Daman's Angel (Crimson Romance)

by Charmaine Ross

  It was just as Angel had said. There was no good or bad, just decisions made when there was a need for them to be made. And repercussions of those actions.

  Pete groaned. It snapped Daman from his trance enough for him to take control of his limbs. He flat-bellied across the floor to Pete. There was a long nick on the side of his head where the bullet had gouged his skin enough to cause blood to cascade from the wound, but not enough to kill. The bullet had missed. Daman let out a hiss of relief. He pulled out a handkerchief and pressed it Pete’s head to stem the flow of blood. He grabbed Pete’s hand and placed it on the bit of material. “Keep still and keep your hand here.”

  “Wass happening?” Pete mumbled in a slurred voice.

  “We have the power of God on our side. Angel’s fighting those men. Stay here while I take a look and see where they are.”

  Daman scanned the church, using the altar as protection. He kept low to the ground, minimizing his body as much as he could so as to make a harder target. The four men had their full attention on Angel. One of the men nudged his partner and indicated that he move into the next aisle. The man nodded and ran, bent at the waist into the next aisle, using the space between the pews as protection. The leader of the men indicated that the others move. They fanned out between the pews. She couldn’t grab all of them at once and would have to attack one at a time, leaving time and opportunity for another to attack her.

  Daman knew the maneuver. They were forming a careful net. Although they had their weapons drawn, none of them fired at Angel. They moved to capture, not to kill. They were being very careful, even though two of their men were down, they hadn’t retreated, only re-formed their position. They had tried to catch her without hurting her. That also told Daman they wanted her in good condition. They needed her for something.

  Pete and he, however, were expendable. They’d already dropped Pete without a second thought. That bullet had been fired to kill, and he knew if their attention wasn’t diverted, he would be their next target. They wouldn’t hesitate.

  “Get over there, bro. Cover the door.”

  Daman’s attention immediately riveted onto the large body of one of the men. Haki. That son of a bitch. He was trying to capture Angel when she’d saved his ass from hell. Daman knew who his first target was going to be. This time, Angel would not be there to save him from an untimely death.

  He had to help Angel. To do that he had to take out two men, one at a time. A plan formed in his mind. He’d take them while their attention was diverted. He crawled down the steps of the altar to the first row of the pews where he crouched. In his mind, he went through where the men were positioned. First he would kill Haki, and then he would pick off the other three. With the help of Angel, they could do this.

  He would have to move fast. He crouched, positioning his legs and feet so that he could stand and drop quickly. He pushed up, eyed riveted to one of the men. Without hesitation, he squeezed the trigger. The man went down. At the sound of the gunshot, one of the remaining men turned just as Angel came behind him. He lunged at her. Angel beat him with her wings. He grunted as they struck but he was too close to her for her to strike with enough impact. He smashed a fist into her temple. A lucky hit. And an unexpected move. She sagged, her wings going limp and drooping to the ground. She staggered, a trembling hand pressed to her temple.

  “Angel!” Daman couldn’t help but scream her name. He jumped over the tops of the pews, balancing on the backs, desperately trying to get to her.

  There was an explosion. Something pushed into him that stopped him in his tracks. He tried to balance on legs that were filled with pins and needles. They wouldn’t do what he wanted them to do. His legs folded beneath him and he toppled from the backs of the pews. He crashed to the tiled floor. Shock rode his body, from his ankles to his eyes. He blinked back spots of black, leveraging himself onto the seats of the pews.

  Wet warmth touched his side. He glanced down. He pressed his hand into his side and watched red paint coat his palm. No, not paint. Blood. It seeped from his gut, but unbelievably, there was no pain. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but getting Angel out of the grip of that man who’d hit her. Rage screamed a path through his mind.

  He ignored his limbs that were now numb, somehow staggering to his feet. He drew his gun to shoulder level, aiming it at the man who had Angel contained in his arms. The man held her in front of him, using her body as protection. Daman gritted his teeth. He couldn’t get a clear shot without the risk of also hitting her. He staggered to the side, using the seat to maintain his balance. Fury was the only thing holding him upright.

  Angel was incoherent, her head lolled to the side, cushioned against the man’s chest. She struggled for consciousness, arms and legs akimbo, struggling for balance. Her face was shock-white, features slack, eyes glazed. She reached for him, fingers extending and open.

  Out of the shadows, another man grasped her arm. Between the two of them, they manhandled her to the ground. She fell between the weight of the two of them. He yelled — something — a wounded noise came from him. He dropped his gun arm and gripped the back of the pew to charge to Angel.

  Another explosion. Something pushed his shoulder and he flew backward with an unseen force. He collapsed into the aisle, and hit the ground. He tried to move. Red-hot pain shot through his body. He tried to crawl to her, but all he managed was to flop onto his stomach.

  Angel stared at him with shining, helpless eyes. One of the men held her down while the other pierced her neck with a syringe, injecting her with God-knew-what. She screamed, a sound that chilled his core, her mouth opened in shock. Then her eyes glazed, her arm that reached for him drooped to the floor as she fell into unconsciousness.

  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 to 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 to 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.