Angel Unleashed

Hadn’t she dispensed with the last person who tried?

In order to provide this guy with his next canvas she’d have to take off her shirt. Predicting his reaction to the sight of the multitude of scars covering her body was a no-brainer. Very little space wasn’t crowded by the grid of crisscrossed white raised lines. Tat Guy would be fascinated by the old wounds and he’d be nosey, but the stories those grids told were none of his business or anyone else’s.

She wished they weren’t hers.

“Almost there,” he said to her while dabbing at the girl’s ankle with a cloth—a benign little bear on a girl’s youthful, otherwise unblemished skin.

What would this pubescent girl say if she were to witness Avery’s roadmap of scar tissue and the two deep six-inch grooves edging her spine? Humans were squeamish about marred flesh. Other species reacted differently. Werewolves, in particular, got turned on by battle scars and displayed them like jewelry.

So, if exhibiting or touching her old wounds was blasphemy of the highest order and against the rules, why was she chancing this?

She was here because it was her one shot, a last-ditch effort, at soul healing. If this artist could cover the two large wounds on her back with a design that would make her feel like her old self, maybe she’d regain some semblance of balance and a small modicum of peace.

That ever-elusive peace...

The transformation of something ugly into something better, at least superficially, would be an accomplishment terribly long overdue, and one less freakish thing to contend with in the long stretch of unending years to come...if she didn’t find what she had come to London to find.

“You still there?” the guy asked, speaking to her.

There was no need to answer him. He was acutely aware of her. She could feel how badly he wanted to take a closer look. The air between them vibrated with that need. He was struggling to keep his attention on the ankle in front of him, and eagerly awaiting the girl’s departure.

This was the reason she had to be so bloody careful. The uncanny attraction all humans felt when they saw her was due to the light of the Divine still being there...in her face, her body and her hair. Though the light had dimmed considerably over the years, there was no way to mask what was left of it completely. Throughout time, mortals had been mesmerized by its vibrant energy and lingering afterglow.

“Calm the hell down,” she silently sent to the guy to dim his growing interest. He obeyed that directive the way most humans did when she messed with their minds. She’d have to erase this guy’s thoughts completely once they were done.

Running a hand along the edge of the sleek metal counter’s iron and tin compounds served to sharpen her focus by making her fingertips burn. She blew on them, more for sport than comfort, long practiced in dealing with forbidden metals.

“Two minutes,” the artist announced.

Two minutes, and then what? Avery asked herself. Peace actually would descend? Did she actually expect that kind of outcome?

Sound...

Jolted by a sudden lash of nerve burn that instantly heated her face, Avery turned to the door.

“I will wait.”

A voice had seeped under the crack.

“I will be waiting for you.”

“Son of a...” Striding to the door, Avery rested her hand on the wood. She had been right. Someone was out there. Not just anyone, either. Somebody powerful enough to reach her with a threatening call.

All she had to do was open this door to find out who it was.

Or not.

The flush of volcanic heat and the staccato uptick in her pulse that followed that call paved the way for a streak of fiery intuition. Only one kind of presence in the world had the ability to affect her like this. Seven things, actually...which meant that one of Castle Broceliande’s Blood Knights was somewhere nearby. And he had found her.

Fired-up nerve endings were tingling en masse. Avery stifled wicked four-letter oaths. Imagining she could stride through the shadows of this city undetected had been foolish. London had always been overrun by monsters. At least one of those Knights could potentially have been on guard, protecting the city’s humans from things that went bump in the night.

While she...

She was a sitting duck in this small enclosed space, if she had indeed been made by one of them.

Damn Blood Knights.

Guardians. Overseers. Monster killers. That’s what the dangerous Seven had become. Seven physically perfect specimens of immortal manhood had been created to be as much like her as possible, and their Makers had outdone themselves. Due to their skill with alchemic machinations, the Blood Knights existed unchallenged to this day by any who stood against them—immortals unable to die by any normal means. Immortals unknowingly built on a foundation of pain.

Still, despite the agony the creation of the Knights had caused her, Avery yearned for their company with every fiber of her being, and always had. They alone, out of anyone on Earth, would come the closest to understanding her, and yet could never be allowed to. Misplaced longings for them were never to be addressed. Urges like want and need had to remain tucked inside her. Only when her mission had been fulfilled would she be strong enough to get what she required from them.

“I know you’re there, Knight. Leave here. Leave me. Honor my wishes.”

“What did you say?” The tattoo artist asked.

Hell, had she spoken those words aloud?

“Have you changed your mind?” he queried.

“No change,” Avery replied.

“Good. All done here.” To the girl in the chair, he said, “You remember what I told you about how to take care of this, right?”

The girl nodded and slid to her feet, careful to avoid putting too much pressure on her foot right away. She winced as she rolled down the hem of her jeans. After pulling on her jacket, she headed for the door without looking back.

“Will you look at that. No thank you at all,” the artist muttered. “Good thing she paid up front, but what’s the world coming to?”

Standing, he turned, careful to avoid meeting Avery’s eyes. “Now, what do you have in mind?”

“Wings,” she said.

Speaking the word produced a flutter deep inside her chest.

The guy nodded. He would have noted the husky voice she had taken decades to perfect and the slim, leather-encased body only partially hidden by the black leather hoodie. He had to be wondering about the sunglasses.

To his credit, he merely said, “Wings are popular.”

His eyes roamed over her—not in a sexual way, but as a painter might look for the best angle with which to fully see a model’s potential. Almost strictly business now that her silent directive had calmed him down.

“Lower back?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Upper.”

That disclosure interested him. His eyebrows quirked. “Shoulders?”

“A full span.”

His gaze shifted to the counter. “I can do up a design for you or show you some pictures so I can see what you have in mind.”

“No need. I can sketch what I’m looking for if you have a pencil and paper handy.”

Avery wasn’t sure which of the two beings in this room would be affected the most when she bared her skin for the needles. Her nerves were like white-hot pulses whispering along over-strung wires.

There was also the question of whether that Blood Knight outside would leave her alone, and if the ward she had set up at the door would protect her.

“Here.” She was handed paper and a blue felt-tipped pen. “Have a go at what you mean.”

Pen in hand, she began to draw from memory a rendering of the tattoo she wanted. Tonight’s session would actually be an act of camouflage, using art and color to disguise the ridges left over from where the real pair of wings had been cruelly cut from her back.

She was going to replace one set of wings with another.

Each stroke of her pen across the paper intensified the chest flutter. Tension balled in her stomach. How long would the Knight give her before figuring those protective wards out?

The artist nodded at the image she had drawn. “I can do this. When would you like to start?”

“Now.”

His shaggy-haired head shook. “This will take a long time. Two or three sessions, at least.”

Avery pulled out a wad of folded one-hundred dollar bills and laid them on the counter. “Now,” she repeated.

He looked at the money and back to her. “No one can handle all this ink at one time, not to mention the discomfort of so much coverage. That design will reach from shoulder to shoulder?”

“All the way across. And I’ll manage.”

He shook his head again. “I’m sorry...”

His voice trailed off because she had removed the sunglasses and lowered her hood...to give him a first look, a glimpse, a mere inkling of what one of God’s angels who had fallen to the Earth centuries ago, and stayed, looked like.

The poor sod’s wheeze of surprise was audible, but he quickly got hold of himself with a little mental nudge from her bag of tricks. He hadn’t asked any of the questions that had been crowding the tip of his tongue. She also had put a damper on that.

Following him to the back room of the shop, Avery glanced twice more at the front door. Wary, dealing with the craziness of being trapped, she knew that she had only postponed getting caught with her pants down by one of the only beings on Earth who knew what to do about it.

That damn Blood Knight.

Whichever one it turned out to be.

Chapter 3

Rhys’s anticipation had spread like wildfire. Nevertheless, he had to be careful.

At this late hour, people were coming and going, passing the entrance to the alley where he now stood. Predators of the horror movie kind hadn’t yet made an appearance, but for them the night was young.

It was 2:00 a.m.

She hadn’t come out of the tattoo parlor.

He couldn’t imagine what she was doing in there. To be touched by needles would mean exposure. An immortal’s blood would be a hefty giveaway of details no immortal could afford to let slip. His blood was black. Possibly hers was, too.

Rhys pushed off the wall he’d been leaning against, patience wearing thin.

“Time’s up,” he announced.

Three strides brought him close enough to the shop’s front door to feel the buzz of electricity outlining it. The trespassing vixen had set up a defensive ward.

“You did hear me, then,” he muttered.

Lips moving with a silent incantation, Rhys shattered the barrier she’d set in place and yanked the door open.

“Nice try,” he said aloud. “But I’m no amateur.”

Inside the shop, he waved off the burly man coming toward him from a back room with a muttered command. The female he sought wasn’t anywhere in sight, and yet her scent, already embedded in his lungs, led him to where she hid.

All those plans about what he would say to her fizzled when he stopped in the doorway of that back room. As if he’d been slammed by a battering ram, his breath hitched.

She was there, sitting on a cot with her back to him, naked from the waist up. Never once had he witnessed anything quite like this. Like her.

The woman on that bench was completely colorless. Pale to the point of being ghostly. White skin. Hair the color of freshly fallen snow. She was painfully thin, but also incredibly graceful in the way her angles converged. Slender shoulders sloped toward a spine where each bone stood out from the lean muscles surrounding it, as if they were pearls on a string.

Ethereal was the word that came to Rhys with that first glance. And breathtaking. She was also flawed. Damaged. That, too, was startling. Whitened scars covered her back and arms. Old scars, and plenty of them, proved that she had suffered abuse and had been hurt badly in the past.

She had come for tattoos. Those new tats were vivid, red and raw, adding an overlay of color that contrasted greatly with her skin. She’d chosen wings. Dark blue, light blue and gray feathers with blood-red tips spanned from one of her shoulders to the other, expertly filled in. The result was spectacular.

Rhys stared intently at this incredible apparition.

Strands of her white hair—long, straight, shiny—cascaded over one of her shoulders to partially cover the right side of the tattoo. Both shoulders quaked slightly, not from cold, but as if the violence of the needles used to create the wings had affected her. Her emotional turmoil was discernible from where he stood.

Although she was aware of him, the graceful creature on that cot didn’t turn around. Maybe she waited for him to make the first move. Unfortunately, that move didn’t include any of the demands he had planned on using for getting to the root of who she was and what she was up to. What bubbled up from him instead was a show of sympathy.

“Bloody hell,” he whispered hoarsely. “What have you done?”

* * *

Pain sliced through Avery’s back as her muscles stabilized; pain reminiscent of another time, only infinitely tamer by comparison and much more civilized.

She didn’t have time to try out the feel of her surrogate wings or catch her breath. He was here in the doorway, his reflection clear in the mirror across from her. Him. Not just any Blood Knight, but the one she had secretly coveted from among the Seven. The Knight she wasn’t ever supposed to see in person, face-to-face, was less than five feet away, leaving her breathless.

There was no mistaking this creature for any normal mortal male. No chance in hell. His incredibly handsome, aquiline-featured face had Blood Knight chiseled all over it.

There was no use trying to play dumb, either, when they were both far from the classification of mortal and knew it.

“What have you done?” he asked again, the deepness of his voice sending shockwaves of familiarity through Avery.

His question seemed intimate, spoken as if he knew her well and cared about what she did, when neither of those things was true. He hadn’t known she existed until this moment. She had promised herself things would stay that way until she found the right time to change it.

Slowly, and without answering the impertinent query, Avery reached for her shirt.

“You’ve been hurt,” he said.

It was too late to ask how he had found her, and the answer wouldn’t have helped. Like often called to like, and she had gotten too close. But the effect his presence had on her was as unwelcome as he was. Icy shivers crept up the back of her neck. Her insides churned. Blood Knights had been designed to lure the eye and tempt the soul, and angels weren’t immune to those things because those seven Knights carried in their souls some beauty of the heavens.

Get out! Avery wanted to shout, studying his image in the mirror. I don’t have time for this.

As handsome as these Knights had been as mortal men, their famous features had been further enhanced by the grace of the renewed blood in their veins and the importance of their golden Quest. They were, however, ignorant of the fact that some of the immortal blood pulsing through all of them had been hers, unwillingly shared. And that, like a butterfly, she had been captured, ensnared in a net.

This magnificent Knight was muscled, honed, taut, elegant and rugged in equal measures. He stood well over six feet tall, his appearance formidable in every sense of the word. An aura of crackling power surrounded him, announcing that this was a man who had broken from his mortal bonds by stepping into another realm of existence.

He spoke again. “Are you all right?”

His throaty voice sounded like a sweep of crushed velvet, and affected her more than she’d care to let on. They were measuring each other, and she needed time to calculate what might happen next.

She had seen this Blood Knight many times in the past, and always with the same kind of gut-clenching reaction. Frozen in the body of a twenty-something-year-old, he had matured since his inception. His face was more chiseled than she remembered. Bright blue expressive eyes were alight with a worldly, intelligent gleam.

She knew those features well.

In that doorway, too close for comfort, stood the sun-kissed immortal with golden streaks of light in his mane of brown hair whose piercing gaze usually saw through shadows without seeing her.

Perceval had been his mortal name, way back in time. This was one of Arthur’s knights, a warrior champion who’d had a coveted seat at Camelot’s Round Table and been a major player in the Grail Quest. The intense heat of his observation began to melt her chills.

“What’s it to you?” she finally asked, slipping her shirt over her head. “I don’t believe you were invited to this party.”

Speaking calmly was a chore when this Knight’s allure bordered on the mystical. Of all the Seven, he had always been special to her. Her attraction to him had both excited and repelled her from the beginning, and from afar, further complicating the fulfillment of the personal vows she had taken.

Because of that, he was the most dangerous Knight of them all to have found her. She had to be careful, remain calm, when her heart was thrashing. More time was necessary before she turned to face him.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Who’s asking?” Avery returned.

The energy circling the room was expanding, pressing against the walls, humming in her ears. She was trapped, and therefore had to speak to him. No alternative presented itself when he filled the doorway.

She saw in the mirror that he was staring at her back and at the damp towel beside her.

“What’s wrong with your blood?” he asked.

“Nothing’s wrong with it.”

“It has no color at all.”

“What’s that to you?”

“I’ve never seen anything like it, or like you.”

“No,” Avery agreed, sliding her arms into her sleeves. “Other than your comment being incredibly rude, I’m sure you haven’t seen anything like me.”

Glossing over her feisty comeback, he tried again to engage her. “Where do you come from?”

She was fairly sure he didn’t mean the city or region of the world, but something deeper and having to do with her origins...as if she’d blow more of her cover and cough up her secrets because he asked her to.

Turning halfway around, she parried, “Is this an interrogation? Are you London’s supernatural sheriff?”

“Only an interested party.”

“Where I came from is none of your business.”

“Maybe it isn’t. What about your scars?”

“Rude again, and definitely not your concern.”

Persistence was another well-honed Blood Knight trait.

“Is there anything you can tell me about yourself that might help me to understand what you want here?” he asked in a lowered tone that caused Avery’s new tats to ache more than they already did.

“It’s late,” she said. “Maybe you have a job to do that doesn’t include wasting time in a tattoo parlor.”

“Not tonight. Everyone got a free pass in your honor.”

“Do you suppose the bad guys will thank me?”

Don’t let him in. Do not get close, Avery’s mind warned.

Remember who you are, and get away.

None of that was easy at the moment, however. She wasn’t just confronting a Blood Knight. She was confronting an old set of wishes long ago tamped down. This glorious creature had always made her want to forget her rage and her vows to keep clear of him and the others like him. The pressure she felt to fight her way out of the room was outrageous.

If she’d had her wings, the real ones, she could have bested this Knight in seconds. Although he was incredibly strong, she would have been the strongest. Wingless, she was unwhole, halved, severed from the rest of her kind with her strength vastly diminished.

“Go away,” Avery managed to say.

“Answers first,” he said.

Pursuing their prey is what Blood Knights did best, and she was now at the top of that list.

Want to know who I am, Knight?

What if I tell you that your inner light was stolen from me, tortured out of my veins? What then? Would you thank me for your light and for your agile prowess? Someone should.

Stopping the internal chatter was imperative. She felt him tuning in to her. Hers wasn’t the only pulse skyrocketing. The rapid beat of his heart added to the tension in the air.

The truth was that in this guy’s voice, and in his golden presence, Avery heard the far-off rattle of the chains that had bound her to the Earth in his honor.

“You’re immortal, and yet have no sigils,” the magnificent bastard noted with a focus hotter than the artist’s needles.

Avery hated how he unsettled her.

“I suppose the saving grace is that the new designs look like they belong there,” he added. “Somehow, the wings suit you.”

Too damn personal...

Avery whirled around. The creature in the doorway had seen the wings, her new talismans, when she hadn’t had the chance. He had viewed her bare skin, scars and all. And now that she had lost some of her hard-won control, he had seen her face.

Would she let him get away with that? She had wiped minds for less. She had killed to remain anonymous in a crowded modern world. But none of those things was an option here with someone whose strength so closely matched hers at the moment. She had been sloppy and had not covered her tracks well enough. This meeting was her fault. There was no do-over, only escape.

She did not meet that heated gaze.

“Sigils are in these days. Didn’t you know?” she remarked, reaching for her jacket.

“Sigils.” He repeated the word. “Was that what you were looking for here, in a place like this?”

“Actually, that would have been useless, don’t you think, when you have to be born with those kinds of marks, or be born because of them?”

She was getting warmer, catching the fever that came with speaking about forbidden things. Her shoulders were on fire. Real wings would have taken her away from this confrontation. An inked span was nothing more than make-believe.

Still, the inked wings were an added reminder that if she stopped looking for the missing pieces of herself now, she would never know a moment’s peace. If she became distracted after all this time, and after believing she was closing in on the very thing she sought...all the years of searching and hating and destruction that had gotten her to this point wouldn’t be worth one single breath.

She wanted to look at him, but didn’t dare.

“I wonder if you’ll tell me what you are if I ask nicely enough?” he said. “And also who made you.”

“I’m afraid you have taken up far too much of my time already.” That remark actually sounded breathless. The airless room was stifling.

“Places to go? People to see?” he asked.

Avery ignored the remark. She was in need of fresh air and alone time, and he was in the way.

“I’m leaving.” She got to her feet, meeting his gaze at last.

He leaned against the doorjamb as if he had suddenly experienced a moment of weakness. But he rallied quickly. The devastatingly handsome head shook. Blue eyes burned bright.

“They will be waiting for you. London’s monsters,” he warned.

“They won’t find me.”

“I did.”

“You don’t understand...” Avery began, without finishing what she had been about to say. This Knight wasn’t to know anything about her quest. The Perceval of old had died, losing his mortal flesh, and had been resurrected by a golden kiss from a holy relic. After feeling Death’s black breath, his path had been clear. That had not been the case for her. And by the way, she wanted to shout, monsters no longer concern me.

“I’m trying to be polite, and you’re not making it easy,” he said. “What if I came here to welcome you to London, or to warn you about what lurks here?”

“Have you honestly come here for either of those things?” Avery challenged.

“No,” he confessed. “I came because I was intrigued by the sudden appearance of a stranger I couldn’t place.”