Page 69 of Angel's Smoke

The dizzying pain was a new fresh hell. He groaned and rolled over to his side, grateful for the hard ground to cradle him instead of the grave he’d envisioned a breath ago.

Cyro was dead. Actually dead. Along with his armies of charmers.

It was an unfathomable reality to behold, and Iron would have let himself sink into it further were it not for the sizzling crackles of the compromised gates winking down at him.

He took a deep breath and let the reality of what he was witnessing soothe his rattled nerves.

He was staring at the gates of the Empyrean, which no longer needed to remain sealed.

Iron tried to stand on one leg, hoping like hell the celestial light from the Empyrean’s gates would speed his healing along at, say, Superman-level speed. No dice. While the acid burns had stopped actively chewing his flesh to pieces, there was no hope for using his mutilated leg until it healed more.

His wings, on the other hand . . .

Iron forced himself up onto his good knee and tried to spread his wings wide. Like old friends stiff with arthritis but still up for a good time, they creakily stretched out on either side of him. Now free of Cyro’s magic and mostly restored, they lifted him from the ground and carried him toward the one door he never thought he’d see again. He didn’t know how much time he’d spent staring at the monumental structure. A minute? A handful of seconds? Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. He was finally home.

Iron descended upon the center of the gates, gripped two of the rungs on either side of the port’s main fastener, and, using his good leg as leverage, pulsed his power into the central locking mechanism. A muted resonance swept through his core, and he used his feeble strength to pull the gates wide open.

If the raspy breaths wheezing from him were anything worth collecting, the light that poured out would have stolen all of them.

But he was too exhausted to catch the show. It didn’t even feel like anything worth tuning in for, not when a far-more-pressing bone-deep weariness sat on his shoulders and insisted he sleep.

Just . . . sleep.

If I can sleep, I can dream. Maybe I’ll see . . .

With his eternal charge finally completed, Iron surveyed the battlefield as he drifted to the ground. Good and empty, as it should be. Flat on his back, he was content to let the Empyrean’s light get to work on healing the parts of him that could be physically stitched up. But a hollow ache kept knocking at him behind his ribs that had nothing to do with the painful bone, muscle, and sinew regrowth he was in store for.

He’d destroyed Cyro. Wiped out the charmers. Opened the gates to a home that he and his brothers had long been sealed out of.

He was finally fuckinghome, and down to the very essence of his soul, he knew there was zero truth to that statement.

His heart, his true home, had been in a comfortable modest mountain cabin with questionable plumbing, rich charm, and a woman he’d loved more than the spark lighting his soul.

HelovedAnna. Fuck, he loved her, and she was gone.

A trembling sensation stirred within his chest, but he choked it back. Later, he would find a time to properly grieve and care for the few memories he had of her. Magesdammit, but there were so precious few of them.

And then another memory alighted itself upon his mind. One from only a few moments ago.

Helpless to leave that particular scab alone, Iron sat up and looked out at the battlefield. The veryemptybattlefield. He scanned as far toward the horizons as his celestial senses would go, and when they all came back just as vacant as when he’d sent them out, Iron dropped his head into his hands and yanked at his hair for all his damn foolishness.

There was no severed arm of Anna’s winking back at him from the battlefield, and there never had been. It had vanished along with Cyro and the rest of the prick’s dark magic.

It had all been an illusion meant to trap and coerce Iron into battle, and it had worked.

Which also meant that Anna had never been dead at all and was still very much alive.

Alive and waiting for him to come home.

And with the full healing light of the Empyrean beating down and returning his powers to him, nothing was stopping him from doing just that.

Chapter33

The quaint red-brick office building at the edge of Aurora proper had a lot of things going for it, except for its unfortunate proximity to the town’s looming courthouse. Whether that was by design, Anna didn’t know, but it increased the intimidation factor by ten thousand percent. It was the epitome of psychological manipulation for anyone who’d found themselves regrettably yanked into the mire that was the justice system.

A pleasant sign announcing that she’d arrived at the family law offices of Rogers and Wahl, Esq., stood out among the small well-manicured lawn. The neatly dotted rows of pansies that bracketed the signposts and walkway leading to the front entrance might as well have been emergency lights on a runway ramp signaling danger for any misstep, whether sure-footed or otherwise.

Shesooodid not want to be here, and yet like the recurring theme of her thirties, she found herself with no choice.

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