Her Demonic Angel (Her Angel Romance Series Book 5) (41 page)

He had said that? It didn’t sound like the sort of thing he would say but Amelia had been starting to annoy him and he had considered saying something about her attitude towards the woman who had grown up with her as her sister.

“Maybe we should go.” Erin turned to him and he shook his head. He could see that she was hurting, could feel it, but he couldn’t let her run away from those seeking to control her.

“I have come here for answers and I will have them.” He raised a hand to sweep his knuckles across her soft tanned cheek but Amelia’s sword pressed against his throat.

“Don’t touch her,” Amelia growled, her grey eyes burning silver.

“Will you drop it already?” Erin grabbed Amelia’s hand and twisted her arm, forcing her to drop her sword. The moment the sword hit the sand, Erin released her and Amelia rubbed her wrist. “Stop trying to drive the only man who has ever truly given a damn about me out of my life!”

A huge blast of orange light exploded from Erin’s hands, hit Amelia square in the chest and sent her flying into the air. Amelia’s silvery wings erupted from her back and she spread them, righting herself and stopping herself from hitting the sand.

“Erin,” Marcus barked and Erin breathed hard, staring at her hands with wide eyes.

“I didn’t mean it,” she whispered and looked at him, shaking her head, and then at Amelia.

Amelia glided to the ground and folded her wings back. “I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you. It was wrong of me.”

Erin’s hands fell to her sides and she glanced over her shoulder at him. “Is it possible that Veiron is cursed?”

“Anything is possible.” Marcus looked him over and Veiron didn’t like the hard edge to his pale blue eyes. “He cursed me once after all.”

He had?

“Do you have any tattoos?”

Veiron shook his head. “None that I know of.”

Marcus turned his back to him. Elaborate blue-grey wings covered his shoulder blades.

“You placed this curse on me. It no longer works. You removed it for me too… you have nothing on your back like this?” The man turned back around to face him. “We should check you over to be sure. It could be small and you might not have noticed it.”

Veiron nodded and focused so his silver-blue wings disappeared and he could remove his armour. He didn’t want to send it away using his powers. He wanted it on hand in case something happened to him.

Erin stood close to him, her amber eyes locked on his wings as they shrank into his back. If he had known her before his death and had been a demonic angel working for her father, then his wings had been crimson once, as they had been in his dream of her making love with him.

A scowl knitted her dark eyebrows. Did she not like his wings as they were now? Or his hair?

“You had tattoos,” she said when his wings were gone and stepped closer to him.

She ran her small hands over his blue armour and a fierce ache to feel them on his bare chest bolted through him. He stared down into her eyes, losing awareness of the others as her pupils dilated, desire heating her amber irises until they resembled molten lava. She swept her hands over his shoulders, fingers brushing bare skin, and he sucked in a sharp breath to steady himself. Her touch was electric, scorching him at a thousand degrees, making him burn for her.

Veiron stepped into her, driven by a desire to have her closer to him, to capture her waist and drag her soft body into the hard length of his. He wanted to possess her.

“I liked your ink.” She grazed her short nails over his biceps and held his gaze. “It was sexy.”

“Yours is sexy too.” He paused and frowned, echoing the shock rippling across Erin’s features.

“You remember my tattoo?”

He ignored the ache building behind his eyes and didn’t think about anything, just let it flow out of him. When he wasn’t trying to remember, things came to him painlessly.

He could picture her tattoo in his mind, could remember tracing it with his tongue and his fingertips, eliciting soft breathless moans from her.

“A dragon, curled around your spine… like your painting.”

Her eyes shot wide. “You remember the painting too?”

Pain erupted when an image of it flashed in front of his eyes and he clutched his head in both hands and doubled over, growling and gritting his teeth. Darkness swam at the edges of his mind and he swayed, fighting it and the waves trying to pull him under.

“Veiron. It’s okay. I’ve got you,” Erin whispered, hands stroking now, caressing his arms and then his hands, covering them and easing them away from his head. She replaced them with hers, burying her fingers into his short scarlet hair and running the pads of her thumbs around his temples, easing the pain away again.

A fresh wave of darkness surged through him and he didn’t have the strength to fight this one. He fell into Erin’s arms, feeling them wrap around him and her easing him to the warm sand, and then darkness took him.

He wasn’t alone.

Someone was watching him and it wasn’t Erin.

Veiron screwed his eyes up and clawed his way out of the darkness, struggling towards the light. He moaned, his head thumping. Where was he? Still on the beach where he had passed out?

He clumsily groped at his surroundings.

“You have been out cold for several hours. We moved you to a more comfortable location.” That deep voice belonged to Apollyon.

Veiron swallowed and forced his eyes open. It was night. Torches burned outside, staked into the sand. Apollyon stood in the doorway of the shelter, arms folded across his broad bare chest, blue eyes fixed on Veiron.

“Erin tended to you until I made her leave. She needed to eat and rest. She will come back soon.”

“Until then, I am your prisoner?” Veiron met his gaze.

Apollyon smiled and nodded. “Erin gives you too much free rein because of her feelings for you. I do not trust you… but I do not need to. It is not my trust you should be winning but hers. You have done nothing to earn what she has given you. Erin is the reason you’re still alive in your current form, not dead again and sent back to Heaven.”

He knew that. Everyone else on the island would have killed him when he had come down with Nevar had it not been for Erin’s intervention and wishes. He had done nothing to earn her protection. He had tried to kill her.

“Here.” Apollyon held his hand out to Veiron.

Veiron slowly pushed himself up into a sitting position, afraid that if he moved quickly he would suffer another attack and pass out again. He peered at Apollyon’s palm. Two small white discs sat on it.

“I contacted Lukas and he believes that pills of this sort work for us as they do for humans.” Apollyon leaned over him and Veiron took the pills, holding them in his palm and eyeing them closely.

“What will they do?” He looked up at Apollyon, who had resumed his position as sentinel at the door of the small ramshackle shelter.

“Take away the pain in your head. Lukas once imbibed a large quantity of alcohol and suffered what humans call a hangover. He took human medicine and it helped ease his pain. It may do the same for whatever pain attacks you when you try to remember something.”

“Do you know why I experience pain when I try?” Veiron closed his fingers over the small white pills.

Apollyon lifted his shoulders. “No… perhaps it is a curse as Marcus believes, but we did not find any marks on you.”

Veiron looked down and quirked his right eyebrow. It appeared he was naked. They hadn’t even left him the modest protection of his loincloth. A blanket lay over his legs but he knew that beneath it he was as nude as the day he had been reborn.

“Did Erin assist you in this?” His cheeks heated at that thought.

“No.” Apollyon shook his head and then jerked it towards Veiron. “Take the pills.”

Veiron didn’t trust them or Apollyon, but he did as instructed, tossing the two pills into his mouth and swallowing them. They were hard to get down and stuck in his throat.

“How’s the patient?” Erin’s soft voice drifted through the open end of the shelter and she appeared in view behind Apollyon, carrying a round brown object with a flat top.

“Having difficulty swallowing,” Apollyon said and she frowned up at him.

“I thought I said to give him the pills with liquid?” She clucked her tongue in reprimand and Apollyon’s expression remained unapologetic.

Erin stepped into the shelter and knelt beside Veiron. He grabbed the blanket over his legs, holding it to him so he didn’t accidentally flash her, and then remembered that they had apparently been lovers. That certainly would have entailed her seeing him naked.

A brief image of her riding him flashed across his eyes and fire swept through his blood, shooting it all in one direction. His groin.

Veiron pooled some of the blanket over his crotch so she wouldn’t see the change happening to his body. She didn’t seem to notice. She held the brown round object out to him.

“Drink this,” she said and he took it in one hand, keeping the other firmly over himself, and looked into the hole in the top.

“What is it?” He sniffed. It smelled strange.

“Coconut. They grow on the island. I knocked it off a tree.”

“How?” Veiron lifted it to his lips and drank the liquid. It tasted better than it smelled, and it dislodged the pills that had stuck in his throat.

“With my power. I’m trying to learn how to control it. When I can control it, I’m going to kill my father and then I’m going to kill your boss and this whole stupid game will end.”

Veiron choked on the coconut liquid. Erin quickly took it from him and patted him on the back. Her patting gradually slowed until she was resting her hand on his flesh. His bare flesh. He pulled more covers over his crotch.

“Should I leave you two alone?” Apollyon’s grin was nothing short of salacious. “It seems Veiron would like to refresh some of his memories.”

Erin raised her eyebrows so they disappeared under her fringe. “I don’t get it.”

Apollyon’s blue gaze flicked down to Veiron’s hand and Veiron cursed him for drawing her attention there. Her eyes drifted to the blanket pooled over his lap. They widened. Her cheeks darkened. Her gaze shot to the coconut balanced on her lap.

The dark angel chuckled, turned and walked away, leaving him alone with Erin.

She continued to stare at the coconut. “At least part of you remembers me.”

The stain colouring her cheeks darkened. His face heated too. As a newly reborn angel, he had no knowledge of carnal matters, although if Erin was to be believed, he might know more than he remembered.

His gaze settled on her mouth, his breathing accelerated, and he found himself desiring to lean towards her and capture those soft pink lips with his own. He wanted to kiss her.

He couldn’t. He was here for answers. The truth.

His becoming intimate with her could be exactly what she had planned. She may have lured him here with a false promise of answers so she could work another spell on him, bringing him under her command and turning him against Heaven.

Her eyes shifted to meet his and then dropped to her lap again. The dark circles beneath them were worse now and her skin seemed even paler in the low light.

“Are you unwell?” he said without thinking and she shook her head once and then sighed.

“I’m not sick... I just haven’t slept well since...” Tears lined her lashes and she bit her lower lip. It trembled.

Perhaps not a sickness of body but a sickness of the mind affected her. She was born of the Devil’s seed and he was a being who couldn’t contract illnesses. It would make sense that she was not physically sick.

“Why have you not slept well?” He dipped his head so he could see her face more clearly.

Her eyes darted to his and the pain in them spoke to his soul. “My visions are back... my nightmares. The only time they stay away is when I sleep in your arms and since you... since you... well, they’re worse now. I see terrible things but none of it makes sense. I feel worse if I sleep than I do if I force myself to remain awake.”

An overwhelming desire to smooth his palm across her cheek, lure her into his arms and tell her to sleep bolted through him but he tamped it down. It could be another trick. He stared into her eyes and felt the pain that glimmered there in his heart. It wasn’t a trick. She looked close to collapse now and had seemed so haunted earlier on the beach.

A scared, tired woman.

Not the evil destroyer that Heaven had painted her. Just a frightened and hurt female. She didn’t seem like a threat to him. He felt sorry for her. If she could not sleep, she would continue to weaken, and she would have no hope of surviving an assault by Heaven.

He recalled what she had said.

“You seek to destroy your father?” He studied her face for a reaction to that question. Her eyes locked with his, the softness in them hardening to ice. That look of sheer determination and seething hatred answered his question. “Why?”

“Because he took you from me. He used your death to awaken my powers… and I don’t think it’s because he wants me to be a happy independent woman. He wants those powers, or at least he wants me to use them for him somehow.”

“So you intend to kill the Devil?”

“It sounds ridiculous when you say it like that.” She set the coconut down, picked at the white flesh inside it, and popped a piece into her mouth and chewed it thoughtfully. “Do you think it’s possible to kill the Devil?”

“No.” It wasn’t. Not at all. Killing the Devil would be as easy as killing God. It wasn’t something that could happen. They had fought each other since time immemorial and neither of them had succeeded in destroying the other. Erin stood no chance.

That thought made him want to gather her into his arms, call his wings and wrap them around her. He wanted to tell her to forget her desire for revenge and not get herself killed for his sake. She was insane to think she could defeat them.

Veiron’s head ached again. What was he thinking? She was his enemy, his mission target. He was supposed to take her into custody and up to Heaven, not protect her from his realm and her father’s.

“You thought it was possible once,” she said and he frowned at her. “When I first met you, you were bent on killing the Devil and God because of what they had done to you.”