by SM Reine
Summer ran her fingers over each star. The music that spilled forth vibrated up her fingertips, into her shoulders, knotted in her heart. The tones were in perfect harmony.
“It’s so beautiful,” she whispered.
Nash’s arms tightened around her as he buried his face in her hair. She could feel the warmth of his breath as he smelled her. “Everything angels craft is beautiful, in a way. But even though these look like stars from a distance, they are just another part of the bars that contain Leliel’s prison. We can go no further than this.”
She dropped her hand. “Where’s the sun?”
“It hides at night,” Nash said. “Magic.”
“Magic,” Summer repeated.
She didn’t want to play with the stars anymore. Not when Nash sounded so sad. She turned and wrapped her arms around his neck again.
They swayed gently in the darkness for several long minutes, bathed in the soft hum of the stars and the warmth of the air.
And then they began to fall slowly, so slowly, and sank into the clouds.
Everything felt different when Summer and Nash landed on the mountain again. The world was tiny and insignificant. Hazel Cove was nothing more than dots of light in the darkness. The surrounding forest wasn’t her home—it was no more than a dream.
But for now, it wasn’t a dream she was willing to leave.
She spilled to the grass, unable to stand. The view from the mountain was amazing, but she didn’t care about the valley spreading beneath her, the swaying trees, the silver river snaking through the foothills, or even the clouds above and the stars that peered through. Summer only had eyes for Nash.
He rested on his elbow beside her, and she traced the line of his rippling arms up to his shoulders, his throat, his square jaw, the dimpled chin. Summer was convinced that there was no way she would ever get used to Nash’s beauty. Even the five o’clock shadow on his cheekbones and the tiny scar on his forehead only seemed to exist to accentuate his perfection.
“Am I dreaming?” she whispered.
“Can you feel this?” One of his fingers stroked between two of hers, drawing a seductive pattern from fingertip to fingertip. “And this?” He brushed his lips over the pulse point on the inside of her wrist.
She couldn’t nod this time, so she responded by reaching back to tangle her hand in his hair. His hand trailed down her elbow to her side. Nash stroked her from shoulder blade to hip, detouring with a swirl over every rib, and letting a finger dip briefly into her navel before it finally stopped at the hem of her shorts.
“Could you feel that? Was that real, or a dream?” Nash murmured.
Summer used her grip on his hair to pull him down. “I don’t know what’s real anymore. Everything I’ve known is a lie.”
“Not everything…” His warm breaths puffed over the juncture of her shoulder and neck. Summer’s eyes fell closed. “I know dreams, Summer. I’ve lived for such a very long time, but it’s as though I walked through a dark dream. But now…I’m awake.” He kissed the inside of her wrist again. His lips tickled against the soft skin. “You have woken me.”
“But I’m nothing special,” Summer said.
His eyes flashed. “You will never say that again. Understand?”
She bit her bottom lip and nodded.
“It should not be so shocking for us to go to the other side,” he went on, laying a soft kiss on her shoulder. “Though it has been twenty years since you and your brother came to this Haven, time flows differently on Earth. Only a week has passed as far as your parents are concerned. It will be the same world your grandmother left behind.”
“You mean, they’re still young,” Summer said.
“Indeed. Furthermore, this Haven was born of Earth, and they are closely tied in many ways. The culture and technology bleed over. When we explore Earth, I suspect you will be pleasantly surprised to find it is very similar to the town in which you grew up.”
“When we explore Earth?”
“Of course, you will come with me.” His gaze heated as he traced the line of her jaw with his thumb. “There is an entire world for us to discover. Vast cities and wildernesses. An ocean that you cannot imagine. And perhaps together we can chase the moon.” A flash of doubt crossed his features, but only a flash. “If you would want to come with me.”
“You’re not going to threaten to fire me if I don’t go?” she asked, her hand creeping to the back of his neck.
“Not this time. I want to have you, Summer, but only if you wish to have me, too.”
Did he have any clue how hard it was to breathe when he talked like that? Her heart beat like a trapped animal. The blood coursing through her veins was hot. And she felt like she was falling into the expanse of his eyes, vast and eternal.
Did she want to have him? It felt silly that he even had to ask.
“Of course,” she said, pulling him to her.
Summer had only kissed a couple of guys before, aside from Sir Lumpy’s persistent attempts to love on her face, and the experiences hadn’t been remarkable.
This kiss left all others in the dust.
Lips and tongue tangled, drawing Summer’s breath away. She clung to him, struggling to close whatever minute gaps were left between their bodies. He was cool in comparison, and far from frantic. Like he had all the time in the world.
When they finally broke away, Summer had to struggle to remember to breathe on her own. His face filled her vision. She could see herself reflected in his eyes, and she thought that there was nowhere else she would rather be.
Summer could no longer resist the allure of his wings. She ran her fingers through his feathers, savoring the way that the soft tufts felt against her skin. They were thicker toward his back, but softer, too, almost more like fur. Her fingers found their way to the outer edges of his wing, where the feathers were longer and the ribs were firm.
“They’re amazing,” she whispered.
The wings circled around her like a veil, walling them off from the rest of the world until there was nothing but their bodies and the space between them.
He stroked her body as he kissed her again, tongues warring gently with one another. His hand slipped down her midriff. It tickled her abs, and she had to pull away to giggle. She couldn’t help it.
Amusement sparked in Nash’s eyes. “Ticklish?” he asked.
“No.” It was a lie, of course, but Summer had a brother, and she knew better than to admit such a vulnerability. But his fingers only skimmed higher, trailing to the side of her breast, and that tickled, too. She pulled her arm to her side. “Hey!”
“I like it when you writhe,” he said, lips dropping to her jaw. He nibbled gently at the soft skin of her neck. The hard edge of teeth made her head swim. His hand pushed the hem of her shirt over her breast, exposing her to the cool night air.
“There are better ways to do that,” Summer said.
“Yes,” Nash said, “there are.” And then he sucked her nipple into his mouth, hot and wet, and she felt him gently bite the flesh.
His cool fingers slipped underneath her shorts, skimming the soft, smooth skin below her belly button. He was careful and slow, and Summer hated it. She grabbed his wrist and pushed him lower. His hand slipped between her legs.
Nash’s index finger drew patterns on the outside of her panties, drawing moans from Summer’s throat. Her hand seized against the back of his head. “Better ways indeed,” he said. That smirk was all devil, even when his face was framed with the arch of his wings.
She lifted her hips, allowing him to push the shorts down. She wasn’t embarrassed anymore. The way he looked at her flooded every inch of her body with heat.
When she locked her leg around his hip and pulled his weight on top of her, she was rewarded with a satisfying groan, a sound that was much more man than angel. Summer wanted to find all the ways she could get him to make noises like that. She wasn’t going to stop until she found them.
His wings shielded them from the rest of
the world, forming a canopy of feathers. The night was dark, and they were alone, but all Summer knew was light.
fifteen
Nash used to be friends with an angel named Samael. Such relationships were looked down upon as the kind of petty nonsense that mortals enjoyed—angels didn’t forge friendships; they forged alliances. But what they had shared was impossible to describe in any other way.
They brought swift and righteous death upon those who deserved it, side by side as allies, and then spent long hours discussing things that had nothing to do with Heaven, God, or the unfolding war. They flew together, enjoyed companionable silences when there was nothing left to be said, and continually sought one another out even after years apart. They had been birthed from the same seed in the garden many eons past, and Nash thought that it almost made them brothers, in a way—but family wasn’t something angels did, either.
Once, after a battle that spilled mortal blood like crimson waterfalls, they sat upon the roof of a great library to rest. They spoke of many boring things, but eventually, the conversation turned to angelic politics.
“Have you seen Gabriel lately?” Samael asked.
Nash lifted his sword to study it in the fading sunlight. There was still blood on the metal from his last encounter with the Spartans. “No. Hasn’t she been stationed in Dis?”
“Supposedly,” Samael said. “But nobody has sighted her in months there, either. Rumor says that she’s become fascinated and is hiding somewhere on the mortal planes.”
Nash laughed as he wiped his blade on the leg of his trousers. “Gabriel, fascinated? With a mortal?”
“I know, I know. It’s hard to imagine.”
“How did you learn of this?” Nash asked.
“Because I’ve been ordered to locate and kill her.” Samael let out a sigh. “The hunt for treason within our ranks has become absurd. Killing one of our finest archangels for becoming fascinated with a human—it’s absurd. Wasteful. The mortal won’t live longer than a blink anyway.”
“Will you do it? Will you kill her?”
Samael had only shrugged, and Nash never found out if he did the job or not.
That had been the last time they met before the search for treason turned an accusatory finger toward Nash. Just weeks before Leliel betrayed him.
The war meant more contact with humans, and more of the ethereal ranks falling into fascination. Their greatest warriors were the most vulnerable. None of them seemed to have control of themselves once they sank into such a state.
As for Nash, he was already wedded to Leliel, and an angelic partnership was irrevocable. He believed himself to be immune.
For millions of years, he was right.
Summer had exhausted herself by trying to run away from her life in the form of a wolf, and it was amusing how quickly she went from vibrant, responsive, and moaning to a limp body snoring within the circle of his arms.
Nash had no clue if such a soporific effect was normal for mortals after consummating with an angel, but he decided to take it as a compliment.
Her eyelashes were lace fluttering on her cheeks with every twitch of her closed eyes, her lips were still plump from being kissed, and her hair was filled with grass. He had never seen anything so beautiful.
“I have fallen,” he whispered to Summer’s sleeping face.
She snuggled closer to his body, smacked her lips, and remained asleep.
Nash abandoned their clothing on the mountaintop and gathered her into his arms. A shame that she should sleep through their second flight together when she had so enjoyed the first. The joy of her laugh was permanently tattooed on his heart.
Summer remained asleep while he carried her back to the house in which he had lived for some number of decades. He alighted on the balcony, pushed the doors open, and settled her gently on his bed. She never once stirred. Her body was limp and trusting.
He wasn’t sure how long he stood over Summer, his wings hanging behind him and a strange sensation curling through his heart.
So many thousands of years alone. So much heartache, misery, and sadness. He had spent almost all of his life writhing in hate and thinking of nothing but retribution. Yet standing over Summer, all of those thoughts were impossibly distant. There was no desire to hurt left inside of him.
He almost didn’t feel like he was exiled anymore.
Nash might have stood over the bed all night if a scraping noise hadn’t drawn his attention. It came from outside the window, and he was instantly on high alert.
He pulled on new slacks and concealed his wings as he walked onto the balcony. There was no need to panic his guards—not yet. But his senses told him that there was something ethereal nearby, something other than him.
If those balam had returned for Summer, he would slaughter them.
Nash’s eyes skimmed his property. Members of his security team were farther down the hill, doing their usual rounds with no sign of alarm. It looked like there was another charity function at his gazebo, too. He wondered, with sick amusement, if he hadn’t known about it because he had told his assistants that he didn’t want to know about those, or if it was because he wasn’t in charge of Adamson Industries anymore.
A flash of white skin up the beach drew his attention. A gibborim? It was too distant to tell.
Nash glanced at Summer’s sleeping form again. Given infinite time, he would have climbed back in bed with her and seen how much it would take to rouse her again. But he only closed the doors, jumped off the balcony, and drifted gently to the lawn below.
As he drew closer to the lake, the sensation of an ethereal presence vanished.
One stretch of the beach was illuminated by spotlights. A team of men were shouting to each other indistinctly, some of them in scuba gear, others with snorkels pushed to their hair.
“How’s the search going?” Nash asked.
Everyone stopped to stare at him. He drummed his fingers against his hips impatiently, waiting for them to get through the typical shock that all mortals had when encountering him for the first time.
Eventually, one of the men in wetsuits spoke. “We’ve searched about twenty-five percent of the lake,” he said. There was a name tag sewn on the breast of his gear. Edwin.
“I wanted it done by tonight.”
“With all due respect, Lake Ast is huge, sir,” Edwin said. “And considering the weather—”
Nash silenced him with a gesture. At any other time, he would have fired the lot of them for the failure and hired people who had a more appropriate sense of urgency. But he was still buzzing from his evening with Summer. He felt unusually gracious.
Worst of all, her voice was whispering at him from the back of his mind. He knew what she would say if she heard what he was thinking. These guys are just trying to support their families, Nash…
Was consideration contagious? He hoped not.
“Please bring in another shift to continue working through the night,” he said. “It’s urgent. You may name your price.”
“We’ll do our best,” Edwin said.
“Thank you.”
Nash stepped around them and continued walking, searching for the ethereal presence that he had felt.
But the only person he found was Summer’s brother walking along the shore, hands jammed in his pockets and that perpetually brooding expression darkening his eyes.
Abram Gresham looked more like Gwyneth than his sister did. The twins were as different as the water was from the shore. Where Summer glowed with warmth, and an internal light that Nash found irresistible, Abram was forged from stone.
When the young man saw Nash approaching him, he stopped cold.
“Don’t you think that it’s a beautiful night?” Nash asked.
“Leave me alone,” Abram said.
And this was why Nash usually didn’t bother trying to be kind to mortals. “Where have you been?”
Abram picked up his pace and sped toward the house.
As the young man walked past,
Nash noticed a bulge at the small of his back. It had been a long time since Nash had been a warrior, but he still knew a concealed weapon when he saw one, and Abram walked like a man prepared to shoot.
Nash snagged the gun out of Abram’s belt in a single, swift motion. It was the kind of gun he equipped his guards with. It must have been stolen.
“Summer is into trespassing and you’re into theft,” Nash said, double-checking the safety. “The Gresham family is filled with charming quirks.”
Abram didn’t try to take the gun back. “What do you want?”
“Only to speak with you.”
“Why? Do you want to use me, too?”
So Abram had learned what Nash had planned. But it sounded so much worse coming from the young man’s lips—Nash only wanted to “use” Summer as much as she would allow it.
Nash dropped the magazine from the pistol. “Harming Summer has never been my intent. You must understand, I’ve been alone for a very long time, and—”
“That heartbreaking crap might work on my sister, but I’m not as nice as she is,” Abram interrupted. “I don’t care how long you’ve been alone or how fashionable it is for angels to think humans are useless pieces of crap. I’m going to tell you this once: You fuck with my sister, you fuck with me.”
“Big words from a vegetarian artist,” Nash said.
Shock slackened Abram’s features. “How did you—?”
“You ordered a ‘tofu dog’ on the day you were meant to interview for my internship. You hoped to get the job so that you could convince me to build a new gallery.” Nash hooked a finger in the trigger guard and spun the gun through the air. “I spoke to your teachers.”
“Why?”
“I don’t welcome people into my home that I don’t already know.” He stopped spinning the gun, popped the magazine back in, and then held the weapon out.
Abram didn’t hesitate to take it back. “What do you want from me?”
“Cooperation,” Nash said. “We will have to work together to escape this place. Furthermore, during my last visit to Adamson Tower, I made some arrangements. You see, that building has a foyer that would work well as an art gallery. Invitations for an event tomorrow night have been sent to virtually everyone in Hazel Cove and Wildwood.” He lifted his shoulder in a shrug. “Everyone who matters.”
