Page 8 of The Morning Star
Nyalla grumbled something under her breath, but Snip seemed relieved. With a grin he went over to the pool and began handing out the canned drinks to the Lows.
“No sodas in the pool!” I shouted. What the fuck had become of me? Rules? Suddenly there were rules at my house and I was enforcing them? It was bad enough that I was a sort-of angel now, I really didn’t want to be edging any closer to Order than necessary.
“I’m the only one allowed to drink sodas in the pool,” I amended. There. That was better. Rules for everyone else, just not for me. I lay back on my lounge chair and closed my eyes, enjoying the warm sun and thinking of how I was going to eat pizza and drink beer in my pool later this afternoon.
I felt him before I saw him. My eyes opened, my head swiveled, and I watched a tall, freakishly buff angel with copper curls round the corner of my house, Boomer at his heels as he headed toward the pool. I revealed my wings in a flash, snapping them out with a force that nearly knocked Nyalla from her lounge chair.
“Hey! Watch those things, Sam!”
I shifted so I wasn’t crowding her with the giant feathered appendages. We’d had a lot of fun yesterday evening, and I hadn’t expected to see him again so early today. Was this a booty call? I hoped this was a booty call. Gregory loved my wings, so making them visible increased my chances of getting some. I shifted the appendages to draw his attention to them feeling the air against the sensitive feathers.
Sure enough, his eyes immediately drifted toward the wings. I lifted them so the breeze stirred the feathers and felt the change in his blazingly hot energy signature. Yeah, baby. Come get some of this.
“Wanna fuck?” I called out once he was reasonably close. His spirit-self reached out to mine, warm and breathtakingly seductive as it caressed me. Then suddenly it was gone.
“Is our offspring drowning?”
Damn it. “Snip! Don’t let the kid die!”
“I’m on it, Mistress!”
I sat up to see the Low with a pool skimmer, hauling Lux out of the water. The infant angel flopped on the deck like a dead manatee, then began coughing and spitting up the clear liquid.
“See? He’s fine. It’s all good.” I reached out with my spirit-self to rub against Gregory’s, letting him know that I was still ready to go.
“He’s alive!” Snip threw his hands up in the air like he was an NFL referee signaling a successful field goal. “We got to him in time! Not like this morning with the chipper shredder, or lunchtime with the hot dog.”
I glared at Snip, silently willing him to lose all ability to speak.
“Cockroach, what happed to our Lux this morning with the chipper shredder? And this afternoon with an overheated canine?”
I winced at his stern tone, knowing I was probably not going to get any sex, angel or physical, in the next twenty-four hours. Or possibly in the next week.
“Hot dog. It’s a food. Nyalla did the Hymen maneuver or something like that and it popped right out. Shot ten feet across the floor, and he started breathing again. It was his own damned fault. Kid needs to learn to chew if he’s going to indulge in the sensation of consuming food.”
The weight of my angel’s stare was intense. “He should not be eating. He’s an Angel of Order.”
“Yeah, well he’s more like an Angel of Chaos sometimes.” Actually there were times when Lux was alarmingly like me. I’d not made the kid, I’d simply agreed to house him. Why he was copying my personality traits, I didn’t know. Was this a nature or nurture thing? Were Angels of Order more like Angels of Chaos back before the war and the stagnation up in Aaru? Was Lux actually closer to what a true angel of his sort should be? Or was he just a freak of nature?
I hoped freak of nature. That would be a whole lot more interesting.
Gregory sighed and eyed the little angel, who was still flopping around on the ground like a suffocating fish. He was faking it. And my beloved knew this very well.
“Lux, stop being so dramatic. You haven’t died. And even if you had, you’ve proven yourself quite adept at recovering from mortal injury and forming a new, viable corporeal form.”
Lux ignored him and kept flopping. He did that a lot—ignoring us, that is, not flopping on the ground.
“Lux!” Gregory’s voice thundered, and his energy surged white hot. Nyalla gasped. Snip cringed. The Lows who were still in the pool squealed and dove under the water. Lux stopped flopping and glared at his adoptive sire. Then in a flash he was in Gregory’s arms, all nakedly adorable, cooing, with little wings wiggling like a bird’s from his back. The archangel softened, instantly under the spell of the younger one. He snuggled the baby close, an expression on his face that twisted something deep inside me.
I loved Gregory like this. And that alone was worth putting up with this pain-in-the-ass brat. Lux looked over at me and beamed, his pudgy hands reaching out. I took him before I could even realize what I was doing, and felt his face nuzzle against my neck, his chubby hands clutching me. Okay, maybe I actually liked this brat.
Maybe I kinda loved this brat.
I looked up to see Gregory regarding me with the same sappy expression he’d just been using on Lux. Nyalla was giving me that look too. So was Snip. Fuck, I was surrounded by a bunch of idiots that were completely under the thumb of this infant angel.
“Everyone’s your bitch, aren’t they?” I cooed to him. “We’re all wrapped around your little pudgy finger. I mean they. They’re all wrapped around your pudgy little finger. I still think you’re an asshole. And an idiot. I mean, who the fuck puts himself into a chipper shredder?”
The hot dog and the pool weren’t a big deal. Diving down the stairs, jamming a fork in the electrical socket, stabbing himself with a fillet knife—none of that was a big deal. The chipper shredder… I’d never experienced my blood running cold like it had in that moment. I’d been in the house, and felt…something. Without a moment’s thought, I’d teleported into the storage shed and yanked the young angel out of the machine. I’ll admit there had been a lot of screaming and drama on my part as I’d checked to make sure he was still okay inside the mangled, half-torso that remained of his body. If I’d been a few minutes later, if I’d ignored that feeling…
