by Holley Trent
“Who’d choose to live like this? To have chaos be her norm, when she could just reintegrate into her old life and resume being the quiet witch her family expects her to be.”
“Do you choose it?”
He opened his mouth, then closed them on his quick, visceral no. Did he want a white picket fence life, a tidy little yard, and no surprises beyond the occasional visitor?
No. He liked his messy life, minus all the demonic terrorism. He could sure as shit do without all that.
“Yeah, I do,” he said, and nudged the cat off his lap. She settled onto the step below and curled into a furry cat loaf, tucking her legs beneath her body.
“Well, give her a choice, too. That’s all you can do.”
The scenery around him flickered, colors faded.
Maman sighed. “You’re waking up.”
“I’ll guess I’ll see you during our monthly séance.”
“Take a month off. I know how draining it is, especially with all those folks waiting for you in the waiting room. Boy! Don’t you forget to deliver those messages, you understand me?”
“Yes, Maman.”
“And Claude?”
“Yes?”
“Your magic may be a bit different when you wake up. I can’t predict how.”
“Why would it be different?”
He didn’t feel any different, but then again, he wasn’t in his body at the moment.
“Because of what your father did, child.”
She vanished.
He must have, too, because the next thing he knew, he was looking up at an institutional white drop ceiling. He had problems drawing breath and his chest was so tight. Dark brown eyes loomed over him, two sets. One panicked, one calm.
“We had to intubate you to speed up your recovery, Claude. Relax. Slow your breaths.”
Ellery. Thank the gods for a familiar face.
“I’ll get that out of you. Cough for me.”
He did, and she slid it out.
Turning his sore neck slowly toward Gail, he saw the panic in her eyes. She grabbed his right hand and squeezed hard.
“Fuck, I need a cigarette.”
She gave him a light smack. “Asshole. You scared me. This fell off when you reversed that sigil, and I thought you were gone.” She turned his hand over and put his ring on his palm.
Closing his eyes, he groaned, and shook his head. “It’s yours,” he rasped. “Keep it.”
She curled her fingers around it and pulled it back. “Why did it come off?” Her voice was thick, eyes wet.
“Ah, chéri. It’s okay. I’m okay. I made a calculated risk. I gave everything I had to my father so he could deal with Ross. That’s probably why it came off. The magic was broken.”
“Oh.” She turned it in her fingers a few times and leaned her forearms atop the bed rail while Ellery puttered about.
Gail pulled her bottom lip between her teeth, studying him quietly.
“What, chéri?”
“I was wondering if you …” She cut her gaze to her sister, who looked up from the chart she was studying. Ellery slid it back into its holder and nodded.
“I’ll go rustle up a cup of ice chips for you, Claude.”
“Thanks.”
She slipped through the partially open door.
He lifted his right hand, curiosity choking him. With one little flick of his fingers, the door closed softly behind Ellery.
Well, that still worked. He snapped his fingers and the television set mounted in the corner crackled to life. That worked, too, then. But those were little things. Was he still capable of major magic? That he wouldn’t know until he was on his feet again.
Gail waved at the television and the channel switched.
He grinned. “Hey. Look at you.”
“Yeah. You were right. Once I knew I was capable of it, I tried harder to do things by myself. I’m not as natural at it as you, but Ellery’s impressed.”
“You’ve got to start somewhere.”
“Yep.”
“What were you going to say before Ellery fled for ice chips?”
“Oh.” Gail wrung her hands and kept her gaze pointedly fixed on the television screen. “When you were out, asleep—”
“Comatose.”
She cringed. “Yes. I had a couple of days to think. So much of what’s happened in the past couple of months has rocked my world.”
“And mine as well.”
“Yeah. I worried that when you woke up, you would take one look at me and decide I wasn’t worth it.”
“What?” He ground his elbows against the bed and tried to push himself more upright, but couldn’t manage it. His body was at least two days from recovery, if this malady was anything like the last time he’d had the juice blasted out of him. Instead of struggling to sit up, he reached for the bed controls and raised the back. “Why the hell would you think that?”
“Oh. Here.” She rooted through a bag on the chair at the bedside and pulled out that damned striped pillow, grinning. “I remember the stripes now. It came back to me when I was fixing a ball of Clarissa’s yarn that Candy Corn unwound. It was blue like your eyes, and I remembered the scarf. Took me a minute to remember what I was remembering it from. It was crooked and you wore it anyway.”
Gods. He ground the heels of his palms against his burning eyes as she nestled the pillow behind him. Gail was Laurette. The same, but different. The differences mattered. They meant she’d survive. “Of course I’d wear it. You made it for me.”
“Yeah.” Her shoulders fell. “Look. I’ve been nothing but a pain in the ass for four, five, however many lifetimes, and in this one, my own ex-husband tried to use me as a supernatural battery and my great-great-whatever more or less sparked a brand-new feud with the supernatural types in Shaun’s family lines because she dealt with him. Agatha doesn’t seem worried because she knows how to play the game, but I feel like it’s my fault. I’ve reignited the old infighting bullshit. I’d understand if you didn’t want to give this a go. I’d be sad, but I’d understand.”
“Not your fault, chéri. They wanted this. Agatha will get part of the blame, but many will take advantage of the disruption. Besides, they’ve all been acting contrary to their natures for far too long. I think we’re long overdue for the old gods to come out of hiding and for us all to learn our capacities. Your entry into the magic world may have been turbulent, but that seems to be par for the course for our girls. Me and my brothers, I mean.”
Her laugh was soft, but sincere. Her smile brightened her eyes and loosened the tension of her jaw. “You do try to one-up each other with your disaster movie romances, huh?”
“Try to? No. Shit just happens. And Gail?”
“Yes?”
“When I was out, you were worried I wouldn’t want you want I woke up, and I was worried you’d run away because you were sick of all the messiness.”
She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes and chuckled. “It’s a different kind of messy than what I’m used to, that’s for sure.” She let her hands fall to the covers beside his thigh, and sighed. “I like this messy better. I think I fit.”
“Yeah, you do.”
She was still eying that space on the bed, so he patted it. “Know where else you fit? Right here.”
She worked the railing down and climbed onto the bed next to him.
He groaned from the renewed shock of pain as she moved, pulling the rail back up and cuddling close to him. Once she was settled, he immediately felt better. She was like a salve for him. A balm for his frayed nerves and broken body.
She tossed her right arm over his waist and her leg across his legs, and sighed. “Sorry you didn’t get to see the light show of souls before you got knocked out. It was amazing.”
He tried to sit up again, and quickly aborted the endeavor. “What?”
“I don’t know what he did, exactly, but it was amazing. All those souls your father and I guess all his kids were responsible for marking, he ripped
them back as if he was taking money out of the bank. I don’t know what happened to them after that.”
Claude’s chest deflated with a relief he hadn’t felt since he was seventeen. Guilt was such a heavy thing, and he was glad to be rid of some of it. Thank gods. His father had known what to do with Claude’s death magic even if Claude hadn’t expected him to engage in such a feat. “I imagine they got a proper judging,” he said. “Some may yet find their heaven, and the others … well, they may go back to whatever Hell they were in.”
“Why’d he do it?”
“I don’t know, ma reine.” He didn’t know it could be done, really, not even with all the years of researching he’d done on the topic. He’d assumed he’d been chasing a pipe dream.
“Maybe when he wakes up—if he wakes up—you can ask him?”
“Wakes up? What do you mean?”
Ellery padded back in holding a plastic up with a straw with a doctor on her heels.
Panic tightened every muscle in Claude’s body, and while he would have usually sprung to action, he just didn’t have the juice. He could feel the magic his father had given back to him settling back into him in bits, and his mother was right—it was different. It felt—cleaner.
The doctor put up his hands. “Don’t worry, I’m a wolf. Scott called me. No one else has been in here except me and my practice associate. I’m not going to kick your girl out, and I’m not going to ask you any stupid questions, all right? I’m just here to treat the human part of you and get you back on your feet fast. I don’t try to understand the way the rest of you works.”
Claude blew out a ragged exhale and relaxed onto his pillows.
Ellery pushed the dividing curtain open to reveal the second bed in the room. Claude saw that his roommate’s feet dangled over the footboard, and his right arm flopped over the rail.
Claude couldn’t see who he was, though, because Ellery hadn’t pushed the curtain back enough.
“Hey, you’re awake.” Clarissa had poked her head into the room and looked from Claude to the medical associates flitting about. “Can I come in?”
“Please do.”
She stepped in and closed the door. The canvas tote she set onto the side chair was full to bursting, and although Claude was curious about what could be in it, she ignored it for the time being. “Gail tell you I carved out a little parcel of land for you?” Wringing her hands, she paced by the counter.
“He’s been awake for ten minutes,” Gail said. “All we’ve managed to clear up is that we like messes.”
“And thus each other,” Claude added.
“Good, good,” Clarissa said, still pacing.
Clarissa was a woman blessed with nerves of steel, so if she was pacing, something was seriously stuck in her craw.
“Well, it’s there if you’d like to build. I wish you would. Your brothers would like it. And we take care of our own.”
“I’m glad to belong.”
“And you’ll need people around to watch all those kids you’re going to have. Agatha’s already taking up knitting just in case.”
Kids? He cut his gaze down to Gail, but her expression was serene rather than appalled. He gave her a little squeeze, and she squeezed back an okay.
“Agatha’s a nutball,” Ellery muttered, scribbling on the stranger’s chart, but her smile indicated just how she felt about that ancestral oddity.
“I’ll call John and Charles and let them know you’re awake. Julia will probably want to pop over, too.” Clarissa moved back toward her tote bag as if she’d finally remembered she’d brought it.
“Thank you for that,” he said before she could flee the room. “But, tell me, what’s got you so nervous?”
She froze with one hand on the bag straps. “I’m not nervous.”
“You’re a ball of nerves. I’ve never seen you so agitated, and I know now that elves don’t get antsy unless things are bad. What’s up? Please don’t tell me that we didn’t really put Ross down and that he’s still out there being a devious little shit.”
“No, no. You got him. Mark made sure of it.” She sighed, and let the handle fall. Spinning on her heels, she looked to Ellery. “Pull that curtain back the rest of the way, will you?”
Ellery waited with one hand on the curtain edge. “He’s out cold, and we don’t know if he’ll ever wake up.”
The curtains whirred on the track, and it took a moment for Claude’s brain to make sense of what his eyes could see.
Yellow-blond hair obscured his eyes and a layer of scruff had grown on his usually smooth chin, but there was no doubting who that was.
Fallen angels didn’t sleep, so what the fuck was wrong with Papa? He wasn’t dead. His chest rose and fell with each breath, but his skin bore a sickly pallor, and even with his feet dangling over the end of the bed, he looked smaller than usual. Frail.
“I’m not convinced what’s wrong with him is medical,” the doctor said, shaking his head. “He’s got all the right organs and in the right places, but they don’t function quite like ours.”
“For people like him, they’re usually just decorations.”
“Well, he’s using them. I think. Look I can’t see any reason why he wouldn’t wake up, but he just won’t.”
“What’s wrong with him isn’t medical. It’s supernatural.”
“Do you know how to wake him up?”
Claude pushed one shoulder up into his best approximation of a shrug. “When I’m on my feet again, I have some things I could try. With some help.” He chafed his right hand down Gail’s back, and she nodded.
“Happy to help.”
“But what’s got you so antsy, Clarissa?”
“You know, I’m on his paperwork as next of kin?” Her laugh was forced, bordering on crazed. “He changed all his insurance policies three years ago and added me as a person who could make decisions about him. He must have known there’d be no plug to pull if it came down to this. You can’t pull a plug on someone who can’t die unless he’s been smote.”
“I imagine he didn’t trust anyone else. He’s an enigmatic man.”
“Or maybe he just wants to drive me crazy, even from a coma. I can’t go anydamnwhere. I have to sit in this hospital and make sure anyone who comes in this room has already been exposed to our world.”
“What’s in the bag?”
“His personal effects. You know he wears a size seventeen shoe? Custom.”
Claude couldn’t help but to laugh. It hurt like a motherfucker, but he laughed.
Gail laughed, too.
“It’s not funny.” Clarissa pouted and fished her phone from the bag.
“Why don’t you go grab yourself a few hours of sleep? We’ll hold down the fort in here for a while.”
Clarissa’s thumb froze over the keypad, and her mouth opened as if she were going to argue, but then her right eye twitched.
“Go to my apartment and take a nap. My keys are the nurse’s station. Come on.” Ellery waved Clarissa toward the door.
After a few seconds, Clarissa sighed and joined her, leaving the bag. “Just a few hours.”
The doctor followed them out.
Claude waved the door shut, pulled the curtain closed between his bed and his father’s, and dimmed the lights.
Gail pressed the bed button to lower the head a bit, and maneuvered herself under the covers with him.
“You’re warm,” she said, snuggling closer.
“Better than the alternative.”
“Loads better. I don’t know if I ever said it before, but, thank you for holding out for me—waiting for me.”
“I’d do it again and again. I do wish you knew your own worth, ma reine.”
“I’m learning. With help.”
She pressed the ring into his hand and closed his fingers around it. “Fix it so it never comes off again.”
“I’ll try. My mother did it the first time.” He kissed the top of her head, and skimmed his lips over her messy hair. He loved every lump, gna
rl, and tangle. He loved that she didn’t try to hide them from him. Like he’d said before, they were messy.
And perfectly matched.
About the Author
Holley Trent is a Carolina girl gone west. Raised in rural coastal North Carolina, she currently resides on the Colorado Front Range with her family. She writes sassy contemporary and quirky paranormal romances set in her home state.
She’s hard at work writing other stories set in the same world as the Sons of Gulielmus series. Catch up on other stories in the collection in the following order: A Demon in Waiting, A Demoness Matched (Melt My Heart anthology), and A Demon in Love.
See Holley’s complete backlist of paranormal and contemporary romances at her website, http://www.holleytrent.com. When she’s not on deadline, she boldly tweets under the handle @holleytrent.
An Angel Fallen
A Sons of Gulielmus Novella
Holley Trent
Avon, Massachusetts
Copyright © 2014 by Holley Trent.
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.
Published by
Crimson Romance
an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.
10151 Carver Road, Suite 200
Blue Ash, OH 45242. U.S.A.
www.crimsonromance.com
ISBN 10: 1-4405-8790-6
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-8790-0
eISBN: 1-4405-8791-4
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-8791-7
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
Cover art © 123RF/Vioral Sima; iStockphoto.com/jiexaa; iStockphoto.com/Pampalini; iStockphoto.com/Gilmanshin
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
CHAPTER ONE
