Chapter 3
F lecks of Rhode’s awareness flirted with the familiar bite of excruciating pain. Ever the fighter, for better or worse, his mind still tried to bob to the surface, while his body resigned itself to the agony of torture.
There was something he was leaving behind, though. Something his memory recognized, even through the blanketing acid that sizzled across his skin. Something he didn’t want to leave quite yet. Something curious . . .
He tried to reach for the memory, for whatever it was that felt elementally wrong to abandon, but every time his brain would snag on a loose thread of comprehension, Cyro’s magical warfare would burn hotter, heavier.
Rhode’s body fell away from him then. No sensation, no movement. No pain, even. Just nothing.
He’d never been so lucky, no matter how many times he’d wished for the prime mages to grant him oblivion. It was fitting, he supposed, that now, when something was gnawing at him, a clue finally offered after eons of searching, it was snatched away like any great danger should be.
And then it all came rushing back to him a thousandfold. Searing light flared behind his closed eyelids. A gentle weight pressed into his chest, molding against him, bringing with it the faint aroma of hyssop, freshly tilled earth, and life .
The fire that exploded on its heels incinerated it all. Through the din that erupted around him, he heard muffled shouts of “Grab her!” and “Off! Now!” Then a different sort of pain roiled through him, one that both burned for and cried out against the weight being lifted off him. A sharper pain filled in the depression left by that comforting heaviness, instead tumbling within his core and dispersing throughout every muscle in his body. Limbs stiffened, balls tightened, and teeth gnashed together as the brilliant white light receded bit by bit, leaving healthy skin and tissue and awesome power in its wake.
Flames. Blue electric flames exploded from his core and arced down every part of his body. He could feel them, but . . . not. There was no longer heat, nor any scorching pain. There was only power. Power he’d solely witnessed in battles long ago but never wielded himself.
Angel fire.
“Back up. Everyone back the fuck up right now ! Jesus Christ, how is this happening?”
As soon as Rhode registered the speaker’s voice, the fire around him retreated, shuttling into a ball of banked embers deep within his soul’s depths.
“Chrome?” Rhode whispered hoarsely.
“Right here, brother. I’m right here.” Strong arms gripped him behind his back and gently sat him upright. On any other day in the life of an Empyrean warrior, the picture that solidified around him would have made perfect sense. Piles of dead charmer ashes turning cold enough to gather a thin layer of snow. His sentinel brethren solid and hale, fresh from a victory.
What had yet to make sense was the breathy inhale of the woman standing next to a tow truck.
“I didn’t know you had wings,” she said through a stifled sob.
Then his body nearly exploded again.
Never had he seen such breathtaking abundance as what stood before him. From the rooftop, he’d only been able to make out bits and pieces of the thief. The bare-bones basics afforded by any aerial view. But up close?
She was a blessed bounty.
A vibrantly coiled corona of gold spun down to her elbows, only parting from her full breasts in so far as to hug them, framing them as an offering beneath a bed of cashmere that extended past her generous hips. Her hands were balled up into worried fists beneath her delicate chin, which quivered slightly, likely from the cold, for the outerwear he’d first spied her in sat in a heap on top of him.
The past few minutes came back to him in a rush. The attempted robbery. The charmers. Nets firing from cannons. The woman trapped, lashing out beneath the mesh. The pain. The fire.
Her scent.
And then a collection of words that made some semblance of sense on their own but none whatsoever in the context of who had spoken them. I didn’t know you had wings.
Rhode tossed her coat aside, shrugged off Chrome’s hold, and then, much to the angel’s colorful protestations, got to his feet. Iron and Steel, two of the other sentinels, stepped forward, a shared concern passing across their tense features.
Instantly, Rhode’s stomach seized up, and he fought against the familiar disdain that always threatened to pull him under whenever he saw those expressions painted on his kin’s faces. Damn, how he hated those looks. Hated them ever since he’d been plucked from Cyro’s grotto and thrown into a different sort of hell. They were looks of limitless possibilities and resources, kinship and community, renewed purpose and responsibility.
All things one had little use for when they’d been robbed of as much as he had been. And yet, there they were, stoic reminders baked into the forms of his loyal brethren who looked at him through the lens of their singular shocked and shared emotion: hurt.
Rhode tried to clear away the sentiments that had gathered in his throat and silently pleaded to four different sets of eyes for any explanations for what had just happened to him. He’d do far better to get answers to his own questions first than face the painful ones poised behind everybody’s lips.
Steel was the first to step forward and flicked a discerning gaze between the woman and Rhode. “You two know each other?”
“No—” Rhode answered.
“Kinda—” the woman responded over him.
Rhode pinned her with a warning. “Do not tell tales with these men. You will not like the outcome.”
“I-I’m not. I wouldn’t,” she rushed to clarify. “I just mean that I didn’t know you with wings.”
“You didn’t know me with?—”
“Wings. That makes the boatload of us, apparently.” A simmering crackle disrupted the night’s stillness and ushered in the earthy sweetness of Chrome’s choice Nicaraguan cigar. After the angel took a drag and freed the blue smoke to dance with the snow, he circled the butt end at Rhode and threw all his misguided authority into the gesture. “Just when in the hell were you going to tell us that you’ve been able to call out your wings again? Was this a recent development or did you figure it out somewhere around month six or so but concluded it was none of our damn business, so what the hell, you’d just keep your mouth shut about it for another fucking year?”
Rhode gritted his teeth. “I am not discussing this right now,” he seethed, then curled his fingers and caged them to gesture over his exposed chest. “What I want to know is what the hell just happened to me!”
Steel’s icy glare softened with concern. “You called forth angel fire.”
“Impossible!” Rhode slashed his hand through the air.
“Yes, it should be,” he acknowledged, dragging a hand through his short blond hair and shaking his head. “But it happened regardless.” Then his frosty stare settled on the woman with a questing sort of sadness.
Her soft voice rose up among those of the arguing angels. “What was that white light?” Honeyed eyes flicked to Rhode. “What happened when I touched you?”
He paused in his seething just long enough to eye her in disbelief. “You . . . you touched me?”
She nodded. “When you were”—she lowered her gaze and squeezed her fists beneath her chin again—“dying, I think. Parts of you were crumbling away. Whole patches of skin were turning to rust and just flaking off you like you were an old car bumper or something. I didn’t know what to do. Your friend screamed at me to get off you, but when he pulled me away, I lost my balance and fell forward.” When she lifted her eyes again, a silent sincerity lit her features with a desperate honesty that would have made his heart smile once upon a time.
Now, it only made his soul scream.
“I landed on your chest, and that’s when the white pulsing light flared out. I felt it. In here.” She tapped the collar of her sweater, which was just high enough to force his eyes away from what had commanded his attention earlier.
So that had been her. The soft weight he’d felt blanketing him, molding him back together in some elemental way. That was what his soul had thrown itself at as whatever it was had stitched him back together. That delicious heaviness was the anchor that the roaring parts of him had been able to cling to as the rest of his body felt like it was being melted down into new molecules with a new mission.
Rhode shook his head in abject bewilderment.
Then a plume of smoke wafted across his periphery. “Lot of people I know would have begun leaking out of both ends and turned tail if they saw a man start losing chunks of himself like that, yet you’re still here.” Chrome narrowed his eyes at the woman and shifted the cigar to the other side of his mouth. “Why aren’t you running, lady?”
“And I’d like to know just how you know so much about him.” Iron adjusted a leather bracer and tightened his fist on the handle of his mace.
Steel spread his arms out in a placating motion. “Easy, guys. Look, it’s clear we all have questions?—”
Rhode’s kamas were out and under Chrome’s and Iron’s throats before either of them had taken their next inhale. The cigar tumbled from Chrome’s mouth, while some of the hairs on Iron’s beard separated at the root and slid down the curve of Rhode’s blade. He couldn’t say what propelled him to act, if only that not acting, even against his own, was like a strike against his soul. Rhode growled into the angels’ faces. “No threats. You hear me? You will not threaten her.”
“Oh?” Chrome barked, sticking his neck out closer against the bite of the blade. Molten metallic flames swirled in his former intelligence master’s eyes. “Does that mean you’re happy to threaten us? You finally feeling up to talking to us after almost dying ?”
“I had no say in this night!”
“Bullshit. You had a say, you just chose to keep your mouth shut. Every fucking night since I pulled you out of that grotto, you’ve had a choice. And I’ve given you your space, dammit, because it was my fault you were taken in the first place.” A heavy silence settled over the parking lot but did nothing to quell the rage amplifying the moment. “I thought you needed time. I knew you had stuff to work through, and I thought that as long as I gave you time, however much you required, that you’d eventually come and find me. Trust in me again. But instead, I pick up on the scent of charmers, follow it here, and what do I see? My former seraphim commander, who barely looks me in the eye anymore, let alone talks to me, slicing up the enemy with his wings out, blades out, like the past year and a half just didn’t happen. Like I hadn’t been begging Drea, my own fucking soul bond, to lie to me and tell me that everything will be okay with you, with us. That tomorrow would be the day you’d finally talk to me about what Cyro did, because I don’t believe for a second you don’t remember.”
“Cyro? You know him?”
If any words in the mortal realm could have broken through the rage coating Rhode’s vision, those were it. All four angels turned toward the woman in unison as Rhode lowered his blades.
“What do you know of that name?” he asked.
Those golden eyes of hers widened, but thank the blessed mages, she still answered him. “He’s my sire.”
And his fists promptly hardened around his weapons once more.
Chrome coughed in disbelief. “Come again?”
“My sire,” she repeated.
Steel and Rhode stood there, mouths agape.
Then Iron shook his head, his motions jerky, and extended a finger toward her. “Then you’re?—”
“A charmer.”