Page 6 of Angel's Smoke

So hedidknow what was coming. Interesting.

Iron lifted his head to the arched ceiling, scanning the granite for the specific specs of mica that, sometimes, if he squinted hard enough, resembled a constellation or two. His only access to any sort of night sky when he was forced to remain belowground and recharge his angel fire. Unlike the others. “Because something tells me these dreams, this fantasy woman, aren’t just dreams but visions—visions that are leading me toward figuring out how to get this relic to finally release its magic.” Iron started to pace in stride to the hammering of his heart as he finally let his crackpot theory run wild. “What if I’m meant to find her and, in doing so, at last discover how to return to the Empyrean and stop Cyro for good? What if I regain my full powers? What if I force you all to choose between the lives you’ve fought so long for versus the lives you live now? Who the hell am I to force any one of you to make that decision? But this woman . . .”

“What about her?” Titan asked baldly.

The abruptness, both of the tone and the question, drew Iron to a halt. Just laid the brakes on whatever force was pushing him to crave the restless sleep that had begun to rub him raw for a reason he’d been too afraid to analyze.

“I think she’s hurting,” he confessed softly.

At that, Titan sat up straighter. “Hurting?”

“I don’t know the how or why of it, but whenever I dream of her, I also dream of . . . sadness. Suffering, maybe. The encounters we’ve had of late, if you can even call them that, have changed. Her spirit or aura or whatever the hell it is that visits me each night has gotten increasingly . . . yeah, I’m going to say strained, if that’s even possible. Over the months she’s held my mind captive, she’s been becoming more and more skittish, darting away from me when I reach for her, even though she must know I’m no threat by now. I wasn’t certain of it at first, but after last night, when I heard her speak for the first time, her words were hurled at me with such defiance, such fear masked with ferocity, that once I found out she was from New Hampshire, I swear I thought it was just more of that typical New England grit.

“But what if I was wrong? What if she acted that way as a form of defense because she was feeling attacked and is no stranger to suffering? What if I’m the cause of it somehow? What if she’s been right here all along and I could have helped her, but I didn’t, and she’s still out there somewhere hurting? Or what if I find her but then dragging her into my life only ruins all of yours? Or, worse, hers?”

The three shots of espresso Iron downed earlier had finally offered up their concentrated caffeine, effectively shooting his already panicked mind into overdrive.

Titan rose from his seat but still stayed clear of the path Iron was doing a damn good job of wearing into the granite floor. “Easy, now. You’re getting yourself worked up. There’s no use agonizing over hypotheticals here. You’re a data man. Work with the facts. Let’s start there.”

“Facts,” Iron parroted, only mildly less flustered. “Facts. Okay.”

“Yes, facts. I’ll ask you onefactualquestion. Only you can answer it, and it’s a yes or no choice. Super simple. You ready?”

Iron finally put the brakes on his pacing and fisted his hands at his sides. “Shoot.”

Titan nodded knowingly. “If you could stop her pain, would you?”

“What the hell kind of a question is that?”

“I’ll ask it again. If you believe this woman is in pain and it was within your power to stop it, would you?”

“Yes. Always. A thousand times over. Without question. I wouldn’t let her suffer.”

“Good. Now, question two.” Titan flicked his gaze toward the test tube containing the severed shard of the Empyrean’s relic.

A shard that was now glowing with a jumpstart of celestial magic Iron had been trying to unlock for months.

A shard that was pointing directly toward Iron’s chest, where the core of his tethered angel fire lived.

An overwhelming panic seized Iron’s lungs as Titan’s final question solidified his resolve. “What the hell are you still doing here?”

Chapter4

There were certain behaviors that never truly got old, no matter how much Anna wished they’d go the way of the dodo or, at the very least, the way of electric seat belts. Could the residents of Aurora, townsfolk and tourists alike, come together and agree that hoarding bread and bottled water before a snowstorm wasn’t the action New Englanders needed to take when their town was only two and a half hours from Boston and had every major East Coast highway running through it? The boonies, it was not. Did they think one of the statistically snowiest regions in the country would truly see its residents stranded to the point of endless peanut butter sandwiches or—and she’d tried so hard to understand this one, she really did—frozen milk?

The small grocery store’s overhead lights buzzed a soft hum of disapproval, mimicking the mildly stern judgment of a tenured college teacher who hadn’t had to change their teaching methods in thirty years because their contract included a parking spot.

God, she hated this and was mentally kicking herself for not prioritizing appropriately. Without realizing it, she’d turned herself into one ofthosepeople. The bread-and-milk-ers.

Lovely.

“This is your own fault, Anna. You really should have known better.” The verbal lancing she gave herself wasn’t enough to quell her frustration, however, or bring back the past three hours of her booked-solid afternoon when it would have been smarter, though similarly impossible, to run to the store to stock up.

Through the miracle of scheduling and the desperate need to pay her mortgage this month, she’d stacked clients as close as virtually possible. Unfortunately, by the time five o’clock rolled around and she was finally able to shut her laptop and check her phone, it left zero time to analyze weather alerts or figure out what she needed to stock her house with before eighteen to twenty-four inches of heavy, wet white stuff started blanketing the area during the overnight hours.

Thank you, higher elevations.

Oh, her pregnancy-induced sciatica was going toloveshoveling that out.

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