Savage Bond (The Fallen)

by Anne Marsh

  Praise for Anne Marsh and her novels

  "A master world builder!"

  —Romantic Times

  "Bond With Me is a superb romantic urban fantasy."

  —Harriet Klausner

  "Fans of fallen angels will eat this one up."

  —Anna's Book Blog

  "The sexy fallen angel is an exciting new addition to the pantheon of paranormal romance heroes, and Anne Marsh adds to that the dark seduction of bonding your soul to obtain your secret desires. You will be seduced along with Nessa by the deliciously sexy Zer, and as seduction turns to love, you will be enraptured by the Fallen."

  —Heroes and Heartbreakers

  Look for these titles by Anne Marsh

  The Fallen

  BOND WITH ME

  HIS DARK BOND

  SAVAGE BOND

  Hunter's Mate

  THE HUNT

  SAVAGE BOND

  ANNE MARSH

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright ©2012 by Anne Marsh

  Cover design by Anne Caine

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9854720-0-9

  Savage Bond

  © 2012 Anne Marsh

  annemarsh@ymail.com

  http://www.herfallenangel.com

  http://www.twitter.com/anne_marsh

  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Anne-Marsh/225897900782649

  As a former Dominion warrior and Fallen angel, Vkhin knows how to fight. How to track his prey. And when to deal out death with brutal efficiency. Redemption isn't part of his plans—until he finds himself chasing Ria Morgan through a wasteland.

  Now, he's hunting for the woman who could restore both his lost wings—and his soul.

  Ria Morgan was just doing her job, shooting recon photos of a secret Fallen prison. When her chopper goes down, however, she figures her days are numbered. Until the dark angel hunting her offers her a temptingly seductive deal: bond with him and he'll keep her safe. Safety's tempting—but Vkhin is even more so. Now, Ria must choose between long-held loyalties and the wickedly sensual pleasure of Vkhin's touch.

  Table of Contents

  Savage Bond

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  Excerpt - His Dark Bond

  Booklist

  About the Author

  Forward

  Three thousand years since they rebelled, since they Fell.

  The archangel Michael took their wings, took away their ability to feel.

  They were exiled to Earth, and now they tempt the human race with a devil's pact of their own: one soul for one favor.

  They are now the Fallen angels. Before, bred to be brutal warriors, they fought for the Heavens as part of the Dominion host. They fought. They defended. They did the archangels' bidding. Heavens' enforcers, nothing stood between them and their duty—until a series of savage murders shook the Heavens and the Dominions rose up against the archangel and chose a new side and a new path.

  Now, in the year 2090, they fight to survive on Earth. Fight to control an insatiable thirst for human emotions that threatens to turn them into the ultimate monsters when they can no longer control their desire to drink. Fight to find the one thing that could save them.

  A soul mate.

  Find his one, pre-destined mate and a Fallen warrior finds his one second change. Loving her would redeem his soul and regain his wings. He would feel once he had bound her to him through the bonding ritual. A ritual that tied their souls together forever. A ritual that marked both the warrior and his woman body and soul. Lose her, however, and he was condemned to live forever without souls or wings. She was his one hope—and his ultimate weakness. She was the last chance for his dying race.

  Chapter One

  She was dying. As the chopper banked hard right, Ria Morgan's stomach decided it was a good time to remind her of what she'd had for lunch four hours earlier. The sandwich and greasy fries threatened to make a return trip up her throat despite her best attempts to swallow. Flying was for the birds. And maybe, once upon a time, for the Fallen angels.

  Not that the Fallen were fairytale material. That kind of sensuality scared her. Big and hard and edgy, the Fallen were sexy as hell, but she was smart enough to know she didn't want to take all that on. They were beautiful to watch, the way a king cobra or a panther was, but she wasn't getting in a room with one. Closest she got to that sort of beast was at the zoo— with two inches of shatter-proof, bullet-proof glass between herself and the animals.

  "You're no good at this flying shit," Lieutenant Jane Reece observed cheerfully, stretching out her booted feet like her ass was parked in her favorite Barcalounger and not five thousand feet in the air. As the pilot did another hard right to avoid the latest mountain ridge springing up in front of the windshield, Reece readjusted the muzzle of the Vektor. Anyone came at them, Reece here had Ria's back. Trouble wasn't expected, but the Fallen were full of surprises, so MVD, M City's paranormal policing unit, wasn't taking chances. The good lieutenant had orders to shoot on sight.

  "No good at all," she agreed shortly. Her toes tingled in her sneakers, a prickly connection to the vibrations shaking the chopper's floor.

  "Bet you don't like heights, either," Reece suggested. "Explains how you pulled this job. Got the short end of the straw, Morgan?"

  Ria got her arms up and braced, pointing the camera down at the target. What she needed here was a tripod, but she'd be making do instead. "Something like that."

  She'd spent years learning to read the images she shot for hidden messages. A hangar's size advertised the number of troops that could be concealed inside those four walls. Anything the lens picked up was just one more tip off, broadcasting enemy movements. From the chopper, she had a bird's eye view of just how big the arteries available were for moving troops. She was damned good at reading those signs.

  Even if she was usually reading those signs from her office, her ass parked in a desk chair rather than strapped into a jump seat.

  Movement unfolded beneath the chopper and she swung the lens around to follow. Vehicles moving over land always left some sort of mark behind – wheel marks, tracks, ruts. The size, shape, and length of vehicles were all there in those distinguishing marks. She couldn't tell yet what was moving beneath her, but something was definitely happening here, where there should have been nothing at all—and she was getting to the bottom of it.

  The chopper hit a draft and bucked, and Ria swallowed hard, the lens losing whatever it was she had been tracking. Damn it.

  She and heights had the kind of love-hate relationship usually found between brothers and sisters. Angle was good for her shots, but vertigo hit her hard as her brain took in the height. The sheer space between herself and safety made her dizzy, the ground falling away as the chopper ate up the air. She sucked in a breath. Inhale. Exhale. Focus. The world on the ground jumped into sharp focus as she zoomed in. The movement she'd spotted wasn't unfriendly, just an animal. Nothing interesting.

  She'd been cold moments ago, but now she was burning up, desperate to escape the choking confines of the flight suit. She wasn't in danger, she reminded herself. She just felt like
she was, her mind's convenient little mental trick to get her feet back on the ground where her feet belonged. Where she was safe.

  She knew these feelings. Wait it out, she reminded herself. Just a handful of minutes—two or three—and she'd be okay again. The panic would tuck itself back into the dark corner of her psyche where the fear lurked. Everything would be fine.

  Until the next time.

  Each time, she hoped the panic attack was the last one, because she had a job to do and the panic was a barrier that got harder and harder to overcome. Each time, she'd been wrong. She'd avoided planes and flying for years, until MVD had forced her ass up into the air.

  Ria might work for MVD, but she wasn't an agent. The covert stuff made her nervous, made her want to throw up from the adrenaline dancing its way through her nervous system. She was strictly backroom and support. She watched, she sent the little unmanned drone winging through the air and over Fallen territory to do the snap-and-click, and she processed the images the drone sent back electronically.

  All from the peace and quiet of her office chair. Hum of the servers and the bank of screens in front of her. She was damned good at her job.

  She wasn't supposed to be here however.

  This was no UAV. She wasn't piloting an unmanned aerial drone, driving the little craft through a low altitude sneak in the silent battle between the Fallen and MVD.

  No, this was an actual, real life, honest-to-God plane with an engine and a human pilot and five thousand feet of empty space between her feet and the cold, hard ground.

  Sure, she'd done six weeks of boot camp for MVD, gritting her teeth through the runs and the sit-ups, the survival training and the arms drills, but she'd done that so she could get her hands on their hardware. MVD had the most powerful, most cutting-edge software and hardware of any human organization she'd ever interviewed with. Or hacked her way into. The lure of those bits was powerful, plus the digital world just made sense. Programming was pure logic and she loved it. All cause and effect. If. Then. Neat little branches and subroutines. Predictable, if you could wrap your mind around the code base. And she could.

  So it still didn't answer the question of: why?

  UAVs reacted poorly to weather and there was weather rolling through the Preserves right now. Whatever MVD thought they'd seen, they wanted their second look right now and they weren't waiting for that weather to clear. She was a Combat Systems Officer, her CO had pointed out dryly when she objected to the reassignment, and that meant she was fully qualified for the job at hand. Not to mention she was the only CSO available.

  And that was just the story of her life, wasn't it? She was always last choice. Never the first. She'd been the only photographer available when word came in that the unmanned drones weren't cutting it and the higher ups wanted to send in a human team. Rain had screwed the cameras to hell and back, but not before the last set of images came back, hinting at unusual movement out here in the Preserves.

  "You think we're going to find us any?" The good lieutenant's finger stroked the trigger of the Vektor.

  "There aren't supposed to be any angels out here." Supposed to be being the key phrase here. There was no denying the rumors about winged angels being spotted flying over M City and in and out of the Preserves. Hence her presence here on the plane, because she got the fun job of confirming or denying those rumors. The Preserves were supposed to be a prison for the Fallen who couldn't keep it together any longer—not a launching pad.

  "Yeah." Lieutenant Reece patted the Vektor's barrel as her eyes sifted through the shadows on the ground. The lieutenant was looking for trouble, too. "But if there were, we'd be ready. I'd like to take a shot at them."

  The pilot came on the headset. "I'm dropping down to angels two. Get you a good look at our hot spot." The flight plan called for a close-up up on the area where MVD had been getting some disturbing intel. So far, all they had were high-aerial satellite shots, which meant not enough detail. To get the close-ups, her ass was out here on a plane.

  In and out.

  Something was going down, but fucking Fallen angels hadn't shared the 4-1-1. All stonewall and "No, ma'am, nothing happening here."

  Air slammed into the chopper as Lieutenant Reece forced the side door open. Ria hated flying, hated this part of the job, but the paralyzing fear wasn't lifting until her feet were back on the ground, so she'd do her job here and then she'd go home.

  Which was more than the occupants of the Preserves would be doing anytime soon.

  The Preserves were no rest home, that was for damn sure. She wasn't sure how or if the bastard angels could be killed, but this was where the worst of the lot went to wait out their days when their own kind finally decided they were too dangerous to run around unchecked. Just a fancier way of saying prison, because that's what the Preserves were. And, if the bad apples of the Fallen world had found themselves a revolving door from their prison, the consequences wouldn't be pretty for M City.

  She hated that she was afraid, hated the way fear tied her gut up in knots. She couldn't let that fear stop her, however. She was the best photographer MVD had.

  There. Movement again beneath the bird on the ground. "Take us down closer," she commed. She needed a better shot—this was big. Bigger than she'd suspected was possible.

  Surrounded by rocky canyons, an unfamiliar Fallen angel stood in the center of the others like he was the mother lode of all things magical. When she adjusted the zoom, using the camera's lens to get up close and personal, she could see his lips moving. And, with each word he pronounced, new marks appeared on the bared backs of the Fallen angels surrounding him. The marks glowed red in the slowly gathering twilight, as if they had some kind of life of their own.

  One minute and five hundred feet later, she knew the truth. The speaker shut his yap and his companions hit the ground, as if their legs were just done holding them up. Even from her bird's eye view perch in the sky, the screaming came through loud and clear, punctuating the crimson lace of bloody droplets hanging from the surrounding trees. Red wings tore through the skin of their backs.

  "Fallen don't have wings, right?"

  Lieutenant Reece shook her head. "Never have had yet. Supposed to be part and parcel of that divine punishment package they've got going on. No wings. No soul. No Heavens."

  "Then something's changed." Ria didn't move the camera from the scene unfolding in the clearing below, kept her finger working the shutter. Whatever was happening down there looked damned close to some sort of ritual.

  "Well, shit." Reece's curse summed it up well as far as Ria was concerned.

  "Yeah." Unless she was mistaken, she'd just shot a one-two-three tutorial for making monsters.

  Those Fallen bastards had wings. They weren't supposed to be able to fly. That was the deal as she'd heard it. Three thousand years ago, the archangel Michael had exiled his Dominion warriors from the Heavens for staging a rebellion. He'd ripped their wings off and thrown them down to Earth. Not like she appreciated her home being used as the celestial equivalent of a penal colony, but truth was truth. The Dominions had become the Fallen and none of them could fly.

  Except these Fallen clearly could.

  One of the newly winged creatures soared up through the air. Her camera clicked instinctively, but her mind was screaming Wrong.

  She wasn't second-guessing this and the intel couldn't wait. As soon as the pilot had opened up a line, she commed back to M City. MVD needed to hear this.

  Her boss's voice came in loud and clear—and filled with annoyance: "This channel is not secure," he snapped. "Next time, wait until you're secure before you call in."

  Next time? "This can't wait," she argued. "I'm sending pics," she said, starting the upload. Connection was poor and it would take time to move those images over, but she wanted eyes on this.

  "Roger that." Before her boss could say more, the chopper jerked sharply left.

  "We've got bogeys." The pilot cursed. "Not sure who or what, but definitely hostile."<
br />
  Reece looked out the open door and cursed again. "Bastards definitely have themselves some wings."

  More curses came from the pilot's seat, as the man got on the headset back to base, his fingers racing to find a secured channel. Reece shot her a glance. "Hold tight," she ordered and then she put the Vektor to work, firing round after round out the open door.

  Ria knew the chopper wasn't built to sustain this kind of attack. There had to be thirty winged angels all slamming bodily into the chopper and already the bird veered hard left with the first hit. As an angel banked and came about for a second pass, the glowing red runes on its back lit up the sky. The next hit jarred her teeth, the vibrations tearing through her body.

  How long could they take this kind of damage?

  "Suit up." Reece didn't take her eyes off the fight unfolding outside the chopper, jerking her chin towards the chutes hanging from the webbing. Fingers trembling, Ria pulled on the chute.

  "We've got a hard landing at best," Reece continued. Worst was crash, but the other woman didn't waste breath pointing out the obvious.

  MVD had set Ria up with a Black Hawk helicopter for today's field trip. The chopper could fly at low altitude, which meant she could get her shots. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, the chopper was still just a machine. The pilot was maneuvering them through the Preserves' rocky canyons, but the bird was barely making those turns, the blades fighting for lift.

  The winged angels that weren't supposed to exist descended towards the chopper. The pilot dropped the bird even lower to evade, but he couldn't avoid the powerful downward push of air from all those alien wings. The chopper wasn't built for bat-turns, the blades whining as the pilot forced the bird to turn tight and hard. The one-eighty heading change slammed Ria against the side, her hands instinctively cradling the camera.