly, my whole body wobbly and satiated.
He pressed his forehead to mine, his breath fast and ragged like mine even though he hadn’t come. “I don’t care what marks your arm. You’re mine.”
Chapter 20
I shuddered with desire at his words and an aftershock of my climax rushed through me.
He hit the basement button and the elevator door slid open right away. We hadn’t pressed a button when we entered and I guess no one had hit a button on another floor.
“You’re mine,” he said with a growl, “and I will move heaven and earth to get you your life back.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. A primal part of me thrilled at how much he wanted me, while the rest of me cried. There wasn’t any way I could make this end well. “I… ah… I’ll be back down in a minute.”
He frowned. Yeah, not the response I’d expect either, but I couldn’t stay no matter how much I wanted to.
“I was on my way to the bathroom when you… when we…” Desire flamed my cheeks, a mix of mine and his, inside and out.
He grabbed the door before it closed again and flashed me a heated smile. “When we…?”
“Yeah. When we.” Another aftershock shook me, drawing a gasp. God, how I wanted to stay with him, satisfy him like he’d satisfied me, forget about everything.
But I couldn’t forget. The buzz still crackled under my skin, reminding me that even if everything hadn’t gone sideways, being with Marcus, living in the supernatural world, put me in danger. As well, the need to save Gideon twisted in my chest, reminding me destiny had shoved me to someone else, someone I didn’t even know. Marcus had given me a temporary reprieve from the madness. Nothing more. Still, I was grateful for the gift.
“I really do need to go.”
His smile softened. “There’s a bathroom in the triage waiting room. You don’t have to go all the way to your room.”
He stepped away from the door and it slid closed.
God, this was a mess. Such a big, heartaching mess.
And there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.
My shirt had fallen down, but the sports bra was still shoved above my breasts. I tugged it down and hit the button for the first floor. If I had the time, I’d go all the way back to my room and replace my nicotine patch, but I couldn’t afford to run into anyone else. I had to leave now.
And please, God, don’t let me run into Jacob and have him tell me to do something, whether he intended it as a command or not.
The door slid open to the first floor. No one was around, but I could hear people working in the cafeteria, the massive rocks still covering the entrance.
I hurried to the main hall and down to the garage. Raised voices, coming from behind the door to the building’s emergency room, made me pause, my pulse racing. It sounded like Amiah and Jacob, her voice shrill with distress and Jacob’s a firm rumble.
“There’s nothing to think through,” Amiah said.
Jacob said something back, but I couldn’t make out his words.
“Well, that’s not my problem,” Amiah said.
I hurried past the door and into the garage. Jacob and Amiah arguing wasn’t my problem, either. Saving Gideon. Stopping the archnephilim from murdering any more people in his mission for vengeance. That was all that mattered.
First up, I needed transportation. All of the JP vehicles were too modern to easily hotwire, but I was pretty sure I’d seen a late model minivan and a late model compact hatchback at the back of the garage, most likely personal vehicles of people who worked here.
The minivan was gone, but the tan hatchback was still there. I hurried to it and tried the door. No point in breaking a window if it was unlocked. And in an enclosed parking garage belonging to the JP, I was hoping the owner wasn’t security-conscious.
The door was unlocked. I checked the middle console and the sun visor for a key, but didn’t find one. Guess that was too much to ask for, so I leaned down under the steering column and pulled out the wires I needed.
When I was in my late-teens, just before my mom had died from cancer, she’d taught me how to hotwire a car in the event I had nothing on me and needed to flee. I don’t think she’d ever expected me to use the knowledge to head straight to an angel instead of away from one. I know I hadn’t.
Never in my wildest imagination or even my nightmares did I ever imagine I’d find myself in a situation like this. My entire goal in life had been to be unnoticed, fly under the radar, and nothing about this was flying under the radar.
I stripped the wires with my teeth, twisted the ends together with my fingers, and got the car to start. My pulse racing with a mix of fear I’d be caught and what I was headed to, I put the car in gear and pulled out of the garage.
The archnephilim’s warehouse wasn’t in the Supers’ Quarter, but close on the outskirts of town. I didn’t recognize it as anywhere I’d been before, but I knew exactly where it was. I could also feel the pull of both Gideon and the archnephilim drawing me in its direction. Even if the archnephilim hadn’t slapped the warehouse’s location in my mind, I probably would have been able to find him.
Which only made me more nervous. My connection with both of them was growing stronger. I could feel their essences, the archnephilim’s fire and Gideon’s electricity, under my skin. Gideon’s pain hadn’t increased, but it hadn’t decreased either. His electricity was still jagged, and now I could feel a pull on my soul draining strength from me to him.
The archnephilim’s fire, however, flared and banked without rhyme or reason, as if his fire was being battered within me by a ferocious wind. His brand also tore strength from me, ragged spurts cleaving chunks off my essence. I hoped that meant he was still weak from his fight with the guys and that I could manage to keep him from controlling me long enough to release Gideon and sear the brand with divine light. But I feared with both of them consuming my essence, I’d be too weak to withstand much of a mental assault from the archnephilim.
That only meant I needed to get to the warehouse as soon as possible.
I drove through the park ring separating the Supers’ Quarter from the rest of the city, the need to hurry making my nerves thrum, but I managed to hold it together and not speed. Getting pulled over without a license and no key in the ignition was a surefire way to screw everything up.
I headed south toward the highway, but instead of getting on, I took a side road that, while it wasn’t dirt, hadn’t been maintained in a long time and only a third of the streetlights were working. The road headed into an old industrial section with the shells of factories and warehouses lining the street all the way to the end. It was a perfect spot for a business, close to the city for employees but also less than a mile from the interstate onramp. Most of the buildings, however, were barely standing and abandoned. Only a few had cars in their parking lots and half of those lots weren’t full — although given that it was after suppertime, those businesses might be shut down for the night and not running twenty-four-hour shifts.
While Michael hadn’t managed to exterminate all of humankind, he’d sure been determined to try, and even with the influx of supers coming out of hiding and those — mostly demons — coming from the realms of light and darkness, the world population of over seven and a half billio
n was now closer to five.
Europe had had a casualty rate higher than North America since the main passage to the Realm of Celestial Light was in Rome — the focus of all those centuries of worship from a religion that gave angels a prominent role thinning the veil between the human realm and the light realm. But countries with the densest populations and the densest cities took the worst of it. Easier to exterminate the humans if they were all bunched together. Thankfully Gabriel had stepped up after the first few brutal assaults, making it harder for Michael to target large cities and forcing him to be more strategic in his attacks.
There’d already been a weapons manufacturer on this side of town, and the federal government had confiscated most of the factories and warehouses in the area to increase production. But that had made the area a target, and during the height of the war, the nephilim had attacked, destroying or damaging beyond reasonable repair most of the buildings in the area.
As a result, when humanity and supers turned to rebuilding, they focused on city cores, creating areas for supers, hospitals, and schools. Buildings not in use, whether they could be useful in the future or not, weren’t a priority. And in reality, the war had only been twenty-three years ago and the rebuild effort had barely begun.
The archnephilim’s warehouse stood at the end of the road, which stopped with a metal barrier and a forest growing in and around the stumps and fallen trunks of the original forest, destroyed by powerful magic during the war. The small parking lot looked uneven, riddled with cracks and weeds, and had a massive wave of asphalt cutting through the middle of it, the top curled as if it had actually been liquid at some point. It hid the front half of the building from the road, and I had to pull into the lot and drive around it to get a full look at the structure.
The warehouse was a tall single-story building, with windows up high near the roof, backlit by a blazing red sunset that turned the clouds above ominous. The back half of the structure had collapsed, and parts of the roof had been ripped away. At the end closest to me, one of two wide bay doors hung precariously from broken hinges and creaked in the breeze, while the other one stood about ten feet away, partially embedded in the ground, and twisted into what people were now calling post-war urban art — anything damaged by the nephilim’s magic that had yet to be cleared away.
I could sense both the archnephilim and Gideon inside. Their essences burned and vibrated through me. Gideon’s jagged electricity was now stronger and made my buzz claw under my skin, while the flares in the archnephilim’s came farther and farther apart because his overall fire had grown in strength.
This was the worst idea ever.
I shut off the car and got out.
But there wasn’t a better plan. While there might be a way to capture the archnephilim, no one would find it before Gideon’s hour was up. And even if I wanted to, I couldn’t resist the need to go to Gideon and do whatever it took to save him.
I pulled the ring from my pocket and slid it onto my thumb. It was a tight fit, but better that than too loose on my finger and falling off. It would be awkward if I was going to shoot a blast at the archnephilim, but not a problem for pressing it against the brand burned into my biceps. Light flickered from it and power swelled around my hand for a moment then dimmed, ready, waiting. All I had to do was cast the spell summoning divine light to release the power from the ring.
I squared my shoulders and strode toward the creaking bay door, feeling naked without my department-issued sidearm. Funny how I’d gone two days now, talked down a robber and faced the archnephilim three times, without my Glock, and now I wanted the weapon when I knew it wouldn’t do any good.
But the sense of self preservation that Marcus claimed I didn’t have was screaming at me, proving that it wasn’t that I didn’t have it, it was that I was practical enough to ignore it to do what needed to be done. I’d grown up understanding that sometimes hard choices had to be made, and this was one hell of a hard choice.
Except it hadn’t been my choice at all. I hadn’t asked the archnephilim to brand me, or Gideon. The only choice I had left was how many people were going to die before I ended this.
“I knew you wouldn’t be able to stay away,” the archnephilim said in my head as I reached the bay door.
I hadn’t expected the element of surprise since the archnephilim could probably sense me better than I could sense him, but his voice, suddenly within me, still made me jump.
“Myself for Gideon.” I entered the gloomy darkness of the warehouse, the air cold and musty. “That was the deal.”
Weak light shone through the holes in the roof, while the last of the sunset streaked through the cracks in the wall. Gideon hung from a metal rafter thirty feet from the floor, hands tied behind his back, noose tight around his neck, and hooks — the only thing actually holding him up — sliced into his wings, spreading them taut. Blood caked his wings, the side of his face, and his shirt. Light glimmered on his pants, tracing a thick trail of still-wet blood down his legs to a blood pool beneath him. His head lolled forward as if he were unconscious, and maybe he was, but his eyes were partially open, light radiating across a face swollen and bruised. His electricity was still jagged inside me, almost as painful as the buzz now, and the pull on my strength was now an urgent tug.
The archnephilim stood on the floor near him. He was mostly angel with onyx wings, hair, and even clothes. Hints of smoke curled around him, softening his edges, and half a dozen tentacles writhed around his torso.
The heat from his brand flared in my arm, and I stopped in the doorway, hoping it was far enough away that the archnephilim would have to come closer if he wanted to grab me — as well as to prove to myself that I actually could stop. “Release him and I’m all yours.”
“Release him yourself,” the archnephilim chuckled in my head.
Yeah, not going to happen. Getting closer was the last possible option. If the archnephilim grabbed me before I could activate the ring, all was lost. But if I couldn’t get Gideon free, or at least the archnephilim away from Gideon, then he was dead, and the connection between us wasn’t willing to accept that. “I don’t see a ladder.”
“Free your wings, little nephilim,” he hissed, sending panic racing through me even though he was still in my head and Gideon hadn’t heard him… I hoped. “Or do you not want your mate to know what you are?”
The archnephilim curled a tentacle up Gideon’s leg, around his ankle, knee, and thigh, then yanked down. Gideon’s wings bowed, and his head jerked up with a strangled cry of pain. Light blazed from his eyes then sputtered out, leaving him shuddering and gasping for breath.
“Wakey, wakey. Your mate has arrived,” the archnephilim said aloud, his voice no longer in my head.
Gideon’s unfocused gaze lifted slowly, dragging across the warehouse floor until he found me. For a second his eyes were filled with hope, then realization swept across his expression and his grief rushed around me in a thick mist. He’d thought Zella had come, and just my presence reminded him that she hadn’t been his mate and was now dead. His disappointment tightened my throat with emotions I shouldn’t have for a stranger and certainly not for an angel. But I couldn’t resist the connection, and right now I had other things more important to resist, like the archnephilim’s control over me.
The archnephilim chuckled. “Doesn’t look like he’s happy to see you.”
I pushed back my hurt at Gideon’s disappointment. “Doesn’t matter if he is or not. The deal was him for me. I’m here. Let him go.”
“And I said, get him yourself.” The archnephilim burst into his wraith form, growing in size, massive tentacles writhing from his smoke, crushing around Gideon’s chest.
Gideon cried out, his agony cutting through the mist and stealing my breath.
“Go on. Get him.”
“I can’t.”
“Then let me help you.” The archnephilim’s power exploded from his brand and fire seared my back with such force I screamed and my knees gave out.<
br />
Chapter 21
My pulse roared and panic swept through me. I tried to stand, but the archnephilim’s power heaved me forward. I caught myself, my palms scraping against the debris littering the concrete floor, but my muscles contracted, freezing me on my hands and knees.
No, please. The power tore through my back, slicing between my shoulder blades. I gasped, fighting to breathe past the pain. I didn’t have wings. He couldn’t just make them appear. But I convulsed and a new power, something different, not fire or electricity, something else and without a doubt mine, curled tight in my back.
Oh, God. Do I actually have wings?
The archnephilim howled with laugher, his inky darkness sliding from his brand around my heart, while his power ripped at my skin.
Gideon wrenched against the hooks, light blazing from his eyes. Whatever disappointment he’d had that I wasn’t Zella was gone and now his electric hum crackled through my buzz with ferocious determination. It set my nerves on edge, my muscles contracting as if the low voltage electric fence of my buzz had been turned up to medium, zapping it through the fire.
The archnephilim’s heat in my back shuddered, dimming for just a second, and I jerked myself up, sitting on my heels. The fire flared back with a vengeance, screaming not just through my back but every inch of my body.
I clenched every muscle I had and fought to stay upright. I couldn’t let him win. And there wasn’t any chance now to ensure Gideon’s safety. I had to go ahead and burn the brand.
Except I couldn’t move. It took everything I had just to stay up and not collapse on the floor, writhing in agony.
Come on. Just move your hand. That was all I needed to do. But another surge of the archnephilim’s power screamed through me, stealing my breath.