Authors: Carrie Ann Ryan
Wow.
Bitter much?
He
shouldn’t be; he had everything he wanted, didn’t he? His forehead scrunched as
he thought, and his wings fluttered a bit in agitation.
He
certainly had all the money, titles, glory, and privileges a warrior of the
finest caliber could have. Why did he feel like he was missing something?
Shade
shook his head and looked around. He stood at a midpoint on the mountainside,
the enclave circling him. Stone buildings jutted from rock faces, thousands of
feet above the surface, old as time. No stairs or elevators here. Open the door
and, without wings, they’d drop to their death. Marble and crystal twinkled in
the sunlight from the adornments and windows on all of the structures. It may have
looked cold to some, but to Shade and his angelic brethren it was warm and
inviting.
It
looked like home, but it wasn’t truly a ‘home’; There was no love waiting on
the other side of the door, and that pained him.
He
sighed. He really needed to stop thinking such depressing thoughts. Taking one
last look at the place he called home, he jumped off the ledge, his wings
spreading to catch a drift, as the cool breezes hit his skin. He flew past
other angels in the air, nodding to a few, but kept to himself. He was a
warrior angel, the last face some would see as they stared beyond the end of
his blade. Tough to make life-long friends outside of certain circles that way.
Shade
descended, the wind whipping his hair back from his face, until his feet
touched the stone balcony set off the council chambers. He set his wings back,
making sure they didn’t trail on the floor. He was exhausted, but that didn’t
give him a reason to be lazy. He walked through the ornate doors that reached
tall to the roof. Despite his thousand years of living, sometimes the immense
beauty of the council chambers had him at a loss for words.
Gold
and crystal adorned the walls. Intricate carvings and art filled the room. Eons
of pride and talent gave the room a sense of grandeur and honor that made Shade
feel young in relation to the other angels surrounding him.
In
reality, he was the youngest warrior angel of them all, and second in command
to Ambrose, the leader of the warriors, the best at the job. That wasn’t pride
talking, just fact.
Shade
walked to the center of the room and surveyed the five council members before
him, perched high on their thrones, their noses turned up towards him. Another
presence worried him. Ambrose stood off to the side, a frown on his face. What
was happening?
“I
see you have finally decided to grace us with your presence,” Caine, the leader
and all-around pain-in-the ass, admonished, and Shade held in a scowl. The
brown-haired angel lifted a lip as if the mere sight of him disgusted the
ruler.
Shade
bowed his head. “I’m sorry I was late. I had just finished my dealing with the
young angel and needed time to clear my head before I came. I didn’t want to
taint the council with the thoughts and actions of a warrior.” There. That
didn’t sound like sarcasm and distain, did it? Well, maybe it did, but it was
the best he could do. He wasn’t overly happy with Ambrose in the council
chamber. It felt like an ambush.
Caine
snorted and shook his head.
Okay,
apparently he couldn’t quite mask his true feelings. Oh, well.
Shade
didn’t hate the council. He just didn’t like the fact that they held all the
power and didn’t seem to do anything but hand out decrees and punishments that
were enforced by the warriors. There were only three classes of angles: the
council, the warriors, and the others. He didn’t like all the power on the top
that trickled down to nothing, but who was he to speak out of turn?
“Enough
of your pleasantries. We need you here, now,” Striker, the second-in-command,
cut in. Dishwater brown hair and plain features made him look almost human. If
it weren’t for the brown wings coming out of his back, he’d look like a mortal.
Maybe that’s why the angel was always an ass.
“Okay.”
Shade nodded. “What is it that you need?” He once again wondered why Ambrose was
there? Why did they need two warrior angels? Tingles of dread filled his belly.
Had the other faction of angels done something? They hadn’t destroyed the
rebels completely in the war. It was always a cause for trepidation and concern
that the others would come back and start something. Were they on the brink of
another war? He’d not heard anything, but he couldn’t be too sure.
“We
have been alerted to a breach of security,” Caine announced. “Our secrets may
be unraveled soon if this is not fixed.”
“You
mean the secrets of the supernatural?” Shade asked. “How can that be?”
Striker
gave a laugh, filled with bile rather than humor. “You dare ask this when it is
your fault we are in this predicament in the first place?”
Shade
froze. “What?”
“Your
dust.” Striker sneered. “Your oh-so-favorable blue dust has been collected by a
human. If it falls into the wrong hands, do you understand what will happen?
Everything that has been held secret for eons will be lost because you have a
dusting problem.”
Oh,
crap.
As a
child, he’d had a problem with his dust. Whenever he got excited or angry, he’d
sprinkle dust where he flew or stood. Beyond a few occurrences recently, he’d
thought he’d conquered it years ago. How had someone gotten it? Did they even
know what it was?
“I
didn’t know,” Shade whispered.
But
that was a lie. He did know. Just that morning, he’d seen a sprinkle of his
dust flowing on the wind and thought nothing of it.
My
God. What have I done?
“We
know you didn’t,” said Agnes, the sole female member of the council. Her
piercing blue eyes filled with understanding.
Of
all the council members, Shade liked her best.
“But,”
Agnes continued, “you must fix it, Shade. Finish it. Find your dust and reclaim
it before someone finds out what it is. We don’t have the power to wipe the
memories of an incidence such as this from a human’s mind as we once did. The
humans don’t believe anymore. Because they don’t, we’ve lost our ability to
shield ourselves the way we should.”
Shade
nodded, sadness and frustration setting root.
“I
will fix this,” Shade promised. “You have my word.”
The
council nodded and dismissed him. With a glance toward Ambrose, Shade left the
room, his best friend on his heels.
The
two friends didn’t speak once they reached the end of the balcony. They simply jumped
off the edge, their wings catching the wind, and flew toward another
mountaintop. Shade needed time to think. To calculate.
He
was damned fine at his job. Strong and fierce. Yet a childhood problem of
dusting could take down a civilization. He would have laughed at the
ridiculousness of that statement if it hadn’t been true.
They
landed, their feet settling on the soil. Shade looked behind him at the place
he called home. They didn’t live in heaven because they weren’t godly angels, far
from it. He wasn’t even sure there was a heaven beyond their time. Their world
was in the same realm as the humans, but it was tucked away in a pocket of
space between two mountain ranges, hidden from the eyes of the unknown.
A
few raindrops fell from the sky before turning to a slight mist. The other
angels who were at a lower altitude flew to the safety of their homes, the rain
beginning to weigh heavy on their wings. Only the strongest could fly in anything
more than mist, another reason they didn’t live on clouds, as most humans seemed
to believe. One flight through a dense cloud could be dangerous; the moisture seeped
into their feathers and threatened to drag the angel down. Without sufficient
muscular back strength, the angel would plummet.
Most
didn’t. Despite the vast strength they possessed, angels were weak in some
respects.
“Are
you going to stand there in the rain and watch others while everything falls
around you, or are you going to fix this?” Ambrose’s deep voice cut through his
thoughts, and Shade turned toward him.
Tall
with white blond hair pulled back from his pale face in a braid, with white,
almost crystal wings, Ambrose was the light to Shade’s dark. Yet, the colors
masked the personality, for where Shade saw the humor and light in some things,
his best friend was the dark, the edge to the blade. Shade, too, held his own
fury; he just didn’t show it as often.
Dangerous
and agile, his mentor had taught him everything he knew. Shade lowered his head
in shame. He’d failed.
“You
didn’t fail, Shade,” Ambrose whispered.
“I
didn’t say that aloud.” Ambrose was always doing that. He was practically a
mind reader
“You
didn’t have to. We all leave trails of angel dust. You are no different from others
except that you leave greater quantities. It’s not something to be shameful
of.”
“I
beg to differ.”
“It’s
only different this time because it got into the hands of a human. I’m worried
how it got there, which is why I was in the room when you came in.”
Intrigued,
Shade lifted his head. “What are you saying?”
Ambrose
shrugged. “I don’t know yet. Something just seems off to me, but I will work on
finding out.”
“Okay,
what else do you know?”
“Only
that the dust may be in the hands of a woman.”
“A
woman?” Interesting.
The
motorcycle vibrated beneath Shade as he pulled off the side of the road and
parked. The rain pelted him, the cold seeping into his bones, but he shrugged
it off. He was in northern Washington, and this seemed to be the norm in terms
of weather.
He
lifted his leg and got off the bike, ignoring the stares of the women around
him. They watched him stroll, his powerful legs leading to long strides. He’d
tucked his wings into the slits in his back to hide the fact he was an angel,
but he couldn’t hide his face or the fact that women seemed to fawn over it.
It
had been a long time since he had a woman, not since that jaguar shifter a
century or two before on a night of deep depression and loneliness. But the
heat, claws, and desperation had served to fill only a physical need that left
him even lonelier than before. From that moment on, he left his carnal needs up
to his hand. Before the jaguar, it had been even longer, but he didn’t want to
think about her. The one he’d lost. She was long since gone.
Shade
walked into a nearby café, the smells of baked goods and coffee filling his
nose. He ordered a small coffee then went back to sit at a table near the
window so he could watch those who passed by. A male pixie, in human form,
walked in front of the window and nodded toward him. There were so many supernatural
beings hidden from view in the world that Shade couldn’t even count them.
All
humans were diluted forms of supernaturals. For millennia, the supernaturals
had bred with one another and mixed the species until, finally, their powers had
dwindled in most, and they stopped believing in things that came out of fairy
tales. Those with so little non-human blood running their veins that they
seemed ordinary were now called humans, although each had at least something
beyond human lying dormant in their DNA.
Council
did not identify the name of the human who collected the dust, but Ambrose told
Shade it was about to be in the hands of a woman who lived and worked nearby.
Her name was Lily.
Who
was this Lily? Shade wanted to get a look at her. She had the answers. She
possessed the reason behind his shame: his blue dust.
A
woman with expressive emerald-green eyes passed by the window; a slight smile graced
her face, and she had those side-swoopy bangs women loved so much. She was of average
height and held delicious curves. He looked over every inch of her—a small
waist, large, perfect breasts to fit his palms, slightly wide hips that would
serve well when he gripped them, and sexy legs beneath the hem of her brown
coat…
Lily.
That
had to be her. He didn’t know how he knew, but he was sure of it.
His
groin tightened.
She
was human. Not a lick of anything else came from her. Yet, why did he want her
so from just a look? He’d never looked at a human this way before. Why now? Was
it because she might be the one who held his dust?
Lily
stopped under the awning right in front of the window, careful of where she
stepped—
odd
—and brushed the hair out of her eyes, before smiling at a
passerby. She was radiant. Absolutely gorgeous. Shade held back a groan and
shifted uncomfortably in his seat when she bit into her lip. She smiled again
then walked to what must have been her car, got in, and left before Shade even
thought to stand.
Some
warrior he was, completely frozen in shock by his reaction to her. He was,
however, unrepentant. He didn’t want to follow her today anyway. A town small
as this would know of Lily and aide him in his research. If the supernaturals
were revealed, chaos would rain. Humans could feel threatened, start wars, do
untold atrocities when they met with what they didn’t know and therefore
feared. If the supernaturals felt threatened…Shade didn’t want to think about
that. He had to know more before he did anything.