Page 24 of Angel's Smoke

“I’ve got ‘em.”

Iron went down on a single knee, reached for the glasses, and held them in one hand to his chest before he rose to take his seat on the couch again. Anna’s breath caught. With his head bowed, back arched, shoulders dipped beneath his ears, and her clear frames clutched in a fist hovering over his heart, she saw it all as plainly as she’d dreamed it in her mind.

As plainly as the last time she’d seen him on one knee before her.

Anna shot to her feet. “Who the fuck are you and how the hell did you get in my head?”

Chapter12

When Iron thought of all the different ways of breaking the truth to Anna, not one of them had him on his knees. An error in judgment on his part, clearly, and one he feared would cost him far more than his honor if she got it in her mind to put some power into that right thigh of hers. Given how close her foot was to what he’d left unprotected between the goalposts of his bent legs, he wouldn’t blame her.

He would, however, take the blame for the shimmering fear in her eyes, and that somehow brought him far lower than any bended knee ever could.

“Anna . . .”

“Nope. We’re not doing that. I’m not in the mood to hear my name spoken in placating tones. And I’mnotcrazy. I know what I’ve seen.”

Iron sighed, getting to his feet. “You’re not?—”

“Stay the hell away from me.” She shot out her arm, palm up, and started circling toward the front door. Fear, blazing and brilliant, had struck an urgency into her movements, regardless of sense.

“You can’t go outside, and I’m not here to hurt you.”

“What are you here for, then? To brainwash me? Drug me? What the hell was in those apples, anyway?”

“Nothing! Anna, please. You’re not?—”

Her hand reached the doorknob behind her back. “You were in my head,” she accused, trembling. “In my dreams. How the hell did you do that? How?—”

“Anna, you’re not crazy!” Iron threw the full force of his power into his words, and thank the mages, it worked. All at once, the alarm behind her eyes took a station break, signaling to the rest of her body to do the same. Only when some of the tension fled her fingers and her hand fell away from the knob did he finally breathe out the tension from his lungs. “Yes, I have been in your dreams, as you have been in mine.”

Uncertainty cast her features in a pale light, and she must have seen the reciprocating emotion reflected in his, because her socked feet shuffled a step and a half away from the door.

Away from the exit but not nearer to him.

Instead, she skirted around the arm of the loveseat opposite the couch he was standing in front of and collapsed into the cushions. “What do you mean?” she pleaded in that way mortals often did when asking questions to beings they could not see but hoped were listening anyway. “How is any of this possible?”

Iron scratched the back of his head, then brought his fingers around to knead his eyes. He was doing this. He was actually going to do this. “I’m not mortal.”

“What?” she whispered, shocked uncertainty plunging her eyes into a simmering haze.

“May I sit?” He took her stiff nod as a sign that he had the floor but only until her curiosity reached nuclear reactor meltdown levels, which was surely any goddamn moment. After that, all perceived stability and safety on her part would go out the window.

He had to work fast.

“I’m a sentinel angel, a fallen warrior who once served in the Empyrean, Heaven’s highest realm, but has been trapped in the mortal plane for eons. In our quest to return home, my brothers and I—yes, they are like me, as well—obtained a relic of the Empyrean’s gates from our enemy, Cyro, the demon ruler. That was several months ago. Once I began to examine the relic to try and unlock a dormant magic strong enough to destroy the demon charmers and reopen the gates we’d been sealed out of, I unlocked something . . . more. A different sort of discovery. One that led me to start dreaming.” He held her frightened gaze. “Of you.”

Anna’s brows shot up, then she shook her head vehemently. “That’s not a real explanation. Those aren’t even real words actual people say. They’re just things from, like, comic books or those fantasy shows you always have to pay extra to watch. They’re not real.”

But Iron knew that the moment her worried words left her lips, she didn’t fully believe them. It was her poor mind trying to paint facts out of fiction, and the battle was a brutal one, judging by the toll it was taking on her furniture. Anna’s trembling fingers had dug into the nearest throw pillow, some frilly number with enough fringe to at least keep her hands distracted so her mind could hopefully focus on what he was saying.

It was better than nothing and something he could work with. Perhaps starting with that much truth had been the wrong move. He needed to go simpler, to the root of the matter, and connect with something easier for her mortal mind to understand, at least conceptually.

“In the Empyrean, there exists an Eternal Flame, and every being’s soul, mortal or otherwise, contains a spark of this flame. And when these twin sparks find each other, a soul bonding occurs. It is a link between two individuals that can never be severed.”

Iron had no idea how to sugarcoat the facts or lessen the blow that came with the heaviness of his words, so he stuck to the basics. There would be time for questions, and if he didn’t cause Anna to scramble up the wall to get away from him, he’d welcome each question openly. But for now, he could only distill the choicest cuts of information into the words she needed to hear first.

Mages willing, her trust would come later.

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