“Are you sure you’re ready?” Tajael didn’t like Charlotte’s frown.
“Absolutely. I’ve been gone too long.” She was tucking in her t-shirt then pulling on her shoes. They’d only been in Markos’s Dominion for twenty-four hours, and even though it was his home, it felt like a wondrous alternate reality. One where Charlotte spent every moment in his bed—talking, cuddling, letting him whisper his love for her. Miraculously, she returned that love, even though he couldn’t give her all the things a man should. He couldn’t pleasure her body, but he found he could kiss her forehead with a tenderness that felt it might break his heart—agony and bliss entwined again. He couldn’t offer her sex, but he could give her comfort. Talk away her fears. Hold her hand for encouragement. Bathe her in the words of love that flowed ever more freely the more he used them.
All of it was a miracle he didn’t want to end. Which might happen upon return to the lab.
In Truth, he expected her need for him to wane eventually, no matter what the return to earth entailed. She was a brilliant, vibrant woman. She would want—and would deserve—a man who could give her all the blessings of a mortal life. Sex. Children. Pleasures he could only dream of. That she shared herself with him now… that she freely gave a love he’d never had and never would again… it meant the world to him.
“Are you ready?” she asked, peering at him.
He’d been silent too long, so he gave her a small smile. “In Truth, having to choose between you in my bed and you in your lab… it is only a great act of Charity to the world that I can allow you to return.”
She grinned. “Well, that just means we’ll have to explore my bed. Guaranteed more comfortable, I can tell you that.”
He shook his head, just a little. “You’ll be busy.”
“Not too busy for this.” She leaned up on tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek. They still avoided the lips, but cheeks and foreheads and noses seemed… safe.
“That is a promise I plan to hold you to.” Sweet magic, it would break him when she eventually tired of him.
He reached out his senses to sweep the Dominion and found the others had gone ahead to the lab—nearly Markos’s entire contingent of angelings, plus some on loan from several other angels of light, comprising a force almost a hundred angelings strong, including Markos himself. The plan was to converge on the towers where Charlotte’s lab and apartment were located. They’d tapped the dragons to erect one of their wards around her apartment, keyed for any angeling pledged to Markos, but they couldn’t encase her laboratory in any such magical shielding. Otherwise, her experiments would be futile.
“All right,” Tajael said. “Nearly everyone’s gone ahead, so they should be ready for us. But at the first sign of trouble, I’m pulling you back here.”
“Understood.”
He didn’t think there would be trouble, not at first. He would have heard already had Markos arrived to find chaos in the wake of their previous departure. But two concentrated armies of angelings in Seattle would attract the attention of the shadow realm, even if they hadn’t noticed the ripple through magical space before. But such a show of force should also deter them from attacking. Light and shadow would not be battling for Seattle as a whole. Markos would merely protect two safe harbors within it, carving out territory, so to speak. Tajael would transport her between strongholds, as he should have been doing from the time he first revealed himself.
“All right, then,” he said with a sigh, placing his hand on her shoulder and gently squeezing. “Here we go.”
He twisted, opening a doorway and taking her with him.
They appeared in the hallway of The Pointe, the exact spot in the office from which they left. It appeared empty.
“Where is everyone?” Charlotte whispered.
“Everywhere.” Angelings of light filled the hallways—cloaked, so he couldn’t see them, but he could sense their magical signatures. They also lined the roof, filled the hall outside the office, circled above… shadow angelings could travel into their midst, just as he did, but they’d have a dozen angel blades in their backs the moment they arrived. “Just go to your lab. Do your experiments. Wait… you’ll need new clothes.” He lifted her t-shirt off, ignoring that she was now in her bra alone, and conjured a new one. It said Black holes are where God divided by zero.
She peered down at it. “Ha ha.”
He smiled and brushed back a lock of that gorgeous dark hair, the silky strands he’d been playing with, exploring, for the last twenty-four hours. “I’ll whisper in your ear if I need you to come out for a visit.”
She gave him that smile, the secret one full of meaning and promise that he’d seen blossom on her face in the last day.
It was like a physical pain in his chest when she turned away, heading for the lab. He cloaked and followed, but it wasn’t the same. He was instantly reduced to a shadow. An insubstantial thing that only mimicked a man. There was a hollowness to it that echoed the empty space where she should be—where a full life with her would be if he were capable of it.
He struggled mightily to banish those thoughts and become attentively watchful, as the other angelings must be. They were a dozen shadows, wraiths from the over-dimension, haunting the hallways and guarding humanity’s greatest treasure. And his heart.
“Holy shit!”
“Charlotte!”
“Where have you been?” The last came from Jimmy, and his scowl was as much a fatherly reprimand as anything.
“Hey, guys,” she replied, shuffling her feet a little for dramatic effect. “Sorry, I’ve been sick. Twenty-four-hour flu.”
“Dude, did you turn off your phone?” Tomaz complained. “Jimmy was calling you like every hour. I said you were out getting drunk or, you know, celebrating.” He waggled his eyebrows, which Tajael took as a euphemism for having sex.
“I wish.” She sighed convincingly, which only made Tajael cringe more. “Mostly I threw up until I thought I was going to legit die. Then I pictured Robert picking up my Nobel prize in physics, and I said, No way! Not in this or any other dimension.”
Robert scowled at her. “Typical. Big Wig scientist floats in at the last minute. Wants all the credit.” But he gave her a wink as he brought over the Flash figurine. “We were waiting for you to try this one, Dr. Netherman.”
She took the Flash but frowned. “Wait, have you done more tests while I was gone?”
“Just system checks,” Tomaz said. “Jimmy wouldn’t let us move forward without you.”
“I was a little pre-occupied with finding our physicist.” He stepped up to Charlotte and looked her over. “Are you sure you’re all right? I was ready to call Maxon and have him bring out that small army of private security guys he has.”
“I’m fine.” She nodded for emphasis. “Did you tell Maxon? About the experiment, I mean?”
“I figured you’d want to be the one.” Jimmy smiled.
She grinned. “Well, let’s get back to it. I want more than one successful run on tape before we go to the boss and tell him we’re making his dream come true.”
“All right, then.” Jimmy nodded for her to put the Flash in the machine.
Tajael had already taken his perch above the ring, and now that it had proved successful with the paper crane, he figured they didn’t need him as an invisible shield. It was as good a spot as any for staying out of their way as they scurried around the tight space, and it was tactically a better position. Just in case.
Charlotte placed her Flash figurine in the device. Tajael wondered where the objects really were going, but he supposed it didn’t matter. The immortal realm was vast and formless, just a gray void of magical energy unless one crafted something of it. Markos and his Dominion. The other angels of light had theirs. Each of the shadow angels had their Regiments. And the Winter and Summer Courts had done the same, creating a solid physical oasis out of the pure energy void. Charlotte’s Flash would most likely be out there, somewhere, floating in nothingness for all eternity.
Tajael watched as they spun up the machine and hovered around the monitor, their expressions just as excited as the first time when they sent the folded crane through. Just like before, when Charlotte pressed the imaging button, the object—this time a miniature red-suited man—disappeared. At the same instant, Tajael felt the pulse through magical space, stronger this time, perhaps because a bigger object had been thrust from one realm into the other. He was sure the legion of light angelings filling the hallways and hovering above and around the building felt it too. It meant something, this pulse of energy. Such pulses weren’t generated when angelings or other immortals simply traveled. This was bigger than just moving a small figurine from one realm to another. Just like the treaty renewing, it was a seismic shift in the rules that governed the magical realm. Charlotte was changing something with these experiments, and he didn’t know what or how it would unfold, but he felt the magnitude of it was far greater than the momentary tremor through magical space.
Charlotte and her team were all smiles, winding down the machine and congratulating each other. He saw her peering around the room, and he felt like she must be surreptitiously looking for a sign from him, even though she knew he was cloaked. He stood up from his crouch atop the machine to float down and whisper his congratulations in her ear—
Then an earth-shaking boom knocked him straight off the ring.
Terror seizing him, he fought his way free of the tight space between the machine and the wall he had somehow fallen into. He frantically looked for Charlotte—her whole team was on the floor, knocked down by the same pulse wave that had taken him down.
Charlotte wasn’t moving.
He lurched toward her but was thrown back once again—this time slamming hard enough against the recently-constructed wall he literally went through it.
What in all the heavens— He leaped into the air, and what he saw made his heart seize. Every angeling of light was decloaked and engaged in hand-to-hand battle with a shadow angeling. The office was a chaos of blades flashing and walls smashing and feathers flying. The lab was filled with dark wings, and they were forming a shield—a shield to protect an elegantly tall woman in a dress made of diamonds and snow. Even before he saw the pointed ears, he knew what she was: fae.
Tajael hurled a pulse of energy to keep her from reaching Charlotte, but her black-winged guard blocked it. He surged toward them, drawing his blade. Charlotte was still unconscious on the floor—heaven knew how badly she was injured—but a forest of dark blades bristled and blocked him.
“No!” he screamed in anger, slashing his way toward her, battling off some of the shadow blades, but others bit into his flesh. He couldn’t reach her.
The female fae knelt next to Charlotte, laid a hand on her… and disappeared.
His rage blasted forth in angelsong, buffeting the shadow horde attacking him, but that wasn’t what drove them off. Suddenly, as one entity, they twisted away, leaving as fast as they came, leaving a sole dark angeling behind.
Tajael just stared at him. The vast contingent of Markos’s light angelings lay wounded or hovering in a confused state in the hallways. Charlotte’s crew were still on the floor, scrambling for the door. But Charlotte was gone. The shadowkind got what they came for, leaving this one, madly grinning dark angeling behind… Tajael surged toward him, only to see the bomb at the last second. It sailed through the air and into the ring, where the Flash had been just a minute before. The angeling twisted away, winking out of this reality and safely into another.
Tajael tried to scream a warning, but the blast ripped any cry from his throat as it blew everything apart. He slammed through cubicle walls, pain thrashing him as he tumbled. Sound was gone, for a moment, his ears blasted by it, but they quickly healed. The shadow cuts all over his body would take longer, as would the smoldering feathers and flash burns across half his body. He staggered to standing.
The destruction was unbelievable.
A darkened pit of twisted metal stood where the ring was a moment ago. Everything in the lab was on fire or shattered or both. Angelings were still reeling from the blast, the uninjured coming to the aid of those closest, including Tajael. He waved them off and glimpsed the dazed and confused expressions on the faces of Charlotte’s crew. But they were alive.
And Charlotte was gone.
Markos appeared by his side. “What has—”
“They took her!” Tajael screamed. Where was the angel when he needed him? Why hadn’t he been by Charlotte’s side? Why hadn’t Tajael? There weren’t enough curses in any dimension for the Wrath that had taken hold of him. But it was a pure and righteous anger, born of the chaos and destruction and harm the shadowkind and fae had wrought in mere seconds. Tajael wouldn’t Fall from this anger, but he might slay a whole lot of shadowkind and end up Warrior Class whether he chose to or not.
That mattered not at all.
Markos was surveying the damage when it began to rain on them. Strange umbrellas of water were spraying down, dousing the fires. Tajael just stood under the drenching, his mind reeling. Another angeling hovered up to Markos and said something.
“Yes, make sure they’re safe,” Markos was saying to her.
Tajael’s ears were still ringing slightly. He assumed Markos was referring to Charlotte’s crew. “The fae took her. Winter fae, I’m sure of it, but I didn’t recognize the one who did it.”
“Probably Zephan’s cousin Alvara,” Markos said, coolly. “With Zephan in his magical coma, Alvara has been angling to take his place at the king’s right hand, given he has no other offspring. She would be behind such an attack to complete Zephan’s work of stopping humanity in the technological progress.”
“You knew this!” Tajael’s voice boomed, just below angelsong. “And you said nothing!”
But Markos hardly reacted. “Would it have helped you to know? To disturb your time in becoming acquainted with the soul-bright Ms. Netherman?”
The anger that welled up in Tajael now was the threatening kind. The kind which wanted to throttle Markos for his cool calculations and manipulations. The kind that would send Tajael into shadow. And then he would be useless to Charlotte. That, and only that, pulled him back from the edge.
Markos dispassionately watched him struggle.
“We need to go after her,” Tajael said, his words rough but no longer screaming anger. “If the Winter Fae have her, we should attack—”
“We will not attack the Winter Court.”
“We have to!” Tajael felt his fists might break with how tightly he was squeezing them. He was drenched, and the rain kept coming.
“For one, we are far outnumbered. The Winter Court is prolific in their reproduction.”
“I can’t believe you’re not… you can’t just let them have her! She’s key to everything!”
“Secondly, we have the other scientists. Even the technicians can reproduce her work.”
“What?” Tajael actually took a step back. Markos was abandoning Charlotte outright.
“I know you are greatly attached to her, and it will be a personal loss—”
Tajael took another step back and drew his blade.
Markos’s attention fixated there, then he gave Tajael the coldest look he had ever seen from an angel of light. The kind a Warrior Class angel used when calculating the maximum damage an enemy could bring.
Tajael wasn’t an enemy. And he wasn’t shadow. But there was no magic in any dimension that could keep him from going after Charlotte… and Markos had better not try.
But it was clear Markos would be no help whatsoever.
Tajael didn’t bother explaining, he simply twisted, opened an interdimensional door, and stepped through.