Angel Eclipsed (The Louisiangel Series Book 2)
Read Angel Eclipsed (The Louisiangel Series Book 2) Online
Authors: C. L. Coffey
Copyright © 2015 C. L. Coffey
All rights reserved.
ISBN:
1514622459
ISBN-13: 978-1514622452
Cover design by Amalia Chitulescu
Background Image by Ahmad Turki
Edited by Tina E. Williams and Patrick Gilhooley
Proofread by Naomi Jones
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, distributed, stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval systems, in any forms or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, without express permission of the author, unless for the purpose of a review which may quote brief passages for a review purpose.
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locations are used fictitiously. Other characters, names, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblances to actual events, locations, or persons – living or dead – is entirely coincidental.
The Louisiangel Series
Angel in Training
Angel Eclipsed
Contents
It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.
~ Buddha~
Trigger Warning
October 20
th
New Orleans
63,447.
That was how many minutes had passed since I had killed someone. Six weeks… 44 days… However you looked at it, I knew how long it had been. Apart from the first eight hundred minutes or so where I had been unconscious, I had been aware of every single one of the sixty-three thousand, four hundred and forty-seven minutes.
Painfully
aware.
When I first arrived in the convent, I couldn’t understand why there wasn’t a single clock in the building. The angels didn’t even wear watches. After I had earned my wings, the reason for this had become apparent. I knew what time it was. Not from a rough guess driven from the height of the sun or the moon. I just knew. It was how I knew exactly how long it had been since I had killed an innocent person.
When Michael had told me that I would reach a point where both sleep and sustenance were more of a choice than a necessity, I hadn’t believed him. In my defense, I had just found out that he was an archangel, and I needed to earn my wings to become an angel myself after being murdered. I had stumbled down a dark alley while celebrating my birthday with friends and was stabbed to death. I didn’t believe in Heaven and Hell, or angels and fallen angels for that matter, and yet I was supposed to believe I was dead, despite the fact I was still walking and talking? On top of that, I was to become an angel
called
Angel? You try telling me you wouldn’t be skeptical.
Had you asked me to describe an angel to you, my answer would have been ‘beautiful men with large white wings, lying around on clouds, playing harps’. Only the first part of that was right. Every single angel I had encountered was beautiful: their hair was always immaculate, they all had bodies that looked like they spent a considerable amount of time in a gym, and a complexion so clear, you’d think they’d been Photoshopped – in real life. Michael looked like he had been hand sculpted because there was no way anyone could be that handsome. Even the other angels in the convent were beautiful – except for me. I’d been stuck with my own body: too tall to be considered cute, too curvy to be considered model-like, and with my exceptionally ordinary green eyes, I certainly wasn’t a goddess.
My body was now, as Michael called it, my vessel. It was frozen in time – never to grow old or gain weight. Had I known that was going to happen, I certainly would have made the effort to lose those last few pounds and tone up. As it was, that was the least of my worries when it came to my appearance. The artificial cherry red hair that I thought would be a great idea for one night out, which still had yet to fade despite the amount of shampoo it had seen, was now a permanent replacement to the blonde it had once been.
It wasn’t just my appearance that should have made me one of the least likely candidates to become an angel. There was also the fact I’m probably the least likely person you could pick to
be
an angel. Angelina Connors PD (pre-death) was a college student, majoring in marketing, whose biggest ambition was to graduate. I was also a girl who liked to go out with my friends and make the most of the fake ID I had.
Mardi Gras had fallen on my twentieth birthday, just over eight months ago. My friends had gone out dressed as angels, and I had dyed my hair bright red, found a red dress (that my aunt would never have let me out of the house wearing if she had seen me in it), and played the part of a devil. I’d had too much to drink and lost my friends. My killer had taken advantage of that and stabbed me in my abdomen. I’d died in an alley. I suppose there are worse ways to go, but all alone in a damp alley, close to an overflowing dumpster was not even close to what I expected.
After I died, I had been convinced it was the drinking that had gotten me killed – before then it never occurred to me that something like this could happen to me. If I could go back and change it, I would have kept a better eye on how much I had consumed, and certainly made sure to stick with my friends. I would still have gone out though. The alcohol wasn’t what killed me, although I’ve since learned that it probably helped make my killer’s job easier: I was going to die that night anyway, regardless of how many hurricane slushies I’d had. I was just another piece in a puzzle: a puzzle to raise Lucifer.
Michael has told me that was not possible. He should know. He had, after all, killed Lucifer millennia ago. It made what I had done even worse, because I had dragged Joshua into all of this.
Joshua Walsh was my charge. He was a recently graduated cop in the New Orleans Police Department, on a special program to fast-track his way to becoming a homicide detective. He was the one person I was responsible for protecting. Ironically, had I not been his guardian angel, he probably would have stayed safe. Thinking of Joshua sent another jolt of pain shooting through my body and I rolled onto my side, wrapping my arms around a pillow and curling up into a fetal position. As far as I could tell, the pain was all in my head. Angels were supposed to be able to heal quickly – before I had awoken in the hospital, I had been stabbed in the leg with a sword. When I had awoken a day or so later, it was an angry red line. By the time I had been discharged, it was nothing more than a silver scar. This pain constantly reappeared, and usually when I wasn’t prepared for it, but I didn’t deserve anything less for what I’d done.
When Hurricane Tabitha, a storm strengthened by the Fallen, had made landfall, I had been in position to the west of the city. I was part of a circle of angels trying to protect New Orleans. Joshua had been kidnapped and I had abandoned my post to save him. Michael has assured me I did the right thing – that protecting my charge was the single most important thing that I could do, the
only
thing I had to do – but breaking the protective circle had left it weakened. The unnatural hurricane that had hit New Orleans should have passed over with little more than minor storm damage. Instead, there were dozens of buildings that had been destroyed, twenty-three people dead, and hundreds more lives ruined. I couldn’t help but feel guilty about that too.
Damaged buildings were only a part of the guilt I was feeling. A larger chunk was directed towards Joshua himself. He had been targeted because of me. My predecessor, Lilah, had earned her wings and become an archangel. Then, she’d fallen. Or at least, according to Michael she’d fallen. She was adamant she hadn’t. Leaving Michael’s House had been her choice.
Agony flashed through me, and I squeezed my body as tightly around the pillow as I could. That was the main source of my guilt: Lilah. Or rather, Paige Kenworthy. Lilah had had this crazy idea that Lucifer wasn’t dead – only trapped. She had been convinced that if an angel were to kill another angel as well as a human, then the act would release Lucifer. Lilah had possessed a human girl, Paige, and attacked Joshua. So I had attacked her. Only I didn’t know she had possessed someone until it was too late. I had saved Joshua, but at the end of the day I had killed an innocent girl in doing so.
The pain shot through me again, starting in my chest then shooting out like lightning flashes, only instead of disappearing, they lingered. Every time I allowed myself to be distracted for even a moment, as soon as I remembered what I had done, it felt like someone was injecting ice into every single cell in my body. Carefully, I concentrated on my breathing. Inhale and exhale. Inhale and exhale.
“She killed an innocent.” Conversation from outside of my door broke through the silence and interrupted my thoughts. “She needs time to come to terms with this.” The voice belonged to Cupid. Cupid was another archangel and Michael’s second in command. He was not, contrary to popular belief, a Roman god; just an archangel who had gone out of his way to set one of the Caesars up on a date.
“She’s been in there for weeks,” a second, more melodic voice, agreed. This one belonged to Michael.
“Far too long,” Veronica, Cupid’s best friend, and one of the cherubim who lived in the House, agreed.
I sighed and turned over so my back was to the door. This wasn’t the first time they’d had a conversation like this. It would last a few minutes as they argued between them, over whether or not they should enter my room, and then they would walk away. Every once in a while, Cupid or Veronica would come in and try to tell me everything was going to be alright, but how could it be? They hadn’t killed anyone. How could they possibly begin to know what I was feeling and how it could ever be all right again?
The sharp stabbing sensation returned, just as strong as it always was. With all my attention on trying to focus on my breathing, I didn’t even hear the door open. “Angel?” he called, tentatively.
I could hear Michael, vaguely registering the mattress dip as he perched on the bed beside me. I ignored him, pulling the blankets closer to me. It takes some time, but that pain eventually becomes a more manageable dull throb in a small area just below my heart. Allowing myself to become distracted by Michael, just focusing on anything else, rather than focusing on trying to manage the pain wasn’t going to let that happen.
“
Angel
?” he repeated, this time using the psychic connection I had with him. Aside from knowing the time, being an angel came with a few other gifts and abilities, one of which was a psychic connection with the archangel of the House you belonged to. Thankfully, it was just the ability to communicate telepathically with Michael and he didn’t have the ability to read my mind. No one needed to see what was constantly being replayed in there.
I chose to ignore him, trying to breathe through the added discomfort his presence was causing to flare up: inhale and exhale. He had high expectations of me and I had yet to deliver.
“Angel,” he tried once more, returning to the verbal method. He got up, the mattress once again shifting, and for a brief moment, I thought he was going to leave. Instead, he jerked the covers away from me.
My eyes flew open, then I quickly shut them again as I discovered he had opened the curtains, allowing what little light there was outside, to illuminate my room. “Leave me alone,” I grunted, barely refraining from launching my pillow at him.
“Enough is enough,” he said firmly. “It is time you left this bed.”
“It is time you stayed out of my room,” I snapped at him. “Or I swear to God, I will go to the police, or the papers, or whoever will darn well listen to me, and tell them exactly what I am!” I regretted saying the words even before I saw Michael’s reaction. His rich brown eyes widened, and a muscle at his jaw twitched in anger. Then as quickly as I could blink, he vanished. Oaths to God, it turns out, are a very serious thing for angels. If Michael had stayed, I would have been obliged to follow through on my actions, regardless of whether or not I ever intended on doing so.
In what felt like the same speed as Michael’s disappearing act, the air seemed to be sucked from the room and suddenly I was struggling to breathe. Without thinking about what I was doing, I darted over to the window, pushed it open and tried to take in deep breaths. It should have been easier than it was. It was night-time and raining. Two things that brought the temperature and humidity of the Louisianan air down, but I still couldn’t catch my breath.
I was feeling more claustrophobic than anything else, feeling suddenly trapped in my room, my self-imposed cell. Everything – the guilt from killing Paige, for only just keeping Joshua alive, Michael’s expectations – even the walls in the room felt like they were closing in on me. I pushed the window open further and jumped, landing clumsily on my knees. If I was still human, the fall would have, at the very least, hurt. As an angel, it felt more like I had taken one large step down.
The relief at being outside was instant. The rain and the cool breeze started to have a calming effect on me, but it wasn’t enough. Bare foot, and wearing only my night clothes: a long since faded England football shirt and shorts; I took off at a run.
Before I had earned my wings, Michael had spent hours with me in the gym, trying to get me to run at the supernatural speed I was supposed to, but had never been able to. All that had changed now. I had earned my wings and accepted what I was. I tore across the grounds of the convent at a speed that would have made Usain Bolt look like he was running at a casual jog.
Thankfully the streets surrounding the convent were unusually deserted – probably because of the weather – as it took me a moment to realize that nobody should see me moving at these speeds. I slowed to a walk, pleasantly surprised to discover that finally, running didn’t leave me feeling like I was going to keel over and die. Though that, of course, led me back to thinking about the girl I had killed. I stumbled to the side of one of the buildings, clutching at my stomach as I waited for the guilt to subside, and the ability to stand straight again.
It took several deep breaths and a lot of effort, but I managed to push the pain back to the dull throb. Getting out of the room, and the convent, had helped a little, but I was at a loss of what to do next. I knew I didn’t want to go back. Another option was going to my aunt’s – the place which had once been my home.
No, that wasn’t really an option either.
Even without looking at my reflection I knew I was a mess. Turning up on Aunt Sarah’s doorstep would do nothing more than make her worry.
I regretted not taking the time to get dressed, or at least put on some footwear, even if I didn’t really need any. Despite the fact I was completely drenched, and the wind and rain continued to swirl around me, I didn’t feel the temperature. I could tell that the concrete sidewalks below my feet were cold, but I couldn’t really feel it. The footwear was more for the benefit of the few people out braving the weather, who were looking at me like I was homeless.