Page 9 of Angel's Smoke

It grated on nerves that Iron had been certain had no nerve endings left to grate down.

Yet more proof that the universe was full of surprises.

Over the past three days, Iron, an immortal sentinel warrior and guardian of the Empyrean, had been forced to resort to combat of the keyboard variety. His investigation into his mystery woman had started with any low-hanging fruit he could find. With Chrome’s help, they’d been able to tap into a multitude of mortal state and municipal databases, but having no idea where to go from there, Iron had started with the ones that included photo entries for each registrant. Though his female’s features were still mostly hazy in his mind, he figured he’d be able to at least pinpoint someone who matched a basic description and start from there.

Yeah . . . no. After days of staring bleary-eyed at image after image, Iron had pushed the laptop away and pinched the bridge of his nose. Had her hair been a bright strawberry red or more of a darker auburn? Or perhaps it hadn’t been red at all and it was a trick of his mind? Shades of brown were similar to red, as he well knew given his hair color. Or what if she’d dyed her hair or had grown it out from the time a potential photo could have been taken?

He could very well be staring at a picture of her from five years ago where she sported a blond pixie cut, nose piercing, and goth eye makeup, and he’d have no idea who the hell he was looking at.

The shrill honk of several cars choking the street next to him drew his thoughts away from the dark path he was heading down and instead painted his landscape in garish hues of red and blue. Up ahead, some vehicle had made the unfortunate decision to give up the ghost in the middle of an intersection, effectively congesting every artery in town into individual wells of despair.

He couldsorelate.

Iron let the cold prickle his ears as he barreled down the sidewalk with a mountain-sized chip on his shoulder.

Despair . . . that was certainly a concept his conversation with Titan a few days ago had scratched at. Iron had referred to it as suffering when he’d recounted his worry of not finding this dream woman in a timely manner, but perhaps that had been the wrong approach. Then he froze, digging his heels into the concrete.

Tired. She’d seemed so damn tired. There was a tightness to the edges around her eyes that he hadn’t bothered to think too closely about before. Was she a teacher? Or a member of another overworked profession?

“A teacher. Hmm . . .”

Iron pulled out his phone and began typing out a text to Chrome about checking the different education rosters of all the New Hampshire school districts. It would take more than a hot minute, but if he could recruit his brothers in the search, perhaps?—

The resounding screech of brakes set Iron’s back teeth on edge and slowed the harried steps of everyone around him.

“Jeez, lady. Drive much?” The tallest mortal in a teenage gaggle of women in front of him looked up from her phone just long enough for the rest of her party to cast their attention toward the line of standstill cars next to them. Before the urge to care about a stranger took too strong of a hold among the women, the siren song of social media pulled the group back into the numb safety of their screens.

The disruption was minimal. To a mortal. To Iron, it was the Freightliner he didn’t see coming.

Boxed into the far-right lane was an unassuming Subaru of lower-middle-class proportions spotlit by alternating beams of headlights mixed with shadows of pedestrians weaving through the thrall. The car’s bumper would have all but given the Jeep in front of it a proctology exam if the driver hadn’t slammed on the brakes when they did. Even so, there was barely a centimeter’s worth of breathing room between those bad boys. Impressive for a near-miss love tap.

On any other night, Iron would have dismissed it. Just shoved his hands into his pockets and kept right on walking away from yet another mortal mess. He had exactly fuck all to do with congestion best practices and even less interest in being first on scene to an almost oopsie.

But the flash of the driver’s rust-hued copper hair pulled any remaining acts of self-preservation from his mind and chucked them toward far more useful endeavors.

All that remained was the shocked resonance of recognition as, through a foggy window, his enhanced nighttime vision had him staring into the soft jade eyes of the woman from his dreams. The one he’d been looking for.

His feet were moving before he could think better of it and then sped way the hell up once he realized what must have happened. Despite the wall-to-wall traffic, she must have stepped on the gas by mistake and then stopped short before she hit the vehicle in front of her.

Iron ignored the honking around him as he weaved through the stalled cars and went over to her window. Gently, he tapped his knuckle on the glass. “Miss, are you all right?”

The defroster’s poor performance did nothing to prevent his celestial senses from picking up what he needed to through the pane’s haziness. And when the glass finally lowered, revealing the woman inside, he was . . . amused.

The woman pushed a pair of clear-framed glasses higher up her nose and then went to work lifting and lifting andliftingsections of long hair into some sort of complicated top knot situation. Like nearly rear-ending cars was all in a day’s work and she was about to go on lunch. “Yeah, yeah, I’m okay. Just got a little too trigger-happy there. I didn’t hit him, did I?”

“Uh, no. No, you stopped in time.”

Iron took a step back when she moved to lean her head out the driver’s side window and wave at the car in front of her. When no one waved back—or even noticed, though something told him he shouldn’t point that out—she just sank back into her seat, her features twisting into despondency. Was she . . .unhappythat she hadn’t hit the Jeep? Then she fished around into the shopping tote next to her and pulled out a handful of M&Ms. Peanut, judging by the smell.

Oddly enough, onlyaftershe popped a few into her mouth did she start talking. “I don’t know what happened to me there. It’s not like I didn’t know we were in gridlock. I was just thinking about something, and then I had a sort of shitty experience at Nature’s Value Market. Which, newsflash, don’t go to that place on a night like tonight. Or ever, really. Pretty sure the owner has me on a list now. Anyway, they didn’t have the cereal I wanted, or maybe they did, but I couldn’t find it, and then I forgot to get the pancake mix. But then the M&Ms looked good. They always look good, don’t they?” A wistful sort of acceptance curved her mouth into a sad, small smile, immediately disarming him of whatever line of questioning he’d been preparing to throw at her.

“I prefer mint M&Ms myself. The peanut ones are okay, too.”

Mint M&Ms? What the fuck, Iron?MintM&Ms?

He was about to retract his prior statement for something more appropriate, like whether she needed help, when her shoulders shook with a sharp laugh, and she looked up at him.

Whatever haze had clouded his thoughts around her thinned. With one hard shake of his mental snow globe, the blurred edges of what he’d dreamed she might have looked like crisped up with all due haste and purpose. There was no mistaking her eyes, gems of rich sea glass floating in a jade lagoon, or the softness of her features he thought had fled his memories for good. But it was all there, the pert nose and resolute lower lip that she seemed to push out without realizing it. The hair, even the tension that pulled her shoulders higher beneath her ears while her chin aimed at whatever threat was in front of her.

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