Angeli: The Pirate, the Angel & the Irishman Read online

  “Wait, do you know what you’re doing?” asked Leo, pushing in front of Michael.

  “Not really. I don’t usually try to save Perfidia.”

  “She’s not a Perfidian,” said Michael.

  Leo thrust his arm toward Anne. “Practice on me first.”

  Anne took Leo’s muscular forearm in both hands, closing her eyes to concentrate. She tried to imagine her own energy flowing into Leo. The process did not come as naturally as draining power away from an Angelus. Resisting the urge to drink his vibrant energy was like trying not to eat the last piece of bacon on her plate.

  “I feel it,” said Leo, a tiny smile developing. He closed his eyes.

  Michael added his trademark grunt to the proceedings. He eyeballed Leo.

  Leo took a slow, ragged breath. “It’s working, yessss...”

  Anne threw down Leo’s hand. She’d felt him pulling at her energy.

  “I’m sorry,” Leo held up his palms, but fell short of hiding a smirk. “That was involuntary. But keep that in mind; Ariel might start to pull from you as well. We’re here to be sure things don’t shift the other way, but keep your wits about you... Honey.”

  Anne scowled. “Call me ‘honey’ again, and I’ll shave that mane of hair of yours off the hard way.”

  Leo smirked. “Kinky,” he mumbled.

  Leo moved away from the bed, but as he did so he whispered in Michael’s ear loud enough for Anne to hear.

  “Delicious.”

  “Enough,” Michael snapped.

  Leo sniffed and took his place behind Michael.

  Michael motioned to Ariel. “Save her,” he pleaded.

  With a last dirty look at Leo, Anne took Ariel’s left hand in her right, and placed her left hand gently on the girl’s cheek. She felt the electricity between them causing her skin to tingle. Her energy flowed into the Angelus and she watched as color returned to the girl’s face.

  After two minutes, Ariel gasped and opened her eyes as if awakening from a dream. Anne let go of her hand and stood. She stepped away and steadied herself against the dresser, exhausted. She watched as the Angeli hovered over their own, her presence in the room forgotten.

  Ariel made a move to rise, but Michael pushed her back to the bed with the tips of his fingers against her shoulder. The girl’s eyes locked on Anne.

  “Rest. You’re not ready to get up,” said Michael.

  “Sentinel?” she croaked in a raspy voice. “Am I a Perfidian?”

  “No.” Michael gave the girl’s hand a reassuring pat. “Ariel, can you tell us what happened?”

  “Start with being a bear,” said Anne.

  All three Angeli turned their gaze to Anne. Ariel appeared confused, the two men, irritated.

  “Go ahead,” said Anne, holding her hands up like claws. “Tell them how you were a big, furry, claw-slashing bear.”

  “Is she crazy?” Ariel asked. “What is she talking about?”

  Anne scoffed. “You don’t remember attacking me?”

  “I attacked you?”

  “Who kidnapped you?” asked Leo over Michael’s shoulder.

  “That I remember. Sort of. I know it wasn’t one of us.” She nodded towards Anne. “And not one of her.”

  “Was it a human?” asked Michael.

  Ariel shook her head.

  “When we were fighting her energy was all wrong,” Anne interjected. “Everything was off: her color, the feel of her energy, her appearance. Everything was...” Anne paused, searching for the right word. “Everything was schizoid.”

  Ariel’s brow knit with concern.

  “You’re not a Perfidian,” Michael reassured her again.

  Anne pursed her lips, trying to think of a way to jog the girl’s memory. No one believed her story about the bear attack, and she was beginning to doubt herself.

  “She seems normal now,” said Leo. “Maybe your draining healed her. Like sucking poison from a snake bite.”

  Anne raised a lip in degust. “Lovely.” She moved away from the bed.

  “I’ve had a long day,” Anne said, flopping into the chair against the wall. “I’ve been attacked twice, whether or not the attacker remembers. And if I’m on one more rooftop today I’ll have to buy a fiddle.”

  “I’m not sure what to tell you,” said Michael. “I can only surmise whatever kidnapped Ariel did something that enabled her to take that bear shape. This isn’t something we’ve come across before.”

  “My daughter, the bear,” mumbled Anne.

  “I wasn’t a bear!” said Ariel, her voice growing shrill.

  Michael held up a hand to hush the girl.

  Anne looked at Ariel. “Do you have any memory at all? Do you remember attacking me? Climbing the fire escape of that building?”

  “Nothing really. I was in Germany, Dusseldorf to be specific. Someone jumped me, a man I think. He was powerful, like an Angelus or a Sentinel, but the energy was different—”

  “Yes,” Anne said, pointing at Ariel. “I know exactly what you mean. I was attacked by a similar being.”

  Leo crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. “This might take some time.”

  Anne sighed. “Well I’m averaging one attack every two hours, so we’d best speed things up a bit.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Con sulked.

  In his quest for the perfect brooding vehicle, he’d borrowed the body of a gray-haired old man he’d spotted sitting on a bench. The man’s shoulders were hunched, his mouth drawn in a dour, upside-down “U” that only years of disappointment could carve on a countenance. He looked miserable. He was the perfect physical manifestation of Con’s mood.

  Con wanted to take a slow, thoughtful walk, even if he had to give himself stiff joints to do it. With the man’s bowed legs, Con shuffled down Annapolis’ Main Street, circling the City Dock area located at the edge of the Chesapeake Bay. Con felt he had a lot of thinking to do, but as he walked and pondered, no revelations came to mind. He had no idea what attacked Anne or how he had siphoned the human, and he found it difficult to think without a whiskey in his hand.

  It was too early to return to the Ram’s Head basement bar to see if Amy the ghost had reformed. Con thought Leo was up to something; but he didn’t know what. Was the Angelus spying on him? Why had he appeared at the bar? Con’s walk didn’t answer that question, either.

  With growing embarrassment, Con lamented siphoning the football fan. Pulling the life-force from an unsuspecting drunk was shameful behavior. Worse, he shouldn’t have been able to do it all. Only an Angelus could drain a human. What had he become? Why was his energy manifesting purple? The oaf had been wearing a purple American football jersey; had he imagined his own light being purple?

  The thought that he shared traits with the Angeli made Con sick. He stopped shuffling, eased himself on a bench, and watched a preppy Annapolis couple walk by with their well-groomed dog. It reminded him of Anne’s moppy mutt and a crooked smile crept across his lips. It made him laugh, the way Anne doted on those dogs.

  Con felt something give way in his mouth and he coughed, spitting out a set of dentures. He closed his eyes, wrestling back a gag reflex.

  Once composed, he shakily pushed the dentures back into place and did his best to erase the saliva-covered image of them from his memory.

  Sweet misery. This host was perfect.

  Con turned his thoughts back to his current predicament. He had a choice. He could try to talk to Anne again, or he could continue to throw a pity party for himself.

  There was no rush. An Irishman could feel sorry for himself for decades.

  Con determined to see if the old man could hold his liquor. A quick hit, and then he would visit Anne once again. It would be good to disinfect the dentures. He gagged, thinking of them in his mouth, and a woman walking by sneered with disgust at him, giving him wide berth as she passed.

  “Piss off,” he growled at her. “You’ll be old someday.”

  She turned and sped away from him
.

  Con walked another block and then started moving his creaky, borrowed hips up the tilted marble steps of the Federal House Restaurant. Half way to the door, he stopped and turned to scan the street. The hair on his neck rose.

  Something was near.

  Extending his energy, he attempted to identify what triggered his senses. He felt a strong energy field emanating from one particular man, just as the figure disappeared around the corner onto Main Street. The strength of the aura led him to believe it was an Angelus, but he hadn’t resembled Michael or Leo.

  Con took another step toward the restaurant door, but found he couldn’t continue. The strange man had him curious, and with Leo already sneaking around like a cat, he felt he should keep tabs on all the Angeli.

  He left his elderly host behind and pursued the man with the shimmering aura. He glanced back in time to see the old man look into the bar of the restaurant, shrug, and continue inside, a smile spreading on his miserable puss. The old man just needed a drink.

  Con returned to his pursuit and sensed his quarry’s strange signature the moment he turned the corner. The man moved at a leisurely pace. Con slipped into the body of a woman striding at a good clip in the direction he needed to go. He hoped borrowing a human form would squelch his own signature and hide him from detection. Moments after entering the woman’s body, he left her, hopping into a thirty-year-old man walking just in front of her. Con never felt at home in female bodies, it was too easy to be distracted by all the jiggling parts.

  He closed within ten feet of the man and shadowed him for another twenty paces. From that distance, he could tell his instincts were correct. There was something different about the being in the dark suit, other than his dress appearing overly formal next to the shorts and polos of the other tourists on Main Street. The energy signature was not Angeli, nor Sentinel. As far as Con knew, other than the occasional ghost, there were only three strange things in the world, Sentinels, Angeli and Perfidia. Now before him, strolled a fourth option.

  The man slowed. Con slowed. The crowd split around Con and continued past.

  The man stopped.

  Before Con could decide on a course of action, the man turned, his gaze falling directly on the Irishman.

  They squared, confronting each other like gunfighters. Con knew the thing staring at him was not something he’d seen before.

  It took a step towards him.

  Con’s gaze locked on the creature’s face, partially hidden beneath a fedora pulled low. Its features shifted and rippled, ever in motion, as if a hive of bees danced together to recreate the shape of a human face. Two glowing embers mimicked his eyes. None of the humans walking by seemed to notice. To them, Con reasoned, the creature must have projected a more believable human appearance.

  The monster advanced until the two men stood three feet apart.

  “What are you?” asked the humanoid thing. Con heard the question, but the man’s mouth did not move. He spoke in Con’s head.

  “What are you?” Con asked in return.

  The man reached his hand towards Con.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Anne lay in bed, exhausted, but wide awake. Drained three times in twenty-four hours, twice by attack and once as charity, sleep proved impossible as she replayed the day in her mind. If one day in Annapolis included mysterious phantoms and bear-girls, what might a second day bring? She needed to be awake and prepared.

  Michael, Leo and Ariel had left her hotel room hours ago. Ariel regained the strength to travel, but little else occurred. The only thing on which all three agreed was that something had kidnapped and brainwashed Ariel, probably the same thing that attacked Anne in the alley. None of them had any idea what it was. They had no way to track it.

  As nerve-racking as policing Angeli could be, at least in the past Anne had always known her target. Not even the Angeli had a bead on this new threat.

  Anne felt unfamiliar emotions creeping like cockroaches across her consciousness. Anxiety. Doubt. Isolation. She wanted to switch on the light and send them scattering.

  Seeing how quickly Michael had sided with Ariel, Anne wondered if she’d become too dependent on the dark-haired Angelus’ companionship. Con had been her constant, but after his accident, Anne spent fifty-odd years believing Con dead. Michael had remained. The Angelus seemed indestructible, and she counted on his consistency.

  Didn’t she deserve some constant in her life? One person? That’s all she needed. One person. And maybe three hundred dogs, over a thousand years, give or take. Could a dog be a Sentinel and live for a thousand years? Wouldn’t that be stupendous? She had to make a note to ask Michael.

  The door to the suite rattled, shaking Anne from her brooding. She leapt up to peek though the crack of her bedroom door, and watched as Jeffrey walked straight to his room and closed the door behind him.

  Anne resisted the urge to run out and push him into a long, distracting conversation. Jeffrey could read her like a book. Maybe she didn’t want those eyes on her during a weak moment.

  Anne turned back to her bed, and in doing so, slammed directly into a man standing behind her.

  She yelped and struck the man solidly in the throat with the braced and rigid fingers of her right hand.

  “Gack!” gagged the man as he reeled, coughing and sputtering.

  Anne gasped.

  “Michael! You scared me!”

  Michael stumbled to the bed and sat down, rubbing at his throat.

  “Remind me not to do that again,” he said, still coughing.

  “I have. Repeatedly. What are you doing sneaking up on me like that? I could have killed you.”

  Michael stopped rubbing and smirked. “Really?”

  “Whatever. What are you doing here?”

  Michael composed himself and patted the bed beside him, motioning for Anne to sit. She stood firm, crossing her arms against her chest.

  “Sit. Please. I want to apologize.”

  Anne sighed and sat beside Michael on the bed. Michael positioned himself to face her, and then took her hand in his. She could feel the involuntary energy exchange between them begin.

  “Michael,” she said.

  “What? I want to say that I’m sorry.”

  She looked into his eyes.

  “You’re not really sorry.”

  Michael blinked. “What? Yes I am.”

  Anne squinted, still staring into his eyes and shook her head.

  “No. I can tell. You might be really sorry that I was hurt, but you’re not really sorry you kept your secret family from me.”

  Michael considered.

  “Is there a difference?”

  Anne yanked her hand away from Michael’s grasp.

  “From me, Michael. Not just a random Sentinel. From me.”

  Michael rolled his eyes and rested his large, warm hand on Anne’s thigh. She looked down at his perfectly manicured nails and long, graceful fingers, knowing that in a moment the exhilarating energy exchange would begin beneath his palm.

  “I’m sorry. I really am.”

  Anne looked up into Michael’s ice blue eyes. In the dim light, they had a subtle glow of their own, like a backlit computer screen, only sexier. She wondered if he tried harder to hide that otherworldly glow from normal people, and if not having to hide it from her, gave him any comfort.

  Michael’s laugh-line grew more prominent.

  Son of a bitch.

  “No. You’re cheating. You can’t just look at me with hypnotic blue eyes and manifest a laugh-line and make everything all better.”

  Michael smiled and scooted closer to Anne. She moved away from him, but he held up a finger, asking her to wait. He leaned forward and whispered in her ear, his lips brushing her neck as he did so. She felt a shiver run the length of her back.

  “What if I let you ask one question?”

  Anne’s mouth fell open a crack. About to stand, she paused at the sound of his voice.

  “I can ask one question?”

&n
bsp; “I assume you don’t want that one to count.”

  “No! I mean; are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “You are terrible at this. Look, you get one question. Anything. Any of those annoying questions you’ve been asking me for eons that I won’t answer. I’ll give you one answer.”

  Michael punctuated his sentence with light kisses on Anne’s neck. She knew she shouldn’t allow the shameless pandering to continue, but it felt really good. Every time his lips touched her neck, she felt their energy intertwine and a tremor of pleasure ran through her body.

  Anne bit her lip to hold her mouth shut. She wasn’t sure where to begin. Could she ask him where he came from? How the universe began? If there was a God? Did he know these things? Her mind swirled as he ran a soft path of kisses down her neck and across her collar bone.

  Maybe I should just ask if he could kiss a little bit lower...

  Anne felt the familiar tingle of energy exchange intensify. Her blood felt warm in her veins. It took everything she had not to push him back on the bed and leap on him like a cat.

  Michael reached forward with his left hand and used it to pull her mouth towards his. He took a deep breath through his nose.

  “Why do you always smell so fantastic?” he whispered.

  “Please, I’m trying to think,” she said, intoxicated by the smell of his skin, something like licorice and citrus.

  Anne realized she’d come to rely on Michael’s sexual prowess as much as the comfort of his never-ending existence. Simplifying their relationship might prove more difficult than she imagined. Again, she shuddered with pleasure as his mouth met hers.

  Anne tilted back her head, trying to concentrate, but the evasion only offered her exposed throat to the Angelus’ kisses.

  “Why do I let you do this to me?” she whispered.

  Michael worked his way down Anne’s throat to her chest.

  “What’s that?” mumbled Michael, his lips against her t-shirt. His hand brushed her breast, his thumb drawing across her nipple.

  Anne groaned.

  “You think you’re so smart. You pretend you know more than you do, don’t you?” she said, tugging her t-shirt over her head.