Aurora was on her bed researching when her mum came into her room. It had been a whole day since Zad had visited, and her parents had shared the truth of how they’d met.
They hadn’t encountered the Guardians. But it hadn’t been as simple as her mum walking from her world straight into her dad’s arms, the way they’d always told her.
If not for Zad, her parents would have been crushed between realities.
Not that it mattered. She’d never try breaching dimensions again. And not just because it was too dangerous.
It was because her mum no longer denied her true heritage.
Her mum sat at the end of her bed and smiled at her. She’d given her parents an edited version of her missing week. One day she’d tell them the truth about Gabe, the archangel she loved, but she wasn’t up for that heart-to-heart just yet.
“Why aren’t you wearing your necklace?”
Instinctively, her fingers went to her throat. She hadn’t worn it since leaving Gabe. The urgency to feel it next to her skin had died. After touching the real archangelic token of devotion, she couldn’t bear the thought of an inferior, human-crafted imitation.
“I don’t know.” She shrugged, then wondered if her mum thought she had lost it. “It’s in my bag.”
Her mum picked her bag up from the floor and pulled out the glittering jewelry, and frowned, as though she’d never seen it before.
“What’s this?” She dangled the chain from her finger, and the wings sparkled in the early afternoon sunlight that spilled through the window. “It looks like yours, but it isn’t.”
“What?” She shoved her laptop onto the bed and went to her mum’s side. Her breath hitched as she stroked a shaky finger over the wings, and the ethereal pulse echoed through her blood. The magical rainbows and gold dust originated from a long-destroyed City of Archangels.
Gabe had given her his beloved daughter’s necklace. And kept hers for himself.
There was only one reason why he would have given her something so precious. Why hadn’t he said anything?
Why didn’t I?
“Gabe didn’t just save your life, did he?” Her mum’s voice was soft, and Aurora slumped against her. She guessed today was the day, after all.
“No.”
“I could feel how much he loved you, Aurora.”
Bittersweet pain squeezed her heart.
“I don’t know—” The words locked in her throat and she caught her mum’s steady gaze. “You felt it?” But she didn’t speak out loud. Her mum hadn’t spoken aloud, just now, either.
“Yes,” her mum said. “And that’s when I remembered everything. I’m sorry I left you for so long.”
“It wasn’t your fault.” Her voice was husky, and she cleared her throat. “I’m just glad you’re back.”
“I was always so afraid.” Her mum’s voice was barely above a whisper. “That one day you’d find someone the way I did. That you’d leave this world, the way I left mine, and we’d never see you again. My mind tried to convince me none of it was real. Because if it wasn’t real, you could never leave, could you?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Guilt gnawed through her. By trying to help her mum regain her memories, she’d attempted to do the one thing her mother had feared above all else.
“You were too young. And then it was too late.” Her mum took her hand and dropped the necklace onto her palm. “You need to find him. However impossible you think this love is, it’s real.”
“How am I supposed to find an archangel?”
“The same way you did before,” her mum said, which didn’t make a lot of sense. And then she whispered with her mind. “He’s in your heart.”
The best chance of Gabe hearing her call was if she was in the exact same spot as when they’d first met.
She made her way to the other end of the village and halted just before the woods. She wasn’t going into trance or entering the astral planes. Gabe had initiated telepathic contact, and that was how she was going to try and reach him.
There were a few tourists wandering about, but she couldn’t worry about them right now. She took a deep breath and prepared her mind.
“What the hell are you doing?” Mephisto’s incredulous voice blasted through her head and her eyes sprung open. He towered over her, his moonlit streaked midnight wings fully extended like an avenging archangel of death. And instead of terror whipping through her, all she could think was why isn’t everyone staring at him?
“I wasn’t trying to cross dimensions.” Obviously, he was invisible to everyone but her. Which meant it looked as though she was talking to herself. Great. “I was just trying to contact Gabe.”
A tortured expression flashed over his face.
“If you love him, E, set him free. Don’t let him find out who you really are.”
“E?” Her whole body froze. He raked his gaze over her. But it wasn’t condemning, and there was nothing threatening in his manner, the way there had the first time he’d seen her in Gabe’s villa.
It was almost as though he was fighting an internal battle as to how, exactly, he should treat her.
“You really don’t know, do you?” He folded his wings, but she had the feeling he didn’t expect an answer to his question. Not that she had one, anyway. “What a fucking mess.”
A shiver trickled along her spine and she curled her fingers around the necklace, drawing comfort from the ethereal pulse within it. There was nothing benevolent about him, the way there was with Gabe. Yet she wasn’t afraid of him.
He had called her E. Did that stand for Eleni?
Had her fragile hope been true?
Before she could untangle her thoughts to ask him, the earth rumbled, and she staggered. An earthquake in Cornwall?
Except it wasn’t anything as ordinary as that. A violet streak of lightning ripped reality apart, and a dozen nightmarish Guardians emerged.
No …
Mephisto gripped her arm and slung her behind him. Terror snaked through her. Why were the Guardians still after her?
“Explain.” Mephisto’s voice was low. Deadly. He did not speak in English.
He spoke the language of the ancients.
And I can understand him.
A screeching hiss scraped through her nerves, but deep in her brain dormant synapses reconnected and primal pathways reactivated. And then the hisses and shrieks formed substance and cohesion and the most ancient words of all clawed through her mind.
It belongs to us—
Anomaly of nature—
Outside of your jurisdiction—
“No matter what the parentage,” Mephisto said. “You touch the beloved of an archangel and you risk war against all Immortals.”
The beloved?
Gabe had elevated her to the status of a beloved. That was why the Guardians had backed away in Kala’s suite.
Why he had given her his precious archangelic necklace.
So why the hell were they back?
Section 188, Sub-Section 52, paragraph nine point three hundred of the—
“Don’t quote the protocols at me.”
We have the right to take all anomalies in order to maintain the integrity of the universe—
Such abominations cannot be allowed to survive—
The anomaly must be given to us for neutralization—
Slowly, he turned and looked at her, his wings outstretched, protecting her from the Guardians’ sight. Awe radiated from him in lethal waves.
“You didn’t just come back. You came back as the one thing outside of an Immortal’s protection. A trans-dimensional being.”
How had the Guardians discovered her dual heritage? And then she remembered. She’d torn her arms and left traces of her blood in the Voids when they’d rescued Evalyne.
Terror hammered through her. “I’m condemned because of my parentage?”
Mephisto’s eyes turned crimson with rage. But it wasn’t directed at her.
“Aren’t we fucking always?”
Gabe
Gabe pulled on a fresh shirt and ignored the trepidation that washed through him. He was an archangel. Trepidation was something mortals suffered from.
It didn’t change the facts. Apprehension snaked through him at his planned confrontation with Aurora.
The outcome wouldn’t change the way he felt. He’d always love her. But he had to find out if Zad was right. He’d rather his heart shattered into a million pieces a thousand times over, than have broken hers a single time.
He picked up her necklace and dropped it into his shirt pocket. Without warning, vertigo slammed through him, so violent that he staggered against the wall for support.
The oxygen burned his lungs, and a formless, primal, terror struck him, twisting his gut and squeezing his heart as the image of Aurora filled his mind. For a split second he saw the repellent shadows of the Guardians looming over her and denial crashed through him.
It wasn’t possible. His love protected her. Yet the dread ground through him that it wasn’t over. It would never be over.
Aurora, his beloved, was in deadly danger.