Page 1 of Angel's Vengeance
Chapter1
Misting snowflakes danced in the streetlights below but would be too puny to cushion Rhode when he finally—really,anyminute now—hurled himself off the roof.
January in New Hampshire brought with it shorter days and, therefore, shorter attention spans on the photocells in the outdoor lighting tasked with illuminating all of Aurora’s small-town charm.It was a handy feature most of the time, especially when darkness frequently descended before the mortals’ dinner bells chimed.
For Rhode, however, the little streetlamps’ enthusiasm for the job was sorely underappreciated.After all, when a fallen angel of the Empyrean was about to test his flight ability for the first time since he was freed from eons-long enemy captivity, spotlights weren’t necessarily in theprocolumn.Knocking off the rust was one thing.Lighting up the show for any potential audience was another thing entirely.
Rhode pressed the toes of his boots farther over the edge of the mechanic’s garage until his steel-toed tips hovered above the still-leaf-leaden gutter.It was a directional focus of sorts and aimed his body where he hoped to land—hopedbeing the operative phrasing.
He squared his shoulders back and called forth his wings, again grateful that he was alone.The shiver that licked up his spine every time they appeared should have been second nature, something as normal as breathing for a seraph.
And then his ever-so-unhelpful brain chose that moment to remind him that even breathing could be strenuous given the wrong environment.
Rhode chased the memory away and recentered himself.Then translucent flaps of energy unfurled from between his shoulder blades, lengthening and solidifying through his outerwear until Rhode’s back muscles strained with the pseudo-familiar weight.
Familiar but still strangely foreign.
He imagined the sensation was much like what Drea, his caregiver and soul bond to his sentinel brother Chrome, had once described to him as phantom limb pain.She’d mentioned it casually during one of their physical therapy sessions in those early weeks following his rescue.Mortals who had lost a limb often still experienced the sensations of having it: physical aching, itching, lingering spatial awareness, even temperature and vibrations.
The concept had intrigued him almost as much as the fact that mortals could still function so completely without their limbs.
In the end, though mortal physicians still hardly had a handle on the whys and wherefores of the phenomenon, they likely boiled the cause of the phantom sensation down to a miscommunication between the mind and the body.The central nervous system sending signals to the brain and spine to tell that part of the anatomy to move, despite it no longer being there.
Commands issued to parts of themselves that were long dead.
His muscles had connected with the explanation long before Drea had finished describing it, with Rhode having experienced the very same thing but in reverse.Despite what he’d endured, his body was still willing.His mind, on the other hand ....
It had been so long since he’d called forth his wings that he wasn’t even sure whether he still could.His brothers—sentinel angels who had fallen to the mortal realm in a bid to protect the Empyrean, Heaven’s highest realm, and were now stuck there—had not pushed him in his recovery, a fact he was grateful for despite how heavily it weighed on everyone.
No, onlyhecould push himself to heal, though he doubted such a mundane word could even apply.
Bodies were far easier to mend than minds, and yet he found himself on a roof convincing his scrambled senses that some part of him still remembered how to fly.
Because if he could fly, he could fight.And if he could fight, he could find the demon responsible and pay him back a thousandfold for the lifetimes that had been stolen from him.
Forallthat had been stolen from him and done to him.
The mechanic’s garage he was perched on wasn’t particularly high, maybe twenty or thirty feet off the ground.The building was a modest automotive shop that serviced the New England tourist town’s residents with basic repair, towing, and oil change options.Two bays.A parking lot with ten spaces.No gas pumps.A sign on the side of the road boasting what Rhode had to guess was a clever play on the wordlube.And most suitable for his purposes on that particular evening: operational hours that did not include Sundays.
With the sun having just shuttered its drapes over what was left of the weekend, there was not a single mortal, or well-meaning angel, in sight.
Once again, Rhode had retreated to the solitude that had been his long-constant companion.What he’d fought to escape for so long and what he always found himself coming back to despite the sentinels’ many attempts at reviving that once-affable side of him.
But frozen tundras were frozen for a reason.Permafrost didn’t take a vacation, regardless of whether it wanted to.
Rhode stretched his arms and wings wide.With the moon at his back, the condor-length curtains had taken shape and crept their heavy shadows above his shoulders and farther over the edge of the flat roof until the dark silhouettes of his flight feathers taunted him from the pavement below.He tightened his abdominals, which had strengthened beyond what he’d once known them capable of, and puffed out a soft grunt.
By the mages, his back muscles were tight.Despite the consistent training regimen he’d adhered to, some parts of the body were hard to work when the action they were designed for hadn’t been available to them in some time.
Still, he managed to hold his wings out as wide as he could, relishing the strain.From that high above, the shadows of his wings didn’t look any different than what he’d remembered of them before his captivity.
Before he had turned into a shriveled shell of the seraphim commander he’d once been.
His eyes immediately landed on his wings’ curvature, but surprisingly, he didn’t flinch at what the contours revealed.They were the same.Exactly the same as he remembered them, even the left one, which had always crested just slightly higher than the right.
He swallowed around a thick wad of emotion and squinted through the lightly falling snow.Hell, he was a damned fool if he thought he was prepared for this.
“How do they look exactly the same?”he whispered to the wind, an air of disappointment coloring his words, as if seeing an unrecognizable image of his own shadow would have made his course any clearer.