He didn’t dare look at her with the Makers so close. They had the ability to move like lightning. He had seen this before. Could they take the box from Avery with so many Grail guards watching over it and watching over the angel who held it? Maybe not. Because in order to break the wards sealing the Grail inside, Avery had needed permission from all of his brothers. Without that permission, Mordred could no longer touch the item he sought.
Trapped as he was, Mordred smiled again. “What my queen means is that the angel cannot take the Grail, even if her wings were to heal—which, by the way, is unlikely. She would have to get past us first, and if you think those creatures you faced here were the only ones standing between her and Broceliande, you are not as smart as you have led us to believe.”
“There is no Broceliande,” Rhys said.
Beside him, Mason’s muscles twitched.
“You saw to that,” Mordred said to Avery. “But a house is not a home if the people living in it have already moved on.”
“The only people there were half demon,” Avery countered. “And now there is nothing for them there at all.”
Mordred nodded. “Yet I believe in order to set things right, you have to go back. Isn’t that the way these things go, angel? That is where you landed and where the Grail lured you to us. In order to return to the heavens, you’d not only need wings, but also to stand in the same spot where your feet first touched down.”
He smiled as he continued speaking, assured of their full attention. “When you arrived and had set both feet on the Earth, wasn’t that point of reference stapled to the castle’s grounds?”
Rhys wanted badly to look at Avery. He wanted her to explain what the madman was talking about.
Mordred went on as if he read Rhys’s puzzled state.
“And once the wings were removed, you no longer had a connection to your friends. They couldn’t help you because you were no longer an angel. You were no longer enough like them for the heavens to track you among so many others requiring their attention.”
So, Rhys thought as sickness rolled in his stomach, that was it, that was why she had been alone. If Mordred’s take on things was true, Rhys had his answer as to why other angels hadn’t appeared. Finding the Grail had been Avery’s assignment. Only hers. Each angel has a mission, she had told him.
Perhaps time wasn’t the same in the heavens as it was on Earth, Rhys reasoned. Maybe only seconds had gone by up there since Avery had left the clouds. Possibly there was no such thing as time, at all.
Is it true? he wanted to ask her. She hadn’t countered Mordred’s remarks.
“So,” Mordred said smugly, “unless you can fight your way back to Broceliande, where this whole thing began, through an army of creatures at my beck and call, your Grail is not safe.”
Avery moved at last by nodding her head. When she looked up again, she was smiling. That smile told Rhys she had more surprises up her sleeve and that she wasn’t through yet. He watched Mordred’s grin dissolve.
“There are two things wrong with your thinking,” she said. “The first is your belief that all of my power is tied to the wings. The second is that you have forgotten about something else that stands in the way of your victory.”
“And that would be?” Mordred’s mistress asked, confident in her lover’s explanation of the way this was to go.
Avery’s smile did not falter when she said, “Daylight.”
On cue, the clouds rolled back to reveal a bright yellow sun. Thunder cracked as those clouds hustled away. And the sound of monsters dying in the distance rang in Rhys’s ears like the chimes of a golden bell.
* * *
It wasn’t quite so simple, Avery knew. Mordred, a being conceived of darkness, also had the ability to bring back the clouds. He tried to do so now, shocked at having overplayed this hand. It was too late to save his little army of vampire freaks, however. Daylight was their enemy, and therefore Avery’s weapon of choice. That, and an angry wolf pack of Mason’s friends. There could have been more monsters hiding in the shadows of the trees, but she didn’t sense them.
Mordred and his mistress had backed up, seeking shelter. Their velvet clothes protected them only slightly from the burn their faces and hands had received from the flash of yellow fire. Avery didn’t let up on her command for the clouds to keep away, and with her wings in place, her new power shone as brightly as the silver box in her hands.
Mason and the wolves that had proved themselves good allies surrounded the pair. The black wolf growled a greeting. Without the darkness, the vampires, no matter how strong they were, or how cunning, were as good as chained in place.
“It’s all connected, you see,” Avery said calmly. “I am the Grail, and the Grail is me.”
Rhys turned to her, surprise lighting his face. Avery knew what he was seeing. Her color was returning. Her skin felt flushed, and hotter than ever. Strands of her hair, blowing in the wind, were changing from white to gold.
On her back, her wings began to unfold. This time, there was no flutter. With a sound similar to shaking out a blanket, they extended—a full span of blue, gray and crimson that picked up the wind and lifted her inches from the ground.
Rhys didn’t speak. Maybe he couldn’t, but then, neither could she. This moment marked the beginning of the end for them, and they both realized it. Maybe, for the first time, he was seeing the angel. The whole one.
Funny, she now thought, as she had before, how close love and pain truly were when weighed on the scale of emotions, and how much pain one sometimes had to endure in order to find the right kind of love. The look on Rhys’s handsome, angular face reflected a similar belief. The sadness in his eyes said everything he couldn’t.
When she could speak again, Avery dragged her attention from Rhys. “They’re dangerous,” she said to Mason. “Those monsters are too dangerous to have hanging around.”
Mason nodded. “Do you want them?”
She took time to ponder the question.
She had wanted vengeance in the past. Lived for it. She had dreamed of tearing them apart limb by limb as they had torn at her. She had dreamed of stringing their fangs on a necklace and offering it to anyone else thinking of daring to pit their strengths against those of the light. Because, in answer to the question Rhys had once posed, she had truthfully replied that the light didn’t always win, but it came out on top more often than not.
Rhys was waiting for her to answer Mason’s query. But the truth was that by meeting Rhys, and by loving him, she had given her demons back. She had sent them where they belonged, and the desire for revenge had gone with them.
“No,” she said solemnly. “Would you like the honor, Mason?”
Mason nodded. “It’s a decision for all of us to make. All of our brotherhood, together.”
“You’ll call them?”
“Oui.”
“And until then?”
“Let caring for them be my mission,” Mason replied. “Now that I have no other, it will give me something to do.”
Rhys’s shoulder offered support that Avery took. In his touch, a whole bunch of sensations returned with astounding speed. Remembrances of the beauty of his mouth on her mouth, the hardness of his chest and how she had briefly nestled against it. Memories of the way his muscles danced when they had made love on the debris-covered floor of an abandoned building, their bodies meshing perfectly, fitting together as though they had been made for each other.
“I’ll accompany you there,” Rhys said. His voice was unsteady. “I must make my own peace with Broceliande.”
“I want to be with you for whatever time we have left,” he silently added.
Their eyes met. Light streaked through Avery, as it did each time he looked at her like that. She almost wished her wings would carry her away now, so that the pain of parting from Rhys
wouldn’t be postponed. Yet she didn’t really want that. Each moment with him would, from now on, be a gift.
Stop, she wanted to say to her glorious Blood Knight. Stop looking at me. If it weren’t for the Grail, maybe...
If I didn’t need to take it where it will be safe...
She blinked slowly, barely able to catch hold of one decent breath. Hell. Vengeance was wasted on Mordred and his mistress, because love, it suddenly seemed to her, was the strangest beast of all.
Chapter 30
Rhys surveyed the landscape.
Pieces of the castle’s white walls remained, but not many. Here and there a polished stone punctuated the brown, overgrown space of what had once been a garden to rival any garden on Earth. There, bloodred roses as tall as a man had bloomed by starlight, and the sound of water had hidden the cries of an angel trapped beneath the ground.
Aurian Arcadia.
She had been quiet on the return to this place, and he hadn’t wanted to disturb her thoughts. Her appearance had radically changed. Her hair was fair, and hung to her waist like threads of 24-karat gold. Her face, once so pale, bloomed with color. The mouth he had found so full and lush was a rosy pink.
Those lips had been on his lips, as well as so many other delightful places on his body. He could remember and relive each nibble of her tiny white teeth along his rib cage, and feel each flick of her tongue. Her breath had been fiery and, oh, so sweet.
The body he craved was still ultra lean, and yet a few of her starker angles had been replaced by curves. All she was missing from the picture book of angels was a halo. Yet, if there were such things, he very much doubted warrior Avery would have accepted one.
She was stunning. Different, but also the same. Instinctively, Rhys bowed his head, honoring this transformation while unready to face it. Avery would go now. She’d fly home using those incredible wings. He didn’t see how he’d be able to go on without her, alone for all the countless years still ahead of him, though he had, he supposed, signed up for that.
It was easy to sense that Avery was smiling without seeing her lips upturn because he had always been connected to her. Avery’s blood ran in his veins, she had said, but that was only part of their bond.
He looked at her now, noting how radiant her smile was and the way it beamed. Today, sunlight clung to the ruins, replacing former shadows. Avery didn’t seem to mind being here, where evil had disrupted her course. With her by his side, neither did he.
Avery’s wings were folded up again, tight to her back. They helped to feed her in some way, as if some special kind of sustenance ran through them. Her blood connected to the veins that attached each individual feather to the structure that supported them. They had healed in time to see the grand finale of her story. Finding the Grail had helped with that. She was again a unified whole. A heavenly creation.
He wanted her so badly, his body had begun to quake.
“You’ll take the Grail away now,” he said.
“It’s why I came to this world.”
Back when he had first set eyes on her, glittering light particles had accompanied her in the darkest places. Those particles were present now and reflected the sunlight.
“The Grail is precious,” she said.
How many other angels had experienced the trauma and pain of being split in two, Rhys wondered, and continued to adhere to a quest? Could any other kind of being have endured the way Aurian Arcadia had?
Am I expected to wave goodbye, Avery?
Watch you ascend?
Go back to the life I’m relegated to continuing?
So all right, he’d do that and make it work. What else was there? He wasn’t going to be the second immortal responsible for grounding her.
“You were right when you suggested that in being free of old vows, we’d also be free,” he said. “However, I can’t see how things will change for me or my brothers. We have been chasing the concept of right all this time, and won’t give up on that.”
“I know,” Avery said softly. “Here is where you’re needed.”
Rhys strained to hold himself back when that seemed futile. He desperately wished to see those wings spreading and to feel the brush of downy feathers on his face.
“I can’t go with you,” he said.
His eyes found hers...still pale blue and dark-rimmed, like the earlier edgy, anxious, kick-ass angel version of Avery. He was happy to see those black marks. Still, he had to wonder what the rest of the heavenly hordes would think of that one leftover modern touch when she showed up.
Angels don’t have forms, she had said. Unable to picture that, Rhys tried unsuccessfully to return her smile. “Can you travel like that?” he teased.
“Like what?”
Her red-tipped wings appeared to be nothing more than fanciful shadows in the afternoon light. The rest of Avery was now as naked as he’d wished her to be, having shed her cloth bindings. Rhys grinned, finally, unable to help himself. Avery had been a showstopper before. She was light-years beyond that classification now.
She would draw attention wherever she went if she stayed here with him. No one would be able to resist a second look and a third. She was just too incredibly beautiful.
“A question,” he said, sobering, jealous of things that never were going to happen, missing her before she had left.
She nodded for him to go on.
“How did you get away from this terrible place? You never told me that part.”
He glanced around at the remains of the castle that bordered the garden. Only part of one tower stood, choked by a tangle of vines.
“You did this, Avery? Took it down stone by stone?”
She was standing close to him. Her golden breasts brushed his chest each time she took in a breath. He didn’t want to close his eyes, but had to. The pleasure of being near his angel made his soul ache.
“Maybe you can also explain why angels need to breathe,” he added, needing to speak, seeking to quell the absolute necessity of reaching for her, kissing her, burying himself inside her.
“All living things breathe,” she said.
The words she formed were puffs of warm air. In this cold, wicked space, Avery was the only warm thing.
“Then you are alive,” he said.
“Like you, I am alive here, now.”
“Hell, Avery...”
She placed a finger against his lips to silence him. That, too, was a familiar gesture. Rhys’s pulse continued to race as her finger first slid between his lips, then tracked downward over his chin to the triangle of bare skin exposed between the sides of his shirt.
“Did someone help you to escape?” he asked with a sigh.
She shook her head, sending light particles dancing, and slipped her hand into that opening in the cloth. She laid her palm on his bare chest, above his thunderous heart. “I’m in there,” she said. “Part of me fuels that beat.”
“And I...” Rhys said in a deep, throaty voice as he angled his hand over her waist and hips, over her abs and beneath, where he softly stroked the V between her thighs. “I always want to be inside of you.”
Avery threw back her head, accepting his stroke as if she had been waiting for it. Rhys held her to him with an arm around her waist.
It crossed his mind that this wasn’t the time or place to prove to Avery how much he loved her. She had been tortured here, and had bled. She’d been wrapped in cold iron chains, alone, when he had believed his Makers to be good.
But Avery didn’t protest this personal touch. By sealing their emotions and bodies together near what remained of Broceliande’s foundations, they were overwriting what had gone before and truly laying the past to rest.
“I...” she began, as her eyes shut. “I tricked them, in turn. That’s how I got away, and how I knew they could
be beaten.”
Rhys lifted her up, brought her closer, so that her face was level with his. He spoke haltingly. “It only matters that you did escape from this terrible place.”
Her eyes remained closed. Her body was pliant beneath his touch.
“We will consecrate this ground, rendering it golden, erasing what has gone before, my angel. My winged lover. The spell will be broken and, like us, whatever haunts this place will be free. We need never look back.”
Avery’s arms encircled his shoulders. Her scalding hot mouth found his. “Make it so, Blood Knight,” she whispered, searching his face.
“All right,” he said, holding her in his arms a moment longer before easing her to the ground where he’d have her one last time. One final time. Before she left him.
* * *
She had never seen Rhys sleep. Had never pictured him at rest. He looked almost peaceful when no one needed rescuing.
Perched on the chipped base of a pedestal that had once supported a marble statue of a maiden with a lyre, Avery carefully observed Rhys, noting each intake of breath and the way his broad, naked chest rose and fell.
She breathed with him.
He hadn’t stirred for some time. Possibly this was the first night he had felt at ease in a long while, since no one would dare to trespass on this castle’s tainted land now that Mordred and the other Makers were gone from here.
Soon enough, he’d waken. A new sunrise sat on the horizon. The sky was already a mixture of yellow and pink. It was likely Rhys hadn’t enjoyed waking in daylight for years. He had told her something like that. Bad things came out at night, and facing down bad things was his business. It was his calling.
Avery ran a hand over her stomach, stroking every inch of skin he had touched. Last night, their lovemaking had been rough. She had demanded that of him, needing to experience everything he had to offer. She craved a rematch now. The desire to have all of Rhys, over and over, was primal, and only teased by having sampled his talents.
Rhys de Troyes looked like a sleeping prince in a fairy tale, when the true nature of his existence was far from fantasy. He complemented the place as no other could. His presence on these grounds marked the end of one tale and the beginning of another. After centuries of trials and battles, Rhys was free of the Grail Quest.
Angel Unleashed Page 25
