Embraced (The Eternal Balance #2)(24)
I stared at him. Was he kidding? “Do you not see what this thing is?”
He blinked and nudged the angel with the toe of his boot, glancing from me to the corpse again. A single black feather fluttered free and landed at his feet. “…dead?”
I double checked, just to make sure I hadn’t lost my mind. Nope. They were still there. Two huge black feather-covered appendages protruding from either side of her back. “Wings?” I said. “An angel?”
He laughed. “Sammy, come on—”
“Jax,” I snapped. I had no clue why he couldn’t see the wings, but they were there. I bent to retrieve the feather and held it out for him to see. “Where do you think this came from?”
He blinked several times, squinting. “Sammy, there’s nothing in your hand.” Palm resting flat against my forehead, he cocked a brow and said, “You sure you’re okay?”
“Fine then.” I dropped the feather. “You can’t see it for whatever reason, but that woman was an angel.”
“An angel attacked you? Doesn’t that go against the whole good versus evil thing?”
Was attacked the right word? She hadn’t hurt me, though I was fairly sure she would have if that what it would have taken to snap me up. “Heckle said both sides will stop at nothing to keep the other from getting their hands on me. That means we have heaven, hell, your demon-infused brother, and Azi’s demonic-woman-scorned on our asses. Did anyone ever tell you that you come with a shit load of baggage?”
His lip twitched. “Tired of me already?” At the other end of the alley, something clattered. Jax cursed. “We need to go.”
Chapter Nine
Jax
Five minutes. I’d been gone five f*cking minutes. If I hadn’t returned when I did—shit. No reason to go there. She was safe. Other than being shaken, Sam was fine. And the whole angel thing? Yeah. I had no f*cking clue what to think about that. “You doing okay?”
The murky swirl of emotion surrounding her filled the car, infused with the distinct hint of gray, making it hard for me to concentrate on the road. Azi nibbled at it, taking small bites, but all it did was make the thing more unsettled. It was hungry and we were approaching the danger line. I’d need to feed it something more substantial soon or control was going to become an issue.
“I’m good,” she said quietly.
“Are you?” The hazy mist surged. It coiled around her like tiny snakes, tendrils circling chunks of her hair and neck, with stragglers entwining her arms. I’d never seen emotion so thick. “Because you don’t seem okay.”
She stared down at her hand, running her thumb along the black metal band. “I’m just a little thrown by all this.”
“Thrown?” If things weren’t headed up Shit Creek I might have smiled at the understatement.
“A few months ago everything was normal. I was a normal girl—damaged, but normal—trying to make it in the world. School, minimum wage jobs, a pile of bills… It all comes back to that damn party. The one at Huntington where I was attacked. Everything changed that night, even if I didn’t know it at the time. If I’d never gone—”
“I used to think like that. What if. What if I’d had the balls to off myself instead of leaving home? What if I’d stayed away instead of keeping tabs on you, watching from the shadows? Would Chase have even targeted you? What if I’d never left to begin with… Would things have turned out differently if I’d just come clean?” The gray smoke started to ribbon with blue. “The answer is, who gives a shit?”
She turned toward me, mouth agape.
“Seriously, Sammy. Why ask questions that are irrelevant? We can’t go back. We can only go forward. The past can’t be changed, but the future can be adapted to. And we will,” I said with ferocity. “We will adapt. It’s who we are, you and me. Fighters. Always have been. Always will be.”
She sighed and looked up. It was hard to keep my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel, knowing she was so conflicted. “Maybe it’s the cuff,” she said. “It all feels so hopeless.”
“I know it feels that way, but it’s not. We’ve been through a lot together. We’ll get through this, too.”
She didn’t answer, but the gray waves of fear, swirling and reaching for everything, seemed to diminish just a little. A moment later, her hand, so small and soft, slipped beneath mine on the console between us.
I drove until just after midnight before pulling off the highway and into the parking lot of the first motel I found. The Star Rise Inn was a dive, but it was cheap and out of the way. I should have gotten us two rooms, but letting Sam out of my sight was a bad idea. Plus, we didn’t have the cash. The Viking paid out once every two weeks, and I was new to the whole budgeting thing.
“You want the shower first?” she asked, sitting on the bed to pull off her sneakers. She faced me, and as she bent down, the neckline of her T-shirt fell forward to reveal…
Shit.
I picked my eyes, and my jaw, off the floor and cleared my throat. “Nah. You go first. I’ll check to make sure everything is sealed tight and secure.”
When I looked again, she was grinning. She shrugged and stood, turning slowly to face the wall. “Have it your way.”