by Wylde, Nora
THE FAITHFUL
EPISODE 1
NORA WYLDE
The Faithful
Copyright 2015 Nora Wylde
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
In the suburbs of small town New Jersey, a chain of events set in motion years before is about to come to a head. Hidden in plain sight amongst humans, disgraced members of a mythical race called the Faithful live their lives in penance, hoping to gain favor by completing their assigned tasks.
Samael, once an exalted warrior among the Faithful, is only months away from completing his punishment and he is ready to return to his place up above. He is given one simple task: bring death to the human man named Lee that he has watched over for years. Yet when the time comes, Lee's daughter Abby stumbles into his path and suddenly his ticket to salvation is put on hold.
Abby doesn't know why she is so drawn to Sam, but suddenly everything about her sexy neighbor sets her blood on fire. As much as she fights, she can not stay away, and soon she understands exactly what it means to belong to a fallen angel.
As Abby is drawn into his world, Sam must make the choice to follow through with his duty--or risk it all for the one human who stands in his way.
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Preview: The Faithful 2
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BOOKS BY NORA WYLDE
Then I looked, and behold, a white cloud, and seated on the cloud one like a son of man, with a golden crown on his head, and a sharp sickle in his hand. And another angel came out of the temple, calling with a loud voice to him who sat on the cloud, “Put in your sickle, and reap, for the hour to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is fully ripe.” So he who sat on the cloud swung his sickle across the earth, and the earth was reaped. Then another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle. And another angel came out from the altar, the angel who has authority over the fire, and he called with a loud voice to the one who had the sharp sickle, “Put in your sickle and gather the clusters from the vine of the earth, for its grapes are ripe.”
– Revelation 14:14-20
EPISODE 1
Prologue
The Nurse wrappeD the squirming bundle in soft pink flannel before placing her in his waiting arms. Lee wondered if nurses always swaddled babies up that way, or if they did it to make it easier for a trembling old fool to hold his daughter. She barely filled his arms, so he held her that much tighter to make sure she would not drop her. Not that he could fathom such a thing. As he returned her curious newborn stare with a sleepy grin of his own, he knew one thing for certain- he would give his own life before he let any harm come to her.
A cool wisp of breeze tickled the back of his neck, and he shivered as a rash of goose bumps climbed up his arms. Had he heard a voice?
“A father’s joy…”
His eyes scanned the sterile white hospital room. His wife remained undisturbed in a peaceful post-birth slumber, and the door to the room was closed. There were no open windows in the hospital, nor a vent above his head. He let out the breath of air he had sucked into his lungs and shook his head with a chuckle to himself. Must have been imagining things.
“Abigail. He should call her Abigail.”
He heard it again, a murmur that rippled through the air, the remnants of an ethereal conversation he should not have been privy to, yet he was fairly sure the exchange was meant for his ears. As he rolled his eyes upward and searched the shadows of the dimmed room, he knew he would not find the source of the whisper. A memory from his past surfaced and he relaxed a bit. They never meant any harm.
The knowledge was both strange and comforting. It had been a long time since they paid him any mind.
The baby began to squirm in his arms. Maybe she sensed them lurking? He tucked his daughter’s blanket more securely around her bottom, patting the infant in a rhythmic motion as he soothed her.
So it appeared his new daughter was special to them as well.
He sat down on the edge of his wife’s hospital bed and reached out to gently shake her shoulder. Dina rolled toward him, her face creased with a contented smile.
“Honey, I think we have a name,” he said.
“Oh, yeah? What is it?” Dina replied.
“It’ll be…Abigail. We can call her Abby.”
Dina brushed the baby’s cheek with her fingertips and nodded.
It was the perfect name.
Chapter 1
Sam
“She’s unpacking her truck all by herself. Lee’s too weak to help her.”
Sam continued to stare at the television screen above the workbench, his feet crossed and propped up on the wooden crate coffee table. The football game was near finished, but he could not recall which teams were playing or what the score was. Daren, who should be sitting at his side, was instead perched by the opened garage door. The towheaded archangel wiped his oil-stained hands on a rag and stared across the yard, seeming nonplussed that the neighbors might see him spying on them.
“Stop staring. Humans consider it stalking,” Sam replied. He finished off the beer he had been nursing and continued staring at the game, hoping his companion would drop the subject.
Yes, he was fully aware Abby Mansfield was home from college. How could he not know it? The moment she pulled up in her truck his skin tightened, his true nature surging up beneath the shielded exterior he was forced to assume. Around most humans it was not particularly painful to shield himself, and after all he was quite accustomed to lying low. Yet from the second she arrived he could hear her clearly inside his head, as if she screamed even the most menial of her human thoughts to the heavens. Her worry over her father’s health echoed so loudly in his skull that he could have sworn she was standing next to him. Sam shook his head to chase the connection away, something he had been trying to do all afternoon without success.
Abby was a different creature entirely. With her, he had always felt…exposed. Unsteady. Like a clumsy fool on the verge of revealing everything to her. For his entire human existence it had been a struggle to hide his nature from her, and to some extent, from her father, Lee. It had been a relief when she went off to college and he no longer needed to expend the effort to avoid her. Sam could play the role of the helpful neighbor without complication.
The last time he saw her was the day she left for college. It was the morning he had discovered the power of shifting had returned to him. The power surged into his gangly teenage body with the force of all that was holy, giving him an insatiable taste of the powers that he had surrendered. As part of the punishment for his crimes, his sentence on earth required him to be born as a human and suffer all the indignities associated with the menial form. Only as his human form aged would he recover the powers taken from him, and he suspected God threw a wrench in the process and allowed his powers to return as He saw fit to amuse Himself. Sam was relieved beyond measure to have the shifting power in his grasp; it was so much easier to think of where he wanted to be and just appear there, rather than use the clumsy human legs he was granted to travel from place to place.
So enthralled with the return of his power, he had shifted without conscious intent and ended up in the l
ast place he should intrude on. In the span of a careless thought he surfaced at Abby’s bedside, staring down at her as she slept. It was her last day at home before she left for college, and he should be glad she would soon be out of his way. Instead, as he sat at her bedside and looked down upon her peaceful slumber, he was captivated.
Her heart shaped face remained relaxed, her lips soft and full even as he traced his fingertip down her cheek. At the contact, her mouth fell open and a sigh escaped her, a surge of arrogance washing over him amidst his relief. He knew what his unguarded touch would do to her in her slumber, but still he reveled in it. In her dream he was her every desire, those known and unknown, the fiber that was woven through the roots of every emotion. No matter what she wanted, in her dream he became it, and when she gasped and turned her face into his hand it was all he could do not to take her into his arms. When she opened her soft brown eyes her gaze was filled with the sleepy haze of euphoric dreams and he felt his human insides twist.
Something foreign gripped him, a need that had been taken from him on the day he had surrendered his powers. The removal of desire was part of his punishment, as were all those basal urges archangels wielded so freely. He should be happy it returned to him instead of afraid, but when the emotion hit his fragile mortal body he realized he never truly had known what yearning meant.
Samael, fallen archangel, bringer of darkness, suddenly fell to his knees beside her, completely enraptured by a simple human.
“You’re here,” she murmured with a smile.
When she reached for him, he left. As easily as he had traveled to her, he left her the same way. He held her thoughts long enough to hear her dismiss his presence as a dream, and then he broke the connection between them.
Never again would he get so close to her.
He could not be so weak.
He had a job to do, a duty to fulfill, and a place of power to return to above. No good could come of revealing himself to a mortal during a moment of hormone induced human weakness. Despite being trapped on earth as a human, he was still an archangel – one of The Faithful.
As he grew into human manhood he slowly regained his powers, and the punishment he had once thought intolerable had become a painful prison. He thought on it with a bitterness sometimes, in those dark moments where he allowed himself to remember the formidable archangel he had once been.
Yes, God had chosen his punishment wisely. Taking away his powers and submitting him to living a human lifetime was one thing; gifting his powers back yet keeping him bound in the mortal body until his task was accomplished? It was the ultimate torture.
All the more reason he should avoid her. He was too close to fulfilling his duty to deviate from the plan. He was a grown human male now and there was no chance he would risk salvation by breaking any of the rules.
After all, the Maker did not give second chances, and the last thing he needed was to get on God’s shit list. Again.
“You’re an asshole. I’ll go help her if you won’t,” Daren commented, a wide smirk creasing his face. Daren was a painfully beautiful archangel, forged direct from the blood of the Almighty himself. Thick golden locks curled around his squared face, and even cropped short to his head it still crowned him like an earthly halo. He wore his true form so close to his skin that he was excessively large on earth, his muscles rippling out under his tight tee shirt and straining to make an appearance. If he flexed his back, the cloth might rip. It was the way Daren chose to appear to humans, a vision that startled and captivated those who looked upon him. But that was typical of his race: they were proud bordering on egotistical, as enthralled by their own beauty as the humans who looked upon them. Daren, in particular, had a demented sense of humor and a wicked affinity for sticking his nose where it did not belong, but since they had been friends for more than an eternity Sam usually let him run amok with his games. This time, however, Daren was treading on dangerous ground and the grinning fool knew it.
“Leave it. Just leave it be,” Sam growled. Compelled out of his spot on the couch, Sam joined Daren at the garage door, his empty beer bottle clutched in his hand.
“You’re such a prick,” Daren mumbled, taking a swig of his beer. “Like most of your kind.”
“My kind? We’re cut from the same cloth, brother. Don’t forget it,” Sam replied.
“Hardly. Life, meet Death. As if you’ve forgotten.”
Sam planted a fist in Daren’s broad chest and shoved him, knocking his brethren into the wall.
Of course he had not forgotten what his true nature consisted of. Death was his business, his duty to humankind. Since the beginning of time he had tended his task, leading souls to the afterlife, and he was damn good at it. That was until he had screwed up and been forced to live a human life as punishment.
They watched Abby take a cardboard box from her truck bed, fumble it, and then recover. Her thick brown hair was loose over her shoulders and Sam could see the glimmer of sweat along her brow where a few strands stuck to her skin.
“We’re not having this conversation,” Sam replied. Sam followed the rules, as he always had. He kept a careful distance from Abby since adulthood as he watched over Lee, waiting for his chance to regain his standing up above. Deviating from his sworn duty was not part of the plan.
“Whatever,” Daren said, rolling his eyes. “Doesn’t change the fact you’re going over there. Just don’t be a dick. She doesn’t deserve it.”
Sam gave a noncommittal grunt as he shoved the ball cap on his head. It was his favorite Philly hat, old style pinstriped red and white. Lee had bought it for him years ago when the man had taken Sam and Abby to a ballgame. Abby had been only thirteen, still wearing braces and sporting worn out jeans over a sweat jacket. Sam recalled mock fighting over a fly ball with her, but of course, he let her have it. Her metal-laced smile had been thanks enough.
He shook off the memory. There was no time for weak sensitivity. Soon he would be back where he belonged and all the trappings of humanity he had suffered during his intolerable mortal lifetime would disappear. No more pity for humans, no more compassion.
No more useless human desire or human regret.
It would vanish from him as if it had never been.
His fondness for the human Abigail was something he had always held in careful check. He admired her from afar, watched her grow into a striking woman, all without interference. It was not his job to intercede with her; his relationship with her would be nothing more than friendship. As much as all archangels loved humans, they were still…only humans.
Weak. Short-lived. Entirely mortal.
“I’ll help her for Lee’s sake. I don’t want him trying to carry any boxes,” Sam muttered.
“Have at it then,” Daren commented. “Oh, and buddy?” he added as Sam left the garage.
“What?” Sam barked.
“Don’t look at her ass. A woman can tell when you’re checking out her ass.”
“Shut up, man. Shut. Up.”
Sam stalked away from his friend and walked over to the neighbor’s house. He would help Abby because her ailing father was too sick to do it. He had a job to do, a reward to collect, and one interaction with a senseless human would change nothing.
At least he told himself that as he planted a smile on his face and prepared to greet his childhood friend.
Chapter 2
Abby
Abby leaned over the tailgate, the belt loop of her faded blue jeans catching on a tow hook as she tried to pull another box off the truck bed. She yanked away from the hook and groaned as she heard the fabric tear, hoping the damage was not too bad since it was her last serviceable pair of comfy jeans. She knew there would be no time for frivolous chores like shopping over the next few months. Heck, she had no job and no money either, so random shopping sprees would be crossed off her agenda any way she looked at it.
“Great,” she muttered. The belt loop hung from the remnants of a thread, and there was a nice little tear pointing down
to her button fly in the worst spot possible spot for a mending attempt. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth and frowned when she noticed the grease smeared across her skin from her pickup truck. Standing there filthy and disheveled, she heard her father chuckle and pointedly ignored him.
She heaved a box of clothes onto her hip and turned back to the house where Dad sat on the porch. Rocking away in his creaky chair with a blanket tucked neatly over his knees, all he needed was a smoking pipe to accent his three-day beard and he would fit quite nicely into a Norman Rockwell portrait. Although the lines of his normally slim face were more drawn than usual, he still smiled when she cursed under her breath and she could not help but grin in return. It was good to see him outside in the warm afternoon sun, if only for a little while. He could nearly be mistaken for a man who was healthy.
“Need a hand?” a familiar voice asked.
Abby turned to see the neighbor step out of his garage and cross the lawn between their houses. As Sam shoved a baseball cap over his mass of brown hair and trotted over to her truck, she noticed he looked different somehow. It was impossible to quantify, but there was something new going on with him, she was sure. His tee shirt was taut over his powerful biceps, and she raised her eyebrows in barely disguised admiration as he approached. Had it been that long since they last talked? He had always been built like a fighter, but this was ridiculous. Taller than she recalled and as wide as a house, she felt a little uneasy in his presence.
“Sure, that would be great,” she said.
Sam took the next box off the truck bed, a grin slowly replacing the perpetual scowl on his face as he glanced down at her torn jeans.
“Still a grubby little thing, hmm? I thought your Dad said you were some sort of college grad now,” he commented. She smiled wryly back. She was long accustomed to his stormy moods; friendly one moment, moody the next. That was the Sam she remembered.
