Angel Unleashed

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  Her heart, which should have been buoyant, hurt. Her soul, which should have helped her to ascend, struggled to remain rooted in the body of the creature Rhys loved so much and so well.

  Straightening, standing tall, and as naked as Rhys was, Avery spread her wings. Allowing them the freedom to expand and to again taste the sunrise after their long hiatus from those things, she reveled in the sensation. She had dearly missed the sun. The rising warmth was like a dose of medicine for a wounded soul.

  Dawn sang to her. Wind caressed her face. The clouds were calling. The Grail waited to be taken to its next resting place. And all she could think about was Rhys. Her Blood Knight lover was the most delicious thing in a world that looked better today, but was actually so incredibly sad.

  When Rhys stirred in his sleep, Avery arched her back. When he made a soft sound, the one she loved, her hand slipped between her thighs.

  One great flap of her wings, and she was in the air. One more and she was straddling her sleepy Knight, whose eyes slowly started to open.

  “More,” she whispered.

  Almost magically, the part of his body she wanted rose to the occasion, hard, erect and willing. She slid over him, allowed him to fill her completely, absorbing the quakes and the pleasure that swelled within her. Only with Rhys had she experienced true bliss. Not even the glory of the clouds could rival this.

  Tears collected in her eyes. She gave him one more stroke, and with the Grail in her hand, free of its silver box, Avery began to drift away from all sensation. The rumble of a rising climax faded into the distance...and she felt herself go.

  The sky rushed in, tugging her upward and away from her lover. She uttered a cry of protest, but it was too late.

  Her wings carried her, soaring, lifting her up with the currents, until the castle was just a dot below—and then nothing at all. And in that final flight home, her heart shattered into a million tiny pieces.

  * * *

  Light surrounded her. Whispers of welcome came. She was fading again, fading more, losing the flesh, becoming pure spirit.

  The angels were singing. The Grail was safe now, and where it belonged, but Aurian Arcadia wasn’t happy or where she wanted to be. She knew that now. She had known this since meeting Rhys.

  Her hands were empty. The Grail was gone. It had been taken away and her mission was complete. She floated as the last threads of her earthly existence separated into ribbons of light. Soon she would lose touch with the last few hundred years, when she didn’t want to forget him. She didn’t want to lose her beautiful Blood Knight.

  Her tears surrounded her and felt like rain. The last wisps of her earthly consciousness were wavering. No. Not yet. I’m not ready.

  “Avery.”

  Rhys’s call reached her, resonating in her soul. She sensed the pain in his voice. Her hurt had become his. She had taken away his beliefs and left him with nothing but the leftover stone shards of a castle.

  If he had used her real name, he could have commanded her to return. He hadn’t done so. Rhys assumed this was what she wanted—to be free of earthly bonds, pain and dark memories. Rhys was accepting this separation because of what she was, and who she was. He was allowing her to be part of the greater good at his own expense. Rhys was sacrificing his happiness for hers, knowing he’d pay for letting her go.

  While she...

  Heaven help her, she loved him, and she was about to become one with the light until she was needed again.

  Those thoughts were disturbing.

  “Avery. I...I will always love you. And I will never forget.”

  He had issued his final farewell. Avery recognized it as the last.

  No! she protested. “Rhys!”

  Wind whistled at her ears. The angels stopped singing, perhaps in recognition of a heart in tatters. Another voice came, speaking to her spirit to spirit, and it was a beautiful thing, a peaceful conversation. But it wasn’t enough. Not now.

  She was determined to go back to her lover.

  “Please,” she pleaded. “Please.”

  A sudden jolt to whatever was left of her system began to draw pieces of her back together again. Hands, arms, legs all took form. Hips and waist were there, buoyant beneath a great pair of crimson-tipped wings that strongly and surely surfed the breeze.

  She was being rewarded, after all. Someone had listened, she thought...

  ...as she fell.

  * * *

  Rhys uncovered his face, startled by the soft slap of flesh meeting with his flesh and the sound of his name being spoken.

  “Rhys.”

  He looked hard at the apparition straddling him, certain he was dreaming.

  Great wings, colorful and expansive, were outstretched. Centered between those wings was a naked female form he knew intimately. But that couldn’t be right. Could it? Avery had gone away.

  “Am I dreaming?”

  “Yes,” Avery whispered, leaning over him where he lay resting, tightening her legs around his sides.

  Long golden hair tickled his ribs. Pert breasts brushed his chest as her angelic face came close. Familiar blue eyes looked into his. Lush rosy-pink lips parted. “I am nobody’s sweetheart,” she said.

  “I know about the thorns,” Rhys managed to say.

  “I am a holy warrior.”

  “And terribly handy to have around,” he said.

  “They might call me back. There might be another quest.”

  “We’ll tackle the next one together.”

  A beat passed before Avery said with a warm breath, “So, in the time left to us, may I make a suggestion, Blood Knight?”

  Rhys’s heart pounded. His pulse boomed. He wasn’t dreaming. This was real. She was real. He felt her weight, saw the glorious wings, the golden skin and the challenging sparkle in her expression.

  Avery had come back to him.

  Her smile was like Heaven itself. Her hips were another story. They began to move, taunting him, teasing, urging him to take up where they had left off. Without understanding how or why, he had been granted his wish. Just one. And he vowed never to ask for another.

  “Suggestion? Yes. What?” He hardly got that out. She knew exactly how to arouse him, how to please him. The rhythm of her body riding his was pure ecstasy.

  “Why don’t you stop thinking and make the most of this reunion?” his angel coaxed with a sexy, very unangelic grin.

  “That,” Rhys whispered to her, his body more than willing to meet her challenge, his hands reaching up to draw her mouth to his, “is exactly what I plan on doing. Right now.”

  He added, barely, “You used up another trick to come back?”

  Her lips trembled slightly when she breathed a final few words into his mouth.

  “The angel and the Blood Knight, forever,” she said, with the adamancy of a promise.

  “Forever and a day,” Rhys heartily agreed.

  * * * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt from THE IMMORTAL'S UNREQUITED BRIDE by Kelli Ireland.

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  The Immortal’s Unrequited Bride

  by Kelli Ireland

  Prologue

  The Year of Our Lord, 1485

  “Your personal powers of destruction paired with your sense of justice may yet bring about the end of the world.” Isibéal Cannavan, wife of the Druid’s Assassin and powerful white lady in her own right, crossed the great hall and stopped beside the massive oak table, shaking her head in wordless censure. “In the time it took me to gather fresh herbs and root stock for the infirmary, it seems you have agreed to mediate a grievance between a god and two demigods while in the presence of the All Father, Daghda. Quite the morning you’ve had, husband.”

  Though nothing compared to mine.

  She gripped handfuls of her skirt, and her heart seized as Lachlan Cannavan—dark blond, thoroughly sensual, immensely powerful—slid low in the large, ornately carved Tuam chair situated at the head of the table. The worn leather protested his movement with a sharp creak. Indifferent, he folded his hands over his abdomen. The dark phantom of negotiations—his and hers alike—hovered between them, a divination she alone could see. Again Isibéal thanked the gods that it was she who held the power of visions, not her husband. For if he knew what she’d done...

  She’d had no other choice, though. Not after the vision had struck her unannounced, revealing that the strife brewing between divine beings would rip her husband from her grasp.

  Lachlan was engaged in an authentic struggle. This was no training exercise or sparring session. This was a battle where those who had lifted sword or fist would either claim victory and, as such, live, or they would suffer the highest loss and make restitution in death.

  The fight grew more brutal with every passing second. Men shouted and metal blade beat against metal blade so that the whole of the battle was reduced to harsh sounds that stung the ear. But it was the two men in front of her who claimed the whole of her attention. The swing of the men’s blades whistling through the air, steel impacting steel and making her teeth ache, the harsh declarations of extreme effort as each combatant hoisted his respective weapon—each sound was horrifying when singly wrought. Together? They overwhelmed her mind and shouted at her to flee.

  Sweat slicked Lachlan’s arms and trailed down his bare chest. He gripped his sword hilt so tightly his knuckles appeared skeletal beneath his sun-kissed skin.

  A vicious blow and he knocked his opponent back, down, and afforded himself a brief advantage. But that small triumph changed neither the tenor of the fight nor its probable outcome.

  The strength and valor of the honorable could not hold its ground in the face of malicious deception and heartbreaking betrayal.

  Lachlan would not, could not, fight an opponent who was possessed with such disregard for honor, but this particular opponent hurt him on a deeper level than any other. The blood tie between them demanded as much. And that, Lachlan’s inability to double-cross the man who would have his head before he’d even hear his brother’s plea?

  That would be the cost of Lachlan’s pride and a brother’s love.

  Lachlan would lose this fight.

  His attacker rose from the ground and charged. Swords clashed. Men shouted unintelligible words. The battle raged. These two men were pitted against each other, a violation of nature’s intent. Their animosity was so strong it fouled the air even as it clung to them, a sticky cobweb of hatred that spun from one and bound the other, back and forth as they moved through the steps of death’s dance.

  Lachlan’s opponent lunged at him, and, with what could only be described as willfulness...nay, willingness, Lachlan stepped into the man’s blade. It struck true, the resulting sound disturbingly similar to a butcher’s meat cleaver striking the thickest part of a mutton’s leg—heavy, viscous, dense.

  Lachlan stumbled back and the damning sword slid free with a wet, sucking hiss. Eyes bright in a fast-paling face, Lachlan grinned with grim satisfaction. He coughed once. Twice. “I will thank you for this.”

  “Then you are far greater a fool than I believed,” his attacker, killer, said, voice muffled as though he spoke with a rag over his mouth.

  Lachlan shook his head. “I said I will, not that I do. Not yet.”

  “And what, then, is the difference?” came the arrogant reply.

  Lachlan lifted his long sword in his dominant hand, stealing his opponent’s attention. Then, his nondominant hand yielding his short sword with untraceable speed, he raised his weapon and swung down as hard as he could. The blade was smaller but not lesser, proving sufficient to near cleave the man’s head from his neck in one blow.

  The man dropped his sword and fell to his knees. Defeat fouled the air around them.

  “The difference,” Lachlan said with cold indifference, “is that I will thank you for striking my deathblow, as it afforded me the opportunity to reciprocate and offer you the same, save one significant difference. The wounds I bear will end me, but they’ll send me into the welcoming fields of Tír na nÓg. The wounds I deliver shall not afford you the same. They will carry you straight to the Shadow Realm.” Gritting his teeth, Lachlan yanked the shorter blade from deep in his adversary’s neck and then swung again. This time the man’s head separated cleanly, hit the ground and rolled free. “You cannot escape your fate,” Lachlan said as sweat ran freely down his brow and into his eyes. Swaying, he blinked rapidly. “It did not have to be this way...brother.”

  Lachlan’s fingers straightened spasmodically, his swords clanging off each other as they fell. The grass muffled the metal’s impact with the earth. He clutched his side, breath wheezing. His eyes lost their intense, sharp look, growing unfocused between blinks.

  Isibéal screamed at him to hold on, admonished him to fight, threatened to see that his cherished knarr—the long boat his Viking great-grandfather had sailed—was used as his funeral pyre should he die. All to no avail, for the living held no dominion over the dying, and Lachlan was dying.

  Without acknowledging her, Lachlan slipped sideways, caught himself with one hand and, in fits and starts, eased himself to the ground.

  Then it was done. The headless body of Lachlan’s enemy lay mere feet from where the Assassin had fallen. Both men’s souls had been set free with their last breaths.

  Isibéal knew with absolute certainty that Lachlan’s soul had begun its journey to the heavens. It was no consolation.

  She fell to her knees at his side. And while she alone seemed to hear the impact of her husband’s death, hear it she did.

  Her heart broke with a thunderous crack, much like a heavy foot on thin ice.

  Life as she knew it was over.

  Desperate to hide the tear that burned her eyes, Isibéal spun away from the hale and healthy man who watched her now.

  She could not, would not, stand by and watch Lachlan enter into a conflict he wasn’t slated to walk out of. She’d seen his death and held suspect one man who should never have been suspect at all. Still, it seemed he would strike the blow that would rob her of her heart’s blood.

  How? How could he do this to me?

  This vision was the first to reduce her to a shivering mess of skirts and tears. Throat too tight to scream he
r refusal of what she’d been shown and now revisited, she locked her knees and forced herself to remain standing. The original imagery and consequent sounds had left her a collapsed heap of emotional devastation. One truth had separated from the thousand questions she’d been left with. That truth?

  Isibéal wouldn’t survive losing Lachlan. Therefore she’d do whatever was necessary to stay with him. If it meant sacrificing herself so he carried on and met her in the afterlife? So be it. Where he went, she followed.

  The affirmation wasn’t based on the melodramatics of a weak-minded woman, but rather a simple, if brutal, truth recognized by her as one of the realm’s most powerful witches. Should she be forced to take matters into her own hands, should she be required to end her own life, she would do so. And gladly.

  To that end, she’d sought out a solution in the early-morning mists that silently rose from the floor of Cahermurphy Forest. It meant she’d had to break her geis—the oath she’d taken to honor her magick’s gift and never use it to try to change fate to suit her—but it mattered not.

  Isibéal would follow Lachlan into this confrontation.

  She had set aside the convictions of her faith that bade her not interfere in the workings of free will or destiny’s machinations. That done, she’d set her circle in place, retrieved a small bowl she carried in her pack and then filled it with water. Settled in her circle, she cast it and worked the deep magick required to scry. She would use the reflection of the water’s surface to look into the future with intent and the belief she could secure Lachlan’s safety.

  What had appeared had not been foresight. Yes, the answer to her initial summons had appeared on the water’s surface...but as a reflection of the man who stood behind her.

  Lugh, God of Vengeance and Reincarnation and one of the aggrieved parties at the meeting slated for Lachlan’s involvement, had sought her out.