Fallen Angel of Mine (51 page)

She actually seemed to consider it,
pursing her cute little mouth and tilting her head like a puppy,
blonde ponytail hanging at an angle. A sigh broke through her lips.
"It would be cool to sic a demon spawn on those meanies, but I
really can't risk the end of the world just so you can beat up a
few idiots."

I tried a different tact. "Why do you
think I'll cause the end of the world?"

"Because Grandpa told me."

Biting back a sigh, I asked, "What
exactly did he tell you?"

"You're gonna unite the nasties and
kill off all the good guys like Grandma and Grandpa. I mean, anyone
who's friends with vampires and trannies is messed up."

My forehead pinched. "Trannies?" I had
no idea how cross-dressers entered the mix.

"Yeah, the ones who transform into cats
and wolves." She made a vague shape with her fingers.

I laughed. "Ivy, it's not what you are
that makes you good or bad, it's what you do."

She opened and closed her fingers and
thumb like a mouth. "Blah, blah, blah."

Her mind was sewn tight against my
arguments, glued shut with the bigoted lies the Conroys had told
her. I wondered if Mom had helped taint my little sister's mind
with their propaganda or if she might possibly be trying to undo
it.

"You've already corrupted the
Templars," Ivy said, interrupting my thoughts. "A whole
organization dedicated to the Brilliance and you somehow come along
and corrupt it with the Murk."

"Brilliance? Murk?"

"Yeah. Light and Dark.
Whatevs."

"First of all, I didn't corrupt anyone.
The Divinity did. And once they found out, you might say the
Templars saw the light." I grinned at my clever
comeback.

"Ha, ha." Ivy glanced to her right,
seeming to see something I didn't.

Obviously, I wasn't going to change my
sister's mind about anything, at least not today. But my goal all
this time had been to save her from the Conroys. I scanned the area
she was looking at and saw no sign of them or my mom. Unless they
were invisible, Ivy was here alone. She was tall but thin and
willowy. She couldn't possibly match me physically. As an added
bonus, nearly a hundred Templars stood a scant fifty yards away. I
supposed I could grab Ivy and stow her on the Templar compound.
Maybe Elyssa and I could figure out how to undo the mind-twisting
my dear grandparents had wreaked on her.

"If you think I've really corrupted the
Templars, why don't you ask them?" I said, leaning against the
Conroy headstone and inching forward with a casual
stretch.

"I'm not stupid. They betrayed their
sweet angel and she'll make them pay for it, believe
me."

A cold spike pierced my spleen.
"Angel?" She already knew?

She smirked. "Of course.
Daelissa."

I almost staggered back a foot, losing
the few inches I'd closed between the two of us. "Do you realize
how dangerous that woman is? She's the real evil behind everything.
Did you know she let a very dangerous demon spawn named Vadaemos
loose and he killed over a dozen Templars two days ago?" I pounded
the bottom of my fist against the tombstone. The blow splintered
the marble, sending a crack diagonally up to the edge. "Daelissa
may claim to be an angel, but she's a demon."

Ivy shrugged, her eyes exploring the
crack I'd opened in the tombstone. "I don't know anything about
this Vadaemos man, but when the Templars turned their backs on
Daelissa, they got what they deserved."

I gritted my teeth to keep back an
angry response. Ivy wasn't in her right mind. Good god, if Daelissa
had her claws into her, no wonder she was so messed up. Had
Daelissa also done something to Mom? She must have. It totally
explained her behavior the last time I'd seen her, back in the
parking lot across the school. Since then, I'd been transported to
Colombia by a malfunctioning arch, fought vampiric drug lords, and
finally cornered Vadaemos in El Dorado, a city these so-called
angels like Daelissa had ruled like gods.

Nightliss was also one of them. Except
she seemed to be good, or at least she'd helped me so far. If it
hadn't been for her, Vadaemos would have killed me. He and I had
manifested into our demon forms and fought, but it hadn't been a
contest. His strength and cunning dwarfed my own and only
intervention from the dark angel had saved me.

"You look scared," Ivy said. "You
should be."

I snapped out of my recollections.
Enough was enough. Maybe Nightliss could figure out what to do with
my errant little sister. Maybe she could clear her mind of
Daelissa's touch just like she'd done for Elyssa. I blurred toward
Ivy. Wrapped my arms around—thin air. Ivy's nose was practically
touching mine. Except it wasn't. It couldn't. Her body flickered
where my hands touched it. A breeze kicked up fallen leaves,
sending its cold fingers through my hair. Ivy's hair didn't so much
as move.

"I knew you'd try to kidnap me or do
something bad," she said, clicking her tongue at me.

"You're a holograph?"

"A projection. Mom would freak if she
knew I was talking to you."

"How did you do the note?" Maybe she
was here somewhere hiding and using this projection trick to throw
me off.

"Mr. Bigglesworth put it there for
me."

"Who?"

"You'll meet him soon, big brother.
Don't worry. I think I figured out how to get rid of you." She
smiled. Waved. Vanished.

I looked at the note from the
gravestone. The words had changed and the original message was
gone.

I wish you weren't evil. :(
Goodbye.

###

MEET THE AUTHOR

John Corwin has been making stuff up
all his life. As a child he would tell his sisters he was an alien
clone of himself and would eat tree bark to prove it.

In middle school, John started writing
for realz. He wrote short stories about Fargo McGronsky, a young
boy with anger management issues whose dog, Noodles, had been hit
by a car. The violent stories were met with loud acclaim from
classmates and a great gnashing of teeth by his English
teacher.

Years later, after college and
successful stints as a plastic food wrap repairman and a toe model
for GQ, John once again decided to put his overactive imagination
to paper for the world to share and became an author.

Connect with John Corwin
online:

Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/johnhcorwinauthor

Blog
http://johncorwin.blogspot.com/

Twitter:
http://twitter.com/#!/John_Corwin

Books by John Corwin:

Sweet Blood of Mine

Dark Light of Mine

Fallen Angel of Mine

No Darker Fate

The Next Thing I Knew

Outsourced

Seventh

House of Slide Book
2

Read an excerpt from
Juliann Whicker's HYBRID, Book 2 of the House of Slide series, the
sequel to HOTBLOOD.

Available now!

Happily Ever
After

The snow came down and down and down.
It covered the sidewalks and streets dulling the sounds of cars
crawling by, leaving me feeling insulated and far away from
everything else, even myself.

"Dariana, aren’t you coming down for
dinner?" my mother asked from the doorway of my bedroom. Startled,
I looked up at her. She had new lines around her eyes, wrinkles
from worry about me or my dad, but she was still strikingly
beautiful with her sheet of glossy black hair and dark blue eyes. I
nodded and slid off the window-seat. I tried not to notice the
painting as I left the room. It was painfully alive and beautiful,
a swirling miasma of life and color that reached out to me as I
passed.

Downstairs in the white gourmet kitchen
Satan scowled while he filled my plate with something cheesy and
gooey. He cooked like that while my mother worried about calories.
I found neither cooking styles appetizing anymore. I gave Satan an
appreciative smile and ate, but it was something I forced myself to
do, mostly to get them to stop looking at me and feeling concern
for me that I couldn’t help picking up. It made my skin prickle to
feel the worry as my mother urged some salad on me. I closed my
eyes and leaned back in my chair. They were overreacting. They
didn’t know what to do now that I had my soul. I couldn’t blame
them since I didn’t have the slightest clue either.

The first few weeks after it happened,
after I regained my soul and everyone had come back from fighting
Bliss it had been really bad, really hard. My dad was here, staying
until Christmas was his excuse, but it was really to help me stop
leaning everyone unintentionally. I’d been so out of it, so
incapable of knowing what I felt, I’d cried or laughed
hysterically, and made everyone around me feel the same way I felt,
which left Satan really irritated with me. He seemed disappointed
that I had my soul back. He wanted someone who could destroy a room
full of Hotbloods and Wilds. Now I couldn’t even kill a small
animal. My dad had tried to take me hunting, tried to help me get
back to full strength but the smell of blood made me sick. My dad
thought it may have been from all the death I took at the exhibit.
I don’t know. All I knew was that I had to deal with an entirely
new set of issues with my new soul and it wasn’t any easier. It was
actually harder because I wasn’t as direct and simple as I’d been
before. Before when I was upset it was easy to hunt and feel
better. Now I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel better again. It was fine
though. I was fine, however much my mother stared at me like I was
about to fade away before her eyes.

"I’m fine," I said to Satan while he
leaned back and lit up his cigar.

"Satan, are those filthy cigars really
necessary?" my mother asked, but her heart wasn’t in it. The smoke
drifted out the window and I couldn’t smell it. Satan didn’t bother
to respond to my mother.

After a few more long drawn out
silences I wandered up to my room to do homework. I was still in
art classes, but I slightly resented it since it was hard to
disappear into numbness when I was dealing with Mr. Landon and his
insane expectations for the daughter of Alex Woods. I sighed as I
sat down at the desk in my room and looked at the picture I was
trying to draw. It was horrible. I had expectations of myself as
well. It wasn’t bad enough that my dad was a fantastic artist, but
that my… I shook my head and shook off the thoughts of Lewis. The
name came into my head unbidden and with it a pain that pierced the
numbness. I put my head down on the desk and felt the beginnings of
a headache, the throbbing behind my ears the prequel to the pain
I’d feel struggling to keep my feelings about him to myself. It was
better not to think about him, about the look in his eyes when I’d
left him on the roof of the school, the way his words had pierced
me when he’d told me that he… no. I closed my eyes tightly and
thought about Snowy, about Osmond and Valerie, and forced myself to
wonder if Snowy and Smoke were ever going to go on a date, or if
Ash was going to feel better any time soon. He was fading away. My
dad told me that Cools sometimes didn’t feel tied enough to this
world and their souls eventually abandoned their bodies to become
part of whatever. I wasn’t like that. I was the opposite of not
tied to this world, he’d told me, I was too tied to it, to someone
in it, tied in a way that made living without him something of a
pain, lots of pain. When my dad had left my mother she’d gone
ballistic, redoing the kitchen over and over again, putting down
tile and ripping it up; our house had been in a state of perpetual
chaos for a year or so until she’d suddenly stopped. My parents
were soul mates. Old Peter had thought that Lewis and I were soul
mates, but he was gone now. I’d killed him. I got up from the desk
then wrapped a blanket around me before collapsing on the window
seat. I leaned my head against the glass, feeling the cold against
my skin, the cold that spread through me, helping me to
forget.