Drake of Tanith (Chosen Soul) (28 page)

He watched the little girl from where he stood in the shadows between two buildings across the street from the park. His keen blue-eyed gaze missed nothing. Angel knew that he was well aware of who the black-haired girl was.

She was Eleanore Granger, an archess. She was the first of four. And she was still a child.

However, despite her tender age, she was both powerful and priceless. A fact she proceeded to prove when the light beneath her palms spread until it engulfed the fallen child’s unmoving body. A few moments later, the light once more disappeared and little Eleanore rocked back on her heels, clearly spent. Her hair hung around her lovely face, wisps of it moving with every soft exhale.

Beside her, the fallen girl shifted where she’d landed in the dirt. After opening her eyes and looking around, she sat up. A quiet exchange passed between the two children. Eleanore Granger shook her head. The little girl who had been mortally injured felt her cheek with dusty fingers and then smiled. Her laughter drifted across the dried grass and dirt of the playground to where Angel stood beneath a willow tree near the parking lot.

From where he had been watching in the shadows, the Adarian general smiled as well. Angel watched as he then turned toward the darkness behind him and slipped into it, vanishing from sight.

Angel let him go. She was under no misconceptions that Abraxos intended to pursue the archess. As a child, Eleanore wasn’t nearly as powerful as she would be once her powers had been given a chance to grow, so most likely he would be back later – in the years to come – to make his move. The archess had something he desperately wanted. In fact, she had just demonstrated it in healing her young friend. That healing power was something Abraxos had desired for a long time. Angel was also well aware of the fact that the Adarian general was strong enough, powerful enough, and resourceful enough that there was a good chance he might succeed in whatever plan he hatched between now and then. However, Angel didn’t intend to try and stop him.

She couldn’t – for so many reasons. And, at that very moment, she had more immediate fish to fry.

The Adarian hadn’t been the only one watching Eleanore heal her playmate. Angel could feel the second creature’s essence like a kind of thick, sluggish slime in the air. She wondered whether the Adarian had noticed it as well. Probably not. He’d been rapt with Eleanore, caught in the pull of her like a moth to a flame.

The Icaran had more than likely gone utterly unnoticed by Abraxos. But not by Angel.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” she whispered into the breeze, her eyes scanning the sky and tree tops for any physical sign of the supernatural creature. Icarans were notorious for being found lurking, slinking and sulking anywhere that magic was being used. The fresher the magic, the newer the user, the hungrier and more eager the Icaran. Also known simply and rather derogatorily as Leeches, Icarans fed off of magic, absorbing the essence of a magical being to the point of death – either the victim’s death or the Icaran’s. A Leech often couldn’t prevent itself from continuing to feed, caught in the frenzy of orgasmic pleasure the magic afforded, until finally he exploded.

It was never a pretty sight. Luckily, they were relatively incorporeal creatures, existing on the outskirts of human dimension, and when they went
pop
, the mess they left behind went unnoticed by all but those with supernatural abilities of their own.

Angel went still as the air around her shifted and something unpleasant brushed the edges of her consciousness. The Icaran had been closer than she’d thought.

“Thissss one’s miiiine,” a voice hissed nearby. It was a whisper like wind through reeds and it echoed around her as if by magic. It made sense; you are what you eat. Icarans were chalk full of magic.

Angel concentrated, honing her senses until the world around her became one of stark contrasts between what was magical and what was not.
There
, she thought as she zeroed in on the creature’s location where he crouched on the lower branch of a neighboring tree. He was no longer watching Angel. He must have recognized her as out of his league. But the child…. She was so tender and young and vulnerable – and
delicious
.

“Poor, delusional little Leech,” Angel taunted softly, her gaze slicing through the no-longer-invisible being. His head snapped up and he looked at her, leveling her with a strange and slightly surprised cat-like gaze. “You’ve bitten off more than you can chew this time,” she told him, shaking her head ever so slightly.

The Icaran bared his teeth, a glowing, neon-white maw, razor-sharp and deadly. They were good for ripping magic from a person’s body and chewing it to smithereens before swallowing. This particular set of choppers still bore the residual “blood” of the being he had last devoured. Magic always glowed. Angel supposed it was slightly less disgusting than a mouth full of entrail bits. But it was foreboding, all the same.

“You’re quite the little piggy, aren’t you?” she asked as she left the shelter of the willow and paced toward the neighboring tree and its perched beast. Eleanore Granger and her friend didn’t notice her. Almost no one noticed Angel if she didn’t want them to. “Best be careful, Leech,” she warned softly. “Or you’ll paint the sidewalk with your insides before night fall.”

“Sssstaayy out of thisssss,” the Icaran warned, his razor-sharp claws curling around the branch beneath him. His coal-black skin shifted over the bones and muscle of his body, slithering as if composed of tar or oil. A wall of stench slammed into Angel and she barely managed not to let it stop her in her tracks. It smelled like death, but of a different kind. It was the odor of a hundred eaten magical spirits, taken and digested as no more than food.

It was a warning. And Angel blatantly ignored it.

The Icaran was aware of it the moment she was going to attack. The beast was built on magic, and it sensed the swell of that power within Angel just before she unleashed it upon him. He dove for the young archess, leaping from the lower branch of the tree like a massive black, hairless cat. But he wasn’t fast enough.

Angel had been fighting creatures like him for a very long time.

It took only moments for her to finish him off. When it was over, she cleaned up the mess using more of the substantial power she possessed. And then she stood still on the sidewalk and watched as Eleanore Granger’s parents arrived on the scene. They gathered their daughter and made their way to their car. They’d been in this situation before; they were well aware of the special nature of their daughter’s abilities. Angel could feel their worry, their fear, and their sense of urgency. But they knew what to do.

For now, the young archess would be safe.

For now.

Always Angel is currently available in eBook-only format at most eBook retailers.

Please read on for a sneak peek at the first full-length novel in the Lost Angels series by Heather Killough-Walden, Avenger’s Angel….

They were there for a signing. The movie
Comeuppance
had been such a hit with vampire fans around the world, it had been turned into a book – and then a
series
of books – and cast members from the movie were signing autographs in bookstores across the globe. It was late in the afternoon and Uriel’s signing as “Christopher Daniels,” the actor who had played Jonathan Brakes, the gorgeous vampire in Comeuppance, was about to begin.

They’d pulled up to the back of the bookstore in order to prepare. Across from him in the back of the limousine sat Max, Uriel’s manager. He was also Uriel’s guardian – and guardian to his three brothers, Michael, Gabriel and Azrael. Max was good at the job; he was an ace at donning the multitude of different hats it took to deal with four very strong male spirits in an ever changing world.

Just as Max was reaching his hand through the break in the separation glass to signal to the driver that they were ready to go to the front of the store and meet Daniels’s fans, a harsh shrieking sound drew Uriel’s attention to the limousine windows.

His vivid green eyes grew very wide. “Is that what I think it is?”

“
I’m afraid so,” Gillihan replied.

“
They’re blocking the exit,” Uriel said, his tone laced with shock. A throng of teenage girls had amassed on the Tarmac that ran around the side of the bookstore and were racing toward the limousine at break-neck speed.

There was no time to formulate a plan. He could either stay inside the car indefinitely and wait for the cops, or he could escape from the car and run.
Fast.

Uriel threw open the door of the limousine and bolted out of the backseat. Behind him, he heard Max calling, but he ignored the guardian and headed directly for the bookstore.

Later, and in retrospect, he would realize that heading
toward
the bookstore instead of
away
from it was, at the very least, a bizarre decision. Especially considering that the slew of fans now racing toward him like a medieval village mob was coming from said store.

However, there was little thought involved. The girls were coming around the corner from the front of the store, which gave him a clear shot at the back door. It was mostly instinct that propelled Uriel across the lot to the locked back exit of the establishment. And it was superhuman strength that then allowed him to wrench the door open against the lock and rush inside.

He sensed that the alarm wanted to go off. He used his powers to silence it and pulled the door shut behind him, making sure to yank it in tight enough that it warped a little and held.

The girls outside reached it just as it shut and their fists pounded furiously on the metal of the barred exit. They were getting soaked out there. He was more than a little damp himself.

He wondered if they were also hurting one another as they shoved toward the door. He sincerely hoped not. But whatever was happening, the sheer number of them suggested that the door wouldn’t hold for long. All they had to do was work together and it would come open.

Uriel passed the restrooms on his left and strode toward the science fiction section of the store just beyond the exit foyer. There, he stopped and grimaced. Another mass of girls, nearly as large as the first, was grouped around the front of the store. There must have been a hundred of them. . . . Maybe more.

The door behind him creaked and then scraped.

Uriel thought fast and ducked into the women’s restroom. Once inside, he closed his eyes, pressed his back to the wall beside the door, and listened. The exit door of the bookstore gave way beyond and he could hear the group of girls rush into the hallway. They raced by, their Converses squeaking with rain water on the linoleum tile.

“
You have to memorize a script to act, and the movie you starred in was also turned into a book, so I assumed that you could read.”

Uriel’s eyes flew open to find a woman and a little girl standing a few feet away, beside the door of the first stall.

“
I was obviously wrong,” she continued. “Because you’ve mistaken the women’s restroom for the ridiculously famous sex symbol restroom—which is next door.”

Uriel’s heart stopped beating. His jaw dropped open.

He couldn’t be seeing what he was seeing in that moment. He
couldn’t
be feeling what he was feeling. Not now. Not here, in a
bathroom
—after two thousand years. Maybe he’d slipped in the rain outside and hit his head.

No, that was impossible. He was relatively invincible. Being hit on the head would do nothing to him but make him a little cranky.

She was really standing there before him. She was real; he could see her, hear her—he could even smell her. She smelled like shampoo and soap and lavender.

Jesus,
he thought, unable to refrain from letting his gaze drop down her body and back up again. She was everything that he had ever imagined she would be, from her tall, slim body to her long jet-black hair, and those indigo blue eyes the color of a Milky Way night. Her skin was like porcelain. Her lips were plump and pink and framed perfect, white teeth. She was an
angel
.

She was his archess. And she was . . .
scowling
at him?

He frowned.

The door to the bathroom had shut firmly behind Christopher Daniels, and he clearly had heard what she’d said, but he still just stood there like he was frozen and Eleanore could not figure out why. “Mr. Daniels, is there something I can help you with?” Eleanore asked.

She had to admit to herself that when Daniels had first entered the women’s restroom, she’d been taken completely and utterly by surprise. First of all, he was even more handsome in real life than he was in his plethora of press photos. And that wasn’t supposed to be the case at all. Wasn’t there supposed to be loads and loads of makeup involved? Tricks of the light? In real life, didn’t actors have acne and scars and wrinkles and undyed roots for miles?

In real life, an actor’s eyes didn’t seem to
glow
the way they did in the movies. But Christopher Daniels’s eyes did. It was nearly eerie, they were so intense. They instantly called to mind the dreams she’d had of him. It was always his eyes she saw just before she woke up. All of the pictures he had plastered across the nation didn’t do them justice. His eyes were the color of arctic icebergs, so very, very light green that they seemed . . . more than human. They were incredibly beautiful.