Forbidden (The Preternaturals) (18 page)

Hadrian unlocked the passenger side of the old yellow Buick Roadmaster and
carefully put the fallen angel in the passenger side, locking the
seat belt into place out of habit. He was glad he’d maintained the
car over the decades.

Chapter Eight

Angeline sat wrapped in a blanket in Father Hadrian’s car. He was inside
getting them a room at a mid-priced chain hotel that had interior
hallways. It would be more secure for him than a motel where someone
could bust in and allow the sunlight to stream in and fry him.

She couldn’t stop shaking. It was like she was hungry, but the light of
Heaven wouldn’t be an option anymore. What did she eat now? She
didn’t know. Angels were forbidden from speaking to guardians, and
it seemed guardians had gotten the same message. They feared further
retribution from Heaven, so when they saw an angel, they turned and
walked the other direction.

Angeline hadn’t spoken on the drive, and Father Hadrian thankfully hadn’t
asked her to. She wasn’t sure her vocal chords would process
further sound after the screaming in the black room.

It was all too much to process. Everything she’d lost. They’d
dropped her right out of the sky, through the gathering storm clouds,
onto the steps of his church. She’d been torn between the pain of
having her wings ripped out at the roots and the pain of falling so
hard on the steps. She’d felt the deep bruises forming as she’d
prayed for someone, anyone to hear her cries.

Angeline couldn’t stop crying. She pulled down the visor and looked in the
mirror. Her face was a red, splotchy mess. She wiped away the fresh
tears and tried to stop the jitters.

Why was he helping her? After two days in the black room she knew Father
Hadrian would never help her, that he didn’t want her, that she was
unclean and wrong and bad and even a vampire could never look on her
with anything but disgust. Especially when she’d made him into one.
Could she have ever forgiven Linus?

If he’d come back as an angel and watched over her would she suddenly
have fallen for him? Of course not. She would have wanted him as far
from her as possible. She understood now. So why wasn’t Hadrian
pushing her away? Was it a trick? Was he not finished punishing her
for what she’d done?

She hadn’t believed he would open the door, and thought if he did, he
might just kick her down the stairs. But she was too weak to go
anywhere beyond where they’d dropped her.

He hadn’t just helped her, he’d given her blood to heal her. She
still felt the bone-deep pain, barely muted from the small amount of
healing that had happened. At least the bleeding had stopped. She
hadn’t believed it ever would.

Angeline jumped when two people scuffled nearby in the parking lot and bumped
against the car. A vampire drained someone without thrall out in the
open against the passenger side of the car. The blood dripped down
the outside of her window, and she almost vomited. If she never saw
blood again, it would be too soon.

The vampire let the body drop and smiled at her as if to say: “You’re
next.”

Her spine burned as the protective reflexive wing expansion tried to
happen, but of course there was nothing. There would never be
anything again. Before she could mourn the loss, the vampire pulled
back his fist to smash the window and drag her out. Angeline shrank
back, wincing from the pain of the effort, but the shattering glass
never came.

She peeked around the edges of the blanket to find Hadrian beating the
vampire into a bloody pulp. The vamp wasn’t an old one. She would
have felt more power from him if he were. Even though Angeline was no
longer a vampire herself, she still knew the energy that crackled in
the air when one was old and had a lot of power.

Hadrian was exceptionally strong for his age, courtesy of the excessive blood
she’d given him for his change as well as drinking angel blood now.
But he was still quite young. Thankfully, the vampire thug was
younger and weaker than his opponent.

Truly old vampires were unlikely to attack in the open no matter how much
chaos the world fell into. It wasn’t their style. The old ones
preferred to blend and hated when even another preternatural could
sense their power, let alone sniff out what they were.

She watched Hadrian shake the sting from his fist as his wounds healed in
front of her, an annoyed expression on his face. The vamp on the
ground wasn’t healing nearly so fast. Hadrian bent down, grabbed
the vampire’s head, and pulled it off his body. The vampire melted
more slowly than most. Yes, very young. And very stupid.

Hadrian got into the car and slammed the door. “What a fucking idiot.”

“D-did you get a room?”

He nodded. “Top floor. One of the suites. I enthralled the
receptionist and learned the suites have a second room without
windows. It’s safer for me that way.”

Angeline would never pull the curtains back on him, but she understood the
self-protective paranoia. A vampire was so vulnerable during the day,
so prone to being killed—suspended in a complete death sleep and
unable to defend himself. The instinct was to hide in the darkest,
most private hole one could find until night came. She was still
surprised Hadrian would risk having her in his space during such a
time—not that she had much ability to hurt anything right now. Even
staking or decapitating a sleeping vampire would be too much exertion
in her state.

And she would never try to hurt him. Especially not after tonight.

Hadrian parked in the garage and carried her up the back stairs wrapped in
the blankets. When they reached the room, he laid her on the bed in
the master bedroom. He’d sleep in the spare room, likely meant for
children or personal assistants.

There was a balcony off the main living area with a sliding glass door.
Angeline thought it was good they were so far up with doors like
that. A vampire could never be too careful, especially now that the
secret was out.

She bolted off the bed and ran for the sliding door.

“Angeline? What is it?”

“I feel like I’m suffocating… I need… I need to be outside. Now!”
She struggled with the deadbolt and half fell out onto the balcony
when she got the door open. She gripped the railing, not caring about
her naked state.

The jitters were worse. She felt lightheaded. The vertigo swamped her,
and she might have pitched over the railing to fall ten stories, if
it weren’t for Hadrian pulling her back to safety.

“What’s wrong?” Was that fear in his voice? For her?

“I-I don’t know what’s happening.” She shook her head. “I don’t
know.” Was it something with his blood? She didn’t know the
effects of drinking vampire blood on her kind. It wasn’t the kind
of question that came up often. She’d been too desperate for
anything to make the pain go away and the bleeding stop that she
hadn’t had the presence of mind to think about it.

Angeline looked up at the sky as a large cloud moved away, revealing a bright
Moon. She turned toward it on instinct, soaking in the moonlight.

Of course. It was so obvious.

As an angel it had been sunlight and the huge balls of light they’d
raised in prayer circle that had fed and sustained her. Now that
she’d fallen, it was the light from the Moon. A weaker light in a
darker world. She laughed with relief as she started to feel better,
but then she began to sob again.

Hadrian’s hand was warm on her back, and for the first time since landing on
the church steps, she was aware of her nudity and wanted to cover it
up.

“Angeline?”

“My wings. This is when they would come out. Either to protect or to feed
and now… they’re never coming back. They’re just gone.” She’d
loved her wings. She’d loved the power in them, the grace, the way
she could soar through the sky—assuming no one was nearby to see or
she flew above the clouds out of sight. She’d loved the built-in
protection and the ability to help others. She’d loved the way
they’d looked, framing her body.

“They’ll grow back,” he said.

“N-no they won’t. They’re gone. They ripped them out.” She shuddered
as the image of those horrible metal claws descending from the
ceiling in the black room bloomed fresh in her mind as if it had just
happened.

“Look at me.”

She looked up.

“Yes. They will. Guardians have wings. They have protective power, just not
the unstoppable power of a full angel. You’re part angel and part
demon. You’ll be okay now. Everything will be okay.”

They were the same again. Darkness and light, wrapped and blended
together. Contrasting natures warring within the same being. But she
didn’t say it. She’d never say it again because it would only
call back that terrible night when she’d taken Hadrian’s choices
away.

She never would have been happy with mystical power over him. It felt
wrong and unnatural, like she had been a child wearing a costume. But
she hadn’t known another way they could be together, and she’d
been too afraid to trust her instincts about him, too afraid to trust
he would ever come to her on his own. She’d handled it wrong, and
now she could never fix it.

His hand rubbed down her spine. “You’re healing more from the
moonlight. I’m sure the wings will come out when you’re fully
healed.”

Angeline wanted to believe him. Even if the wings weren’t quite the same,
and even if they weren’t quite as strong, she wanted to believe
they would come back again, that they hadn’t taken everything from
her.

City lights blinked in the distance, but behind the hotel, it was
peaceful. “I-I need something to wear,” she said suddenly.

Hadrian stepped out of her way so she could go back inside. He followed her
and rolled back his sleeve. “Drink. It will help your back.”

Angeline wrapped the blanket around her and followed Father Hadrian to the
couch. This time when he cradled her and offered her his wrist, it felt intimate. It wasn’t a desperate attempt to survive or get
help. It felt like warmth and safety and caring.

He stroked her hair as she drank, and she wasn’t sure if he realized
he was doing it. She felt the benefits of the blood this time as her
body healed, and the pieces seemed to come back together into one
whole. For the first time since she’d stepped into the black room,
she felt as if she might be able to be okay, that everything in the
world wasn’t terrible and unfixable.

Instead of feeling ostracized not being in Heaven, she felt relief. She felt
the shackles of mindless drone obedience fall off of her inside the
circle of Hadrian’s arms. She tried to shake those thoughts from
her head. Of course Father Hadrian couldn’t read them. Unlike in
Heaven, she had mental privacy here, but she still shouldn’t think
it. Whatever kindness he showed her was happening for the same reason
he absolved others.

It was something deep inside the core of who he was. The need to fix and
help. Maybe he thought she’d suffered enough, that her penance was
complete now, but it wasn’t as if he would wake up tomorrow night
and declare his unending love and that they should travel eternity
hand in hand. She wasn’t that foolish. She wasn’t a child.

“I still expect to feed from you,” he said.

Her heart picked up its rhythm at that, and though she knew he couldn’t
read her thoughts, he could surely read the increased excitement of
her heart. Though, let him think it was fear. It might be better all
around if he thought that.

She pulled away from his wrist. “W-why? I-I mean it’s not angel blood
anymore. It won’t be the same for you. You won’t like it as
much.”

“It’s still the best blood I’ll ever have on offer. Guardian blood is one
step below angel blood. How many of my kind do you think are drinking
angel blood?”

“No angel that stayed an angel for long,” she said, still bitter about
it, though not at Hadrian. It was hardly his fault the angels were so
weird about vampires.

“Did you get enough?”

“I think so.”

She closed her eyes as he pulled back the blanket to examine her back.
His hands skimmed over her skin, checking the place where her wings
had been taken.

“No scarring, even. I’ve seen a few guardians with scars. I doubt they
had vampire blood to prevent it.”

Angeline pulled the blanket back around her. “Thank you. You didn’t have
to…”

He put a finger to her lips. “I’m responsible for you. You put
yourself in my hands.” Before she could dissect his words or obsess about them, his gaze went to her throat. “My turn.”

There was something in the way he said it that both excited and terrified
her. Unlike their other two nights together, she didn’t have the
excuse of prayer circle—an easy escape hatch to avoid whatever it
was they were dancing around. She’d felt content to dance around it
forever. To confront it could mean possible rejection. She wanted to
exist in this in-between place where it wasn’t everything she’d
ever wanted, but it was something. And she didn’t want to think
about how utterly pathetic that probably was.

“I…Father Hadrian… what is it that you want with me?”

“You may just call me Hadrian if you wish. And I told you, I want your
blood. Daily. It will always be a thousand times better than any
human. I’m not going back now.”

Angeline was sure that it wouldn’t be that difficult to protect herself from
a single vampire, once her new wings came in. She didn’t know how
the guardian world worked, such talk had been forbidden. And
guardians were always so discreet about everything—no doubt because
they knew about the screens in Heaven. But Angeline was sure
guardians worked for vampires voluntarily, and not because they
couldn’t protect themselves from them.

She wasn’t sure if this was a game he was playing, offering forgiveness
that would never materialize, or if he even
could
forgive her.
She wasn’t sure it mattered one way or the other, as long as he
didn’t hate her. And the way he looked at her right now definitely
wasn’t hate. And it wasn’t pure lust—blood lust or
otherwise—either. There was a tenderness that she was sure she
didn’t deserve, but would try not to question or push away.