Guild Hunter 02 - Angels' Flight

dazing her enough that he’d almost succeeded in shoving her out onto the unforgiving rocks below.
     
    Jessamy was more than two thousand years old, and while not the strongest of her kind, she was in no way weak—the fall wouldn’t have killed her, but it would have shattered her into so many pieces that it wouldȉve taken years, perhaps a decade, for her to recover. In the interim, she’d have lain mute and still as death. Plenty of time for anyone who didn’t wish his plans exposed to bring them to fruition. “You saved me from terrible pain.”
     
    Even as she spoke, she waited for Galen to berate her for having a clifftop residence when she couldn’t fly. How could she explain to him that she had the same soul-piercing hunger for the sky as her brethren, the same need to soar? Her house was as close as she could get to the clouds. However, the expected recrimination didn’t come from this warrior male who’d stroked her with shockingly gentle hands, his voice low and deep against her ear. Instead, he frowned, his attention on her attacker. When he pulled away from the table, she had to bite down on her lower lip to keep from begging him to stay.
     
    The rawness of her need rocked her. She’d been on her own for decades even before she reached the hundred-year mark that constituted adulthood among angelkind. It was highly unusual for an angel to request emancipation as an adolescent, but the constant presence of her mother’s guilt had been a shroud that threatened to suffocate Jessamy. Keir had spoken for her with Caliane—into whose section of the Refuge she had been born, convinced the archangel Jessamy was mature enough to be trusted on her own.
     
    Over the years, her aloneness had become something she’d embraced, as much a part of her as her twisted wing and brown eyes. But today, she wanted nothing more than to be held, to be protected by the big stranger who was currently going through her assailant’s pockets with grim efficiency. She should’ve hopped down from where he’d put her, ordering her to “Stay” like she was a pet or a sack of potatoes, but the truth was, she wasn’t sure her legs would support her.
     
    “What have you found?” she asked when he withdrew something from the vampire’s pocket.
     
    Rising, he walked over to hand her the piece of paper. She opened it, felt her heartbeat shudder. “It’s a time and a place. My house, at this time of day—I often come home to eat something before going to the library to work.” It was in the mornings that she usually taught, though she did sometimes change the lessons to the afternoons, especially when the days grew dark and cold. The children never wanted to wake up.
     
    “So,” Galen said, his shoulder flexing as he put one hand on the table beside her hip, the primal heat of him unfamiliar,but not unwanted, “someone either knew, or watched you long enough to learn your patterns.”
     
    Her eyes lingered on the dead vampire’s body. “What a waste.”
     
    “He made his choice.” With those pitiless words, Galen looked at the body again, at the wall splattered with red congealing to black. “I’ll clean that up, but first, I have to inform Dmitri. We’ll fly to him.”
     
    “No.” She pushed at his shoulders when he went as if to gather her up in his arms.
     
    Galen’s scowl turned the pale green of his eyes into stormy seas. “I won’t drop you.”
     
    “It’s not that.” Her resistance to being flown had its genesis in the agony of a realization she’d had long ago—that each taste of the sky only deepened the bruise of loss. Not evn the best of friends could ever take her flying for as long as she needed. “I don’t fly with anyone.”
     
    “I’m not leaving you here alone.” Deep voice, a wall of unyielding muscle.
     
    “I’ll be fine.” Her eyes skated away from the bloody ruin of the corpse. Fighting the bile burning her throat, she said, “I’ll wait in the front yard.”
     
    Galen snorted, put his hands around her waist, and picked her up so her toes hung above the ground. Grabbing onto his shoulders, the heat of him burning through her palms, she said, “What are you doing?” her voice breathless.
     
    He answered by carrying her out of the kitchen—to her silent thanks—and to the paved courtyard she’d bordered using colorful pots spilling a wild cascade of blooms. Where he finally put her on her feet and glared. “Wait.”
     
    “Stay. Wait,” she muttered