Angeli Trilogy: Angeli Books 1-3 Read online

  Sadly, Florence loved the dogs, and the treats and belly rubs were still plentiful in Anne’s absence.

  Traitors.

  Anne rolled out of bed and took a shower. Slipping into a robe, she padded into the main living area of her suite. She found Jeffrey already in a t-shirt and shorts, working out to his exercise video game. He had packed the entire console and brought it along on their trip.

  “Your face is red. Is it very strenuous?”

  Jeffrey shot her a look. “My face is red because I nearly had to take off ten layers of skin to remove the mascara.”

  “Think of all the money you’ll save on chemical peels. And maybe think twice before you slap my image on a t-shirt.”

  Jeffrey grunted.

  Anne nodded toward the video game. “You know, you can actually exercise out in the real world,” she said, watching his bobble-headed avatar jog around a cartoon track.

  “My game trainer gets disappointed in me if I miss a workout,” panted Jeffrey. “Plus I can’t move to the next level running around outside.”

  Anne shook her head and returned to her bedroom.

  Anne went to her adjoining bathroom and applied her makeup. She studied her face, finding nothing new; not a pimple, not a wrinkle. Anne squinted to create the illusion of crow’s feet and wondered what she would look like as an old woman. Aging at the rate of about two years for every hundred lived, she appeared to be in her mid-twenties, having become a Sentinel at the tender age of eighteen. Decades passed with no change in her countenance. Sometimes, the sameness of it all couldn’t help but make her feel like a Disney animatron.

  “You’re not an alien. You’re not a robot. You’re not a critter from a body snatchers movie,” said Jeffrey, appearing in the mirror behind her. He leaned in the doorway of her bathroom, dabbing his forehead with a terry towel. Anne could see that his light brown t-shirt featured a wild pirate woman on the front, a woman who looked very much like her. Blazoned across the front, a lively font declared, “I’ll cleave you to the brisket!”

  “Aaaand there it is again. The Wench Line.”

  Jeffrey nodded, beads of sweat dripping from his floppy blond locks.

  Anne returned to her makeup.

  Jeffrey took a step back. “Putting on makeup for Michael?”

  Anne felt her face flush, embarrassed that Jeffrey knew her so well. She looked down at the mascara wand in her hand.

  “I wear makeup all the time.”

  “You only put some actual effort into it when that Angelus is around. You do it for Con as well, when he gives you some warning of his impending arrival.”

  “So?”

  “So,” said Jeffrey, shrugging. “You’re kind of a hussy.”

  Anne snorted a laugh and finished with her lipstick.

  “Bacon,” said Jeffrey, turning to leave.

  “Bacon,” Anne agreed.

  Jeffrey also knew nothing put her in a better mood than crispy pork products.

  * * *

  After breakfast, Jeffrey announced his plans to tour historic Annapolis, and Anne went downstairs to wait for Michael. Jeffrey wasn’t a fan of dead bodies; and that’s what Michael and Anne intended to see.

  At exactly nine a.m., a black BMW 7 series pulled to the curb outside the Maryland Inn. Anne watched as the window slid down to reveal Michael, radiating health and vitality the way only an Angelus could. He appeared in his mid-thirties; the age she thought him most handsome. Over the years, she had seen him appear both younger and older.

  She had every reason to be tense. When the Angeli donated a portion of their power to create the Sentinels, they did so with a reverse charge. The reversal of energy bestowed the ability to drain Angeli upon the Sentinels. Previously impervious to harm, the immortal Angeli had created the only creatures on earth that could disrupt them, a move necessary to empower the Sentinels with the ability to defeat Perfidia.

  But this phenomenon also made being close to an Angelus titillating to both the Angelus and the Sentinel. Their energies complemented each other, and a small exchange of power was impossible to avoid.

  With monitoring and self-awareness, Angelus/Sentinel interaction could be exhilarating. With careless abandon, it could easily jump from rapturous to destructive for either party.

  Michael’s crystal blue eyes twinkled with delight on seeing Anne. He burst into a broad grin.

  “Hello you.”

  Anne’s stomach felt like a nest of restless snakes. She hated the way Michael could make her feel so insecure. She never knew if it was their past that made her feel like a smitten teen, or some mysterious Angeli charm. Michael told her their ability to enchant humans had enabled one Angeli to become President of the United States but, true to form, he insisted he wasn’t at liberty to reveal which one.

  Anne had seen Michael bewitch humans. They didn’t stand a chance. She liked to think she was above that, able to resist Michael’s charms, but it didn’t always work out that way.

  Sometimes giving in was half the fun.

  “Hello you,” Anne returned. Clearing her throat, she took a quick, calming breath.

  “If it isn’t the breathtaking Ms. Bonny.”

  Michael hopped out of the car and escorted Anne to the passenger side. Opening the door he held out his hand as she gingerly offered him her own. Anne slid into the soft leather seat as the electricity of his touch played along the skin of her arm. She resisted the urge to pull at his energy, well aware where that could lead.

  “Fingers and toes,” he said, closing her door. In the side mirror, she watched the tall, dark-haired Angelus stride back to his side of the car.

  Such a handsome guy. I really hope I never have to kill him.

  “So,” said Michael, sliding into the driver’s seat.

  “So.”

  As Anne attempted cool, calm eye contact, she felt her cheek twitch with the strain of steadying her nerves. She had stared down death countless times, but somehow, staring down this particular Angelus always unraveled her. It didn’t help that all the electricity in her body begged to mingle with his.

  “Here we are again.”

  “Right. So...” Anne dragged her gaze from Michael and focused forward. “So where are we off to?”

  “We’re going somewhere where, hopefully, they don’t end sentences in prepositions.”

  Anne rolled her eyes. “Sorry. I mean, where are we off to, smartass?”

  Michael looked behind him for traffic, putting his arm behind Anne as he backed up to maneuver out of his parking spot. Anne could feel the warmth of his skin behind her, his energy playing with the hairs on her neck. It felt like someone’s lips brushing her nape.

  For the love of... Anne clenched her jaw and vowed not to notice.

  Michael removed his arm and put the car into drive.

  “Today we’ll be traveling just around the corner. The Brice House, to be specific.”

  Michael smiled flashing a laugh line at the corner of his mouth so alluring Anne stared. She looked away. She didn’t remember that particular facial feature and she loved it. Had she mentioned before how much she liked laugh lines? Had Michael added a laugh line to his appearance since the last time she saw him?

  If he is trying this hard to charm me, I am in bigger trouble than I thought.

  “The Brice House,” she echoed.

  Admiring the historic brick buildings lining the streets of Annapolis, Anne recalled a party at the Brice House that she had attended in the early 1800s. Over the years, it had become difficult to pinpoint every memory’s exact time, but closing her eyes, Anne could picture the women wearing empire waist dresses, the older women with lace to the neck, the younger women revealing their cleavage. Many at the party had adopted a Moorish look, adding feathers and turbans to their ensembles, as was the rage in England at the time. In the glow of the gas lamps, the party had felt exotic.

  Anne remembered a blonde woman at that Brice House party, her hair in curls to mimic a Grecian style hairdo. She stoo
d in front of the fireplace, alone, admiring a porcelain figurine of a man in a light blue coat playing a flute. A strand of the woman’s hair caught in the corner of her mouth, and even now, Anne fought the urge to reach out and brush it away.

  At the end of the party, Anne noticed the statue missing, and the woman she’d seen admiring it was gone as well. Apparently, the woman had considered the porcelain flute player an appropriate party favor.

  Michael turned on to East Street, and Anne recognized the Brice House. Though not ornate, the massive brick mansion still demanded attention. The boxy Georgian style home had matching chimneys on either side of the roof, standing a good seven feet above the roofline.

  “Supposedly haunted now, isn’t it?” Anne asked, as Michael circled to find a parking spot. “I saw a brochure at the hotel for a ghost tour.”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know, but it isn’t the disembodied spirits we’re concerned with this time, it’s the disem-spirited bodies.”

  Anne glanced at Michael. “I’m pretty sure ‘disem-spirited’ isn’t a word, Mister Don’t End a Sentence in a Preposition.”

  Michael shrugged and smiled. “At least I get points for creativity.”

  It took Michael several minutes to find a place to park on a nearby street. From their rare downtown Annapolis parking spot, Angelus and Sentinel made their way to the Brice House on foot, where Michael led Anne to a small cluster of people gathered on the side of the building. The group of eight hovered around a dig site, which appeared to be little more than one three-foot round hole in the grass. Moving closer, Anne peered into the gap to find it nearly twenty feet deep.

  A pixie of a woman with a dark bob haircut and infectious smile stepped from the group to thrust out her hand.

  Michael introduced himself to her.

  “And this,” he said motioning to Anne, “Is Anne Bonny, noted historian, as promised.”

  “Like the pirate!” said one of the members of the group hovering nearby.

  Anne groaned quietly.

  “Yes, like the pirate,” she said, to no one in particular. People frequently recognized her name. She supposed she could have changed it once history recorded her exploits on The Revenge, but it was her name and she planned to keep it. She should have never told that bookish fellow she met in a bar about her pirate days. She had been so excited after escaping jail and he had seemed so interested in her stories. It helped that he’d been attractive as well. How was she to know that he would record her exploits and publish them, dooming her to a long lifetime of pirate jokes? The worst part was that she had fabricated half the tales to sound more interesting. She wondered how many other historical figures’ stories were drunken, self-aggrandizing captured by the right person at the right time.

  “I’m glad you could come, Ms. Bonny,” the woman said as they shook hands. “I’m Dani Crissey with the Historic Annapolis Foundation. We’ve got quite an unusual case here.”

  “How so?” asked Anne.

  “Last week this section of the garden collapsed, and noticing some objects of interest in the pit, the Brice House gave us a call,” Dani explained, motioning towards the hole. “I think it would probably be easiest to show you what makes it particularly interesting.”

  Dani grabbed a battery-operated lantern and mounted a ladder that led down into the pit. Michael and Anne followed her into the dark den, the only illumination provided by what little daylight penetrated the tight entrance. At the bottom, Dani switched on the lantern, flooding the area in a yellow glow.

  Anne gasped as the lamp revealed the contents of the pit. With the exception of the patch of dirt on which they stood, tightly packed human bones filled the cave. The empty sockets of dozens of skulls stared silently at the three of them, as Dani gave Anne and Michael a moment to absorb the scene.

  “At first we thought it must be some sort of mass grave,” Dani said after a minute, her expression apologizing for the obvious nature of her statement. “Maybe a plague or some other tragedy had taken place. But if you’ll take a closer look, particularly at this area here, you’ll see why that idea didn’t stick.”

  Anne moved to the section where Dani gestured. There, she found the bones had much more dried flesh and clothing clinging to them than the other nearby remains. Picking her way through the piles, Anne came to an unsettling conclusion.

  “They’re from all different time periods, over the course of maybe hundreds of years.”

  Dani nodded. “That’s what we realized. In fact, there are two bodies missing here that you can’t see; they were taken to be examined. If I had to guess, I’d say they’d not been dead for more than three years. You probably noticed the crime tape; the police have come and gone.”

  Anne snapped her attention to Dani.

  “Three years? I thought the garden collapsed to reveal this mess. How were bodies deposited here within the last few years?”

  “That’s the million dollar question,” said Dani. She pulled out a dainty handkerchief and wiped her dusty brow. Anne smirked; it had been a long time since she’d seen a woman with a handkerchief. Dani noticed Anne’s flash of amusement.

  “My grandmother’s,” she explained with a sheepish grin. “I have allergies, I dig in the dirt. It just comes in handy.”

  Anne nodded and smiled.

  “Anyway, we don’t know how or why,” Dani continued. “There is no entrance to this pit, other than our own ladder. There are no adjacent cells or hallways from the main house. The ground above is about fifteen feet deep even in the area that eventually collapsed. The topsoil hasn’t been disturbed for as long as anyone can remember. It’s been a lawn for a hundred years.”

  Anne looked up and noted the thickness of the remaining ceiling beside the hole, compact and undisturbed. The only way to get into the grave would be to phase through all that dirt, a talent she only knew one group to possess.

  Anne turned a suspicious eye to Michael, but on catching her interest in him, he averted his gaze. Glancing around the chamber, he acted as if he’d just noticed the abundance of human bones.

  “I’d have to guess access was through the collapsed area somehow,” Anne mumbled, trying to convince herself this was a possibility.

  “You would think, but the collapsed area was on the ground here, looking as undisturbed as the rest of it, but for its fall. We’re baffled. I’m not even entirely sure how the cell was dug; natural caves aren’t generally perfectly square.”

  “Almost like they were teleported here,” Anne said pointedly in Michael’s direction.

  He picked up a finger bone and began to study it closely.

  Anne spent some time examining the bones. She found evidence of trauma, a broken leg here, a broken arm there; but all the breaks had happened to the bones’ owners long before they died. There were no obvious causes of death, but there was an unusually large amount of osteonecrosis—dead bone. Osteonecrosis occurred with lack of blood supply to the living bone. The bone died, broke down and collapsed.

  Anne knew other causes for osteonecrosis. She could remember very clearly the first time she studied the remains of a human drained of energy by a Perfidian.

  Anne turned to Michael again, inspiring him to study the ceiling as if constructed from the most fascinating dirt he’d ever seen. Anne wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d started whistling to appear even more innocent. Clearly, Michael already knew a Perfidian was responsible for the grave.

  “Well, Dani,” Anne said, brushing her hands briskly to remove the dirt. Unable to clean the damp earth stuck to her fingers, Anne wiped her hands on Michael’s arm as she continued.

  “I’m going to go through some notes of mine and I’ll get back to you with a few ideas.”

  Michael scowled and flinched away from Anne to protect his shirt.

  “I’d appreciate that, Ms. Bonny, thank you for coming by.”

  The three headed up the ladder, Anne, followed by Dani and then Michael. On the way up, Anne heard a ragged gasp and glanced behind h
er to be sure Dani hadn’t lost her balance. Dani remained steady on the ladder, but her eyes closed and her knuckles grew white from gripping the rungs.

  Anne leaned forward to look past Dani and glowered at Michael, who turned up a palm and silently mouthed the word “What?” to her.

  “Are you all right, Dani?” Anne asked.

  Dani opened her eyes and swallowed hard.

  “Sorry,” she said, her face flushed. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  Anne knew an Angelus sipping when she saw one, or heard one, as the case may be. Michael had proven himself a master of the sneaky sip in the past, and Anne knew Dani’s gasp of surprise and delight wasn’t the sort of gasp someone made when slipping or spotting a scary spider.

  Once topside, Anne shook hands once more with Dani and assured her she would be in touch. When Michael extended his hand as well, Anne saw Dani’s face color before taking it. Dani avoided Michael’s eyes and turned back to her group, a tiny smile on her quivering lips.

  Michael and Anne headed back to his car, Michael still brushing the dirt from his sleeve as they walked.

  “This shirt is expensive,” he grumbled.

  “You didn’t buy it, you materialized it.”

  Michael shrugged. “Well I copied it from a very expensive shirt.”

  “Yeah, well...you sipped that girl. We’re even.”

  Michael raised his eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You took a sip from that girl. I’d know that gasp anywhere. You can’t just go around giving people energy orgasms like Christmas presents.”

  Michael grinned. “Orgasm Santa. What a concept.”

  Anne glared and Michael offered her his best doe-eyed innocent face.

  “I am sure I have no idea what you are talking about. If perhaps my hand brushed her bare ankle while we were climbing the ladder and I inadvertently received a bit of energy from her—”

  Anne held up a hand to cut Michael’s sentence short.