Blood of Angels

by Amber Morgan

  EVERNIGHT PUBLISHING ®

  www.evernightpublishing.com

  Copyright© 2017 Amber Morgan

  ISBN: 978-1-77339-285-1

  Cover Artist: Jay Aheer

  Editor: Melissa Hosack

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  DEDICATION

  For my mum—I rarely write stories I'm comfortable with you reading (don't want you knowing I know so many swear words!), but I give you permission to read this one.

  BLOOD OF ANGELS

  Romance on the Go ®

  Amber Morgan

  Copyright © 2017

  Chapter One

  The night before the storm, Thea dreamed a fireball hit her house. She stood outside in the lashing rain, watching with a detached calm while the Old Clayton House burned. When she woke to dazzling sunlight and the stifling heat of a July morning in Georgia, that same peaceful acceptance was still with her. If the house burned down, so be it. It had endured since the Civil War, but everything had to die eventually. The Old Clayton House, with its shroud of ivy and history of scandals, was probably well overdue.

  She went through her usual morning routine—yoga, shower, dress, breakfast—and didn’t let it play on her mind. She’d been a child the last time any of her dreams came true, and that one had been so mundane, she’d felt nothing but disappointment. She’d dreamed old Mrs. Jackson would find three dead chickens in her garden, and she did. But in a county full of coyotes and bobcats, dead chickens weren’t exactly a surprise. After the chicken incident, Thea hadn't had any more prophetic visions. There was no reason to think the fireball nightmare was anything to dwell on.

  After breakfast, she resigned herself to having to drive into Milton. Her cupboards were bare of everything except coffee and sugar, and whilst she was fairly sure she could subsist on that if need be, it wasn’t a pleasant idea. Going into town wasn’t either, but she figured she could muster the courage for a quick trip.

  It wasn’t that the residents of Milton were unkind, exactly. Nobody would be that impolite. But they stared a little too long and they smiled a little too much, and Thea walked through town with a string of ghosts trailing after her. Nobody said anything, but everybody knew, and everybody watched in case she cracked. Just like her mama. Just like her daddy.

  Thea found herself blushing as she slipped on her sandals, as if she was already under the weight of those stares. She pinned back her fly-away hair and studied herself in the bedroom mirror. Her cheeks were scarlet and icy blonde wisps of hair already escaped her pins. She looked like a literary cliché, some fey waif living alone in a crumbling mansion, wild-haired and unable to interact properly with normal society. Not too far from the truth, she guessed. It was annoying. Maybe people wouldn’t treat her as so fragile if she looked sturdier.

  She shrugged at her reflection and left the house. Outside, the sun beat down mercilessly. Bees hummed just out of sight and any idea of a storm was laughable. The overgrown gardens of the Old Clayton House were sunbaked and dying, the once-verdant and luxurious grounds left to Mother Nature to tend. There had been a gardener once, when Thea’s parents were still alive, and for a while after they died, but eventually Thea realized she couldn’t afford to keep him on and she’d left the gardens to grow wild and fade away.

  She didn’t mind. Or rather, she didn’t care. Keeping the house clean and tidy was more than enough work without worrying about the garden. And, well, if the house did burn down tonight, it wouldn’t matter anyway.

  Still, the driveway winding from the house down to the gate was a sprawl of thorny brambles and weeds, and she admitted to herself that she probably should care more, if only for convenience’s sake. Her battered car crushed the brambles and weeds as she pulled away from the house and she had an image of herself simply driving up and down the garden all day, smushing the tangle of thorns to mud and mulch, and smiled.

  ****

  On the outskirts of Milton, in a dusty field that usually housed a few forlorn-looking horses, Thea saw a huge tent being pitched. Stuck at a stop light, she watched men scramble around the tent with a single-minded industriousness, like a colony of ants. Despite the dust swirling around, the tent was brilliantly white in the sun’s glare. A revival meeting, she guessed, and, as she pulled away, she saw a huge wooden sign propped against the fence of the field. “Experience the Healing Hands of Brother Hiram!” the sign screamed in garish, carnival letters.

  She scoffed and put it out of her mind as she drove into Milton. Such meetings pitched up once or twice a year, caused a commotion, then vanished in a cloud of grit and grime again. Brother Hiram’s Healing Hands would make as much impact on the town as Mrs. Jackson’s dead chickens.

  She parked outside Ada’s General Store and spent a few seconds grounding herself, breathing deep and slow. Seeing people, interacting with people, was hard. She sometimes wondered if it would be easier in a different town, one where nobody knew who she was or why her parents died. She could sell Old Clayton House, drive into the sunset, and start over somewhere new. Be a stranger, instead of just strange.

  But she wasn’t sure anyone would want the Old Clayton House. She wouldn’t, given the choice. So she stayed and reserved her strength for these infrequent trips to town.

  The inside of the store was cool, the shelves of produce bathed in gentle golden light. Soft music played somewhere and people shuffled around lazily, turning over peaches and plums in their hands as if they were jewels. She joined them in their slow shuffle, trying to decide what she wanted to eat. When her basket was full—of what, she didn’t really know—she went to the counter where Ada Jones had sat for as long as Thea could remember.

  “Good morning, honey,” Ada said, just a little too loud, in case Thea was deaf as well as mad. “You doing alright this morning, Thea? Hmm?”

  “As fine as I ever am, Ada,” Thea said.

  Ada clucked her tongue as if this was terrible news. “You taking care of yourself up there? No drinking? No funny business?”

  “I’ve never drunk, Ada,” Thea said coolly, “and I don’t even know what funny business is, so I can hardly engage in it.”

  Ada gave her a sad, knowing look. “Well that’s good, honey. You keep it up.”

  Thea promised that she would, whatever it was, and paid. Ada patted her hand as she passed over her cash, a gesture so full of well-meant pity it stung. The whole town was waiting, she thought. Waiting for her to do ... something. Because she would, they were thinking. Her mama had and her daddy had, so she would. Maybe she’d turn to drink like Joseph Clayton and slowly decay before their very eyes, become a spidery husk of a woman reeking of gin and regret. Or maybe she’d be dramatic like Eloise Clayton and drown herself in the town river, with a garland of water weeds around her neck and a bottle of pills on the riverbank. An Ophelia for the modern age—beautiful, tragic, and predictable.

  Thea didn’t think she’d be like either of her parents. But she felt the weight of Milton’s expectations and wondered what they’d do if she just kept ticking along, without any dramas or tragedies.

  As she was leaving, Geoff Thompson, a grizzled elder of the town, bustled in, knocking her bag from her hands. Thea dropped to her knees to retrieve her groceries, cheeks flaring red, while Geoff stood over her, chuckling lightly.

  "Stocking up for the big storm, Miss
Clayton?" he asked her. "Gonna be a real show tonight."

  "Geoff, there's no storm tonight," Ada said. She, too, watched Thea scramble around on the floor and made no move to help. "Sky's as blue as you like. Not a cloud in sight."

  "There's a storm coming fit to rip the heavens open," Geoff insisted. "Hope the Old Clayton House ain't gonna blow down, Miss Clayton."

  Thea stuffed a bag of peaches into her bag and stood. "It's survived this long, Mr. Thompson. I'm sure it'll survive one more night."

  Geoff gave her a smile that hovered between kind and sardonic. “Sure it will, Miss Clayton. Sure it will.”

  Thea left the store feeling certain Geoff would be driving by the house tomorrow morning, just to see if the storm had washed it away.

  ****

  She went home and did the usual things she did to try to fill the days. She rearranged books in the library, ignoring the clouds of dust she displaced and focusing instead on the soft, powdery smell of aged paper. She threw out the dead roses that had been sitting in the lounge for a week, petals browned and crumbling. She listened to Debussy and Chopin and all the sad, heart-breaking waltzes she could find while she polished the ugly antique mirror in her parents’ bedroom and wondered how one became normal.

  Parts of her were normal. She had a degree in Art History. That seemed normal, if somewhat frivolous. But then, her mother had been famous—the children of celebrities were supposed to do frivolous things with their lives, weren’t they?

  She’d never had a job. That was probably pretty normal for both a graduate and the child of a celebrity. It wasn’t meant to be that way. Just two days before her mother killed herself, Thea had accepted a job as an archivist’s assistant at a museum in Savannah. She'd had to turn the job down to take care of her daddy. And then his drinking had gotten out of control, and Thea found herself trapped in the Old Clayton House caring for him. Trapped in Milton, trapped by her parents’ flaws and tragedies.

  She liked to bake. That seemed normal. She just didn’t do it very often because she had nobody but herself to bake for, and eating an entire angel food cake for breakfast probably wasn’t normal. She liked animals. They’d never had pets because her mother was strange about germs, but Thea had always fancied a cat or a parrot. She guessed she could have one now. A parrot could talk to her at least. But maybe she had more of her mother’s strangeness about her than she realized, because the idea of bringing another living creature into the Old Clayton House seemed cruel for reasons she couldn’t quite fathom.

  Parts of her were normal, yes. But more of her was not and she didn’t know how to fix those other parts, bring them into line with the expectations of the world. She didn’t even know if she should. We’re not like other people, baby, her mother would whisper as she wove flowers into Thea’s hair. We’re special. We’re blessed.

  Thea was twenty-six, an orphan, living off the dregs of her once-famous mother’s fortune in a decaying house in a town where everyone knew who she was and everyone was waiting for her to break. She didn’t feel blessed.

  ****

  By sunset the storm clouds had gathered, billowing overhead in a bloody blaze of red and black. The heat was suffocating and the wind blew hot and wet through the house. Thea curled up on the faded chaise-lounge in the parlor and watched the storm prepare to break. Cracked Sky was the name of the county Milton nestled in, after the storms that raged in the summer months, generation after generation. Cracked Sky County, where thunder and lightning was as common as birdsong. Thea loved a good storm. The drama, the intensity … there was something invigorating and cleansing about it.

  But when midnight came, the storm still hadn’t broken. Disappointed, Thea went to bed. Instinct prodded at her to sleep in the guest room rather than her own and, thinking of her dream with trepidation for the first time, she obeyed.

  When she woke up, she was outside.

  She wore just a thin cotton nightdress and the rain had already plastered it to her skin. Soaked and shivering, she hugged herself and stared around the storm-lit garden. She had no memory of coming out here, and no history of sleep-walking, but she felt as eerily composed as she had that morning, waking from her dream. Perhaps that was madness. Perhaps that was how it would manifest in her, not in drinking or suicidal urges, but simply in accepting everything that happened to her without worry.

  Thunder rocked the night, loud enough to make her believe in Zeus and Thor. She gazed up, watching lightning flick and flash through the iron clouds and wondered when the fireball would come. It seemed impossible, now, that it wouldn’t.

  It struck suddenly and brilliantly, illuminating the darkness as if Hell itself had exploded from the shadows. Thea was far enough from the house that she could watch without fear as the white-hot orb crashed into the roof, sending a shower of molten drops cascading down the ivy-ridden walls. She smelt smoke and heard sizzling, but the rain was heavy, so heavy, she knew it would quench the flames before the Old Clayton House burned. Still, her heart raced at the sight of flames spouting from the roof, sparks flying, and the ugly plume of smoke punching up into the storm. Was she scared or excited? She wasn’t sure. They felt about the same; adrenaline pumping, mouth dry, body coiled tight and tense.

  This was it. Something had finally happened.

  Chapter Two

  The storm killed the flames before they could spread to the rest of the house, and once Thea was sure it was safe, she went back inside. She stood shivering in the shadowed foyer, inhaling the acrid stink of smoke while she dripped rainwater onto the floorboards. She knew she should go upstairs and take a look at the damage, maybe even call the fire department to be on the safe side, but she felt frozen. The storm had soaked into her bones, turning her to ice, and if she got too close to the fire—even the dying embers of the fire—she was afraid she’d melt away.

  She shook her head, sending a fine spray of water lashing across the room, and scolded herself. This was her home, for better or worse. There was nothing within these walls that could hurt her. She knew that. She’d had so many years to come to know that.

  Wringing out her hair, she went upstairs.

  Wisps of smoke curled around her and the scent of charred wood and soot filled the hall. She thought of the antique furniture she dutifully polished every day, the dressers and wardrobes carved from oak and teak. She felt a lightness at the idea of them burned to cinders, a relief that was almost treacherous.

  At the top of the stairs, she realized the fireball had hit her bedroom, and she started shivering again. If she hadn’t moved bedrooms … if she hadn’t sleep-walked… The bedroom door was blackened and hot to the touch when she cautiously pushed it open. Over her head, rain poured in through a smoking, steaming hole in the roof. The room was half-flooded, half-barbecued. She walked through sludgy ash as if sleep-walking again, barely aware of the wreckage around her.

  All her focus, all her being, was concentrated on the creature writhing in agony amidst the wreckage. He was naked and man-shaped, but she knew, oh she knew he wasn’t a man. He was on his knees, his back to her and his face hidden. His skin was dusty gold, his long hair black as pitch. That wasn’t what marked him as inhuman, though. It was the wounds on his back: livid, fresh, and as bloody as a slaughter house. Dark rivers of blood poured down his golden skin from the two feathered stumps at his shoulder blades. She’d never seen so much blood. It was stomach-turning and magnetic at the same time. There were feathers scattered everywhere, sodden and blackened, but undeniable.

  And his cries … they broke her heart. They made her desperate. She could fall to her knees in the rain and the ash and promise him anything, anything, if he would just stop crying.

  Thea trembled.

  Her granddaddy used to thunder around the house quoting from his Bible, which he always carried with him. He’d terrified and entranced her when she was a child, with his booming voice and wild beard. His words, no matter how loving or beautiful the quote may be, always sounded portentous, turning ever
y verse into a doom-riddled prophecy. She'd listened, wide-eyed and enraptured, while her parents rolled their eyes and called him a silly old fool. And now, like the ghost he was, her granddaddy rose in her memory, deep voice roaring.

  How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations!

  Pulled by the creature's cries, she rushed to him and dropped to her knees, hands fluttering over him. She was afraid to touch him, but how could she not touch him? An angel had fallen through her roof, destroyed her bed, and lay weeping at her feet. How could she resist?

  His skin was hot, deliciously so, and he went still under her hands, like a frightened animal. She swept her fingers up his spine, through the tracks of blood, and whispered, “Please. Please, tell me how to help.”

  His words were nonsense at first. Beautiful nonsense, in a language she couldn’t guess at. But his pain was clear, and so was the pleading. What would she do with an injured animal?

  She talked back to him, soothing, gentle nonsense of her own, and she eased him upright. His only wounds seemed to be the gushing stumps, from which blood flowed faster than the rain could wash it away. Sticky, matted clumps of downy feathers clung to the wounds and she realized she would have to touch them, pull them away to clean the wounds. The idea made her head spin, but she kept up her stream of chatter and got him to his feet.

  He didn’t resist. Perhaps he was in shock? He was heavy in her arms, and his passivity made it hard to guide him through the ruined bedroom, but she managed. His head bowed, his face hidden, he let her drag him along. She got him into the bathroom and sat him down on the edge of the tub. It was a claw-footed, cast-iron monstrosity that belonged in another century, but her father had installed a very modern shower over it. That seemed the most practical way to wash off the blood. If the angel would let her.