Chapter Fifty-Seven
As Angel moved through the safe house, she found she was alone. The safe house was empty, or at least the main areas were abandoned right now. Given that Gabriel had been called in on a job for the Phantom King, she wasn’t surprised. When the clan leaders were called in personally, it meant the job was a difficult one. So he’d probably taken everyone on duty with him. Everyone but her, of course.
She was passing by the door to Gabriel’s office when something inside caught her eye. The door was open, and on his desk was a red folder.
There was nothing particularly suspicious about a red folder; she’d seen plenty in her warden career. They were folders containing confidential information, which either the clan leader or both the leader and the second-in-command, and sometimes the clan messenger, were allowed eyes on. But for some reason, this one drew Angel’s attention.
Without realizing it, Angel touched the bear claw hanging from her neck, and stepped into the office. She closed the door behind her. Then she made her way to the desk and peered down at the red folder.
There were a few others on top of it; it stuck out from beneath them at an angle as if someone had accidentally bumped it in a hurry, or it would have been safely tucked in and invisible. Angel reached down and lifted it out. When she did, she saw the letters in black on the front. “C:LO” They stood for Confidential: Leader Only.
She was going to put it back in the pile and forget about it until she caught the name typed on the label that was taped to the tab.
Michael Clemens
Angel froze. A strange numbness crept through her, and her ears began to ring. In her mind’s eye, she saw blood. She heard sirens. She saw coffins being lowered into the ground.
With shaking fingers, Angel opened the file. A photograph of Michael was pinned to a stack of documents. The picture had been taken from a distance, and Michael hadn’t been aware of it. It was a voyeuristic photograph, probably one taken in a series that were snapped in quick succession. She had a clear view of him in profile as he was preparing to mount his motorcycle.
He was tall, athletically built, and handsome, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket. But as Angel gazed down at the photograph, she felt strange. There was something wrong.
For fifteen years, she’d been remembering Michael with a certain expression on his face. It was calm, easy-going, peaceful. Benevolent, even.
The man in this photograph, however, looked hard. Unrelenting. Mean.
Angel’s stomach began to knot. She had a bad feeling, heavy and sinking. As the ringing in her ears grew louder, she sat in Gabriel’s chair and began to read.
With each line and every truth she uncovered, Angel fell a little further down.
By the time she’d finished, her hands were shaking so badly, she could barely hold the file steady enough to read. She stood up from the chair, slipped the file back where she’d gotten it from, and calmly turned away from the desk.
Well that just cinches it, doesn’t it? It turns out the human was the bad guy all along.
And I was blind to it.
And then she broke.
A roar of pain-filled rage climbed up from some place deep inside and ripped itself from Angel’s throat with a vengeance. She threw back her head and screamed, and only then did she realize that her cheeks were already wet with tears.
The world turned red – actually red – as she spun back toward the desk and swept her arm violently across it, sending every single file on it flying. They crashed to the ground or against the wall, papers fluttering wildly like injured birds. A second scream of rage let itself loose, coming from some place she couldn’t seem to close off, couldn’t seem to control. Her fury was in charge now, and she was just along for the violent, shocking ride.
The door to Gabriel’s office crashed in behind her, and vaguely, far too distantly, she felt strong arms pull her against a hard chest. The impact got partly through the haze of anger spinning its thick, white web around her. But it was Jake grabbing her face, forcing her to look at him, and saying her name that finally broke through to the other side.
“Angel! Look at me!”
“Fifteen years, Jake,” she said, her voice shaking uncontrollably. “He took fifteen years of my life.”
Fifteen years… a decade and a half, not including the six months she’d spent actually dating Michael, she had absolutely wasted. She’d been ripped apart by guilt and grief at his death, she’d taught herself to mistrust and hate the supernatural for killing him, and she’d hidden herself away and shied from dating and men in general. She’d even stopped riding! And she’d always loved riding!
She’d lost the best years of her life. Kind of like Cassiana. But without a marriage or kids to show for it. Instead, they were just gone. Poof – Keyser Söze style.
“See…” she said, her teeth clenched, her hands gripping his arms, “this is what I hate about my job.”
Jacob was quiet and strong above her where they stood in the center of Gabriel’s office. He held her tight, his beautiful eyes searching her face, and she could feel him trying to get in, coming up against the well-built walls of her mental wards. She knew he didn’t understand what was happening. But she couldn’t care. She felt too lost, too maddened and incensed at the sand Michael Clemens had stolen from her hour glass.
“What do you hate about your job, Angel?” Jake finally asked calmly. She loved it when he said her name. It was like he was noticing that she was the only female left alive on the planet and he was marking her as his.
But the thrill of it passed too quickly this time, and Angel sighed an awful, soul-deep sigh that trembled as if she was sitting on a fault line.
There had been a point of no return, a line drawn somewhere in her head, and in that moment she was effectively pushed over it. She stumbled across that border and gave in to the consequences with something akin to relief – and a whole lot of fire.
“You really want to know?” she asked, ripping suddenly from his grip and spinning around to pace several feet away. She kept from looking at him. She was putting distance between them. Because he was too potent, too beautiful. His mere presence could very well deny her this storm, and it had been a long time building. She wanted it. She needed it.
Emotion flooded her, sending the words hurtling from her mouth before she had any hope in hell of stopping them. She turned in pacing circles and kept her eyes down as she hissed, “I hate that every single day, I come face to face with so-called monsters I have to hunt down and destroy, not because they’re monsters, but because they’re suddenly behaving like humans!” She paused, trying to get her breathing under control before she hissed, “Like Michael.”
She stormed over, picked up his file from where it had flown across the room in her fit of fury, and held it up for Jake to see. Only then, when she whirled to face him, did she notice that his hair was wet, and he was dressed only in a pair of jeans.
Oh fuck, she thought.
But he wasn’t looking at her, so he probably didn’t notice the way her mouth dropped open and her eyes glassed over at the sight of him. Instead, he was looking at the file she held up in her hands. As if he was reading it.
Holy shit, she realized. He actually is reading it. He was a vampire, and they had excellent vision, even at a great distance. He could probably see every single word on that page as if it were right in front of his nose. And the look on his face was dark. Very dark indeed.
Angel turned from Jake to the papers. Her eyes fell on the picture of Michael. She looked at his hands, hands that had held her down and pleasured her. She looked at his arms, arms that had held her close. Those lips that had pressed so passionately to hers… and those eyes. Those vivid gray eyes that reminded her of thunderheads when he was angry, and fog when he was at peace. Every time she’d turn to look at him, it seemed he’d already been looking at her. He’d been so attentive to her, always there, always watching.
Angel’s body trembled furiously. She blinked and frowned as realization after realization washed over her, threatening to drown her like a Nazare Beach wave over a fledgling surfer.
Michael was always there. And that was just it. It was strange. Now that she had the clarity of mind to actually consider it, she realized that Michael had always watched over her. To an obsessive degree.
“Oh hell….” she muttered, hopelessly lost. “All my guy friends told me I fell for him too fast. That it wasn’t like me. I was too level-headed to behave that way. But all my girlfriends were jealous. They told me I was lucky. And I agreed. He was everything I wanted in a man.”
A strange sound escaped her throat, a sound of desperate regret, the kind you only experienced after having done something you could never take back but would forever wish you could.
Michael Clemens had tricked her, fooled her, reeled her in, and betrayed everything she believed in. He’d made a business out of evil, and he’d carried it out as if it were a work-a-day world kind of profession. According to his file, he’d been detached about it, he’d separated it from his personal life psychopathically. Cold at work, hot with her. And she’d been none the wiser.
A chill anchored itself in her body, and she shivered before she said in a tone of dismay, “If some supe from one of the Thirteen Realms dares to get jealous, or get angry, or loses their cool, then it’s supposed to be some sort of monstrosity, some kind of inhumane act – but nothing could be further from the truth, Jake!”
She shook the paper in her hand, squeezing it so tight that Michael’s picture crumpled in her fist. “There’s nothing inhumane about it! Because being evil is human! It’s so very, disgustingly human!”
She spun around, pacing back away from the messy pile of papers on the floor. Something very painful was taking place inside her. It made her want to move, or she was going to explode. When she paced back again, she growled, “Humans take more lives on this planet than anything! We wage wars so fast and for such stupid reasons, it’s like we’re bored without it! There has never been a time on earth when someone wasn’t fighting someone else! We cut down life like we’re mowing the lawn! And we think we have to police non-humans? For the love of the gods, Jake, that’s so wrong! And that’s what I hate about my job!”
She was gasping with emotion now, but she was a runaway train. There was no stopping her, and there was no return ticket. “I hate that what I do reminds me that deep down inside, I’m actually the worst of the worst. I’m a cockroach killing butterflies!” A trembling breath released from the core of her, and she was devastated to hear that it was a sob.
She fell to her knees amidst the debris. But now, she couldn’t stop. “Aw hell, that’s mean to cockroaches!”
She sobbed a few times, then breathed around her tears, and her soft trembling voice said, “I trust the kings and queens I’m sworn to serve, I take their jobs, and I do it to protect humanity from everyone and everything else. But the reasoning is all wrong.” She shook her head, closing her eyes. “It’s twisted… because humanity doesn’t deserve protecting.”
She raised her hands, grasped Michael’s pages at either end, and ripped them in half. Then she ripped them in half again. And again.
By the time she was finished and had let them drop, she noticed that Jake was standing directly in front of her. She lifted her head and looked way up.
Jake’s green eyes were glowing. “He didn’t deserve your love,” he told her softly but fiercely. He was terribly beautiful just then. A fallen angel. So very fallen.
Angel dropped her head. And then, as silent tears began to pour down her face Jake knelt down, straddled her knees with his, and pulled her firmly into his arms.