by Tessa Cole
“So be it,” I said to him, then yelled the combat spell and released all the magic within me out through my palms and into the key.
The fire and lightning scorched every nerve in my body, just like the blast from the light ring when I’d released its power into the archnephilim’s brand on my arm. Except this time, the agony was worse, edged with all the bloody dark magic my buzz had consumed. It rushed from my back and my heart and my soul, taking all of me with it.
Ibizual screeched. His magic surged, flooding me, burning me up, and with a scream, I forced all of it back out my hands and into the key.
The key exploded with a blaze of light that left darkness clouding my vision and my head spinning.
Logan howled behind me, and I jerked around as he dove for me. Time stuttered. I wasn’t going to be fast enough to stop him, hell, even if I was, I wasn’t powerful enough. Gideon and Jacob were too far away to reach me in time. Logan was going to kill me.
Time lurched back to regular speed, and I wrenched my good hand up on instinct, knowing it was futile but unable to stop myself. Fire and lightning — God, I hadn’t thought I had any more magic in me — screamed down my arm and a sword of light surged into my hand. Logan was too close to pull back before the blade plunged into his chest.
His eyes flashed wide with surprise then darkened. With a snarl, he shoved his body down the blade and slashed his short, deadly vampire claws at my face.
I jerked back and down, and Jacob rushed into sight and slashed his sword through Logan’s neck, decapitating him.
Chapter 25
Logan’s blood sprayed me in the face, mixing with the fountain’s water and oozing down my cheeks and neck. Then his body burst into a thick dust that filled the air and coated me in grime — and I wasn’t going to think too hard about the fact that I was covered in corpse dust.
All the zombies lay on the ground not moving, and Ibizual’s magic sparked and fluttered around them like embers caught in a breeze. The seal flared with a blinding burst of light and then vanished, and Ibizual’s screams in my head stopped, the sudden silence making my ears ring.
I sagged onto my butt, not caring that I was still in the fountain. It was over.
Jacob dropped to his knees in the fountain beside me, but Gideon stayed lying on the ground, gasping for breath. Marcus and Kol, looking like they’d tumbled through a mess of whirling knives — which they pretty much had — staggered toward us. The guys were all bleeding, their clothes torn and filthy, but they were all alive.
Relief flooded me, and the tears of pain and terror that I’d been holding back leaked from my eyes. They’re are alive. I haven’t lost one of them. Thank God. Oh, thank God.
I didn’t even try to stop crying. I was too numb and raw to fight myself. The pressure from the manifesting seal was gone. So too was the snap of Gideon’s magic and the burn of Ibizual’s, but that had left an achy void within me.
My buzz, however, still remained, although it was now back to just painful bites under my skin and not a blazing inferno. Except those bites accentuated the fact that every nerve within me had been burned raw. I was still alight with pain, just not the kind that threatened to erupt and turn me into a human bonfire.
“Essie,” Marcus said as he sagged into the edge of the basin, his expression a mix of emotions like mine: relief, pain, exhaustion. “Your hands.”
I dropped my gaze, my body and thoughts sluggish. My hands were raw, bleeding, and charred. “At least I’m still conscious this time.”
Kol snorted and wrapped his arms across his chest, as if his ribs were broken, his face twisting in agony. “I’m not sure this counts as an improvement from the fight with the archnephilim.”
“Baby steps,” Marcus said. “Next time we’ll get her through without the serious burns.”
If there was a next time.
Which, even exhausted and in pain, my soul prayed there would be. This was where I belonged, where I made the biggest difference in peoples’ lives. I didn’t know how I was going to convince Gideon that I belonged on the team, but everything within me said I had to.
Gideon made a call, and Chris and a JP clean-up team arrived at the cemetery. We returned to Operations, where Amiah greeted us in the garage with a gurney which Jacob insisted I take, while Gideon leaned heavily against it to keep standing.
The healing angel gave Marcus a quick blast of magic, enough so that when he shifted he’d be able to finish the job himself, then she turned to Gideon, gently angling his head to get a better look at the mess Logan had made of his face.
“Essie,” Marcus said, his voice soft.
I dragged my attention to him. I hadn’t even realized I’d zoned out. He jerked his gaze to Jacob then back to me, and even with my sluggish thoughts the message was clear. Jacob needed to feed, his injuries were as severe or worse than the fight with Logan in the tunnels, so blood from a bunny wasn’t going to heal him fast enough. It was time to test our new arrangement.
“Yeah.” I tried to nod, but moving even just a little bit made my head hurt.
“Amiah first, Essie,” Jacob said.
“Yes.” Marcus glanced at Gideon, who thankfully looked as stunned as I felt and was focusing on Amiah and not our conversation. “Give me five.”
Jacob nodded.
Kol frowned, his gaze darting between the three of us.
“Consider this your phone call,” Marcus said to him, and he strode to the back of the garage to shift in private.
“My what—?” Realization flashed through Kol’s eyes. He’d asked for a call the next time Marcus and I had sex so he could prepare himself. At least this way he wouldn’t need to leave Operations to replenish his magic. In a way it was perfect. I could be with Marcus and help heal both Jacob and Kol at the same time.
The guys helped push the gurney to triage than slipped away, Jacob mumbling something about having bagged blood in his suite, and Kol not saying anything at all.
Amiah, with her usual scowl, gave me a blast of healing magic that hurt. It healed all my physical injuries, but not my magical ones. Whatever veins or passages or whatever they were called that were inside me channeling all that magic had been burned raw, and still hurt. Not as much as before, but I sensed that Amiah’s magic couldn’t fully heal them.
Still exhausted, I pushed any fear about that aside. I’d worry about what all of it meant later, after I’d had time to clear my head.
I left her with Gideon, took the elevator to the fifth floor, and met Jacob outside Marcus’s door. A few minutes later, Marcus joined us, dressed once again in a pair of baggy workout shorts and carrying his gear.
He let us in and there was an awkward moment with us just standing at the doorway, that would have been more awkward if we all hadn’t been so tired. As instructed, I cleaned off a wrist, so Jacob could feed at a modest location on my body. Then Marcus and I — starting in the shower and cleaning off the rest of the blood and grime before moving to the bedroom — both rode the powerful pleasure of Jacob’s magic to a screaming, satisfying climax.
I fell asleep in Marcus’s arms, snuggled in his bed, warm and content — if still a little internally sore — and woke a few hours later still in his arms. Warmth seeped from his body into mine, and his breath, steady with sleep, caressed the back of my neck. He was so still, so peaceful, all his ferocious energy, an energy that made my pulse race and my heart thrill, hidden within him. I could sense his contentment, not as a temperature but as an honest to goodness emotion, and it mirrored a contentment within me. This was exactly where I belonged, and who I belonged with.
But a sliver of doubt seeped in, and I slipped out of his bed before I became too restless and woke him.
Everything would become more difficult if I couldn’t stay on the team, and yet everything would be difficult if I stayed.
I left my shredded and bloody clothes on the bathroom floor and dressed in Marcus’s workout shorts — tying the drawstrings as tight as I could to keep them up — a
nd pulled on one of his T-shirts. Once I left his suite, I wouldn’t be able to get back in, so I wrote him a note saying I’d be in the lounge then slipped out into the hall. I needed air. I needed to think.
I didn’t believe that our arrangement with Jacob would change if I wasn’t on the team. The guys would just find me at my apartment whenever Jacob needed me. But it still was more complicated than if I stayed. And I still didn’t know, if Gideon did send me packing, what I’d do if I couldn’t be a cop any more.
God, I didn’t know what I’d do if Marcus changed his mind about us. He didn’t seem freaked out about the aftermath of the battle with Logan, but that could have been shock and then the glow of amazing sex. Once he’d had time to really think about it, there was a good chance he’d lock me in his suite and never let me out, or worse, he’d push me away again.
I wandered down the hall to the elevator and hit the call button. The door slid open, but instead of pushing the button for the main floor, I decided to hit the top unlabeled button. The elevator took me up one floor and the door opened, revealing a helicopter pad and a small rooftop patio.
Before me stretched the Supers’ Quarter, the thick canopy of the ring park to my left and the UV-filtering glass canopy protecting the vampire part of the Quarter to my right. Streetlights illuminated the roads and buildings, and lights glimmered in a few windows, while a hint of light glowed on the eastern horizon. Dawn wasn’t far off.
I wandered to a wrought-iron patio chair — secured to the roof with a length of chain so it wouldn’t fly away in a strong wind but could also be moved around a bit — drew it out from the matching patio table, and sat. A cool breeze swept through my loose locks, and I shifted so it blew the strands away from my face. I should have put on a jacket, but I didn’t have one. In fact I didn’t have any clean or unshredded clothes at Operations, and didn’t want to go back downstairs to search for something heavier — even if I could figure out where to look. That, and now that I’d shaken the lull of sleep and sex, I was too aware that the magical channels in my body still hurt and my buzz still wasn’t back down to its new — after battling the archnephilim — normal, and I didn’t want to move too much.
A crackle of electricity, nothing strong, just enough for me to notice, danced through Gideon’s brand, and a flicker of shadow against the low-hanging clouds caught my attention. It drew closer and fear squeezed my chest. The archnephilim had flown through the air, a dense, deadly shadow.
I pushed my fear away. The archnephilim was dead. I’d killed him. I had nothing to fear from him any more.
Gideon’s magic danced up my arm again, and I caught a flash of white with my Jacob-enhanced vision. Gideon’s wings catching the streetlight.
My fear shifted from the terror of the archnephilim to the fear of facing Gideon and losing my job. But that fear was soon also edged with awe as he soared closer. He was majestic. He made my chest ache with yearning for him, for the wings I didn’t have, for the freedom I couldn’t allow myself to have to just be myself.
He landed on the roof on the other side of the table from me, his attention on something behind and to my right, and he drew his wings back into his body with a flare of the magic that made an angel an angel and allowed him to release his wings from his body and return them back again without destroying his clothes. He was back to being his handsome self, not a hint of a scratch or bruise on his face, and that only made my ache stronger.
I didn’t understand how he could have such an effect on me. He didn’t want me as his mate— I didn’t want me to be his mate, and yet just thinking about overhearing his rejection hurt something deep within me.
Then he turned his glowing gaze on me, and I was falling into a summer sky. All the things that hurt within me stilled and everything else fell away. There was only him and the angel brand that bound our souls together.
His gaze travelled over me and my borrowed clothes, and a hint of ice chilled his summer sky. Wonderful. Just by being me, I’d reminded him that Marcus and I were a thing and Marcus would leave the team if Gideon fired me. Staying on the team because Gideon didn’t want to lose Marcus was not the way I wanted it. I wanted him to realize I wasn’t a liability, that even if I was a powerless human I could offer something to them.
Another crackle of his electricity snapped through the brand, making me wince.
His eyes narrowed, and he pulled his phone from his pocket. “You’re still hurt. I’ll wake Amiah.”
“It’s okay,” I said before he could call, surprised he cared that I was still sore. Even if I was in agony right now, I still wouldn’t want to piss off Amiah any more than I already had. “I don’t think this is something she can heal. I’ve channeled massive amounts of power twice now in as many weeks. There’s got to be a cost to that.”
“You shouldn’t have had to pay it.”
A hint of heat whispered around me, and my stomach bottomed out with fear. Here it came, the moment where he said I didn’t belong and I lost my job.
“Essie—” Pain flashed through the ice in his eyes, making my pulse stall. But he jerked his gaze away from me before I could figure out what that pain meant.
The temperature around me warmed a bit more, giving me even less of a clue about his emotions. Was he angry? The pain in his eyes should have turned the air humid or misty, but there was nothing.
“Just say it.” I couldn’t fight my worry, heartache, and buzz all at the same time right now. I was just too tired.
He ran a hand through his hair. “Officer Shaw.”
“Joined Parliament Senior Agent Gideon.” I stood and squared my shoulders. If he was going to ruin my career, end the only job I’d ever wanted, I was damn well going to make him say it to my face.
“I don’t like the emotional complications you bring to the team.” Ice flickered through the heat. “But we couldn’t have stopped Logan without you.”
So was this thank you and goodbye?
The muscles in his jaw flexed. “Do I need to arrange for a suite, or will you be sharing with Marcus?”
“Arrange for a suite?” For a second his words didn’t make sense, then realization caught up to me. I was moving into Operations. I was on the team.
Oh, God. I was moving into Operations, angel central, living with all the angels in Union City. Working with Gideon was one thing, but living and eating and socializing with all the angels multiplied the risk of someone noticing something different about me.
“I, ah…”
“You’re wearing his clothes. I’ve figured it out already,” he said.
“That’s because I don’t have any more clothes fit to wear here.”
“Then you should fix that, Agent Shaw.” He strode past me toward the elevator, his hand pressing at the brand on his forearm that matched the one on mine before jerking away, as if the touch had been unconscious and undesired. “Report with the rest of the team in my office at o’eight hundred with your answer.”
With the rest of the team. A whirl of emotions churned through me. This was what I wanted and where I belonged. I knew it in my soul. I couldn’t resist it. But a part of me, a small voice whispering against all that certainty, said it would also be my doom.
To be continued…
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COMING SOON
DESTINED FIRE
Book 3 of the Nephilim’s Destiny series
One reckless move could cost her everything…
It used to be easy to pass as human beat cop Essie Shaw. Lay low, don’t draw too much attention. Now I’m hiding in plain sight, working for the JP, praying my teammates won’t notice my non-human magical quirks and figure out I’m a nephilim.
As the magic clawing within me th
reatens to reveal me, my complicated emotional bond with the team grows: Gideon, whose cold, professional distance cuts me; Jacob, whose mixed messages confuse me; Kol, whose friendship warms me; and Marcus, whose wolf could turn on me.
Thanks to the messy public disasters we’ve barely survived, the Head Office sends in the big guns: Cassius, who’d love nothing more than to rip his brother Gideon’s mating brand from my arm and kick me off the team.
So, no pressure in cracking a ring of vicious magical drug smugglers. But when things go sideways, my magic threatens to expose my secret and cost me the only place where I’ve ever belonged. With the men my very bones tell me are mine.
Destined Fire is the third book in the Nephilim’s Destiny series, an action-packed full-length paranormal romance with four irresistible guys and a kick-ass heroine who doesn’t have to choose.
Other Books By Tessa Cole
THE NEPHILIM’S DESTINY SERIES
Destined Shadows, prequel story
Destined Darkness, book 1
Destined Blood, book 2
Destined Fire, book 3
Destined Storm, book 4
coming February 2019
Destined Radiance, book 5
coming March 2019
