Concrete Savior
Authors: Yvonne Navarro
Brynna held her closed fingers in Eran’s direction, then unfurled them one by one. His mouth snapped shut at the sight of the two-inch flames dancing at the ends of each fingertip. Brynna turned her hand and the flames shaped into a single, sizzling red ball. With a twist of her wrist, she smothered it in her palm.
They stared at each other for a long time without saying anything, then Eran inhaled and nodded. “I’ve never had to deal with the kinds of things you’re talking about. It’s hard enough to handle this reality, and now I’m being forced to accept that it’s really a whole lot worse than I thought it was because there’s some kind of magic in it, angels and demons and creatures that can do things that if I really want to be honest, I probably can’t do a damned thing to stop. Is it really that hard to understand why I’d want
not
to believe?”
Brynna lifted her chin and thought about it for a second. “No, I suppose not. On the other hand, not thinking about it, not
accepting
it, isn’t going to make it go away. It’s my fault, Eran. I’m the one who brings all this into your existence, just because I’m here. If I had gone on my way—”
“Don’t go there, Brynna—don’t you do that. You’ve saved lives, helped people in bad situations, brought hope to folks who thought things could never get any better . . .”
Brynna stared at the floor and didn’t reply. Everything was so complicated now. She hadn’t exactly thought finding redemption on Earth would be easy, but she hadn’t expected it to be so hard, either.
Highborn
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Copyright © 2011 by Yvonne Navarro
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Designed by Jacquelynne Hudson
Cover illustration by Craig White
ISBN 978-1-4391-9197-2
ISBN 978-1-4391-9198-9 (ebook)
My Dad, Martin Cochran
Just because . . .
cknowledgments
Thank you to:
Weston Ochse . . . always
Martin Cochran
Wayne Allen Sallee
Paula Guran
Colleen Lindsey
Peter Rubie
GAK
Robert Myers
ontents
rologue
A
lthough the world outside
her window was washed in summer and sunshine, her soul was soaked in blackness as she stood at the window and thought about her husband’s hands.
They were larger than hers, and roughened by work and sports. He liked to get together with his friends and play softball, football, basketball, or just horse around, and it was stereotypically male the way he could fix a leaking pipe or change a flat tire—which was how they’d met two years ago—or take down the guy with the football in a bone-crushing tackle. There was, however, nothing conventional about the way he made her feel when he touched her; the surfaces of his fingers might look like weathered sandpaper but they felt like hot silk as they slid over her skin. He thrilled her body, but he also touched her heart in a way no one else had ever been able to accomplish. She could almost feel him touching now, but it wasn’t in a good way.
No, not in a good way at all.
She had planned to be all but unpacked by now. Last Saturday they should have had the last of the boxes from the other place taped, packed, and loaded into the back of some rattling rental truck that would have overheated had they tried using the air-conditioning. She should have been happy and laughing, dripping with sweat as she sat in Chicago’s August traffic even as one of those enormous sweet Italian lemon ices from a street vendor chilled the space between her knees while the love of her life threatened the driver in front of them with hilarious, nonsensical curses.
Instead, she was staring out the living room window but seeing nothing but the image of her husband’s hands flickering in front of her eyes. It was sort of like when she’d had too much to drink; her teetering thoughts would struggle to focus on something for a few seconds and everything in her brain would center around that as her vision literally blanked out for a second or two. She didn’t know if that happened to other people, but it was a given for her if she went much over two glasses of red wine. She’d always found it funny and vaguely fascinating—the chemistry and effects of alcohol—but only because she seldom drank that much unless she was safely at home.
There was nothing amusing about it now. She didn’t want to be thinking about her husband’s hands, or trying to concentrate on how they felt or looked or smelled when they were in the shower together and he cupped her face with soap-covered fingers and kissed her on the lips. She wanted to
feel
his hands. See them. Lick his warm fingertips, flick the edges of his fingernails with her own just because it annoyed him.