CHAPTER THREE

Tamatsu would have recognized her anywhere—Noelle, as she was called now. Her garb was refined and there was artificial color on her face. Feminine, he supposed, but not the woman he’d known so long ago.

As he peered through the coffee shop window from across the street, he was flooded with the familiar warring feelings of shame and anger and fascination. Feelings angels shouldn’t have been so susceptible to, but he was Fallen. He’d evoked his own misery by indulging himself with human experiences. He’d wanted to feel, and he’d ached in countless ways ever since he’d turned his back on the heavenly host.

He was supposed to have been stronger, but a woman with a wicked smile and an adventurous spirit had both figuratively and literally forced him to his knees. She’d made him forget reason. Logic hadn’t mattered, because they’d been in love.

Or so he’d thought.

Maybe he hadn’t understood love after all.

At Tito’s prearranged signal of shaking out a napkin and rubbing his right cheek, Tamatsu moved into the shadows to wait.

The charming demigod was, apparently, having difficulties warming her up. Tamatsu had feared that. Tito was universally liked. He made people comfortable. If he couldn’t coordinate a meeting, Tamatsu didn’t know what else he could do except to take his chances and sneak up on her, hoping she didn’t use any more harmful magic on him. He could teleport her to her queen, but that wouldn’t have been fair for Cinnia—who’d finally grown comfortable in her isolation—or for him.

Touching Noelle again would stir hungers that were best left slumbering.

“This might take a while, man,” Tito had warned. He’d wanted a way of letting Tamatsu know how the meeting was progressing and whether he needed to approach her in some other way. A deal was a deal and he’d finally found both Cinnia and Noelle, but the fae were notoriously treacherous. She would never renege on a deal, but she could make him wait to fulfill her end.

He didn’t have time to wait. Thousands of lives hung in the balance. If he didn’t intervene, people along the Mississippi River were likely about to experience the most devastating flood event of their lives, and there was no storm on the forecast to explain the disaster. But weather wasn’t always a natural phenomenon. When minor deities flexed their muscles in what amounted to a supernatural pissing contest, mankind suffered.

This time, the collective weather gods were facing off. Tamatsu’s informant—a friend and wind goddess—had steered him toward their gathering in Ohio. They were getting ready—resting up in advance of the weekend’s events, and there wasn’t anything Tamatsu could do to stop them. They saw the challenge as a necessary thing, meant to root out the weakest of them for culling.

Tamatsu had five days to intervene. Perhaps six.

There were no other creatures with abilities like his willing to interfere. Minor gods tended to be petty, and interference often meant retribution would come later.

Tamatsu couldn’t stop the games or the rain that would come, but he could manipulate the river and shunt some of the water away, in a manner that humans wouldn’t be suspicious of—if he had his voice. He couldn’t speak angeltongue without it.

He paced in the shadows, giving his tensed wing joints quick rolls. The meeting shouldn’t have gone on for so long. It was just a business transaction. She’d give Tamatsu back his voice—and thus the power inside it—and he’d tell her where her long-absent queen was.

Then they’d go their separate ways.

Tito had stared at Tamatsu long and hard before the trip as if trying to read his story on his face, to find any clue that there was more at stake than a deal.

Of course there was. His pride was continuously at stake. He’d endured eight hundred years of shame amongst his kindred. He’d had to have others speak for him, if there was anything worth saying at all.

He was a weakened Fallen one—a punch line to a cruel joke that had never been funny.

Disrespected.

He wasn’t concerned with where she went or what she did when they were done. She could find some other angel to fuck over for all he cared. The woman had made perfectly clear how she’d felt. The fact she’d wasted a little of the major magic she had left on stunning a powerful angel was proof.

• • •

Noelle flung the remnants of her pen into her bag and pulled some air through her teeth.

Damn.

Jenny would be so disappointed. She’d spent good money on that engraved gold pen. They’d swapped Beltane mementos some years back, just for the hell of it, and Noelle valued all the trinkets from her friend of a millennium. She was the only friend she had from “back then.” Finding Jenny in eighteenth-century London had been a balm Noelle had needed during a particularly bleak time in her life. She’d been empty and apathetic. Self-medicating with whatever she could swallow. Jenny was happiness personified, and she’d given Noelle a purpose.

She distracted her when Noelle had most needed distraction.

“So, you’ll meet with him?” Mr. Perez asked, pulling Noelle free of her mental wanderings. “You can name the time and the place, and we’ll get him there.”

Eight hundred years of anger, and not a day went by that she didn’t think about how happy they’d been before what he’d done.

“Fae people don’t break oaths, so I’ll go to see if he’s held up his end. Beyond that, all bets are off.” She would do whatever was necessary to feel some peace again—to feel like she had before they’d met.

“What did he do to you?” December asked.

The question was so unexpected that the words didn’t quite land right in Noelle’s brain at first.

What did he do, not what did you do.

She looked up at the pretty young woman and pondered a dignified response. Noelle had a tendency to come across as brash and strident, and December didn’t know her well enough to not take the tone personally. Massaging her throbbing temple, Noelle grimaced. “You would think that a creature as old as I am would be better at knowing which men to stay away from, right?”

“I’m not one to judge.”

Noelle stared at the gel polish on her nails as she pondered words, but couldn’t speak any of the ones she wanted to. Her life story wasn’t meant for a stranger’s ears, even if the stranger had kind eyes and wrung her hands with worry.

The couple stared silently at her for a minute, maybe.

Furrowing his brow, Tito fidgeted with the rim of his coffee lid. “I feel like I’m shooting into the dark here.”

She didn’t know what to tell him, and she wasn’t the kind of woman who’d pretend otherwise.

He turned his hands over in concession and pulled in a long breath. “Okay. Where should we send him to meet you?”

She flexed her grip around her tote straps. “I’ll come to him. I need time to get my head on straight. If I were to approach him in my current mood, there might not be much of him left.” He might have been one of the most powerful creatures on the planet, but she was creative and had righteousness on her side.

She pushed back her seat and stood, and so did the Perezes.

They made their way to the door, and Tito held it open. Apparently, chivalry wasn’t completely dead.

Noelle pushed her sunglasses onto her nose as they stepped outside into the blinding sunshine. Only in the past few years had she been able to step into the light without cringing. Until the past couple of decades, she’d resided in far murkier cities. The sun was hell on her pasty white skin.

“So, where do you live?” Noelle asked them. She poised her thumb over her phone screen ready to take a note for Jenny. “I’ll book a flight.”

“Western New Mexico,” Tito said, “but you’ll have to fly into Albuquerque and then drive the rest of the way unless you’ve got a personal plane. If so, you can attempt to land at the tiny municipal airport. Gotta call ahead, though. Dude’s not always there. There isn’t shit out there, which is why folks like me live in the middle of nowhere in the first place.”

Noelle tapped

into her phone’s memo app. “What’s the name of the town?”

“Maria. GPS should get you there pretty reliably, and there’s only one motel there. Trust me that you won’t get lost finding the place.”

“Watch out for the coyote shifters, though,” December murmured, cheeks turning an impressive shade of fuchsia.

There was probably a story there, and Noelle had likely heard a similar one before.

“Trust me,” she said. “I don’t need to be warned about them.” She put her phone away before she could accidentally squeeze the device into a pile of useless glass and metal.

Tito nodded and took December’s hand. “So, when can we expect you? Within … the week, you think? Can we lock down the timeline?”

Noelle laughed drily. He’d been coached by someone who knew the fae, and that was obvious.

“No games, Mr. Perez. I won’t draw this out. If he knows where my queen is, I want to see her sooner than later.” For all she knew, though, she’d need some extra time to get her head screwed on straight for the interaction. She couldn’t kill Tamatsu. Killing angels, even the Fallen ones, wasn’t easy for a less evolved creature such as herself to do, but instincts would compel her to try. Her DNA told her to eliminate threats to her wellbeing, and he was that. He was a threat simply by living and breathing, because she hurt. She wanted to make him hurt, too.

December pointed discreetly toward the corner, but Noelle didn’t have to turn to look.

She’d always known that she couldn’t outrun her figurative demons forever, and there they were—suddenly circling around her and stabbing her repeatedly with blades of inadequacy. She should have been enough for him, but hadn’t been.

She could feel the familiar prickles of proximity on the side of her face—the same ones she’d always felt when people she knew were nearby, but stronger. He’d been with her—he’d been inside her. He wasn’t some random encounter.

And there went that damned constriction of her chest—the drowning of her heart and lungs in her fear and anger. “Tethering,” elves called it because they were metaphysically bound to their mates, but the term obviously carried more than one meaning. She felt tied, and the bindings constricted even more when she tried to run away.

But she couldn’t get closer. Even if her body would feel better from her doing so, her spirit would still be crushed.

She turned on her soft, floppy heel and stomped toward her office. She couldn’t engage him. Not yet.

Unfortunately, she didn’t get far. Her new pal Gus stepped outside of the coffee shop, braying like a donkey at joke she hadn’t heard.

She didn’t know if the sound of his asshole voice triggered her or if the look on his asshole face did the job, but suddenly, her hand was around his to-go cup. And then somehow, the remnants of the coffee concoction were dripping down his mirrored sunglasses and into the goatee framing his puckered mouth.

He stood frozen with his drink staining his garish orange, flower-print shirt and mouth hanging open in shock.

His friend cleared his throat, opened his mouth and—looking at Noelle—seemed to think better of saying anything.

Gus wasn’t so smart. “You bi—”

She pressed a hand to his throat and shook her head.

He coughed and shaped his tongue and lips, but no voice came out of his throat.

She whispered, “I can keep you like that, you know. I doubt anyone would care. You’ll go through life mute and people will pity you, at least until they figure out that what you’re not saying doesn’t matter because you’re still a festering pile of garbage.”

His friend took a big step away, eyes hugely round. He was afraid of her, and he was smart to be.

Noelle generally avoided using magic around humans, but there was no one else watching, except the Perezes and that other mute asshole. She figured they could use a reminder about who she was, too. Far too often, people underestimated her.

Gus scratched at her hand. His sunglasses slid down his nose, and up close, she could see the terror in his eyes.

She was glad he was terrified. He’d misjudged her. He saw her as small and female. He saw her as an inconvenience or someone who was trying to use what she was to get something she didn’t deserve.

And all she’d done was opened a phone app and prepaid for a coffee order in the exact way the overworked baristas preferred. That small act of timesaving was threatening to him, somehow, because it gave her an “advantage” over him.

She scoffed and pulled back her hand. “You know what? You’re not worth the trouble.”

Drawing her magic back into herself, she shook out the prickles in her hand. “Get the hell away from me. If I see you again, I’m snatching your voice back, and I’m not going to hold onto it, either. I’ll let your voice go, and there’s no magic in the world that can retrieve it from where it lands.”

Brow furrowed, he rubbed his neck, cleared his throat, and started walking away with his friend. They glanced back at her, likely confused as to what had transpired, but they wouldn’t remember. Within a few minutes, they’d wonder why Gus had coffee on his shirt. Perhaps Gus would be a little more terrified of women of a certain height, without knowing why.

She risked one glance toward the Perezes and regretted doing so. Not because December looked so appalled, but because Tamatsu was standing so close.

And she couldn’t help but to look. Just like she had eight hundred years ago in Japan, she took him in her sights and marveled at the beauty of him.

He was the same angel who’d chased away her nightmares when she slept atop him. The same one who’d patiently listened to her prattling on endlessly about elves he didn’t know and didn’t care about.

The same one who’d asked her in a whisper two days after they’d met, “Could you love me?”

She’d been floored by the question, because it should have been obvious to him that she could have. She would never stop.

He didn’t look like he loved her back, though. He was giving her a cold, dark, emotionless stare that said, “I don’t give a shit.”

She started walking.

Of course he doesn’t.

That was why she’d taken his voice in the first place.