by Anne Conley
She prepared.
The next morning, after a breakfast of oatmeal with brown sugar and raisins, a fairly innocuous affair, considering what they were planning for, she led Michael to the storage building next to her cabin.
It was a new building she’d installed shortly after buying the cabin. It was a metal structure that held her lawnmower, gardening tools, a stocked deep freeze, and her reloading equipment.
Along the far wall, sat a standard five by ten tool bench with cabinets above it. But it had everything she would need in any possible emergency. Not that reloading was a quick affair, but it steadied her nerves and gave her a purpose. Over the past few years, she had reloaded thousands of rounds for her sizeable gun collection. Not that she’d used most of them, but she had them nonetheless.
Michael was impressed, letting out a low whistle as his eyes roamed the bench, his hand stroking it idly.
“What do you reload?”
“Mostly .45s, but I have a lot of different dies, one for each caliber I own, so I’m set up to do most of them.” She opened the cabinet to display over a dozen bullet presses, each loaded with a different caliber die.
“You know bullets won’t kill him, don’t you?” He asked her seriously, his silver eyes intensely focused on her, begging her to understand the situation.
She nodded. “Yeah, but it helps me focus on whatever task I have. So this is what I’ll be doing today, getting my head straight.”
And she needed her head straight. She needed to put all this self-pity back in the recesses of her mind where it belonged and focus on battle.
She got busy, pulling out all her brass and focusing on the steps to reloading: trimming shells, measuring powder, clamping, testing. She lined her finished bullets up in rows in a tray next to Michael, who worked alongside her in silence after he had spent some time watching her.
As practiced as she was, he was faster, but no one could argue her accuracy. She’d reloaded a lot, especially since Eli had died, and she’d tested her loads until she had a formula for her own perfect shot.
Eli had shown her the relaxation in reloading, they’d worked together before he’d enlisted. But nothing was really the same with Michael. She could do all kinds of things with him she’d done with Eli and it would still be different.
Strength and serenity radiated from Michael in waves. Standing next to him, she could smell his scent, hear his breathing, feel his heat. Occasionally, they brushed arms or legs as they reached for something in the other’s space. They didn’t speak or laugh or joke like she had with Eli. But his presence had an effect on her all the same.
They worked into the afternoon when Faith finally ran out of lead. They’d reloaded everything she had in her cabinet, using every last scrap of material. Michael broke the silence.
“Let’s go back to the house, and I’ll fix something to eat. I’m hungry.” She nodded and followed him in.
Faith sat on the sofa, pulling a throw-pillow onto her lap, squeezing it, suddenly restless again, while she watched Michael open cabinets and rustle up sandwiches and heat up soup. He seemed at home in her kitchen, and she supposed he’d watched her in it enough to know where she kept everything.
“How do I get ready for him? Do I need holy water? A cross?”
He chuckled, and it annoyed her for some reason. This was serious. Evil Incarnate had targeted her, and the only ways she knew to protect herself would be ineffective on him.
“He’s not a vampire.” She could hear the smile in his voice even though his back was to her. But when he turned to her holding a tray laden with soup, sandwiches, and a bottle of wine, his face was stern.
Deflated, she looked down at her lap. When he set the tray on the coffee table, she looked at it before grabbing the bottle of wine and pouring some into a water glass for herself.
She took a long swallow before looking back at Michael. “Then what do I do? I can’t just sit here and wait. I’ll lose my mind.”
He picked up a sandwich and took a large bite, chewing thoughtfully before swallowing. He took his time, savoring it, and Faith watched him impatiently.
“You need to get your head in the right place. Fill your spirit with positivity. He feeds on the negative emotions you have and will use them against you. He’d already caught you in a dark place once, and it nearly killed you. That’s how he works. Do you pray?”
She shook her head. She hadn’t prayed in years. Not since the group home. “No, but I think I still remember some of them.”
“You used to be religious?” The question held no guile, Michael’s face was open, non-judgmental, and Faith felt herself open up.
“My parents died when I was young. They were Catholic, and when there wasn’t anyone to take care of me, the Church took me in. I was raised in a Catholic group home until I graduated high school.”
“I’m sorry.” The sympathy in his voice was genuine, but Faith shrugged it off.
“Don’t be. I mean, I’m sorry my parents died, but I had an okay adolescence. The sisters were nice. It wasn’t like you see on TV or whatever. The structure of the place was good for me.”
“You’ve lost a lot of people in your life.”
“Yeah. And I’ve dealt with it by staying alone. Not getting attached to people.” Except Michael. She had found herself attached to him whether she liked it or not. She knew when he left, she would lose herself again. It would be just like a death.
To her surprise, he grasped her hand, entwining her fingers with his. It was out of character for him, usually so aloof, but when she looked at his face she saw only remorse.
“Faith…I know you think I should have done something for Eli, but there were higher powers at work there. I couldn’t save him the way you wanted me to.”
“But you could have.”
His eyebrows raised in the middle, and his mouth turned down at the edges. Remorse colored his words, tugging at Faith’s gut uncomfortably. “I’m not sure. When The Boss has a purpose for someone, I can’t interfere with it.”
“What purpose could he possibly have for Eli dying?” She’d heard all of that ‘higher purpose’ bullshit. Now, even this angel in front of her was plying her with trite words?
She watched as he opened his mouth to say something, then seemed to think better of it, snapping his jaw shut with a snap, his face suddenly devoid of emotion.
She sighed. She could see he was tortured here, but she was too. If she was supposed to leave behind the negativity to prepare for this battle, she needed to do something to get her mind off of it all.
They sat in silence, Faith hearing nothing but their chewing and the ever-present humming in her body. It seemed to have gotten better, not as noticeable, or else she’d just gotten used to it. She wondered if there was some sort of chemistry with Michael that made it happen, like some people could never wear quartz watches, maybe he just made people hum. The thought made her giggle in spite of the serious circumstances.
He stopped chewing and looked at her. “What?”
“Nothing. It’s just…my body hums around you.” She watched the corner of his mouth rise in a satisfied smirk, sliding the little patch of hair around on his chin, and she punched his arm.
“Ow!”
“Well, that’s not what I meant! I think you know what the humming is. Tell me.” She was smiling, relieved at the levity of the situation.
“You really want to know?” His grin had faded a bit, but was still there, turning pensive, like he was wondering what she would think about his answer. It only piqued her curiosity more.
“Yes, please.”
“It’s the Holy Spirit,” he said simply. “When you’re around me, you have part of the Holy Spirit in you. That’s how It manifests Itself.”
It was strange. She’d been spending all this time with this man, having all these sinful thoughts about him, done all these… holy shit, the things she’d done with him… It was just so hard to imagine him as a Holy being. She could feel the heat rushi
ng to her face.
“Don’t.” He looked angry again, and she wondered why.
“Don’t what?”
He turned to her, his hand tentatively tucking a tendril of hair behind her ear. “What humans don’t understand… and it’s hard because for some reason it’s been ingrained in the human psyche for centuries, is…” His voice softened. “The Holy Spirit doesn’t judge.” Silver orbs pierced her, and she saw what he was. He was the archangel that was taught to weigh souls in the afterlife to deem their worthiness.
“Do you… what I mean is…” Why was this hard? “I’ve always heard that Michael is the one who determines who is worthy.” Her eyes were drawn to the soul patch on his chin.
“It’s true. But I’m not the only one. And individual actions don’t determine worthiness. I mean, they can, but it’s the motivations behind them, the spirit of the person. The whole term ‘weighing of the soul’ is a misnomer, though. It came from something the Greeks did and believed. Early Christians just meshed that into their dogma to convert. The truth is we know who’s good. There’s no formula.” His eyes fell on her lips, and she licked them.
“Then how does God feel about sex? I mean…“ Jesus, the things she’d done in the boat house… “What I mean is… We’re all taught, as Christians, that sex without procreation is bad, a sin. What about the …” She swallowed. “… the boat house?”
A smile creased his face, and she could tell he wasn’t laughing at her but was laughing nonetheless. “I’ve got a theory about that, but nobody really knows the answer, except good people get kinky, and it amuses Him, nothing more.” He sobered, and his index finger absently traced a pattern on her knee. It made Faith warm, really warm. “I need to ask you a question now, since we’re talking about good people…” Raising his eyes to hers, they squinted. “Why do you steal? I can tell what it’s not. It’s not for greed. But I can’t tell why you do it. It’s been driving me crazy.”
Faith shrugged. She felt the need to open up to him, but it was complicated. She wasn’t entirely sure herself. “After Eli died, I was lost. The precinct wasn’t helping me anymore.” She had never talked about this with anyone. “Working on the police force was one of the highlights of my life. It made sense. It was where I met Eli. I thought I would be a cop until I died.” Her eyes dropped to her lap. “Then Eli enlisted. I begged him not to. That wasn’t something I could control, and he wouldn’t listen to everything I told him. I had a bad feeling about it from the get go. I knew somehow, something was going to happen to him. And he went anyway and came back in a casket.”
Tears tracked down her face, and she swiped at them with the back of her hands, shying away from Michael’s gesture. “After that, I started looking at my job. Really looking at it. The idealism I’d started out with jaded me. Everywhere I looked, good people got into trouble or died. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. So I quit. I looked for something to do that made sense to me, but I couldn’t find anything. I sat at home and watched old movies all day long, looking for some sign about what I was supposed to do with my life.” She laughed ruefully. “In the end, it wasn’t a divine push at all. It was some sort of movie marathon. To Catch a Thief, Entrapment, The Saint, The Pink Panther, Ocean’s Eleven. And then the next day, there was a marathon of Robin Hood movies, from Douglas Fairbanks to Errol Flynn to Kevin Costner. I watched them all. And the idea was born.”
Michael’s eyes were wide, and there was a surge of pride surfacing in Faith at surprising him. “So you didn’t keep the money? You stole from rich people and gave it to the needy?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t need the money. I kept some of it, enough to live on. But I donated most of it. I would find buyers, people I already knew were out there from working as a cop. The whole idea behind it I guess was it was something I could control. I was good at it. I had been one of the police officers who would go and tell people if their alarm systems were good enough on their homes, what they needed to be secure, that kind of stuff. Eli was really good at making sure I never saw much active patrol duty, especially after we married. I just used knowledge I already had and did some research to improve on it.”
“So where does Shamus fit into this?”
Faith rolled her eyes. “I don’t know how he found out, but he caught me on a job. I was stealing a necklace for a buyer in LA one of my contacts had fixed me up with. Shamus set me up, taking pictures of me getting the stuff out of the safe. He contacted me later and threatened to turn the photos over to the police if I didn’t start working for him and give him a cut. The Howells were supposed to be my last job for him, but he probably wouldn’t have ever let me go. He wanted in my pants so bad.”
She heard a rumble from Michael’s chest and looked at him to see the flash of anger in his eyes. “Can’t blame him for that, I suppose… Your pants are mighty fine. Although if he ever touched you I would rip his balls off and shove them so far up his ass he’d be belching them for days.”
Laughter bubbled up from deep within Faith, and she surrendered to it. “Belching balls…” The laughter turned hysterical, and she let it roll through her. Michael’s stern expression lightened as he watched her, then he started chuckling. They laughed together like that for a few minutes until Faith was clutching her side and then fell silent with a sigh.
Faith contemplated the consequences of the actions she was about to instigate. They had already had sex, and it was mind-blowing. He hadn’t made any moves on her since then, not even a kiss. She was sure he’d been with many women before, probably better, more attractive women if she was comparing herself to women since the dawn of time.
But maybe he wanted it too?
“About the other night… in the boathouse…” His movements stilled next to her, all traces of laughter gone. She could feel him stop breathing, chewing. “Um… you haven’t brought it up, since, and I was just wondering if…” Faith didn’t know how to continue. She didn’t want to actually say the words, ‘was it as un-fucking-believable for you as it was me?’ but she had to know something.
“If what, Faith?” Those silver fucking eyes were raking over her body, and she felt the heat of his gaze flush her skin. “If it compared to the legions of other women I’ve been with?” He leaned toward her, his voice lowering to a husky timbre that washed across her. “If I’d do it again?” Michael bent his head towards the shell of her ear, whispering into it, “If I’ve been thinking about it every fucking second since?” His teeth grazed the lobe of her ear. “If I’ve been dreaming about doing it again?” He sucked her earlobe between his teeth as he mumbled, “…and again…” Goose bumps covered her heated skin and her core clenched with need.
“Yes…” Her voice was a choked whisper, and he withdrew.
“Absolutely. On all accounts.” He put the last bite of his sandwich in his mouth, as if he hadn’t just melted Faith into a puddle on the couch next to him with his words alone. “In fact, of all the women I’ve been with, you are by far the most exquisite.” His eyes on her as he spoke the words were honest, as was everything he did. But they were heated, and she pulsed and tremored, unable to control the fierce desire that was raging through her.
How did she respond to that statement? If she continued having sex with him… what? What would happen? Would she fall for him even more, the one thing she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do again? Too late for that. She didn’t have to sleep with him again to know she was addicted and would never be able to get enough.
She put her hand on his thigh and took a deep breath. “Take me to bed, Michael.”
He stared at her a moment, and she could see him rolling her words over in her mind. Finally, he moved. Michael reached for her hand, pulling her up with him and leading her to the bedroom. Once inside, he dropped her hand and reached for the back of her neck, pulling her to him for a gentle kiss. Lips nibbled at each other, sucking and biting gently, until Faith was weak as a kitten in his hands.
His hands dropped to her shoulde
rs as she reached around his biceps, feeling them tense with her touch. His left arm, where the tattoo was, seemed to bunch more under her fingertips, but Faith dismissed the sensation as others took its place. His groin pushed against hers, and she felt his arousal as his mouth opened around hers, pushing past every boundary she’d ever built.
Suddenly, she was overpowered by a need she couldn’t explain, not even to herself. She pushed him towards the bed, pushing him over and falling on top of him. Her kisses were hungry, and he grasped her face between his hands, plundering her mouth with his tongue. Something snapped in Faith, and she tore at his clothing impatiently.
His hands moved to hers, stilling her. She stopped kissing him and pulled back, questioning him.
“You’re in control. You tell me what you want, Faith. This one’s all about you.” His eyes squinted at her slightly, and she could tell this was new to him. Michael was always in control. He was giving her a gift.
“Thank you,” she said softly, before pulling his t-shirt up over his head. He hissed through his teeth, his head falling back against the pillows when she lowered her mouth to his nipples, sucking one then the other into her mouth, tasting his skin. She feathered her fingertips over his torso before dragging her tongue down his abdomen, tasting salt and something sweet, like his smell. She lowered herself down his body to his jeans.
Unsnapping them and pulling down the zipper, she examined what she found.
Michael wasn’t wearing underwear, and he sprang free, long and thick and heavy into her hand. She stroked him, feeling the silky steel of his shaft in the palm of her hand to his accompanying groans.
She pushed his jeans down off his legs before nestling herself between his knees and kissing the tip of him before licking the length. He fisted her hair as she lowered her mouth onto his length, wetting it. Michael made an entirely unintelligible sound as she surrounded him with her mouth as deep as she could take him, testing the waters.
