Daman's Angel

by Charmaine Ross

  He tried moving toward her. Dug his toes to the tiles, brought his elbows underneath him, inching toward her using every last reserve of energy. His cheek touched the ground, couldn’t leverage it up again. Blurry through a veil of red. Limbs sluggish. Black edged his vision. Everything faded. Then there was no Angel, no life.

  Nothing.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Her limbs were nerveless. She couldn’t seem to move, to focus.

  To care.

  Images and shapes passed her by. She was completely numb. She was manhandled into a car from the church, then driven through unnamed streets, then hauled into a darkened room and shoved into an uncomfortable chair. Her wrists and ankles were bound. But she didn’t care. She had no fight left in her.

  Daman had been taken from her.

  She’d seen the life drained from him. Had seen wounds that bad often enough to know there was no coming back from them. She hadn’t been able to do anything to help. Her body had been unresponsive. It hadn’t done the things she’d wanted it to do after that man struck her in the temple. The shock of it had numbed her, body and mind, and she hadn’t found her way clear of it. It had been hard enough to try and keep her eyes open. She’d seen him struck again and again. Blood everywhere. His blood cascading from his body. He couldn’t have survived with such a loss of blood.

  She sobbed. If she’d been able to touch him, she could have healed him, joined his soul back to his body. If he’d been taken to the next life, there could be no return. Even if she could escape and find her way back to him, as each second passed it would be more and more impossible to do the joining.

  Without him, there was no future. Without sacrifice, she couldn’t return into the Eternity. She would be neither angel, nor human, damned to walk the earth alone. A half life.

  Now she knew what Daman meant when he’d said she shouldn’t stay here. To see people you love die was the true hell. In all eternity, taking souls from the people who love them still living on earth, she’d never fully understood the sadness left behind.

  Now she knew the truth of it. Knew what hell he’d been through with the death of Michelle.

  The image of Daman, bloodied and lifeless, stained her mind. Pete, also gone. The priest. All people she’d touched in three short days. Dead. Taken to the Eternity while she was trapped here without them.

  Faces floated in front of her. Words sounded like she was underwater. Her gaze slid past them to one of a row of small high windows in a red brick wall. It was dark through the grime. Night.

  The third night.

  She wondered what time it had been that she first came to take Daman, then found herself in flesh and blood and able to touch and feel and discover everything she’d dreamed for all of those years where she was invisible to him in all but his pain and his dreams.

  It had to be close to midnight. Although time had no meaning to her then, it did now. She only had a few more hours before she would be irreversibly changed forever.

  She was in a warehouse. Cold and empty. A few crates were stacked onto a corner, topped with water-stained boxes. There was a layer of dust on the floor. She saw marks where she’d been dragged to the chair. It was a place no one came, or was likely to come to in a hurry. She felt the presence of other men behind her. The ones that had taken her, too cowardly to stand in front of her and show their faces.

  She would do nothing to them now. There was nothing left to fight for.

  There was the sound of a door opening and light, even footsteps moving across to her. She watched as a slightly built man appeared from the shadows. He came toward her and stopped so her unfocused gaze might see him. She couldn’t seem to clear the fog in her mind and it took some time to be able to focus on him.

  He might have been slightly built, but now she determined that it was more through fitness than a small frame. A well-tailored jacket hung from solid, straight shoulders. He wore matching pants, fitted with lean, muscular legs.

  He could have been dressed for a business meeting, a billionaire sitting down to lunch to seal an arrangement. But when she looked at his face, read what she saw in his eyes, she knew she was not dealing with a mere company man.

  He was attractive. Not in the sexy way Daman was, but his features were even and well set. His face was rather hawkish, the nose too large for his lean face. His eyes were glistening bright. And wholly black. Sharp. His cheeks were angular, slashes of shadows sat beneath the shape of them. His hair was glossy blue-black, raked back from his face, sculpted with a fine toothed comb.

  He stood before her, one hand casually placed in the pocket of his pants. His mouth was stretched into a welcoming smile that didn’t reach anywhere else on his face. She stifled a shudder. He had the same quality of the red demons she’d seen over the ages. Souls that had once been human, but had chosen after death to be other than human. Willing to live between worlds, but a part of neither. They were the ones that saw into the heartlessness of men and were always there to trap another soul into the Eternity that wasn’t made from the Creator. A human predator.

  “So, you are the angel Haki told me about.” It was a flat-lined statement. His voice was as cold and emotionless as his eyes.

  She clamped her mouth shut and didn’t answer. She didn’t think now was the time to talk. A tinny taste filled her mouth and made her want to retch. She ignored it as best she could. She sensed it would not be good to show weakness to this man who would only thrive on the fear he could produce in others.

  The man crouched on his haunches and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She did her best to ignore his finger as it slid down her cheek, tried to repress the deep chill that iced her bones. “You are beautiful. Truly an angel. Desirous. I just want to reach out and put my hands over you, feel your skin slide beneath mine.”

  She recoiled, instantly repulsed. Her muscles straining against her bonds. He stood, looking down at her, then his lips moved. “I see you’re not as—empathetic—as I thought you might be. Earth can do that to you, I guess.”

  He walked around her. He took a handful of hair and entwined it in his hand as he stood at her back. She closed her eyes, breath hissing in and out between her teeth. “It must be so easy to live where you don’t have to grovel and fight for every day of your life. What’s it like never to be hungry. Thirsty. You must want for nothing. How very…effortless for you.”

  Her hair slipped from his hand and he appeared in her side-vision. She followed his path around her with her eyes only, watching, wary. Distrust was a new emotion for her to name. She was learning it intimately.

  “Haki tells me you saved his life. Took him from the brink, as it were. That got me to thinking. If you can do that, what else can you do? I have to admit, the priest was less than helpful.”

  It snapped into place. This was the man Daman had tried to bring to justice for years. The man who had killed his wife. “Vincent,” she whispered.

  She clenched her teeth so tight that her jaw hurt. There were urges she’d never felt before, all of them drawing her toward the darkness of no control. She didn’t care. She wanted revenge. She wanted this man to pay for the crimes he had committed.

  The smile on his face disappeared. He stepped backward as her wings appeared, real and solid. She spread them outwards, pointing the highest arches toward him. Rage made fire spark on them as it had done in the church. All he would need to do would be to come close to her and she would be able to cave his head in with them.

  “You are…magnificent.” His vice was a strained whisper. His eyes were wide, filled with greed and possibilities. His arms opened to her, palms outward. His mouth stretched, showing gleaming, even white teeth. He could have been selling her a used car or a preacher high on his own word. A messiah spreading the good news.

  “I do not belong to you,” she said. She concentrated, reining her total will to make her wings disappear. If she started now, there would be no stopping something she didn’t want t
o start. By pure will born of stubbornness and subconscious knowledge that to start now would never be the end of anything, she had to show him nothing.

  He had already seen too much. Knew too much about her.

  “My prayers have been answered.” Vincent threw his head back, laughing.

  She hated the way it sounded. Noise. No substance. “I am the answer to no one’s prayers.”

  He hooked a gaze at her, a smile still playing on his lips. “My dear, you are my savior. You were brought here for me. Forget that waste-of-time cop. He was in the right place at the wrong time. In fact, if Haki had done his job correctly, you two would never have met.”

  “Don’t bet on that,” she said. “There is no coincidence. Only what is meant to be.”

  “Come now, my dear, I’m sure people have bent the rules throughout the ages. People can’t have aspired to the heights they have without a little extra help, now can they. Take Henry the Eighth, for example. He started a church just so he could divorce his wives instead of cutting their heads off in a country that was purely Catholic. Couldn’t have done that without a little extra help.”

  “I won’t do anything for you,” Angel said.

  “It’s a win-win situation for you. You help me, and you live on Earth as a princess. I’ll give you anything you want. Name it. You’ll have it.”

  “I want nothing.”

  “Not a little gold. Not a little jewelry. Not a little, not-so-good-copper?”

  Her head swung up, her hands clenched on the ends of the arms rests of the chair. “He’s dead. I saw him.”

  “But if I brought him back to you here, you could save him, couldn’t you? You could bring him back, just like you did for Haki? He’s only been dead for an hour or so. Surely that’s not too long. He’ll be yours again. Think of that. The both of you, here again. Together.”

  She swallowed. The lump of saliva caught in her throat. Daman had gone just as he should have gone three days ago. All she had done in that time was save him a little extra time on earth. With effort, she shook her head. “No.” Her voice was soft, but it was as though she landed a sucker-punch to Vincent.

  He stepped toward her, rage contorting his handsome features into a grotesque mask. “I offer you the world and you throw it back in my face. You haven’t given me time to explain. How can you say no? You’re an angel. You’re here to help me. That is what you do.”

  “I’m not a genie. I have free will and I choose not to use it on someone like you,” Angel said.

  His hand was a blur. One moment it was by his side, the next it smashed, open-palmed into her face. Her cheek felt as though it were split in half. A white-hot pain ripped through her skull. Her vision blurred, became black, then spots of light sparked in her eyes. Her head whipped to the side and the chair tilted. Rough hands gripped her shoulders and righted the chair. She forced herself to breathe through the pain. She looked at him through streaks of red.

  He cracked his knuckles. “You’ll soon learn that it is much easier to do as you’re told rather than fight what I want you to do.”

  Her eyes sunk to the ground. Vincent’s threat didn’t worry her. Everything she’d come to earth for had gone, fallen through open fingers before she’d figured out a way to keep hold of it. Death didn’t scare her. She knew what it was, knew how it happened and knew there was nothing to fear. In fact, she looked forward to finding the Great Eternity and the comfort it would provide.

  “I said no,” she whispered.

  The smack to her left cheek made her feel as though her neck would snap her head free. Blackness edged her consciousness and she slipped into a dream world. Daman was there and she was in his arms, safe and comfortable. This was where she wanted to be, this was what was right. She went to walk into his arms, but her legs wouldn’t move. Her arms remained glued to her sides. She struggled, but her limbs wouldn’t break free. She went to call his name, but her mouth remained clamped shut. She started to struggle against the rising panic. Why didn’t her body do what she wanted? Why didn’t Daman come and help her? All she could do was look at him, try to prod him with her eyes, but his expression remained rigid. It was as though he was but a dream. An apparition sent to trick her. She stifled a sob. Daman, where are you? Slowly he faded and the world returned to the dank warehouse where she was tied to a chair.

  It had been just a dream. Daman remained in her mind. He hadn’t been real. Her heart thumped erratically between her ribs, pounding the blood through her veins. Her mind was the thing that had tricked her. It only served to let her see what she’d lost.

  “What do you want?” she asked through cracked lips.

  Vincent stretched his mouth into what he must have thought was a smile. “I’m glad you asked. It all was brought about by your cop-friend. You know he’s a murderer himself?”

  She glanced at Vincent, saw the smug smile on his mouth before she dropped her gaze to the ground. He dropped to his haunches in front of her so that she had no choice but to look at him.

  “I see you didn’t. Let me fill you on some details he might have left out. He’s been responsible for the death of many of my friends. It seems as though he hadn’t learned his lesson as he kept on coming for us day after day. One sunny afternoon he had more balls that sense. He broke into my father’s house and killed him. Straight-out bloodthirsty murder. My father had more work to be done here, and Daman Quade took his life with no more consideration than you’d give a dog you had to put down. You can imagine my pain. He had to learn so I had his wife put down. But that still hasn’t stopped him,” Vincent shook his head. “He has been a thorn in my side for more years than I care to remember. I warned him through the death of his wife, but even that hasn’t deterred him. But now, there’s you. You can make things right again. I asked for retribution and you were sent to me. All the injustice I have suffered in this life has been brought to pass.”

  He was in a psychotic world, where sins and immortality were blurred lines. A dangerous place to be.

  “I don’t understand what you want me for,” she said.

  “You are the key, my dear. You can bring me back what I’ve lost all these years. I want you to bring back my father to me.”

  Her gaze flew to his face. The full horror dawning on her. “That’s impossible.”

  “It wasn’t for Haki. Or for Christ. He rose after three days.”

  “There is no body for your father to come back to.”

  Vincent shrugged. “I can always get one of those.”

  “He’s been gone for too long. He might have moved on from the Eternity to other dimensions.”

  “My father would never do that. He would never leave me. Our legacy is too important.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  Vincent snorted. “You don’t know how close our bond is. He will want to be back here with me. That is fact.”

  “But…the ramifications…” Vincent’s father was an evil man. How could a man who loved be able to bring up a boy such as Vincent to grow to the man he was now. He would know what death would bring him and there would be no stopping him if he came back into life knowing what he now knew. The outcome would be disastrous.

  “It can be done and you will do it,” Vincent purred, justified in his request. He tilted his head so that he watched her down the length of his nose, his eyes gleaming with self-satisfied success. So sure of himself that she would agree to his crazy request. There was only one answer she would give.

  “No. I will not do it.”

  Vincent watched her silently. She saw his eye blaze beneath their blank veneer. Without her knowing what he was going to do, he stood and rammed a fist into her jaw. Her teeth smashed together, rattling through her skull. Her head snapped, the force sending her careening back in the chair. It unbalanced, tilted backward. No hand stopped her that time. The tilt became a fall and she smashed onto the hard, cold concrete.

  The air from her lungs burst. Her chest spasmed, refu
sing to open for air. She tried to force oxygen down her throat, panic rising up from her gut. Then her restricted chest opened, as though the body knew that it must breathe in order to live and she dragged air into her lungs with a desperate, hitching sound. She closed her eyes while her heart stopped trying to beat a way out from her chest. She waited as her body adjusted after the shock. She rested her head on the concrete, eyes shut, waiting until the pain started to fade.

  There was no doubt Vincent was mad. What he asked her to do was even more mad. There was no way she would bring back a person who had been taken to the Eternity to come back to earth to continue the deeds he had started in a life that was finished. Together the pair of them would be an evil force that would take many innocent lives. She couldn’t do this.

  She only hoped that she would die before her hours were finished. Then she would be stuck here and be of neither world. What she did now as an angel on earth, she would no longer be able to do. She had to anger Vincent so much that he would kill her now. While she still had time. That was her only escape.

  She coughed her voice back. “Your father was evil. I don’t bring back that type of person.”

  “You brought back Haki.”

  “I’ve learned since then. Do your worst to me, but I’ll never bring back your father.”

  Silence. She waited for another rattling blow, but none fell. She cracked open her eyes. Vincent stalked the shadows, displeasure masking his face. He stopped, pivoted and came toward her, lips curving in a sneer.

  “I have to admit, you’re right. You’ll never help me no matter how hard I hit or hurt you. You don’t seem to care about that. But the cop is different, isn’t he?”

  Angel closed her eyes again. Daman was dead. There was nothing Vincent could do to make her do what he wanted. She wouldn’t bring Daman back. He’d had his share of pain of this world. Time for him to finally rest. Only through the pain of losing him did she know what he had suffered. She couldn’t ask any more than that.