Angel’s Vengeance (Elemental Angels #7)

Chapter 1

M isting snowflakes danced in the streetlights below but would be too puny to cushion Rhode when he finally—really, any minute now—hurled himself off the roof.

January in New Hampshire brought with it shorter days and, therefore, shorter attention spans on the photocells in the outdoor lighting tasked with illuminating all of Aurora’s small-town charm. It was a handy feature most of the time, especially when darkness frequently descended before the mortals’ dinner bells chimed.

For Rhode, however, the little streetlamps’ enthusiasm for the job was sorely underappreciated. After all, when a fallen angel of the Empyrean was about to test his flight ability for the first time since he was freed from eons-long enemy captivity, spotlights weren’t necessarily in the pro column. Knocking off the rust was one thing. Lighting up the show for any potential audience was another thing entirely.

Rhode pressed the toes of his boots farther over the edge of the mechanic’s garage until his steel-toed tips hovered above the still-leaf-leaden gutter. It was a directional focus of sorts and aimed his body where he hoped to land— hoped being the operative phrasing.

He squared his shoulders back and called forth his wings, again grateful that he was alone. The shiver that licked up his spine every time they appeared should have been second nature, something as normal as breathing for a seraph.

And then his ever-so-unhelpful brain chose that moment to remind him that even breathing could be strenuous given the wrong environment.

Rhode chased the memory away and recentered himself. Then translucent flaps of energy unfurled from between his shoulder blades, lengthening and solidifying through his outerwear until Rhode’s back muscles strained with the pseudo-familiar weight.

Familiar but still strangely foreign.

He imagined the sensation was much like what Drea, his caregiver and soul bond to his sentinel brother Chrome, had once described to him as phantom limb pain. She’d mentioned it casually during one of their physical therapy sessions in those early weeks following his rescue. Mortals who had lost a limb often still experienced the sensations of having it: physical aching, itching, lingering spatial awareness, even temperature and vibrations.

The concept had intrigued him almost as much as the fact that mortals could still function so completely without their limbs.

In the end, though mortal physicians still hardly had a handle on the whys and wherefores of the phenomenon, they likely boiled the cause of the phantom sensation down to a miscommunication between the mind and the body. The central nervous system sending signals to the brain and spine to tell that part of the anatomy to move, despite it no longer being there.

Commands issued to parts of themselves that were long dead.

His muscles had connected with the explanation long before Drea had finished describing it, with Rhode having experienced the very same thing but in reverse. Despite what he’d endured, his body was still willing. His mind, on the other hand . . . .

It had been so long since he’d called forth his wings that he wasn’t even sure whether he still could. His brothers—sentinel angels who had fallen to the mortal realm in a bid to protect the Empyrean, Heaven’s highest realm, and were now stuck there—had not pushed him in his recovery, a fact he was grateful for despite how heavily it weighed on everyone.

No, only he could push himself to heal, though he doubted such a mundane word could even apply.

Bodies were far easier to mend than minds, and yet he found himself on a roof convincing his scrambled senses that some part of him still remembered how to fly.

Because if he could fly, he could fight. And if he could fight, he could find the demon responsible and pay him back a thousandfold for the lifetimes that had been stolen from him.

For all that had been stolen from him and done to him.

The mechanic’s garage he was perched on wasn’t particularly high, maybe twenty or thirty feet off the ground. The building was a modest automotive shop that serviced the New England tourist town’s residents with basic repair, towing, and oil change options. Two bays. A parking lot with ten spaces. No gas pumps. A sign on the side of the road boasting what Rhode had to guess was a clever play on the word lube . And most suitable for his purposes on that particular evening: operational hours that did not include Sundays.

With the sun having just shuttered its drapes over what was left of the weekend, there was not a single mortal, or well-meaning angel, in sight.

Once again, Rhode had retreated to the solitude that had been his long-constant companion. What he’d fought to escape for so long and what he always found himself coming back to despite the sentinels’ many attempts at reviving that once-affable side of him.

But frozen tundras were frozen for a reason. Permafrost didn’t take a vacation, regardless of whether it wanted to.

Rhode stretched his arms and wings wide. With the moon at his back, the condor-length curtains had taken shape and crept their heavy shadows above his shoulders and farther over the edge of the flat roof until the dark silhouettes of his flight feathers taunted him from the pavement below. He tightened his abdominals, which had strengthened beyond what he’d once known them capable of, and puffed out a soft grunt.

By the mages, his back muscles were tight. Despite the consistent training regimen he’d adhered to, some parts of the body were hard to work when the action they were designed for hadn’t been available to them in some time.

Still, he managed to hold his wings out as wide as he could, relishing the strain. From that high above, the shadows of his wings didn’t look any different than what he’d remembered of them before his captivity.

Before he had turned into a shriveled shell of the seraphim commander he’d once been.

His eyes immediately landed on his wings’ curvature, but surprisingly, he didn’t flinch at what the contours revealed. They were the same. Exactly the same as he remembered them, even the left one, which had always crested just slightly higher than the right.

He swallowed around a thick wad of emotion and squinted through the lightly falling snow. Hell, he was a damned fool if he thought he was prepared for this.

“How do they look exactly the same?” he whispered to the wind, an air of disappointment coloring his words, as if seeing an unrecognizable image of his own shadow would have made his course any clearer.

As if he needed further evidence of the mutilations that had been committed upon him or justification for what he’d do to avenge them.

Before he could think better of it, he whipped his head to the side, lifted his lip in a snarl, and examined the abomination of what was attached to him.

The reflective surface winking back caused a tight fist to curl in his gut. Seraph and sentinel wings had been cast from the prime mages’ pearlescent energy when the races were created. They contained powerful remnants of the Eternal Flame, the source of all light and life in the realms. Once that energy abated and the wings took form, the appendages were soft but strong, swift, brutally sharp, and always efficient.

They were not metal. At least, not his.

The wind picked up and turned from chilly to biting. Almost icy. It was an apropos change to accompany the glacial sheets of feathers that sat shingled and poised for his command. The silky sheen of his natural-born wings was gone, carved away, and mutated into something wholly dark and other.

Yet one more thing that had been taken.

Rhode extended his fingers toward the latest part of him that had also been irrevocably changed. The list, it seemed, was never ending.

Rhode cursed softly under his breath as he brushed his fingertips up and down the smooth rows of metallic feathers. Mages, what he wouldn’t give for a day with no surprises. A day where he could wake up and not discover some new horrible realization about how the body he was in was no longer his own. Or whether there were any parts of him left to recognize at all.

“Metal,” he whispered into the cold night air, his breath fogging against his wings.

He cleared his throat and shifted his feet farther over the lip of the gutter. Then, with a shift of his muscles, he flung his wings high and wide. The movement was quick and comforting, like an old friend waiting to be called into service, albeit armed with a different weapon.

His wings were warm, just like those of Chrome, Tungsten, Titan, and all the other sentinels. Those angels, too, had been altered when they’d fallen to the mortal realm, with metal claiming more than its fair share of who they used to be. And that was before the sentinels had plucked him from hell and enfolded him into an embrace so loving and vibrant he’d likely never find such warmth again.

Except he had, hadn’t he? It was in the very heat of his new wings and the newfound power that pumped furiously through every tightened muscle.

It was a different sort of heat, one that had only been coaxed out of him in the quiet reprieves from Cyro’s . . . attentions. When Rhode’s soiled cell was a blessing because starved solitude meant safety.

Safety and perhaps a certain spark that had been blooming in its vengeful intensity over the past year and a half since his rescue.

Rhode scanned the parking lot below, assessing where to land. Already, his wings were primed and pumping back the early winter’s chill in great gusts around him. Surprisingly, they were neither lighter nor heavier than what he remembered. They just were .

He’d take it, for what choice do he have?

The only vehicle in the parking lot was a hook-and-chain tow truck tucked next to a row of trees that separated the mechanic’s shop from the wooded area fanning out around it. No life. No movement. Not even a dusting of snow yet to cover the ground.

Perfect.

Rhode crouched low and smiled back against the strain in his thighs. It was a welcome, powerful tension that his muscles embraced with open arms. An inaugural flight that would be the final skill he’d have to master anew before his focus would shift and the tides would change. Before he could finally aim his ire in the direction of who deserved it most.

Cyro. The demon ruler. His captor. His current mark.

And soon, the first to feel the full force of Rhode’s true vengeance.

Smiling at what the future promised, he readied himself to leap, to take the first flight since he’d been captured, when a shadowy figure sprang out from among the trees.

Rhode quickly pivoted and sank back on his heels. Shit. Then he recalled his wings and shivered as the metal faded into translucent energy and his wings were reabsorbed into his body.

“No one is supposed to be here,” he ground out as he stared daggers at the intruder down below. “Damn mortals.”

But the figure didn’t keep running across the parking lot as Rhode had hoped. Instead, the person slowed when they reached the edge of the pavement and looked around through the thin veil of snow that had begun to increase. The white winter coat’s hood did a hell of a job staying in place, surprisingly, as its wearer whipped their head in every direction imaginable until finally stalling out on the tow truck.

Rhode had often thought many things about mortal behavior were odd, but living among the sentinels’ mortal mates had taught him to keep those observations to himself. Still, questions were questions, and as he sat hunched on top of the roof, those puppies began to pile up. Engaging with mortals was the literal last thing he had any interest in, but that didn’t mean his curiosity needed to be ignored. Besides, the sooner he learned what was going on down below, the sooner he could get back to throwing himself off a building in the name of recovery.

He was just getting comfortable when the mortal walked back a few paces, then charged at the truck and slammed a shoulder against the driver’s side window.

A single bored brow arched up Rhode’s forehead. “Really?”

Then a sharp cry rang out as the mortal threw their head back and clutched their shoulder. The hood finally fell away, along with what remained of Rhode’s meager interest in the caper. But right as he was about to retreat, riotous golden curls captured his attention as they escaped their confines and settled around the mortal’s shoulders.

Her shoulders.

Whatever curious humor that had glued Rhode in place fled on the next breath when he connected the woman’s actions with the object of her vandalism. “A thief, are you?”

He watched on as the woman, chest heaving, looked around her feet, then picked up a rock, took a few steps back, and heaved the thing at the window.

Rhode leaned forward, becoming more invested than he cared to admit. “That won’t work the way you think it will, though it’s far better than your shoulder.”

The glass didn’t shatter, as he predicted, but then his celestial senses snagged on a curious sound and pulled his ear closer to the scene below. A subtle snap.

“Ah,” he murmured with recognition. The glass had been cracked. Moderate progress, he supposed. She grabbed another rock, aimed at the same fractured point, and threw it again.

Then Rhode’s interest went the way of the dodo. While stealing a vehicle wasn’t exactly petty theft, the act was equally uninspiring. Though he had been living among the mortals for the past year and a half since his rescue and had witnessed many wondrous things, larceny wasn’t one of them. It was one thing for a mortal to steal for survival, to do what they had to do, but this woman? He narrowed his eyes and was immediately—well, he wouldn’t say saddened. Disappointed perhaps, for her clothes were certainly fine enough to suggest that the crime she was engaging in was not one of dire necessity. Crisp blue jeans hugged a well-fed frame, the winter coat’s bright white hue didn’t carry so much as a smudge, and her boots were still nicely soled. Her face was turned away from him, though, but even from behind, her hair boasted a vibrancy that came with easy access to clean water, regular bathing, and sanitary supplies.

“Oh, little miss, stealing is never the answer.”

Should he say something? Do something? Mortals’ affairs were not his. Never were. The mages knew he had other things to occupy his thoughts, even when he so desperately might wish for a reprieve from them.

But this was an active theft by someone who, all things considered, should damn well know better.

The glass had yet to shatter, but the woman kept trying. At this rate, Rhode would be lucky if he could jump off this roof and get a flight in before spring. Still, there was no rush. He had to remind himself of that. Even in his recovery, when his body had pushed past its once-familiar strength into a physical territory Rhode had never explored before, he forced himself to slow down. He was an immortal angel. Time, as had been unfortunately proven, was immaterial. So, if that meant waiting out a thief while the more tender parts of him risked frostbite as he perched on a rooftop during a New England snowfall, then that was what he would do?—

A depressed whine, one barely audible but still ominous, pierced through the quiet winter calm. Every muscle in Rhode’s body tightened with a honed reaction. That tumultuous heat in his core rose up, churning in defense of what the sound meant.

Rhode ducked low and scrambled across the roofline, trying to get a better vantage point of the trees. His stomach bottomed out right as the low hum of vibrations began to build on the scant piercing wail. Then, like clockwork, the dark magic came.

Green lightning lit up the falling snow, providing a shimmering curtain behind which a portal opened and exploded into the night with a roar. One by one, a group of three males—all pale, bald, tattooed with teal and gold swirls, and draped in black tactical gear—filed out. As soon as the last bootheel left the threshold, the portal winked out of existence and a black SUV screeched into the mechanic’s parking lot, blocking the exit. Another three males dressed in the same manner flew out of the doors before the tires stopped rolling and aimed some sort of firearm at the woman, though it didn’t look like any gun Rhode had ever seen. The muzzles gave way to a funnel attachment, with the large end of the cone facing the woman. Then the men took a step forward, and that meager streetlight caught the reflection of two gold bands rimming the males’ throats.

Charmers. Two bands signified them as elite class. Cyro’s warrior demons.

One of the charmers who had come through the portal was running toward the woman but gestured at the closer males with weapons. “Grab her! Grab her now!”

Grab her?

Rhode’s body seized up at the sight of his enemy, even while he struggled to make sense of what was happening. Why would the charmers go after a mortal woman? Had she inadvertently stolen from them? She couldn’t know what they were. That was out of the question. Charmers frequently took the appearances of mortals when interacting with them and were almost indistinguishable from the real deal.

Except for now.

So then why…?

The woman turned back toward the approaching charmers, and whatever questions remained floating in Rhode’s head solidified into cold brutal intentions.

Her shimmering eyes were stretched wide. Nostrils flared. Eyebrows arched. Confident movements from a moment ago had turned stilted.

Fear. This woman was in fear. The signs were etched across every one of her body’s curves and contours, even the ones dimmed by shadows.

She wasn’t a thief. She was a victim. One running for her life from the very demons who’d ruined his.

Rhode rose, retreated a few steps from the lip of the roof, unfurled his wings, and roared. A few running strides later, he was airborne.