Chapter Forty-Two
Pull yourself together, Angel.
She could feel the sponge-like squishiness of the soaked carpet beneath her boot. And she could feel control slipping away from her. She knew her magic was going with it, but she barely cared.
You need to care. You might have to heal someone else tonight!
Everything that had happened in the last few days, even the last few weeks, was closing in on her now. The culminating last straw was the red and the darkness that now made up the furniture of her apartment living room. And something was fracturing inside her, the bending pressure fueled by the impossibility of Dmitri’s return.
Damn it, Angel. She gritted her teeth.
But she was a warden. And for fifteen years, she had trained herself to deal with pain and loss. She’d been taught to handle blood and death. She’d been schooled in moving past the red and the darkness – for moments exactly like this one.
So when the fracturing inside her grew too prevalent and she heard something vital inside begin to crack, she pooled all of her remaining will and forced herself to do two simple things.
Inhale. Exhale.
Just those two things, nothing more.
She breathed. Sometimes it was all you could do. But fortunately it was often the only thing necessary.
With the new breaths came new focus, and Angel’s mind began to clear. In that blessing of clarity, she was able to think, and to care. She reached out for her magic, and her magic at once turned, spinning around her like a protective blanket, waiting at her beck and call. She drew it completely back in and tamped it down. There wasn’t as much of it as she would have liked, but it was better than nothing.
Then she looked up at Gabriel. She knew he had only wanted to protect her by sending those men to her apartment. But this time, his male ego and ultimately, his lack of faith in her abilities, had gone too far.
“I’m not the one to forgive you,” she told him in response to his plea. Her tone was still seething, but her voice was a good deal softer now. “They are.” She couldn’t look at the two men still hanging from the ceiling. She wouldn’t. But he understood her all the same.
He slowly lowered his arms. After a tense moment, a flash of painful emotion crossed his amber eyes and he nodded. Then he seemed to contemplate her in silence for a long, careful time.
She recognized that look. Despite her defiance, despite these deaths, despite how angry she was with him, he was still the Vega clan leader, and his natural position was one of power. So she knew damn well that while he scrutinized her, he was trying to formulate a plan. The expert chess player trying to see move after move into the future.
But he was at a disadvantage this time. He didn’t know anything about Dmitri’s offer. He couldn’t see the other player’s moves. And she intended to keep it that way. She wasn’t going to let anyone else be destroyed by the man who was for some unknown reason obsessed with her. Not when there was something so simple she could do to prevent it.
“Gabriel,” she said evenly, calmly, “I’m going to go down that hall to the bedroom. I’m going to pack a few things in a travel bag. And then I’m going to go back to the Fairmont. I agreed to meet Jake there tomorrow morning anyway.” It was surreal to talk about this while they stood in stains of red and two men hung from the ceiling nearby. But that was training for you.
“Jake allowed me on the Apex case. We’re officially working it together, so even though we now know who the Apex is… Jake needs to be brought up to speed.”
A deal was a deal. She promised she would include him.
Gabriel lifted his chin a little, just a touch, and light sliced across his eyes. Angel was suddenly glad she’d taken the time to tuck Jake’s pendant under her shirt so no one could see it. She had a feeling it wouldn’t help smooth things over with Gabriel right now.
Even so, she expected him to do something cock-headed in that moment, like ask her if she’d traded her body for permission to work the case. But he didn’t. Of course he didn’t. He was a man, not a little boy. Instead he said, “You do realize Dmitri’s last two victims are now in Vega territory.”
Angel blinked as that truth washed over her.
Hudson and Daniels. The two men hanging dead behind her were Dmitri’s latest victims. Technically, Gabriel was right. The job was no longer Jake’s. It was Gabe’s.
Angel’s blood began to heat up again in her veins. He was only stating the facts the way the sovereigns would see it, but her body still automatically prepared for a fight. As if Gabriel could tell this was the wrong route to take with her right now, he held up his hand in placation. “But I happen to agree with you. You should return to the Fairmont.” He took a deep breath and sighed, his eyes never leaving hers. “You’ll be safer there.”
It seemed hard for him to admit it. And honestly, she wondered why it was even true. Why would Cain’s penthouse suite at a hotel be safer than the Vega clan house with its plethora of wards, not to mention wardens milling around it at all hours?
Maybe because Dmitri has already proven he can eat through wardens like a kid and Halloween candy, she thought. But it doesn’t matter. The important thing was that he was agreeing with her, which meant she would soon be seeing Jake again.
The offer Dmitri had made to her spun like a spider’s web in her mind. She knew she couldn’t avoid it, and she knew by now that she couldn’t avoid him. She knew she would be seeing him again. The moment he’d made his offer and its promise, Angel had already made her decision.
The truth was, Angel wasn’t particularly attached to the idea of being human. It hadn’t done a whole lot for her, in all honesty. It had given her cancer. It had taken her parents from her. It made people grow old, get sick, and die. Being human meant having to watch your weight and having to sleep. It meant losing teeth and not having them grow back. It meant being physically weak and physically slow – comparatively speaking. And most of the time, it meant being ugly. God, humans were ugly. Again, comparatively speaking. But in her opinion, that was in comparison to pretty much everything else. A human had nothing on a wolf or a cat. Hell, a human had nothing on a tree frog.
Angel had always felt that being a warden was a double-edged sword. She killed what wardens collectively called monsters. But in her opinion, she’d never met a monster who could hold a candle to the evil in a human being’s soul. She’d seen what happens every day to women in Sudan and The Congo. The witch trials? The Inquisition? Humans were creative in their wrongness. Frankly, Dante’s Inferno was lacking. And that was the one thing she didn’t like about being a warden.
So she wasn’t all that fond of being human, when it came down to it.
Angel was going to give herself to Dmitri. If it meant he would never kill anyone ever again – if it meant sparing clan members, friends, and family – she would hand herself over to him and end this hellish game of cat and mouse once and for all. Let him turn her. Most of her no longer even cared.
But if she was going to do that, there was only one thing in the universe she wanted to do beforehand. She wanted to spend one final night with Jake.
Angel had only been in love once before in her life. And even that had felt different than this. She’d always felt that when she’d fallen for Michael, it had been really fast, surprisingly so. But even that whirlwind romance that nearly ended in marriage was somehow… weaker than what she felt with Jake. It paled in comparison.
She felt ashamed to admit as much, especially given Michael was dead, and because of her. It felt as if she were being unjust to his memory. Unfair and disrespectful. But no one could dictate their own emotions. And when she thought of Jake, her mind melted. Wanting to be with him was a scorching, inexplicable form of surrender deep, deep inside, as if he’d introduced her by a baptism of fire to the world of love.
Love. That was just it, she knew it. She really did love Jacob Crow.
And at the moment, he was the only thing in the world Angel wanted. In the hurricane of blood and death and uncertainty that had become her life, she was surprised to find that the most stable, most comforting, and safest place she could imagine was in the cage of a biker vampire’s arms.
One more night. That was all she asked.
She nodded her consent to Gabriel and looked away, unable to meet his gaze any longer.
“Get your things together and I’ll make a few phone calls,” Gabe told her as he pulled his phone from the inside pocket of his jacket. “No doubt the police were alerted when your gun went off. The sovereigns will want to arrange a clean up.”
Gabriel had obviously seen the bullet holes in the wall – and she didn’t fail to see him shoot a slightly mystified glance at the scimitar sticking out of her fridge.
Angel left her clan leader alone in a room that ironically now more closely resembled a room in the Overlook Hotel than ever, and made her way down the hall to pack her things.