A Matter of Time (The Angel Sight Series) (15 page)

“It’s okay,” Kade said, placing his hand between us on the bed, leaning in an inch.

“No,” I corrected him. “I’m just like the rest of them down there. When I blasted Lucien, all I could think about was vengeance, anger … hate.”

“When you used it against the people in the woods, you said you were scared and it just happened. You used it without those negative emotions. They were probably just stunned. I’m sure they’re fine. Though they don’t deserve to be.”

I shook my head. “That’s not helping. I’m afraid. Afraid I don’t know what’s right anymore. Or who I am. I’m afraid of becoming someone I don’t understand.”

Kade slid his hand closer to mine.

I pulled away. “I’m afraid of hurting you. And the angels,” I added hurriedly, and then raced to change the subject. “Where—where did you go after you left me with Cam?”

“Canada, Amsterdam, France, Ireland, New York, New Orleans. I lured the Fallen away. Let them track me to public places, then disappeared for a day or two, so I could pop up somewhere else.”

I nodded, which I wasn’t sure if he noticed. Information overload had begun a chokehold around my brain and I didn’t know how much more I could take.

“You could use some rest. Why don’t I run you a bath? I can make up the bed while you’re in there.” He left the bare mattress and turned on the tub faucet before he was done talking.

I followed him in after I finished every bite of fast food in the greasy bag, not really enjoying being in the dark by myself any longer. Thanks to the small frosted window above the shower, the bathroom had a square of natural light. Kade flicked on the light switch when I walked in. I took one look at the almost-full tub and remembered.

“I don’t …
like
baths.”

He looked at me, concealing a strange expression.

“I didn’t remember until just now. But I really, really don’t like them.”

“Want a shower instead?”

I nodded again. He pulled the plug. Together we watched the water in the bathtub drain.

The backs of our hands touched as he returned to his spot. My heart quickened, racing faster than it had while I was running from the armed militia in the woods.

“You’re handling this all really well,” Kade said, leaving the bathroom before I could attempt to turn my hand toward his.

I was left standing in an empty bathroom, with an empty tub, an empty hand, and an empty heart.

I pushed the door closed with my foot, turned the shower knobs all the way up, kicked off my shoes, and stepped into the hot water with my clothes on. They were filthy, and all I had. I started scrubbing the shoulders of my shirt with soap, then moved down to my arms. Water stung my eyes. The soap slipped from between my fingers.

I knelt down, fingers blindly searching, and remembered pressing my hands against the walls of the shower stall in Hell. I traced my fingers over where the marks should have been. The gouges I’d made in the concrete shower, counting the days that Kade was gone. How much I missed him then, needed him.

I threw the shower curtain back and stepped out of the tub. I did the same with the bathroom door. Kade looked up from his seat on the end of the freshly made bed. He watched as my soaked clothes dripped on the brown speckled carpet.

“I counted the days you were gone,” I said, eyes locked on him. Wings or not, even before Hell, Kade was the man I never knew I wanted, the one I needed.

He tilted his head, one side of his mouth almost quirking up. The tension in his shoulders finally melted away.

In the almost dark motel room, by only the dim light of the bathroom, I was finally seeing … him.

“I carved lines in the shower.” I held onto the dresser for support. “One for every day you were gone.”

Kade stood. Seconds disappeared. With two quick steps he was in front of me. Adrenaline pulsed through my fingertips. Kade sighed and wrapped me in his arms. I closed my eyes and leaned into him, finally allowing myself feel safe.

He smelled like oak.

“I’ve missed this,” I said under my breath.

He released me too soon. His arm brushed mine as he walked around me, returning to drape a towel over my shoulders. His hands remained on my arms, over the towel, but he came no closer. “You were the only thing keeping me alive.”

“Alive? I was the reason you were down there to begin with.”

“I made that choice, me. It wasn’t your fault.”

“I love you.”

My face burned with heat the instant I heard the words leave my mouth. I pulled back to look at him.

He shook his head. “You’re confused, Ray. You don’t mean that—you can’t. After everything that’s happened—”

“Kade, shut up.”

I pressed up on my tiptoes and kissed him. His lips were almost as chapped as mine. His beard scratched my skin. And his lips didn’t respond.

I lowered myself down, barely breaking the kiss, when his hands came up on either side of my face. A flutter awakened within me. He pressed his lips to mine, moving them eagerly. I let the towel drop, pooling at our feet, and touched a hand to his back where his wings should have been. Gone. They were gone. But he was still here, and not just here, with me, entangled in me. His tongue parted my lips. I responded by pressing against him, my wet clothes dripping between us. After so many years in Hell, separate, now was our chance to be together. He broke our kiss but didn’t push me away. Instead, he stroked the hair out of my face and tilted my chin up.

I grabbed the front of his shirt, now wet from my clothes. I towed him toward me until the backs of my calves reached the end of the mattress. With another kiss, I tipped us back.

Kade landed on top of me, his arms bracing his weight on either side of me. I wrestled his damp shirt over his head and scooted back toward the center of the bed. He followed, crawling forward, heat in his chocolate eyes. I hooked a leg over his hip, pulling him closer. His desire was present, pressed against me as he kissed my neck.

My hands tangled in his hair, mussing it more than before. While his lips dipped lower on my neck, he splayed a hand across my stomach, the way he’d done a thousand times before, down in Hell. I swallowed a gasp. His other hand slipped behind my back. He struggled to get it between my wet shirt and skin.

He stopped abruptly, dropping his head onto my shoulder.

“What’s wrong?” I asked all breath and no voice.

He shook his head, forehead still pressed to my shoulder. He said something, but the words got lost, muffled in my shirt.

“One more time?” I asked.

“We have to stop.”

“Actually, this is one time where we don’t.”

“Yes.” He looked up at me. His eyes were almost entirely black. “We do.”

He pushed off me and paced the room. The front of his clothes was soaked.

I was halfway between wanting to throttle him for not touching me and needing to crack up at how ridiculous we must have looked.

“I need a minute,” Kade said, disappearing into the bathroom.

I collapsed back onto the bed and ran my hands over my face, muffling my scream. Time. The one thing we simultaneously had and didn’t have. We couldn’t hide away forever. But for now, I had to give him what he needed. He would have done the same for me without question.

In desperate need of a distraction, I rolled over and saw something I hadn’t in my equivalent of years. A television. Squealing, I grabbed the remote on the bedside table, flopped onto my stomach at the bottom of the bed, and switched it on.

The TV buzzed to life. The gentle hum that came from an older TV, right before the picture came on, that was the sound of my childhood.

More of my memories were filling back in by the minute, though I wasn’t as aware of them as I had been the horrific ones. They were merely liquid filling in the cracks.

A news reporter on channel eleven said, “Welcome back. Today is day thirty-five of grounded U.S. airways. No incoming or outgoing flights have been permitted since the downing of flight eight-thirty-seven occurred on May eighteenth.”

What the hell?

The live feed switched to a pre-recorded video. The clip came from a shaky camera, pixilated and with bad frame-by-frame, like it had been filmed with an older cell phone. At first all it showed was sky, and then something zipped across the screen. The camera panned over to capture a Fallen, his black wings flapping. Flying. Out in the open.

I gasped.

To normal humans it would look as if a regular man was flying through the air, Superman without the cape. His wings would be completely invisible. Though I wasn’t sure that would make anyone watching the video any less freaked out.

The Fallen collided with a passenger plane that had just taken off, ripping through the plane’s wing. The airplane tipped to the side and careened toward the runway in flames. The camera panned back to the Fallen, flapping in midair. He zeroed in on the camera and flew straight for it. The video switched to black.

The news cut to a man in a suit behind a tall wooden podium, a sea of reporters and microphones in front of him. I recognized the man right away.

Azriel.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Rayna

“What?” I hissed at the sight of Azriel on TV.

Azriel leaned toward the rows of microphones and said, “This is what happens when our demands aren’t met.” His face remained stern, stoic, unlike when he had tortured me. That sick smile was gone now. “We have dozens of men in every major airport around the country. Watching. The skies are ours now.”

I glanced away from the TV, not sure if I could take whatever might come next.

“Kade?” I padded to the bathroom and opened the door.

He was stepping out of the shower, water dripping down his completely naked body. He reached for a towel, but not in the hurried way I would have. He took his time, fully black eyes on mine.

“Get out,” he said, voice low, purposely controlled.

I turned away, pulse pounding. The loose towel rack clanged against the wall as he pulled a towel free. Managing his hunger after the feeding frenzy Lucien made me watch couldn’t have been easy. No doubt Kade was still coping with his demons.

With my wits returning to me slowly, it took me a second to remember why I’d busted in on his shower. “What the hell is going on out there? There are Fallen smashing planes? Showing themselves?”

Kade brushed by me in the doorway, the drops of water on his arm transferring to mine as he passed. He tucked the loose end of his towel in, the thin white terrycloth riding low on his hips. He glanced at the TV, still on, and then at me.

The black faded from his eyes. “Shit.”

“This should have been the first thing you told me when I called you from that payphone.”

“I’ve been trying to keep you safe, which means out of this. It’s part of why I left you with Cam.” He punched the button on the front of the TV, switching it off. “They’re hunting you. These tactics, this is what they’ve been doing to try and flush you out. It started not long after we escaped Hell.”

“How long were you planning on keeping this from me?”

“I was going to tell you when you were better. When you were capable of processing it.”

“I can
process
this just fine.” I crossed my arms, searching for a way to prove Kade wrong. “What are the angels doing about it?”

He stood, tilting his head ever so slightly, judging me, measuring how I was really taking in the new information.

“Don’t do this to me,” I warned.

Kade sighed. I remembered those sighs. This one was the defeated kind. The one he’d shared once with me, that night up on our roof. During one of our training sessions. When we got close. That happened before I knew him completely, before I trusted him, before I discovered my feelings for Cam could be surpassed.

Kade picked up the remote from the end table and switched the TV back on.

The screen was split into two pictures. On the left the anchorwoman behind the desk straightened her papers. On the right an older man sat in a chair, speaking.

“—being pushed out. The economy is suffering. The NASDAQ is still plummeting at a rapid rate. In just over a month, stocks have hit a record low. In fact, they are lower today than they have ever been in the history of the stock market, which includes the Great Depression, and Nine Eleven. As a nation, what are we expected to do?”

The anchorwoman looked up from her papers and said, “Thank you, congressman.” The man on the left thanked her for having him. “Joining our conversation now is Senator Jennifer Greenback from Illinois. Ms. Greenback.”

The woman now on the right side of the screen smiled her thanks.

“Senator, can you tell us—”

“Before we get started, Diane,” the senator interrupted, “I would like to bring up a point no one, as far as I know, has voiced yet.”

“Of course,” the anchorwoman covered, but her eyes were all panic. Obviously this network didn’t work off-book very often. “Go right ahead.”

“My concern is, what has happened to the president’s stance—the country’s stance—on not negotiating with terrorists? Granted, flight eight thirty-seven was a national tragedy, but for the leader of our nation to simply roll over and give these radicals what they want, this is something I don’t understand, Diane.”

The anchorwoman floundered for a moment before the senator spoke again.

“Another concern, can we go back to speculating why the terrorist’s only demand is the delivery of this teenage girl. What does Rayna Evans, a missing fugitive, have to do with any of this?”

A picture of me replaced the split screen between the two women, my latest school picture in which my small smile was sad, leaving my eyes dull. A second picture came up. It was one taken of me the last time I was admitted at the SS Crazy. My hair was wild, my skin tinged a sickly green. I looked like an inmate. I swallowed around a newly formed lump in my throat. The entire country, probably the entire world, knew who I was. No wonder the militia boy with the unsteady hand wanted me dead.

The camera cut away from my pictures and centered solely on the senator as she went on, “The president’s reports say ‘once we find her, we will know more.’ That isn’t good enough for the millions of people in danger in this country. When will he start protecting us? Why hasn’t every branch of the military been called in to settle this?”