Chapter Fifty-Nine
Angel toppled sideways when the portal transporting her to New York gave a sudden lurch. A buzzing in her ears erupted to life, and vertigo took over. At once, she fell to her knees, unable to even cry out, much less understand what was happening. She shut her eyes tight to try to push the vertigo back, but it was stubborn. She was tempted to use magic to do it, but casting magic from inside a portal was risky business, and she’d already pushed that envelope once with her truncated transport spell.
Shit, maybe that’s what’s wrong, she thought suddenly. Maybe her magic was backfiring, and the universe was punishing her for tossing the laws of physics in the blender and pushing puree.
But when she looked up, she found the colors on the walls were shifting, settling into a whole new set. Angel stared at the new hues. She’d seen those particular colors so often over the last several years, she recognized them at once. The portal was taking her to her apartment.
“What the fuck?” she muttered, trying to get to her feet. She was so unsteady, so off-balance, she immediately fell again, so she closed her eyes and simply waited. There was nothing else for it.
A few seconds later, the portal exit swirled open, and Angel rushed through as quickly as possible, not even stopping to look first before she jumped out. She hit the floor and stayed there on her knees a moment, head down, just trying to get her bearings. She noticed the carpet had been switched out for a new one of the same color. It was soft and plush beneath her hands as she closed her eyes and willed the vertigo to go away.
It rapidly receded, disappearing completely within a few seconds. But then Angel noticed something else was off. She felt tired suddenly. And weak. Light-headed. But it was far too sudden to be her body’s natural reaction to exhaustion or anemia.
And then there was… a certain redolence in the air. She slowly inhaled and caught the scent of leather. And of men’s cologne. Heat flooded her, rapidly chased by ice-cold, as if fingers of frost were scraping along her insides.
She recognized that cologne. Gods help her, she recognized the unique way it blended with the scent of leather and made her head fill with thoughts of night and passion.
But that wasn’t possible. No, it isn’t possible, she insisted.
Unable to stop herself because she was unable to process what she was sensing, Angel slowly lifted her head and looked up.
“Hello Angel.”
The world stopped turning, and Angel’s head filled with the sound of screeching tires, funeral bells, and people crying. She saw the bloody handlebars of a motorcycle, and a crunched fuel tank.
But he was there. Sitting on her couch, legs spread confidently, shoes planted, leather sports coat open to reveal a designer button-up shirt perfectly tailored over muscles even more pronounced than they’d been fifteen years ago. He was there. With his black hair that used to be brown. And his gray eyes that were now so light, they were eerie. And his skin that had once been fair but was even lighter now.
He was different but he was right there in front of her. It was him anyway. Same face, same lips, same strong chin, same undefeatable air.
And he wasn’t alone. Two men stood behind the couch, one to each side of him. Angel had never seen them before, but they watched her with cold, keen eyes.
In the distance, thunder rolled. A storm was coming.
“You haven’t aged a day, you know that?” he said, shaking his handsome head as he casually reclined with his arms stretched over the tops of the couch cushions. His voice had changed too. It was deeper now, and a little more hoarse. Something about it sent a strange vibration over Angel’s nerve endings.
“Of course,” he continued, coming off the couch back to place his elbows on his knees and gaze at her through the tops of his too-light eyes. “I’ve been watching you all this time. So to me, you haven’t changed at all.”
In Angel’s mind, she was trapped in a movie scene. She almost even heard music playing. It was eerie and foreboding, and it colored the scene with all the gothic colors of that impossible culmination in the film that makes the audience gape at the screen, mouths open, voices silent.
Angel fought the unnatural weakness stealing over her and slowly straightened. She found her voice, soft and uncertain though it was. And she spoke his name as if it were a magic word at the ending of a very dark spell.
“Michael.”
He smiled warmly at her. “Damn, how I’ve missed you my love,” he told her, continuing to watch her with those starkly uncanny eyes. They were hungry eyes. She knew it instinctively. “You have no idea how much.”
Michael rose gracefully from the couch and came toward her. He was taller than she remembered him being too…. All Angel could do was straighten enough to sit up a little. The closer he got, the weaker she felt. She dropped her head, tearing her gaze from his. This is a bad dream, she thought. I learned how evil he was and now I’m working this shit out in my head. That’s why I can’t move.
But when he knelt before her and she felt his finger under her chin lifting her head, she knew at once that she was wide awake. Because his touch sent cold fire through her body; it was very real, and it was painful.
She flinched at the sensation, and would have pulled away but he grasped her chin and held her fast. His grip wasn’t hard, just firm, and the contact kept the cold fire coming. She felt like dry ice was filling her veins. Angel exhaled a shaking gasp and asked, “How?”
How are you here? How… and why….
Michael watched her in silence for a while, his expression giving nothing away but the hunger she’d already pegged. Finally, he said, “It’s complicated, sweetheart.” Then he released her and stood. He moved away from her, pacing toward the sliding glass doors that led out onto her tiny balcony. As he put distance between them, the cold fire stopped, and Angel felt strength returning to her limbs.
She straightened further, eventually sitting back on her heels. She tried to think as a warden would, tried to compartmentalize her severe shock and focus on survival.
She was in her apartment, and she knew her apartment. Normally, she would have access to weapons stored throughout the property: Under her couch cushions, inside the fake Bonsai tree on the side table by the love seat, in two of the kitchen cabinets, inside a cheese drawer in the fridge, in the tank behind the toilet, in a shallow alcove behind the above-bed painting in her room, in an unused pair of rain boots in her closet, and so forth.
But if the carpet had recently been replaced, and a clean-up job in general had been arranged by the sovereigns, then most likely all of her personal belongings had been removed and the place had been cleared of all evidence that a warden lived here.
A quick glance at the side table where the Bonsai tree had once been was proof enough of that. The tree was gone.
So she had no weapons.
Michael stopped pacing and slowly turned to face her. She immediately knew when his eyes landed on her; they had an uncomfortable weight to them now that they hadn’t possessed before.
If she wasn’t crazy and she wasn’t dreaming, then Michael Clemens was in her living room. That meant one of two things. He’d either never died and he’d changed. Or he’d died and come back – and he’d changed.
“I meant to do this fifteen years ago,” Michael told her, pulling her eyes to him. “But circumstances being what they were….”
Her heart felt so abused looking at him now. Gods, she had been so in love. His presence was powerful. Michael was a tall, handsome, charismatic man who dressed impeccably and always knew exactly what to do and say. And then there were his talents…. He had exquisite control over both man and machine. He could make them do anything he wanted.
But Angel’s friends back then had been right. She really had acted rashly, she really had fallen too hard and too fast. And as she gazed up at him, she had a feeling she might just know why.
Again, his expression was unreadable. He gave nothing away as he slid his hand into the pocket of his black leather sports coat and pulled something out. It glinted between his nimble fingers. Angel’s heart lurched.
“I remember the look on your face when you thought you’d lost this.” He held it up a little so the light caught the emerald set into it. It was the ring he’d meant to give her that night. The ring she’d worn for almost ten years afterward – and then lost one day when it had fallen off her finger at the department store.
“It never fell off your finger, Angel. You didn’t actually lose it. I took it from you.”