by Tessa Cole
“I think I’m good. I still feel like I was lit on fire, though.”
Kol winced and I regretted using that comparison.
“And probably torn apart from the inside out, too” he said. “That’s what Amiah said it looked like the archnephilim tried to do to you. Burn you up and rip you apart.”
I shuddered at the memory, making the buzz snap within me. “So Amiah healed me?”
“The physical damage, yes. But Amiah can’t do anything for the mental. So—”
“So you’re sitting at my bedside waiting to see if I’ll wake up insane.”
“Pretty much.” He flashed a full-watt smile with hellfire flickering in his eyes that made my insides heat with desire. Then his eyes widened, as if he’d realized what he’d just done, and he jerked away, releasing my hand and leaning as far back into the chair as he could get. “That’s me. On damsel duty again.”
“Tell me you haven’t been sitting here for five days.”
“It hasn’t been a problem. I’ve gotten caught up on a ton of paperwork.”
“So just you.” Perhaps that was a good thing. I had no idea what I’d say if I’d woken with Gideon or Marcus at my bedside. But it still stung that they were clearly avoiding me. Jacob, too.
“Jacob is staying away because of the power of his claim on you. He didn’t want you to wake and be caught up in his compulsion, not if your mental state was fragile.” Kol’s expression turned somber. “The moment Amiah said you’d live, Marcus made Gideon promise you’d get your life back, no supers, nothing, then left.”
Of course he did. I shouldn’t have been surprised or disappointed. He’d promised he’d do everything to get me away from the supernatural world, and that meant getting away from him. He hadn’t said goodbye the last time. Why would I think this time was different?
Except this time had been different. We’d given in to our desires, at least in part. I ached to kiss him again, even if he’d used my desire against me to put a tracker on me.
But what hadn’t changed were my reasons for not being able to stay in the supernatural world.
“And Gideon?” I couldn’t believe he’d agree to Marcus’s demand to leave me alone, not with how much he’d said the mating brand was a beautiful fated thing.
Of course that was before he’d learned he was stuck with a human.
“He took Zella’s body back to the Realm of Celestial Light.”
And before he’d lost the woman he’d really loved.
Which left me where?
A part of me wanted to get out of Operations, grab my go bag, and get out of town. If I’d been a cat, I was sure I’d used up at least six, probably seven, of my nine lives just by being caught in this mess. Hell, I had to be down to one life left because somehow Gideon hadn’t heard enough of my conversation with the archnephilim to figure out the truth. If he had, I was sure I would have woken up handcuffed to the hospital bed. The longer I stuck around, the greater the chance someone would discover my supernatural nature.
Except if I ran, Gideon would know. And really, there wasn’t anywhere in the world I could go where Gideon wouldn’t be able to find me.
My best bet was to carry on, life as usual, and hope I, as well as Gideon, could ignore the compulsion from the mating brand to be with each other. The bond between us made that thought sting, but the rest of me knew it was the right call. Maybe if we cut ties now, before we really had any kind of a relationship and while he was still in love with Zella, our connection wouldn’t grow stronger.
Maybe I’d be able to find a magical solution that, while it might not be able to break the bond between us, could mute its affects. I doubted angels with mating brands went to see witches or demons to diminish the strength of their bond.
It was a slim chance, but my best option. Besides, if I was going to risk everything for a relationship with a super, it was going to be with Marcus. Which I wasn’t. So I needed to go back to flying under the radar.
Someone walked past the large glass window behind Kol, drawing my gaze up to the dimly lit hall, and I gasped at my reflection. My eyes were glowing. Why hadn’t Kol questioned my glowing eyes?
Perhaps I wasn’t really seeing the glow, or I was and no one else could, like how no one else could feel the temperature change when someone had strong emotions.
I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them again.
Still glowing.
“Ah…” I didn’t want to ask, but I had to know. If my eyes were glowing, I needed to figure out how to deal with that. “Are my eyes—?”
“Glowing?” Kol asked. “They have been since you passed out in the warehouse. Even with your eyes closed, it bleeds out under your lashes.”
“And you’re not worried about that?” He was acting the same as always, not like he knew I was a monstrous nephilim.
“You just blasted yourself with who knows how much divine light and you didn’t die. I’m surprised your whole body isn’t lit up like a Christmas tree.”
“Well, thanks for small miracles.” That no one knew, and that I wasn’t fully lit up.
“Although it would make it easy to always find you,” he said with a soft laugh that caressed my senses.
“But impossible to do my job.”
“I don’t know.” He offered a sensual shrug, his mirth making his eyes shine. “You could be the new poster girl for the Union City PD, what with your new glowing personality.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “Yeah, and I’ll never be put on a boring stakeout again. Can you imagine? Me, at night, sitting in a car, trying to look inconspicuous while brilliant white light blazes around me?” I burst out laughing.
It was so utterly ridiculous and amazing and… hell, I was still alive. I’d faced an archnephilim, saved who-knew-how-many lives, and Kol didn’t seem at all bothered that my eyes were glowing.
Kol snorted, his laughter growing. “What about trying to sneak up on a perp in the dark?”
“Would it mean I’d never get stuck on the graveyard shift?”
“Or would you always? I mean, you’d never need a flashlight.”
I laughed so hard tears streamed down my cheeks. Really, it wasn’t that funny, but I couldn’t stop. All the worry and stress and fear and heartache that had built up over the last few days needed a release and this was how it was coming out. Which was fine with me.
Kol grinned at me, his smile slightly lopsided and boyish. There was a hint of sensuality to it — I didn’t think he’d ever be able to dampen all of it — but it was warm, friendly, and genuine. “I’m so glad you’re not crazy.”
“Me, too.”
I was going to be okay.
“And Amiah did say the glow in your eyes would go away, once all that divine light leaves your system.”
Everything was going to be okay.
Marcus had said he’d get me my life back and for the most part, all things considered, he had.
Except did I really want to go back to that life?
It was the safest option for me, but it was also the loneliest. I’d had a taste of what it felt like to be part of a team, and an ache for the kind of physical contact I’d always been afraid to commit to.
I wasn’t sure I could go back to the life I’d had before.
To be continued…
BONUS!
Continue reading for a sneak peek of Destined Blood, the next book in the Nephilim’s Destiny series.
CHAPTER 1
I could hear the couple yelling at each other the moment I got out of the cruiser even though I was outside on the residential street and they were, from the muffled sound of it, still inside their apartment building. I could also hear the traffic on the busy street five blocks over, the buzz from the streetlight fifty feet away, and, if I concentrated, the calm steady breathing of Hank, my partner, who stood on the other side of the car from me.
The woman screamed something incomprehensible, but my partner’s expression didn’t change, which meant he couldn’t hear it, p
roving that my senses had in fact been enhanced.
I hadn’t been sure of it when Amiah — the head of the medical team at the Joined Parliament Operations Building — had released me from her mini hospital. Of course, it had been hard to think past anything with my painful, grating buzz clawing under my skin, but even after I’d managed to medicate that down to a manageable level — now requiring two nicotine patches at the same time — I hadn’t been sure.
Yeah, there’d been moments when I’d suspected, but nothing quite as definitive as this. With its surprisingly subtle only-seeming-to-appear-when-I-concentrated manifestation, it had been easy to keep myself distracted and to pretend that life as I knew it hadn’t completely changed two weeks ago.
In a way, it hadn’t. I was back in my apartment — and the skylight and hole in the wall had been fixed — and I was back to my job in the Union City Police Department. And yet…
I couldn’t deny that, core deep, everything had changed. And that scared me.
Yes, I’d survived having an unnatural angelic mating brand forced upon me by an archnephilim — a monster that was part archangel and part demonic wraith — and having his power tear through me as he’d tried to rip out wings I was sure… well, pretty sure I didn’t have. But I hadn’t gotten through that unscathed. My buzz was stronger than before, feeling more like I was in constant contact with a medium-voltage electric fence and not just a low-level one. Not to mention my eyes still glowed from blasting a massive amount of divine light into myself to stop him.
And it was my eyes that worried me the most. I couldn’t pretend to just be a human if my eyes were glowing. I’d purchased enspelled contacts from a shady witch who’d promised discretion, and they were supposed to hide the glow until the divine light left my body.
But even after a week and a half the light hadn’t faded, and I feared it was still around because I was a nephilim and blasting all that magic into me had somehow awakened the angelic part of my DNA. To make it worse, I was sure my essence — readable by those supernatural beings who could sense magical essences — still said I was human, which made the angelic glowy eye thing look really suspicious.
Add to that my enhanced hearing… oh, and the ability to see in the dark… and my goal to live as a nothing-to-see-here human just serving and protecting my city had become nearly impossible.
It was only a matter of time before someone started asking questions, and those questions could get me imprisoned, experimented on, or killed. Probably all of the above.
At least I could attribute my enhanced senses to Jacob’s vampire claim on me. The claim, at least, would go away… eventually… I hoped. But I wasn’t sure how long the effects would last, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask.
At least none of the guys had tried to contact me in the week and a half I’d been gone from Operations, so the risk of being revealed wasn’t as great. I hadn’t expected Marcus to. He’d been adamant in respecting my wishes to have nothing to do with the supernatural world, and had been gone before I’d even woken in Amiah’s hospital. Jacob and Kol hadn’t contacted me either, and much to my surprise, neither had Gideon, even with his angelic mating brand on my arm permanently bonding us together.
And I was going to ignore the empty ache in my chest over him— over all the guys. It had been growing within me from the moment I’d returned home.
It would go away.
Just like the effects of Jacob’s vampiric claim.
Really.
“Dispatch said the call came in for unit one-o-seven,” Hank said, adjusting his duty belt at his slightly paunchy waist as we headed for the apartment building’s front door. “That must be at the back or maybe they’ve resolved their differences and have stopped yelling.”
Glass shattered and the woman screeched something else, her voice still too muffled with the building between us for me to make out her words even with my enhanced hearing. Hank still didn’t react, but I was sure as soon as we got inside, he’d be able to hear them as well.
The building was a tired six-story structure that had been built in the 60s or 70s. Its utilitarian construction hadn’t aged well and the owner had done little upkeep. Through the filthy glass front door, the vinyl tiled floor was scuffed with at least a quarter of the tiles missing. Holes and graffiti scarred the walls and paint peeled from the ceiling.
Three homemade missing person flyers were taped to the window beside the door, two for guys who looked like they were teenagers or in their early twenties, and the other for a middle-aged woman. The number of missing persons — all over town, with the exception of the precinct in the downtown core — had spiked in the last month and a half, and no one in the department had a clue as to why. Although I suspected it was probably one of the many after-effects of the war. Michael’s slaughter to exterminate all humans and supernatural beings had only ended twenty-three years ago and most of the world’s population was still coming to terms with what had happened. Some people dealt with that by running away.
Hank opened the door, not bothering to buzz the superintendent to unlock it. Every few months or so we’d get a call to this building, and, for as long as I’d been with this precinct — just over five years, which was as long as I’d been a cop — the building’s door had been broken.
A man’s angry voice roared around me as we entered. If I hadn’t known I had enhanced hearing, I would have sworn the guy was standing in the hall with us.
“Hunh, guess they’re still at it,” Hank said, and he headed down the hall, his walk quick but his body language calm. Thankfully, not much bothered the middle-aged cop, or he was able to keep his emotions in check, which was good given how my next-to-useless weird empathic magic reacted to strong feelings. He had almost nine years of experience on me, and while he hadn’t been happy to be partnered with the rookie who’d gotten another cop seriously injured, he hadn’t tried to make my life difficult.
Of course, he hadn’t tried to become friends, either. Four and a half years together and our partnership was still awkward. Which, given that I was trying to stay under everyone’s radar, was better than a partner who wanted to know everything about me and stick his nose in my business — like why I didn’t have a social or dating life.
My nerves, however, thrummed with adrenaline and fear. This wasn’t my first domestic call and it wouldn’t be my last, but even with experience, I couldn’t help but worry about how dangerous the situation could get.
The temperature rose as we drew closer to apartment 107, turning the early summer evening that was already unusually warm and muggy even warmer… at least it did for me because my empathic magic manifested as temperature changes and not something useful like being able to actually sense emotions.
Another glass something shattered, sounding like it had been thrown against the wall, and the man yelled obscenities at the woman. The woman screamed back.
Hank reached up to knock on the door, when a gunshot exploded inside the apartment.
My pulse leaped into a fast tattoo, and Hank’s eyes flashed wide.
We drew our sidearms, and our gazes met for a split second, confirming we were good to go.
“Police,” Hank yelled, and he kicked in the door.
Inside lay a living room filled with garbage — empty pizza boxes and beer bottles, food wrappers, and crumpled clothes — along with old, chipped, dented, and even broken furniture. We stood at the far end of the unit, which ran parallel to the hall, and while from my position I could see fully into the room, if both of us wanted a clear view of the entire room — and more importantly a clear shot — someone was going to have to enter.
I gritted my teeth and hurried inside. This situation was all human. There wasn’t a super in sight. I had nothing to worry about.
At the back, near the closed patio door, stood a brawny man with swarthy skin in his twenties, wearing a black wife-beater and navy cotton-knit shorts with frayed ends. He pointed a Ruger 9mm at a short curvy woman, also in her twenties, with blea
ch-blond hair and a dingy yellow sundress. The guy had fingernail marks on his cheeks and arms — nothing supernatural looking about them — and the woman had a black eye and a fresh bruise in the shape of a handprint on her left biceps. She didn’t look like she’d been shot, but both had ashen complexions and wild eyes.
They stared at us for a tense second and their expressions twisted with rage.
The room’s temperature shot up another ten degrees, and sweat instantly slicked my body, making my uniform stick to my skin.
On the floor between them lay a spilled bag of little purple pills, and I inwardly groaned. Zip. Again? Jeez, this was twice in just over two weeks that I’d had to deal with someone high on zip. Except given their expressions, I was pretty sure they weren’t high. They were starting to come down. And that meant aggressive mania and violent hallucinations enhanced by magic.
Just great. I pointed my Glock at the guy. “Police. Drop the weapon.”
The guy snarled.
“Drop the weapon,” Hank repeated.
The woman screamed and lunged at the guy. He fired two shots as she slipped on a half-empty pizza box and crashed to the floor. I dropped to the floor as well. The guy’s rounds slammed into the wall above me, and my pulse jumped with the knowledge that I’d almost taken two in the vest.
“Drop the weapon,” Hank yelled, not taking a shot because the woman was climbing to her feet and in the way.
The guy snarled and lunged toward the patio door. He wrenched it off its hinges with a burst of zip-enhanced strength and bolted outside, gun still in hand.
“Shit.” I scrambled to my feet and gave chase. Hank followed close at my heels and called the change of situation in to dispatch on his radio.