Angel Unleashed

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  Rhys didn’t care about his own safety. Only hers. Come to think of it, he’d never worried about surviving the wars he’d participated in or facing down the hellhounds often sent his way. If anyone had found the key to ending his life, getting around the whole immortal thing, and Avery were to cart the Grail away, he might actually welcome the peace he’d find by permanently closing his eyes.

  Not here, however. Not in some dark den that reeked of vampires.

  Darkness swallowed them when they entered the hallway behind the door. The tight space rang with an echo when the iron door slammed shut. Lanterns lit the passageway ahead, looking like strings of electric lights. Half of them had burned out.

  Avery didn’t seem to notice either the darkness or the smell. Rhys supposed the only scent in her lungs was the rich fragrance of an imminent victory. He wasn’t so sure he felt the same.

  “You’ll go,” he said, leading the way down the passage and toward a set of steep concrete stairs. “Those wings mean your freedom.”

  “They mean fulfillment,” Avery explained. “Wings aren’t simply feathers tacked onto an angel’s back, Rhys. They are tied in to my system. Part of my system.”

  She stopped him with a hand on his back, on the burning sigils that chattered instructions to his nerves beneath his clothes.

  “Do you think I used to look like this?” she asked as he turned around to face her. “Pale and white and colorless?”

  “I like it,” he confessed. “You’re beautiful.”

  She was quiet for a long time before finally speaking again.

  “This...” She ran a hand down her almost iridescent cheek. “This is the result of losing an integral part of myself. I didn’t look like this when I came here.”

  “To Earth, you mean?” Rhys asked.

  She nodded. “Each decade drains more color from me, slowly, insidiously, bit by bit, as if someone were siphoning it off.”

  “Angels aren’t...”

  “Angels have no form in our realm. When we take form, it’s with the beauty and color of the places we’re sent to.”

  Rhys tried to wrap his mind around what she was telling him, but couldn’t. Who could imagine Avery without a body? Or any being of intelligence without an outline of some kind?

  Her eyes had softened. Those big blue eyes.

  “You would have liked me then,” she said. “With my wings.”

  Rhys shook his head. “Hell, I like you now, just the way you are.”

  “I’m being drained, and there’s not much left of what I was. My wings will replenish what’s been lost. My power will triple.”

  “I’ve seen the gashes where those wings were, Avery. Are you sure they can be reattached when we find them?”

  Sadness again, in her eyes, on her face. “One can only hope,” she concluded. “But hope often shines brightest in the darkest places.”

  In the middle of an upcoming showdown with the worst sort of creatures on the planet, and while cursing his Makers for the atrocity they had committed on such a beautiful being, Rhys wanted to take Avery in his arms and offer comfort. He wished for the time to do that and more time to be her lover. He wished he possessed the kind of sight that would allow him to believe she’d come out of this damn tunnel unharmed and with her coveted prize.

  Avery walked on, taking the lead with her knife in one hand. Honor demanded he follow her, help her. However, honor wasn’t the main driving factor here. His heart and his soul couldn’t be separated from Avery. What he felt for her seemed very much like love. Respect, awe...and yes, love.

  Bolstered by that thought, as well as the tiny glittering lights Avery began to throw off as they traversed the steep staircase into what seemed to him like the bowels of the Earth, Rhys repeated an earlier voiced sentiment.

  “We will get them back.”

  As if on cue, and as though his promise had set off a hidden alarm in the dark hole they moved through, the lights and lanterns above their heads sputtered out.

  * * *

  Avery swore as blackness descended. Other than the angel light she was still strong enough to emit, it was difficult to tell which way was up, and which direction was down.

  She heard Rhys utter an oath behind her.

  Taking the steps one at a time, she continued on, able to feel her way along the wall, listening to the scraping sounds her knife made on the rock. Rising anger made her scars tingle. The inked wings began to itch. She ignored all of that, aware, as she moved, of the high-pitched humming noise coming from everywhere at once. She knew what that sound was, and after all this time, she really had found those missing pieces of herself.

  Rhys was quiet now. Did he also hear her wings keening for their rightful owner? That hum filled her head, echoing, calling, luring her downward. Her heart was in her throat.

  The floor leveled out eventually. Her fingers came away from the wall gritty. This section of the tunnel was composed of chalk, and chalk was a conductor of supernatural energy. That was why whoever ran this black market had chosen such a place, and how that creature had been able to hide the wings from her. Anyone with a sensitivity to paranormal phenomena who stumbled down here would equate the sounds and feelings with the presence of ghosts. Severed angel wings wouldn’t warrant a thought, because who would believe such things existed?

  “I’m coming,” she whispered. “Almost there.”

  The tunnel led to another just like it, with stone columns propping up the ceilings every few feet. Darkness had swallowed them, but her angel light lit enough of the floor to assure they didn’t tumble into a hole. And immortals all possessed the ability to manage the dark.

  More sounds reached her, drowning out the keening.

  “Do you hear that?” Rhys asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you ready for what awaits us up ahead?”

  She said, “I’ve been ready for hundreds of years.”

  “All right. Let’s crash this party, angel.”

  The sliding ping of Rhys’s knife leaving its sheath was a comfort to her when she knew he didn’t really need a weapon. Rhys de Troyes was, in essence, a weapon himself. Immortal Rhys would shed his human-like persona when confronted with real danger, true danger, and stun the world with the parameters of his immortal soul’s transformative powers.

  She had seen this transformation once before, and had loved him more because of it. That had been the real Rhys, not the tamped-down super-mortal image he usually projected. As her own light had waned, his had grown. From the background, and from where she’d hidden, she had witnessed the fact that Rhys de Troyes was an unparalleled being, exquisitely fine to behold and totally outrageous at the same time.

  It was so with each of the Seven. But Rhys...

  “They’re coming,” he warned.

  His chest touched her back. The sinewy thighs she had seen in all their bare fineness that very day, pressed to hers.

  Just one more kiss, Avery wished she could say to him. For luck.

  She felt his hands on her hips. His warm breath stirred her hair.

  “Showtime,” he whispered gamely in her ear.

  Chapter 21

  The place came alive with shadows as the light in the lanterns flared. Shades poured into the tunnel like a black tide—more of those creatures than Rhys had ever seen.

  He and Avery were surrounded again by ghostly forms that circled without coming within reach. Even now, with so many of them taking up residence in Rhys’s personal space, the creatures knew better than to take on an immortal. They also seemed hesitant about treading too close to Avery’s heavenly light.

  “I’m guessing you are to be our guides,” Rhys said, back-to-back with Avery now, both of them assuming fighting stances. “So go ahead. Lead the way through this hellish maze.”

 
“Come, Knight,” a voice lured from inside the swirling circle of Shades. “Follow.”

  Avery spoke to that Shade. “I know you. We’ve met before.”

  Thin black veils of filminess created a long shadow that stretched along one wall. But the Shade didn’t respond to Avery’s taunt.

  “Follow,” it said again, and the ring of monsters opened up at one end, showing the entrance to a tunnel that branched off from the one they were in.

  Avery didn’t hesitate. These Shades were seemingly of no consequence to her. Her eyes were trained on the tunnel. Rhys strained to pick up the sounds she appeared to be hearing that led her farther and farther into the dark.

  Behind them, Shades filled in the space from floor to ceiling. This second ghostly welcoming party did little for Rhys’s confidence in what lay ahead.

  Avery moved quickly, surefooted now, confident in her direction. Her boots were as silent as she was. Her silver blade flashed now and then under the flickering lights. He could stop her, Rhys reasoned. He had the power and the strength to remove her from all of this. And then what?

  Will you fade away completely in time, angel?

  What comes after all that paleness? Complete transparency?

  In truth, he couldn’t keep Avery from what she wanted most because of his fear over what might happen afterward. The very real fear growing inside him was his worry about losing her.

  I want this for you, Avery. I do.

  He chanted those words over and over as he walked, trying to rationalize what went so heavily against his need for her.

  Under a great stone archway she stopped, then spun to grab hold of his lapels. Pulling herself closer to him, Avery looked up, moved both hands to his hair and led his mouth to hers.

  In this place, where danger reigned supreme, she kissed him.

  As if she had heard each of his thoughts and desired to reassure him of the importance of her quest and her trust in him, she kissed him with a feverish passion.

  A last kiss?

  A gesture of farewell, since they both knew the dangers of what they were doing, and that things might not turn out as planned?

  For a few brief seconds, somehow removed from time, they were transported to a place of pure sensation. Lips touching. Mouths merging. She tugged him closer. Her tongue swept across his teeth, and her breath was pure fire.

  Rhys’s senses expanded to encompass an image he’d seen before.

  Pale, beautiful Avery, bare from the waist up.

  This time, in his mind, when she turned her head to look at him in the doorway, he heard a distant cry like the one that had haunted him at Broceliande. A sound he had not investigated at the time. The sight of Avery’s inked wings had moved him. She had moved him.

  Half in and half out of this dream, Rhys understood Avery was showing this image to him. She was letting him see what waited for her up ahead and how much she needed it. She was also confirming that she admired and loved him for being here at this time, and for sharing in those moments, however tenuous those moments were.

  She was radiant in the gloom of the cavern. In the dark, her light was like the sun’s corona. She was excited, jazzed. Avery truly expected this to be the culmination of her long search.

  Her heat was extraordinary, her mouth fierce as it took from him and gave back double. Their bodies were close enough to be one body, pressing, straining to be closer still.

  And just when Rhys thought they’d stay entwined forever, in the space between one thundering heartbeat and the next, Avery pulled away. Cold air rushed in to cool Rhys’s fever. Darkness returned to envelop them both.

  She looked at him with sadness before she turned from him and walked on as if nothing had happened...when, for Rhys, everything had. He had tasted starlight, been embroiled in sunlight. If this was to be the end of his time with Avery, he wasn’t ready to go on alone.

  “Avery,” he said softly as the Shades urged him to move.

  But she was beyond hearing now.

  * * *

  Avery had drawn strength from that kiss. She had allowed Rhys to see her whole and as she used to be, as she again needed to be. Winged and angelic. Not the calm-hearted little cherub of children’s dreams and religious doctrines, but one of Heaven’s defenders against the fallen hordes. A member of Archangel Michael’s fighting forces responsible for keeping the dark side at bay and within its set boundaries.

  Fighter. Soldier. Merciless defender.

  As such, it was impossible for her to ignore the closeness of that dark side now. She was in their territory. Walking through it. The walls gave off foul odors of sulfur and brimstone, which had always been the devil’s calling cards. Her reactions to that were primal, visceral, familiar.

  No ordinary black-market dealer would have dared to enter such a place without a guarantee of safety. That dealer had to have something for sale that the Fallen Ones wanted badly, and currently there were only two things on this planet that filled the bill. The Holy Grail, a vessel that possessed some of the spirit of the man some called the Son of God, and the severed wings of a once-mighty angel who had gone by the name of Aurian Arcadia.

  Au. The symbol for gold, for the heavens and what she had been before becoming a colorless freak.

  “Slowly,” Rhys whispered to her, but it was a word she no longer recognized. The hum she perceived had gotten louder, calling to her, pleading with her to hurry. Her pulse was skyrocketing. Her skin had gone cold.

  She charged ahead, traversing the dimly lit darkness effortlessly, led by the inhuman cries of her severed wings.

  Those wings had screamed when the occupants of the castle had cut them from her with a hot silver blade...the same blade she carried now in her outstretched hand.

  Rhys’s Makers had covered their ears to dull the sound. They had fallen to their knees as the cries of two halves of one being, torn apart, became deafening. Yet the powerful, greedy threesome had carried on anyway, cutting, slicing, hurting her in ways she’d never dreamed of before wrapping her in iron chains.

  And one man, she later discovered, when he had not yet been indoctrinated into the world of immortality, had heard her cries. Rhys had heard her and been haunted ever since.

  “I’m coming. I’m here,” Avery said, choking on memories and losing the battle with the instincts warning her to take care.

  “Avery.”

  Rhys called to her again. There was wariness in his tone and a sense of urgency she had to ignore. The tunnel opened up suddenly. The security of close walls gave way to a huge, open orifice filled with dozens of motionless creatures. Shades. Vampires. Demons. Humans. Plus a few monsters Avery couldn’t classify or put names to.

  Fire roared in a metal grate in the center of the cavern, with red-orange flames leaping several feet high into the dank, moist air. Heads turned when she and Rhys stopped beneath a heavily runed archway. Those runes, carved into the rock, were symbols of power meant to neutralize the tricks of each member of this odd gathering, and probably worked with some of them. Standing beneath the arch made her skin ache.

  Other than those annoying little reactions, Avery didn’t feel much of anything at all, except excitement.

  Her gaze strayed from the crowd to the ledges of the cavern above their heads, where iron cages were suspended on thick iron chains. Iron was used here to ensure none of the buyers present could grab hold of what those cages contained and run. The abundance of that particular metal, scattered around the cavern, smelled like death.

  Rhys, beside her, muttered something that got lost in the gloom of the terrible scene being played out. Mesmerized, Avery watched as a man stepped forward to greet them.

  “Bloody hell...damn...” Rhys stuttered, inching forward for a better look, obviously recognizing that man before this gathering’s host had taken ten steps.

 
* * *

  His world was dissolving into one long lie that countered everything he had believed to be the truth.

  Rhys stared with disbelief at the creature parting the crowd. Not a man. Not this one.

  “No,” he protested with a sideways glance to Avery, whose face had settled into an unreadable stillness.

  “Welcome friends,” said the creature coming forward.

  This welcome compounded the lies made real by Rhys’s familiarity with that voice. The moving entity in red velvet robes was his Maker; the eldest of the nameless three that belonged to Castle Broceliande, and who were all supposed to be dead.

  That had been the deal. The seven Knights were to replace the Makers. Only a few immortals could exist at one time, those Makers had explained. Too many of them, too strong, and the world’s balance would tip in the wrong direction. As it had done since then, anyway.

  And here, at the heart of this hellish cavern, lay the possibility of a reason why. His Maker was a liar and a cheat.

  Avery’s expressionless face suggested she also recognized this luxuriously robed creature. She had been correct in her hints about things at that bloody castle being far different than his memories of them.

  Had she known how different? Yes. Because his Makers had taken her wings. The creature walking their way had taken them.

  “Mordred.” Avery’s voice was flat when she addressed their host.

  The sound of that name raised chills on the back of Rhys’s neck. Flashes of more memory returned, images of red robes spreading over a verdant landscape by moonlight and hushed voices that vibrated through thick stone walls.

  Still, this couldn’t be the Mordred of the old tales, Rhys’s mind protested. Maybe it was another being, because Mordred was said to have been King Arthur’s son. Tales told of Mordred turning on his father and dealing Arthur a final death blow in the last battle for possession of the crown. The Blood Knights, prior to their transformation, had sat at Arthur’s table, where they offered their fealty and swords to their king.