Loving Angel

by JL Weil

  I wanted to scream and tell the coward to come forward, to show his face and stop hiding in the shadows. If it was me he wanted, then it was me he would get. But if it was Angel…

  Then he was going to be one sorry son of a bitch.

  “I don’t understand. What’s happening?” she whispered.

  Very discreetly, I used my extended vision, seeking the source of my unease. “You really don’t sense anything?”

  She stood still, the sun kissing her golden skin as she waited for a signal, a tingle, anything. I could see it in her eyes—she felt nothing. “Whatever you are feeling, it’s not from, you know, down under.”

  “Yeah, I’m figuring that out.”

  Lifting her gaze to mine, she chased away the tiny bumps that had lined the back of my neck, searing me with heat. “Your eyes are glowing,” she murmured.

  It felt like something heavy sat in my chest, and this unknown prowler was to blame. “So are yours.”

  There was worry in her expression as she dropped her hands to her side. “What does it mean?”

  I rubbed my hand over my jaw, the two-day stubble rough against my palm. “That neither of us is normal, and the world is filled with shit we’ll never understand.”

  Her lips turned down. “I’m serious.”

  I grinned. “I know. Serious is like your default setting.”

  Her starlite eyes rolled.

  Standing around like sitting ducks was going to get us nowhere, except maybe killed.

  “We should go,” she said, reading my mind.

  A creepy pillow of fog started to crawl at our feet, rising off the ground and wrapping around our ankles. It was yellowish in color, and like a poisonous chemical or acid, it burned through the thick material of my jeans, singeing the hem.

  I nodded and took her hand. “Yep. I think that’s our cue to scram.”

  She let out a yelp as the smoke touched her, scorching the material on her sneakers. She jumped into my arms. My chest rumbled. Even in the throes of danger, she amused me.

  “Chase!”

  The panic in her voice made me react. I bolted.

  “How come there is never anyone around to see the weird shit?” she asked, when her feet touched the ground in front of our little row house.

  “Good question,” I mumbled. “You okay?” I bent down to check her leg. The ends of my favorite jeans were charcoaled. “Son of a—”

  Her eyes shuttered. “What was that stuff?”

  I stood, peeved. “Ectoplasm on steroids.”

  “You have no clue.”

  “No clue,” I echoed.

  Angel headed straight for the shower when we walked through the door, and I understood why. An invasive feeling sat on my skin that made me wanted to scrub it clean. I let her have the first go. I could wait, because I was sure that soap and hot water weren’t going to expunge the feeling.

  Strolling into the kitchen, I listened as the water turned on, running through the pipes behind the walls. It was a homey, a comforting feeling knowing that Angel was so close and hearing her doing the simplest of tasks. Another of my comforts was food. Whipping open the refrigerator door, I pulled out all the fixings for a monster-size sandwich.

  While I was slapping on a thick layer of mayo on both sides of my wheat bread, Emma came stumbling into the room looking like she was in desperate need of some vitamin D. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Shut your pie hole, Winters. I’m not in the mood.”

  “Obviously,” I replied. Emma was known to bring out the very best in me.

  “If I throw a stick will you leave?”

  “Testy.”

  She rummaged through a drawer of medicine and first aid stuff, pulling out a white bottle of aspirin. Popping them like candy, she went to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of water, chugging it with the oval pills.

  “Another headache?” I asked, piling lettuce and tomato on top of my turkey sandwich.

  “Hmm, yeah,” she said, swallowing. “This one is a bitch. They are getting worse.”

  I could tell. Her eyes were sunken with dark circles underneath them, not exactly her best look. “Not sleeping much?”

  “Is it that noticeable?” She plopped her butt into one of the kitchen chairs, taking another swig of water.

  I grabbed my plate and sat across from her. “Are you looking for honesty?”

  Her head dropped into her hands. “Why am I telling you this?”

  “I know it might be hard to believe, but I’m a great listener.” I offered her half of my sandwich, my peace offering for the moment. “And you look like crap.”

  She snorted, but took the offering. “Thanks, ass.” She placed the sandwich on a napkin and massaged her temples. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve been getting these flashes of images, but they don’t make any sense.”

  I took a bite of the glorious sandwich. “There is a lot of that going around,” I mumbled, chewing. “The not making sense part, I mean.”

  She gave me a funny look.

  I wasn’t ready to divulge my current list of worries. One problem at a time. “What kind of images?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure I knew. I had been there, after all, the day her father died.

  She picked at the wheat bread. “Trees mostly. Sometimes I see faces. Travis’s. Angel’s. My father’s. Yours.”

  Shit. On. A. Log.

  This was bad. Epic proportions bad.

  Just once, I wanted my instincts to be wrong. I knew that muddling with Emma’s mind was going to come back to bite us in the buttocks. All I could think about was Travis, and of course, Emma attempting to kill me in my sleep.

  Fun times.

  I cleared my throat. “This better not get kinky.”

  “Hardly. Douche is not my type.”

  I chuckled. “We would kill each other within a week.” That might not have been the right choice of words, but they were out of my mouth before I thought about it. What I wouldn’t give for a take back.

  Hell must have frozen over. I actually pulled what I thought might pass as a smile from the toughest girl I knew. “Less,” she replied. The grin didn’t last long as her green eyes hardened in determination. “Eventually, I am going to put the pieces of the puzzle together. They are right there, waiting for me to put them in place.”

  Our little hunter was on the verge of getting back her memories, and shit was going to hit the fan, which put me in between a rock and a hard place. Did I let her memories return and deal with the backlash, probably the healthiest path for Emma? Or did I screw with her head some more, deeper and with possibly more damage, but save my cousin a heartache?

  By sitting back and letting nature take is course, I would be putting myself into the fire, with Angel burning right beside me. Travis would go back to hating me, just when we were at a good place again. And Emma would most definitely be out for my head. Angel’s, too. Emma would do whatever she could to make me suffer.

  I hated being at a crossroad.

  The more I thought about it, the more appealing compulsion became, but as my eyes flicked to hers across the table, she looked lost, confused, and defeated. Those were traits I’d never seen in her, even before she became a weapon.

  I couldn’t do it.

  Where was the guy who always made the hard choices no one else would make? Good lord, I was becoming a sucker.

  Chapter 13

  I lay in bed that night tossing and turning. Thinking. And thinking. And over-thinking. To the point that my eyes began to go loopy and the water spots on my ceiling started to come alive. The clock on my oak nightstand blinked just past three a.m.

  Typically, I flourished at night, in darkness, but tonight that was not the case. My insomnia was pissing me off. I wanted to shut down my brain like a normal person and sleep, the deep, soundless sleep that wasn’t interrupted by unwanted thoughts or a sudden sense of morals.

  I was the bad guy.

  I was the asshole
who didn’t care about feelings, not if it kept those I loved alive.

  So what was the problem?

  I should march right into Emma’s room and prod her memories before things got dicey. Boom. Problem solved. Why did I care if she lost brain cells or part of her humanity? So what if she’d kinda grown on me. So what if I had a twisted form of respect for her hunter skill set. Our ability to kickass was the only thing Emma and I had in common.

  Utterly sick of lying on my back listening to the wind howl outside my window, I knew I had to do something. Screw the consequences.

  That was more like it.

  Feeling like myself, I rolled out of bed with my middle-finger-to-the-world attitude and strolled out into the hall. The house was so quiet you could hear the dust settle. I stopped at the bottom of the staircase, the old wooden floorboard squeaking under my weight. I thought about the other people in the house, the two I would protect with my dying breath and the hunter who threatened us all.

  I sighed.

  A voice came out of the blackness. “You’re rusty, cuz.”

  I spun, my entire body a live wire, tensed for a fight. I blinked, wondering if I was hallucinating from lack of zzz’s. Lo and behold sat Travis, lounging on my couch like he didn’t have a care in the world, or that it was an ungodly hour and he scared the piss out of me. “Holy shit,” I spat. “Why are you creeping around my house in the middle of the night?”

  Two dimples gleamed through the shadowy room. “I think we should be more concerned that I got into the house without triggering you.”

  Some things never change, like Travis taking every opportunity to razz me. He was right. I should have been able to detect him before he got a pinky toe through the door. My back hit the wall as I relaxed the yellowish spark that had soared in my eyes. “I’m off my game. It happens on very, very, rare occasions.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “You still haven’t told me why you broke into my house.”

  He gave me a shithead grin. “Weekend visit.”

  I slumped down beside him, rubbing my hands over my face. “I almost hit you. Hell, I still might.”

  He chuckled. “I would like to see you try.”

  I raised my brows slightly. “You want to go a round? For old times’ sake?”

  “And risk waking Lexi? No thanks,” he sneered.

  “Is there a reason you’re here before dawn?”

  “I travel better at night.”

  I smirked. Of course he did. Leave it to my cousin to travel unconventionally—running all the way here from Spring Valley. Some would find that insane, but I understood. I would kill for a run right now to clear my overtaxed, foggy head. My muscles would thank me. The school gym was pitiful.

  And then as we both sat there in the dark, I thought maybe this was a sign, that there was a reason he was here. Fate was telling me that I needed to confide in him—share this burden weighing me—after all, it was his life, too, I was screwing with.

  Now that I had the opportunity to unload my suspicions about Emma, self-doubt started to seep into my belly. It was a foreign feeling, and if there was one thing I hated, it was hurting those I loved. What I was about to tell him would indubitably cause him pain. He would probably go back to detesting me, or do something drastic—take matters into his own hands, make Emma forget—again. The more you forced your will on a human, the more scrambled they could become, and in Emma’s short life, she had been f’d over by all those she cared for.

  Love made you do crazy things. I was living proof.

  Yet, it wasn’t just the Emma-thing that was bothering me. It was everything. An accumulation of my mistrust of Emma, the bizarre feeling we were being watched, the biohazardous smog, and mostly, the changes in Angel. If I didn’t unload at some point, I was going lose it. Everything was piling up on me all at once, self-destructing for a guy with anger issues. I had a premonition that a shit storm would blow through all at once.

  There was no one I trusted more than Travis. Okay, so maybe I skim over the Emma-thing, for now. There was still plenty of other crap I could bend his ear about and hopefully gain his support.

  Travis’s sea green eyes shimmered in the pitch-black room. “Are you going to tell me what bug crawled up your ass?”

  I ran my hand through my messy hair. “I’m getting to it.”

  “Sometime tonight,” he said with a false air of impatience. The dimples on either side of his cheeks deceived his tone.

  “Things are…different here,” I said, glancing at my lighthearted cousin to see his reaction.

  His eyes narrowed. “What do you mean? Like the food, the teachers, the sorority girls?”

  “I wish. This is definitely under the ‘not normal’ category.”

  He placed a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “Always is with us. Just spit it out.”

  “It’s Angel,” I blurted.

  I could tell by his expression that I had caught him off guard. “What about her? Are you guys having relationship problems?”

  “Please. Do you honestly think I would come to you for couple’s therapy? No, it’s serious. There is something going on with Angel. I don’t know what it is yet, but my instincts tell me it’s not good.”

  “Do you mean supernatural not good?” he asked.

  “What other kind is there?” My voice was strewn with sarcasm. No longer annoyed at finding him unannounced, I reclined, linking my fingers together behind my head. “I catch her staring off into nothing, in some kind of super trance. We recently figured out that she can track demons, as long as they are under Alastair’s command—I think. The biggest change is her eyes. When her emotions are high, a red ring appears.”

  Travis sucked in a breath.

  “I can’t shake the feeling that she is slipping from me—that our bonds are weakening. I’m afraid I might be losing her,” I finished.

  There it was.

  My one true fear—the deep root of all my worries. It was keeping me up at night, pestering me during the day, and ensnaring my abilities, my emotions, and my existence. I couldn’t lose Angel. The thought stole my breath. It was worse than having your soul ripped from your body. It—it was inconceivable.

  Losing Angel would crush my world. The horror of it drowned me, and I knew I would go fucking insane without her. I sat up, my hands clenched, gripping the ends of the couch cushion. Fabric tore, and a whitish-yellow light lit up the entire family room. My eyes.

  “Chase, calm down,” Travis said evenly. “We’ll figure this out.”

  It was his willingness to always back me up that snapped me out of it. Thinking the absolute worst scenario had brought out the other side of me—the bad guy. My breathing was labored, my heart was racing, and my blood was on fire. On a long whoosh, I let go of the anger that had built inside me. “Sorry. I had an ‘oh shit’ moment.”

  “I can see that. Anymore episodes like that and you are going to need a new couch.”

  I ran my hands over the cushions, straightening the shredded material. “Well, that’s not all.” I paused for dramatic effect and looked him in the eye. “There is someone—something watching us. I felt it before we left Spring Valley and again here, today. It’s not a demon, which actually makes me edgier, because I don’t know what or who it is. Everything is all screwed up.”

  “That’s partially your problem, Chase,” he reasoned. “You take everything on yourself. It doesn’t matter what it is. Big or small. You’re the guy that swoops in and saves the day.”

  “I’m not a damn hero. You know the things I’ve done, and I would do it all again.”

  His expression sobered. “How is she?”

  Internal groan. After getting myself all worked up, the last person I wanted to talk about was Emma. I shrugged. “She’s Emma. Feisty. Impossible to live with. And…”

  “And what, Chase?”

  Shit. There was no easy way around it. “And I think she is starting to get her memories back.”

  Now it was his turn. “Sh
it.”

  My sentiments exactly.

  “We can’t let that happen,” he shouted.

  “I’m not sure we can doing anything to stop it,” I said, although I knew it wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “Emma is strong. And if she is able to break Angel’s compulsion, then I don’t think we should toy with her memories again—”

  He cut me off with a shake of his head. “What you are suggesting is preposterous.”

  “I know, but I think we would only be prolonging the inevitable. I don’t think she would be able to handle it.”

  I was greeted by silence. His head hung low, and I could just barely make out the hard set of his jaw. Time ticked by. When he lifted his head, his eyes were glowing, brilliant and vicious. Obviously we were just going to take turns beasting-out, but I expected nothing less from Travis. The two of us both loved deeply. He and Emma might not have the connections Angel and I had, but I knew his feelings for her were blockbuster.

  It seemed to hit him. “What a clusterfuck.”

  I was relieved to see the green breaking through the gold. “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  “I think I might prolong my weekend visit. Keep a watchful eye on my girl.”

  Oh goodie.

  Don’t get me wrong. I loved my cousin, but I also knew he was masterminding his own agenda in operation-save-head-case. It was hard enough keeping tabs on Angel. My only consolation in this whole catastrophe was that, once a hunter, always hunter. Meaning, I was positive that Emma was still drinking her anti-compulsion juice. So, even if Travis tried, he would need Angel to pull it off.

  And I was going to get to Angel first. Then I was going to make her swear on her mother’s life not to use her wily skills, no matter how much Travis pleaded or what sob story he spun. “Sorry I bombarded you with all my crap. I bet it was the last thing you expected when you got here.”

  “That’s what family is for. I’m going to sneak into my girlfriend’s room before she remembers she despises me.”

  ~*~*~*~

  My crappy mood lingered, as did the day.

  It could have been because of my less-than-sunny disposition, or because she was going through weirdo shit, but Angel’s attitude was a mirror of mine. Freaking-fan-tastic.