What sounded like wings, yet sharp and cutting as if metal, sliced the air. Eden searched the broken window frames overhead. She could only huff and try futilely to settle her frantic heartbeat.
“This is not proving successful. He will not approach when he knows I am guarding you.” Ashur twisted to look at her. “I must lead him to believe I’ve left you to your own devices.”
“No! Don’t leave me alone.”
Her outburst caused him to pause. Had he intended to leave her here? Obviously he was weighing it in his mind right now. And had she just asked for help from a man who scared the crap out of her?
All her life she’d wondered about things like angels and the fallen and what they might look like, and now. This could not be happening.
Finally Ashur nodded. “I will not leave you. But my intentions cannot be fulfilled here and now. Give me your hand.”
She tucked her hands behind her hips.
Ashur lunged and gripped her wrist, roughly forcing her hand forward. And then he bent and dragged his tongue over her skin, right over the itchy spot where Zaqiel had licked her.
“What the hell?”
“It counteracts the angelkiss,” he said. “For a while. Don’t scratch until I tell you to do so.”
He grabbed her, sweeping her into his arms as effortlessly as if she were a doll. He deposited her on the back of the motorcycle again. Tears rolled down Eden’s face as he kicked the bike into gear and they rolled over the litter of glass.
“Tell me where you live. I want the angel to think you are alone and waiting.”
“Oh, hell. An angel? A real …? This can’t be happening.”
“Your address, my lady.”
If she had known the address for the police station, Eden would have rambled that one off. Yet the idea of being dropped off at home, where she felt most safe and could lock the doors and keep out all the crazy men after her, sounded too good to be true.
She gave him her address, and the motorcycle picked up speed.
He’d spoken of Fallen angels, and kisses from angels, which made her think he was talking about real angels. She believed in angels. They weren’t all glowy and peaceful and full of grace as modern media would have a person believe. Some were positively evil—the fallen ones.
Something the cabbie had said returned to her. When they were in the tunnel, the cab had slowed and he said he saw an angel.
Had Zaqiel been that angel?
But why would an angel be after her? Had it something to do with the dreams she’d been having all her life?
As they sped down the pier, Eden glanced over her shoulder and saw Zaqiel keeping track with them on foot.
Chapter 3
Bruce speed-dialed Antonio in Paris, then checked his watch only after he’d done so. It was 6:00 p.m. in New York. That made it something like midnight in Paris.
The receiver clicked. “What?”
“Er, sir, hey. I’m here in New York.”
“Obviously. What do you have for me, Bruce?”
“I tracked the Fallen to an art gallery.”
“You tag him?”
The GPS injection gun Bruce wore in a holster was still loaded with a cartridge. “No. But I did discover something very interesting.” He turned and eyed the gallery, still swarming with mortals oohing and aahing over its contents.
“No tagged vamp? What the hell are you doing? Traipsing through Times Square?”
“Listen, Antonio, I found some paintings you’ll want to see.”
“Paintings?”
“Yes, they were painted by a chick named Eden Campbell. They are all of angels. I think she knows something. They are remarkable.”
“You’ve never seen an angel, Bruce, what the hell makes you think some woman painting fluffy-winged angels knows something? I’m very disappointed—”
“In each painting the angel wears a sigil,” Bruce hastened out. “And I know I’ve never seen an angel, but I have seen those symbols in that ancient book you used to summon Zaqiel and the other. They are the same. I know it.”
He heard shuffling. Antonio must be sitting behind his desk in the cavern. Bruce called the guy’s home a cavern because seventy percent of it was located underground. Five hundred years old and sunlight had never touched his skin. Holy water burned him and he seriously could not see his reflection in a mirror. He was old world all the way.
“You swear this is serious?” Antonio asked. “I’m sure of it, boss.”
“Who is the woman? How does she know this?”
“I have no idea. Some society chick. I missed her. I guess she left before I got here. The gallery closes in a few minutes.”
“Buy them all,” Antonio ordered. “Ship them to me overnight.”
“Will do, boss.”
A thousand years sitting Beneath, doing nothing more than contemplating emptiness, tends to steal a demon’s energy, if not his sense of what is.
What is, is the world had changed, Ashur told himself. Drastically. He hadn’t afforded the time to look at his surroundings upon arrival here on earth. Immediately he focused on tracking Zaqiel. It was what he did; nothing else concerned him.
So why was he cruising through an overcrowded city on a strange two-wheeled vehicle with a muse clinging to his back?
He never got involved with the muse. The woman was merely bait, a necessary lure to bring the Fallen into its half angel/half human form—the only form in which it could be killed. As well, the form it assumed to impregnate the muse.
Generally Ashur arrived just as the Fallen was going to attempt the muse. Then he slayed the angel.
His timing was irritatingly off. He should not have been summoned until the very moment of the attempt. Had the rules been altered? And why were the Fallen walking earth again? Hadn’t their ranks been swept away with the great flood?
He had no concept of how much time had passed since the flood, or since he’d been banished Beneath. Millennia, surely, for the world had changed drastically.
“Take a left!” the woman yelled over the roar of the motor.
Ashur liked the noise of the engine as he revved it, but he did not care to take directions from a female. However, he did turn because he had not navigated this city before, and her directions had given Zaqiel the slip many city blocks earlier.
