Angel Unleashed Read online

  “Black market.” Avery sat up. Lean leather-clad legs dangled over the edge of the couch casually, as if she had no bones at all.

  “You know where that is?” he asked.

  “That Shade might.”

  “Finding one particular Shade in a city this size is unlikely.”

  “And unnecessary, since that Shade will find me.”

  “You know this how?”

  “I’ll set a trap so it will know where to go.”

  “On the rooftop?”

  Avery nodded.

  “And the trap?” he asked.

  “Blood.”

  The back of Rhys’s neck prickled. His sigils stung in protest at what she was suggesting.

  “Whose blood, Avery?”

  “An angel’s. Think what price that would bring on the black market, and what a Shade might do with such a reward.”

  Rhys didn’t have to think about that. The idea was appalling.

  “Whoever has your wings might also want your blood?” he asked.

  “A few drops of my blood would animate my wings and cause quite a show.”

  “That would be a damn circus act. And the Shade would be tortured for information as to where it got the blood.”

  “Yes.”

  Rhys stared at Avery, understanding the plan with a rush of insight.

  “So,” he said, exhaling slowly, “we don’t even have to search for the bastard who has the wings, because he will come to us.”

  Rhys wondered if he was dreaming when Avery got to her feet and stretched by spreading her arms wide. Sparks of light played on each bare part of her exposed anatomy—hands, neck, face. That light caressed her, as much a part of her as her skin. She’d been born of light, and in that moment, when she was perhaps rejuvenated by rest, her heavenly origins showed.

  “What happens when we get the wings back?” he asked without actually wanting to hear the answer.

  Her gaze swept over him, causing his sigils to ripple with anxiety. “I go home,” she said. “If I’m still welcome there.”

  Chapter 15

  It was the third time the Blood Knight had turned his back to her, and Avery knew why. Observing how his muscles stiffened beneath his dark shirt and the way he rolled his broad shoulders made her wish she hadn’t added the part about going home. Rhys didn’t like that, and at some point, with more sessions on her back, on a floor and in his arms, she might have treacherously started to agree with him.

  From the other side of the room, his voice caused an echo. “Why are you here, Avery?”

  Before she could answer that, if she’d been willing to do so, he added, “What brought you here in the first place and left you vulnerable to what happened with the wings? I’ve seen what you can do, and how you fight. I realize it would have taken an army to take those wings from you if you didn’t agree to let them go.”

  Still not finished, he continued after a beat. “So who are you, really, and why are you here?”

  Possible ways to feed Rhys small bites of information filtered through her mind before Avery decided to spill part of the truth. This could have been due to the way he was looking at her and that disconcerting trait he showed of seeming to care.

  “I came here to get the Grail,” she said.

  His response was abrupt. “What did you say?”

  Exposing even that much of the secrets she carried caused her breath to hitch, and yet she went on daringly, trusting Rhys, tired of bearing her burdens alone.

  “I was sent to Earth to take the item you call the Holy Grail to the only true place of safety for such a powerful relic.”

  Silence followed that startling statement. Truth had been spoken at long last, and truth had power. Rhys was struggling with that, and how to comprehend the full extent of her meaning.

  His voice rang with emotion and skepticism in equal measures when he demanded “Who sent you?”

  Again, he didn’t wait for her reply. He had worked out the answer to his own question quickly. “Your Maker sent you?” he asked, with a touch of reverence for who that Maker might turn out to be if she was an angel.

  Avery nodded, observing Rhys’s reactions closely. He had lived with a belief system based only on half-truths.

  “Why would you have come to take the Grail when we had it and the situation of hiding it under control?” he asked. “Guardianship of the Grail is what the seven of us were created for. Keeping it safe and out of all mortal and demonic hands is our continuous objective. Surely an all-seeing creator would know that.”

  They were getting too close to the real problems here, and Avery dreaded having to hide so many more of the answers Rhys sought. She was growing sorrier by the moment for her vendetta against the Knights. Anger and rage had been her driving force for so long, it was hard to let that go.

  Yet Rhys and his blood brothers had never been the crux of the problem surrounding the Grail Quest, only the end result. They had been guilty by association with their Makers, but had, indeed, held up their end of the bargain to protect the Grail.

  “The chalice didn’t belong on Earth then and doesn’t now,” she said. “You and the others who tested its powers must realize this, and no matter how well hidden you believe it is, the Grail will someday be found. Its powers will be discovered and abused.”

  Rhys’s voice lowered further with a dangerous edge. “You know far too much about our creation to have been fed that information by rumors only.”

  “I know everything,” Avery confessed, convincing herself to leave it at that.

  Rhys didn’t need to know that after escaping from her chains in the Castle Broceliande dungeons, she had taken out her anger on the Knights’ so-called Makers. It had taken her less than an hour to destroy their beloved castle and their dreams of controlling the seven Knights. As satisfying as that destruction had been, it hadn’t gotten her any closer to her original objective for coming to Earth, however, since the Blood Knights charged with the Grail’s safekeeping had taken the holy relic away, and she had lost her ability to do much about that.

  Her wings had disappeared, and these Knights had been sent into the wide world, tasked with hiding and protecting the Grail. They had cherished the chalice that had captured the blood of the heavens from a man on a cross. That same chalice’s powers of resurrection were what had been used to reanimate the Knights after Death had claimed them.

  Without her wings, she wouldn’t have dared to try and take the holy relic back. Minus the ability to ascend, her efforts might have jeopardized the safety of the Grail’s temporary guardianship.

  Rhys might not have been to the place the Grail was buried, but he’d know where it was hidden. The sigils carved into his back that connected him with his brothers were, in essence, a supernatural GPS system carrying within their intricate scrolls all the information she’d need when the time came.

  “Which came first, Avery?” he asked. “You followed the Grail, and that led to knowledge of us, to knowledge of my brethren and me, or you’re hoping to follow us to the Grail?”

  “Both.”

  The earnestness of her answer drew Rhys to her side. His expression was sober, questioning. He was wary. His nearness freed her tongue more than she would have liked.

  “I had found the Grail early on,” she said, despising herself for admitting that. Rhys would pounce on the unspoken part of her story. His features rearranged as his thoughts churned.

  “And I was lured by the beauty of the castle belonging to those who had the Grail in their possession, just as you were,” she admitted.

  It was too late to withhold more of the truth. Rhys’s eyes probed hers. His tension could have set the room on fire.

  “Didn’t you ever wonder how your Makers got hold of such an important artifact, Rhys?”

&nbs
p; The question stumped him. Possibly the Knights had been taught not to question their role in the Grail Quest. Maybe the castle’s occupants had erased those kinds of questions from the minds of the Knights as they manipulated a way to give the seven men new life.

  And maybe his current name, spoken by her, played a part in affecting him, the same way it affected her. Some things, even now, remained camouflaged by the weightiness of the secrets at their core.

  Rhys’s eyes were on her, steady, level. “You gave the Grail to them? The Makers?”

  She shook her head. A line had been crossed. The only way she could have avoided what was coming next would have been to disappear, as she had always planned on doing before meeting him.

  “And the wings,” he said solemnly. “Your wings. What happened to them? Did removing them occur before or after you had the Grail in your possession?”

  She saw that Rhys didn’t like the ideas forming in his mind. There was more than one possibility here, and his instincts were to consider them all.

  All right. You want this. You’ve asked for this.

  “The wings were severed from my back so I couldn’t keep the Grail or interfere with Castle Broceliande’s plans for it.”

  Sickness followed that disclosure. In her. In Rhys. But there was only one more question to ask, and he asked it.

  “Who took your wings?”

  An expression of horror crossed his handsome features as one of those ideas rolling around in his mind fostered an evil image.

  “No,” he said with a forceful head shake. “Not possible. They wouldn’t.”

  But, of course, the image he was seeing was the way things had gone down, so Avery waited for the next phase in his understanding to fade some of the color from his bronze, chiseled perfection...the way it had faded hers.

  * * *

  “They wouldn’t.”

  The protest stuck in Rhys’s throat. Roiling waves of enlightenment struck him hard, when what he was thinking was unbelievable.

  He stood beside Avery without moving, close enough to hear the rasp of her breath. Because he wanted to shake more fantastical explanations from her with his bare hands, his voice was harsher than it should have been.

  “How would they do that, Avery? How would the castle’s occupants take either thing from you—a holy relic of such importance or your wings?”

  The question went unanswered, but it was too late for keeping secrets. If Avery wasn’t keen on filling in all of the blanks, he couldn’t make her. Nevertheless, it was frustrating to comb his way through all the possible scenarios piling up that might have explained those nasty gouges on her back.

  “Not the time for full disclosure,” she warned, her voice merely a whisper and always a temptation he wanted to explore.

  He wondered if she did whatever she was doing to him on purpose, in order to lead him away from the hard answers. Her eyes, when they met his, had lost some of their shine.

  “Did you come to London to find me, Avery?” he asked, needing a few more things resolved.

  “Only the wings,” she replied. “That’s the truth.”

  “And you will take the Grail back to wherever you came from, when and if you were to find it again?”

  “I made a promise to an entity for which promises count.”

  “But the wings come first.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you believe I’m going to help you find them.”

  She blinked slowly, as if waiting for bad news. As if she assumed her explanations, as brief as they had been, would change his game plan and he’d rescind his offer to help.

  Obviously, she hadn’t mentioned all of the grittiest parts of the story, because he felt the anxiousness wafting off her. So far, there was no real reason for her to believe he wouldn’t have helped her.

  Secrets...

  What aren’t you telling me, angel?

  What’s so important that I can’t be in on the deal?

  Am I more to you than a helper coming to your aid?

  “The moon has risen,” she announced, carrying things way off course.

  Rhys glanced to the window, taking his gaze from Avery so that he could think more clearly. “So it has.”

  “You haven’t changed your mind?” she asked.

  “I also am an entity for whom promises count, Avery.”

  Her relief was palpable. Slowly, the shine returned to her eyes. “We should go now.”

  “Yes. We should,” he agreed.

  Neither of them moved. But thundering heartbeats, swirling tensions and anxiety caused a vacuum that threatened to bring them together, and wouldn’t be ignored for long.

  “Avery...”

  She was in front of him and looking up by the time he’d finished saying her name. For an angel, her heat was extreme both inside and out. He knew this firsthand.

  “It’s important to you,” he said, already reaching for a firm grip on her slim hips.

  She placed a finger on his mouth. Through that fingertip, he felt the rapid beating of her racing pulse.

  “Important,” she said. “You will never know how much.”

  He pulled her to him. Hips to hips, and with her chest against his, Rhys withheld a sigh of acceptance. They would locate her wings and she would go. She’d search for the Grail and take it beyond anyone’s reach. There was a reason she was so adamant about that.

  “You can do that?” he asked. “Take it away for good?”

  “Yes,” she replied, standing straighter so she could say that with her lips just centimeters from his.

  “I can’t stop you if your reasons turn out to be the wrong ones?” Rhys said.

  “No one can.”

  “And if I don’t want you to take it, or take yourself away?” he asked.

  She shook her head. Her face softened, as if his question had affected her in a way she hadn’t been expecting.

  Seeing that, Rhys’s desire took over, flooding his cells, firing up his nerves with a blistering adrenaline rush. No one could have stopped him from taking the thing he wanted at that moment. Her. And all that incredible angelic fire she was composed of.

  He wanted to keep that softness he saw cross her features and the almost pleading look in her eyes that she quickly covered up by closing them. Her lips were waiting. If she didn’t want him to kiss her, she’d move away. But he was sure she did want this. Passion underlined their every look and hid in the recesses of each move they didn’t make.

  He was going to break down that damn barrier.

  He took her mouth savagely, deeply and as if there might never be another chance. Who knew that Heaven’s warrior angels had so many talents, seduction being one of them?

  And, Lord help him...he found her willing.

  Chapter 16

  Thoughts of quests faded.

  Promises. Vows. Wicked four-letter curses.

  He was all that mattered. The man filling her vision. The man running his hands up her spine and into her hair. This was the magnificent creature she needed inside her so badly, on any surface that was handy. This was the magnificent creature with the power to make her forget her struggles for a time.

  Rhys’s mouth ravaged hers unforgivably, and she fought back with equal intensity, tearing at the back of his shirt, seeking a way to reach that tense molded flesh where he likely had scars of his own to display. She wanted to see those scars because wound to wound is how she’d meet him. Hip to hip, groin to groin, front, back and every position between. Their first round had been mind-altering. This second chance would be even better.

  She was already wet. Her heart was racing.

  In an instant replay of the night before, his hands had managed her zipper and slid beneath to find out just how much she wished for this to ha
ppen.

  Releasing her anger added to the pleasure of his fingertips on her sex. Because they were crushed together, his hand was trapped and unable to explore further, so she pushed him away, half expecting Rhys to question the move the way he questioned everything else.

  He didn’t.

  Instead, he twirled her to the couch, onto cushions far too small for coping with the degree of their lust for each other. Eyeing her for mere seconds, breathing as hard as she was, he tugged her to him again, so they were on their feet, standing.

  There was a bedroom forty feet away, but they wouldn’t have made it. It was a race to see how fast they could remove their clothes while remaining close enough to each other that they could not easily accomplish that. Every time Avery tried to pull Rhys’s shirt over his head, his mouth returned with more force and a fresh set of demands. His kisses had grown as dangerous as the Knight himself, and still she wanted more.

  When her palms found the patch of skin on his back she had been seeking, Rhys sighed with an indication of the sheer pleasure her small victory gave him. She got the impression he wasn’t often touched, and seldom let anyone in, in spite of his earlier remarks about mortals and bedrooms.

  She planned to kick the asses of all the women he’d ever been with, and hated all those to come. Anyone lucky enough to have been on the receiving end of one tenth of his ardor was going to have to pay. Rhys was hers. For now, anyway, she kept reminding herself.

  She wanted to climb inside him, swallow him whole, and nothing was going to stand in the way of that objective.

  When her back hit the cool glass of the windows, Avery prayed those windows were strong enough to hold the force of the impact. Even that thought slipped away as they fell to their knees, going at each other like two possessed beings.

  At last, the front of his shirt, laden with buttons, had been ripped to shreds. All that flammable skin of his—still golden, for all his nights spent on guard here in London and elsewhere—was there for the taking.

  Ending the kiss reluctantly as she urged him onto his back on the cool floor, she straddled his waist. Her hands roamed over each delicious inch of his chest, and the striations defining his spectacular abs. In the dim light, shadows hugged him, adored him, loved him, just as she was going to do.