To read the prologue & chapter 1: click here!

Chapter 2:

~ Present Day ~

     I sat bolt upright and looked around the nearly empty room. The bed moved beside me, and I backpedaled, landing unceremoniously sprawled on the floor as I untangled from the duvet. I cursed under my breath as my body protested. A deep, rumbling moan came from the bed, and I slowly rose to my knees, peering over the side of the bed at the other occupant as I reached for my glasses that sat on the bedside table.

     When I slipped them on, I inspected the body structure. It was too bulky and square to be female, though the last thing I remember was going to see one of my sisters. He was also large enough to make me look small, which wasn’t easy because I was six-three and had more muscle mass than the average male walking the streets. Surprisingly though, he was clothed or at least he was wearing a tight shirt.

     It wasn’t like me to sleep in the same bed as someone and not have sex with them. That was more because I didn’t trust anyone to sleep in bed with me except the five people that I had sex with semi-regularly.

     Maybe we’d only partially undressed…? I couldn’t be sure because his lower body was still covered by the duvet that I’d been tangled in. My fall uncovered his torso, but the duvet was tucked between his muscular legs, and I couldn’t see anything else through my bleary eyes. When I thought he’d drifted back to sleep, I heaved a sigh and sat back on my calves as I pushed my hip length crimson curls over my shoulders.

     “Annie, did you fall out of bed?” a deep, all too familiar voice rumbled. I looked back up as he rolled over, and my eyes went wide. No, I had to be dreaming. It couldn’t be Max.

     Max was my ‘one that got away.’ Last time we were together, he left me a heart wrenching Dear Jane note and vanished. That was twenty years ago and seeing his scarred face still stung. I slowly stood, using the nightstand for support, and cleared my throat.

     “Yes, I did… Now explain to me what you are doing in my bed,” I said. He lifted his head slowly, eyes, searching me as if I had a brain injury. I stared at his Chartreuse eyes which were halfway between the green of his father’s eyes and the orange of his mother’s, both of whom I knew and spoke with recently, but they didn’t know he was alive. He tilted his head, staring at me from under thick blonde lashes as strands of his shoulder length blonde hair fell free from a sleep tossed bun.

     “Did you hit your head when you fell off the bed?” he asked, as I combed my hands through my curls and cringed. My head was a bit sore. “Annie, you look pale… I mean, paler than normal, and a bit green. Come back to bed, and I’ll rub your back.”

     I looked at my face in the mirror on the back of the door to check. He was right. I was ghostly white save for my many freckles and the green tinge. My stomach did feel a bit off… He pulled his shirt up over his head and my mouth watered as my eyes slid to his reflection before something glinted in the light.

     I whipped my head around and stared at the hoop in his left nipple. That wasn’t there the last time I saw him shirtless. What was my mind trying to tell me? Was this a vision?

     “Annie,” he said, throwing back the covers to come to me. He was nude now, and when I saw his already hard *redacted*, I backed up, ignoring the primal part of me that begged me to F*** him. I wanted him, craved him, but he wasn’t mine anymore.

     “What harm can sex in a dream do?” My subconscious reasoned with me, but it didn’t sound quite right. I took a trepidatious step toward him, and he held out one hand beckoning me to join him.

     I was suddenly on his lap, naked and ready for him. That wasn’t normal even for my sex dreams. It was like I’d lost time, but I was too wrapped up in Max to think about it. I always got this way around him. I rocked my hips, stroking him with my dripping wet *redacted*.

     “You don’t have to worry. Here, we can be together forever,” he purred before capturing my lips with his, but his kiss tasted wrong. This wasn’t Max, and it certainly wasn’t a dream of my own making.

     I shoved him down to the bed and teleported across the room, glaring at the imposter. There was only one Angel that could crawl inside my head and manipulate my dreams without my permission while I was in one of my warded apartments.

     “Morpheus, by the nine realms! I’ve told you not to mess with my dreams, especially not parading as my old flame,” I shouted. I was ejected from that dream into reality, or what I hoped was reality. When someone messed with my head, I could never know for sure.

     I sat up, chest heaving, and looked around the room. It was the living room in one of my twenty-four apartments. It was days like this that I wished I had decorated each one differently, but I had an eclectic aesthetic, and it took so long to pick everything out that it was easier to order multiple of the same thing than spend the time to pick out new pieces for each apartment.

     I shoved that thought aside and focused on the facts: I’d fallen asleep on the pull-out bed of the sofa. Sure, it was comfy, but it wasn’t as comfy as the memory foam mattress in the bedroom. My body told me that as I looked down at my fluffy robe. I usually slept in the nude unless I was too tired or had company. What happened last night?

     “You’re a kill joy,” Morpheus called from the kitchenette behind the couch. I growled, threw off the duvet, and stood, tossing it to the bowl-shaped chair in the corner.

     “I told you not to do that,” I growled. I looked at the square Angelic brand smartwatch on my wrist and groaned. It was barely seven a.m. I combed my fingers through my curls and secured the robe before I turned around. I glared at the tall, dark-skinned angel with white, blonde hair who reminded me of his son and our sister, Aeronwen’s soulmate Bríon who’d died over seven thousand years ago.

     “I’m sorry, but your sex dreams are far too tempting to ignore… I couldn’t help fueling it,” he half whined, half purred as he sat back. I stopped in the archway where I was close enough to see him without my glasses. He was nude, and fully *redacted*. He wasn’t just in my dreams; he’d been using them as his own personal *redacted*… again.

     “Morph, how many times do we have to have this conversation?” I asked, and he smirked making things low in my body tighten.

     “Just once more, Dis,”  he said, using the nickname he always did when I shortened his name. I tossed my red, white, and electric blue hair over my shoulders and put on my best seductive smirk. Morpheus was one of the five preters I had sex with, and this was the norm for him. He was drawn to some pheromone or other that I let off in my dreams. I still didn’t quite know how that worked, but I shoved it aside too, pulling the tie to my robe.

     “If you want someone naked and riding you, all you have to do is ask,” I said, dropping the robe. His eyes bugged and slid from my face to my *redacted*. It was the only thing I enjoyed about them being so large. Men and women alike would stare at them and miss little details, like a gun at my side or a knife disguised as a necklace in my cleavage.

     “You’re serious?” he asked, *redacted* twitching. Something about that seemed wrong, but at this point, I was too horny to care. I caressed down the center of my torso over the black widow spider tattoo on my ribs toward the tribal design around my belly button as I stepped into the kitchen and offered my best seductive smirk.

     “Why would I tease? I’m sexually frustrated, aroused, and need release,” I said, sashaying to him. I set my hand on his bare shoulder, and he slowly looked up my body to my face. The lust was clear in his sky-blue eyes, but there was something else too, something that tasted like sweets and fine nectar on my tongue. That wasn’t like him, but I wanted to taste it.

     “You’re not teasing me,” he said as if in a trance. I shook my head as I straddled him and the chair. His breath caught as I captured his lips with mine. Our powers danced as I ate at his mouth draining his energy to make up for my lack of sleep. When I pulled back, he gasped a well meant, “F***—”

     “Soon,” I purred. I lowered myself onto his lap, rocking my hips over his, coating his *redacted* with my dripping *redacted*. On the fifth stroke, I took his *redacted* deep into my body without pausing my rhythm and he inhaled sharply. I grinned as more energy poured into me, my skin warmed, and power burned in my chest. “This is what you wanted… Right, Morpheus?”

     He nodded, not catching that I knew he wasn’t the Angel of Dreams. I just didn’t know who he was yet. His power tasted and felt familiar, but it was too tainted to tell me who it was. He wrapped his arms around me and latched onto my left *redacted*. I moaned at the ceiling as patches of purple scales slid out onto my skin. I threw my head back and rode him faster, harder, release so close that my entire body burned with it.

     He flicked my *redacted*with his tongue and sucked it between his teeth, sending me over the edge. My fingernails grew to claws, and I dug them into his shoulders as scales covered my hands. He pulled back, taking my *redacted* with him until it was pulled taught, on the edge of pain.

     He looked up at me, and I gasped as I saw his eye color. They were no longer blue, but the pink-orange fade of sunsets and sunrises. My fight or flight instinct snapped me out of the afterglow of orgasm as I remembered Lucifer’s phone call yesterday afternoon. This wasn’t Morpheus; This was Ornias, the Fomœræ I’d run from in the first dream, and I had just f- him… again.

Chapter 3

      “Ornias, let go of me,” I demanded. He did, but the pain and anger in his face said that was the last thing he wanted to do. I hadn’t given him a choice. I used his Angelic name, so he couldn’t refuse. It was a fail safe for Angels on the edge of corrupting but was abused and overused so we’d stopped using our Angelic names until they were all but forgotten. I stood and backed up until I bumped into the counter. I grabbed onto the lip of the sink behind me and stared as he shifted into his true form.

      Gone was the dark skin and white hair of the Angel I’d willingly bed. In his place was the olive-skinned Fomœræ with long, luscious black curls and a manscaped beard that was downy soft. This was my soulmate. The one I’d been running from for so long… Would it be so wrong to give in to him?

      I shoved that last thought away as he stood, his *redacted* soaked in my juices. It was still hard and throbbing. By the looks of it, he’d been mere seconds from true release. Thank the Maker I had noticed in time. I did not need a third child from his loins.

      The first was an unforeseen blessing that helped me escape him, the second was a mistake when I got black out drunk the night after Max left me the first time, about twenty-six years ago. Ornias always seemed to find me at my most vulnerable. It was the reason I no longer drank myself into oblivion.

      Again, I tried to remember what happened last night. I’d come to see Ronnie and Lucifer. To help them find him and make him pay for what he’d done to Ronnie’s daughter, Badb.

      “You certainly seem to have missed me, Esca Fraskæ[1],” he said, closing the distance between us. That was his favorite nickname for me and once, I’d enjoyed it, but now… Anger burned like fire in my chest. The Majora’s Mask tattoo on my sternum glowed as if someone held a flashlight to my skin. His eyes drifted to it, and he froze a step away.

      I had to hand it to him, he’d gotten smarter over the years. Not too long ago, he would’ve closed the gap, and let me attack him. I narrowed my eyes and let my Angelic scales slide out from under my skin again, covering me from head to now clawed foot as I grew to my seven-foot-five form, towering over him. 

      “Don’t even think about taking that step. I don’t care what we were just doing. You manipulated me, lied to me, and essentially *redacted* me. Just like every other f***ing time you’ve caught me, plus you nearly killed Badb yesterday,” I growled through my dragon’s mussel. The sheer force of my voice sent him flying backward.

      He knocked the table over, and gracefully turned it into a backwards roll, landing on his feet crouched, arms up to guard himself, and a shield of kinetic energy rose between us for good measure. He opened his mouth to speak and defend himself, but I heard his thoughts before he could take a breath.

      “We’re soulmates, Aesh. I will always be drawn to you.” I shoved him against the wall with a burst of telekinesis as my eyes glowed enough to throw red, blue, and white light around the room in front of me. I pinned him to the wall and glared into his eyes.

      “We may have been soulmates, but we are not a couple. We were joined to keep you from corrupting, but that didn’t work. Instead, you manipulated me into thinking that you were on the straight and narrow. I had to find out from one of the girls you were w***ing around with that you were sleeping with that Scubaid[2]. Even then I didn’t believe it, but then I saw you together and you helped her take me.”

      Tears burned my eyes and choked the rest. I’d been hunting the Scubaid for thousands of years after finding out that she was no longer an Angeles[3]. I shoved that aside and blinked back the tears.

      “I don’t want to ever see your face again; you sack of Dragon shit. Get out of my house and if I see you again, come death or insanity, I will gut you!”

      I teleported him from my kitchen to the Himalayas and dropped his naked ass in the snow. That would cool him down.

      How had he even gotten inside? I warded all my apartments against that Nev’ca Ak'Nævêh[4]. I shifted back to my mortal form, summoned my glasses to my face, and stepped to the door. I inspected the jamb for the runes and symbols that were nearly invisible to anyone who didn’t know where to look. They’d been smudged. Someone had been in my apartment.

      I touched the mark and saw two hazy figures, but the more I tried to see, the less I saw. Even without the wards, the apartment was always locked and the only people with a key were family. They’d have known not to touch the ward or to redraw it if they smudged it this badly.

      It was probably me, coming in late last night. I usually double checked it before I went to sleep. Had I brought someone home with me or were the intruders already gone? I summoned the plush robe to my body and tied it tight at my natural waist emphasizing my hourglass shape before I stalked to the bedroom. The door was shut, and I paused with my fist up to knock. I tried for a solid ten minutes to retrace my steps, but I couldn’t think. Had I met Ronnie last night or not?

      I came to New Orleans to find Jack, and because of Ronnie’s call… Jack was the main priority though. He was my current problematic middle child, even though he was the oldest one alive. Neither of his brothers had heard from him in weeks, and he was constantly bothering one of them.

      Nicholas, Ornias’ son and the second oldest, said that Jack’s last known location was in the south-eastern United States. I knew he was here, but his brothers didn’t know that he had a sort of home base in New Orleans. What had I done last night that I couldn’t remember if I met with Ronnie or not?

      I looked at my smart watch and sighed. I was in the right time zone, and one thing was clear about the individual I brought home: They were a sound sleeper, which eliminated my youngest son, Xedrix who slept like his father and woke at the drop of a feather. I set my hand to the doorknob and took a deep breath, readying the speech I kept for random preters I accidentally brought home who’d been too drunk to sleep with.

      “You don’t have to stand at the door, Kita[5],” A sultry, alto voice called from the other side. I paused at the word for sister in Demoki, the Angelic Language, and blinked a couple times. Was that Ronnie or were my ears playing tricks on me?

      I twisted the knob and pushed it open. Sprawled across my bed like a goddess on a fainting couch was my sister, Aeronwen, aka Ronnie. Her nearly silver skin shimmered where the sunlight from the French doors touched it. Her regal, oval face held almost feline features with large eyes, wider than average lips, and high cheekbones. 

      “Judging by the look on your face, you don’t remember going out for drinks last night,” she said, her purring voice stirring things low in my body as it usually did which brought with it memories of sex with her. “After I touched up your tattoo, we got a bit too noisy for the Emporium, so you teleported us here because we needed privacy, and my house is a bit crowded since Matt, Odin, and now Lucifer are staying there.

      “After some mind-blowing sex, thank you for that by the way, we went to the pub around the corner for dinner and drinks, and I got plastered. You insisted that I stay in your bed because it was closer to the bathroom, should I need to vomit,” she explained in detail. As she said it, the night returned in flashes.

      I walked into the room and sat on the bed beside her deathly pale body as I cursed myself. One of the reasons I came here was to hunt Ornias, whom I just sent to the Himalayas because I couldn’t deal with him right now. I should’ve flayed him for nearly killing my niece, and Ronnie’s eldest daughter. I flopped back and groaned a sigh as she combed out the length of her silver hair, that was streaked with orange. I smiled, glad that she’d decided to keep the highlights that one of her poly partners suggested. They looked amazing and brought out her eyes. I shoved that aside and sighed.

      “No, I didn’t remember… Until you said it. Did I tell you why I was coming to New Orleans in a couple weeks?” I asked, praying that I hadn’t mentioned Jack or Nick. A smirk pulled her dark lips up on the left, and she started combing her long, delicate fingers through my curls.

      “You were coming to get your chest piece touched up,” she said, moving her hand to trace the heart shape of Majora’s Mask from the Legend of Zelda Game of the same name. It was the center of the tattoo over my sternum that was a tribute to the franchise as a whole with Master Sword, Fairies, and a banner that read “what good are weapons without the courage to use them.” She looked up into my eyes and her aura burned with curiosity. “But you didn’t mention any other reason. I figured it had something to do with the murders since that’s why Matt is in town still.” My stomach turned to lead at the thought of murders when I didn’t know where one of my sons was. I looked up into her pumpkin orange eyes and her fingers stopped on the body of the spider on my ribs. “You hadn’t heard about the murders—”

      “No, I haven’t the foggiest. I’m here looking after a friend,” I half-lied. Her nose scrunched as if she smelled the lie, but she didn’t ask. She had her own secrets, and we mutually refused to pry. That was one reason we still had a decent relationship.

      “You might want to check with Lou. I have a feeling your friend got caught up in his investigation,” she said. I sighed and glared at the ceiling.

      “It’s something he would do. He has the same Darwinian lack of self-preservation as his father,” I muttered. She chuckled, and I slid my eyes to hers again as she sat up. “Devil may care runs in his family.”

      “With you as his friend, I’d agree,” she said, assuming he was one of my lovers and not my son. I didn’t correct her, but I worked hard to hide a shudder of disgust. None of my Angelic siblings knew that I had a child, let alone four boys that were all old enough to have families of their own, though only three were still among the living. I shoved the thoughts of my eldest down before the wounds could reopen and turned to her.

      “You’re right about that,” I said, sitting up and sighing. “Are you going to make me see Lou before telling me about the case?”

      “It’s an ongoing investigation…” she began, but trailed off as I raised my eyebrows and relaxed my eyes. “But as I’m not an Agent of the Preternatural and Mythical Creatures Agency, I’m not bound by their rules—”

      “Spit it out, Ron. I need to know what to wear,” I said. I stood and stepped to the bifold closet doors. I pulled them open and looked at the clothing that was made up of mostly leather and lace with a few denim and cotton pieces sprinkled in.

      Unlike my apartments, which were decorated the exact same, my closet was enchanted for lack of a better term. When I opened the closet door at any of my twenty-four apartments or my two houses, it was the same closet, and the others would appear empty. Ronnie sighed and slid to the side of the bed.

      “The MO is similar to Uriel’s near the end of his reign, but nowhere near as dignified. Someone is trying to call attention to themselves in the worst way possible,” Ronnie said as I flipped through the slinky dresses moving toward the tank tops. “They’re sporadic, unplanned, and the only thing that connects them is a calling card.”

      I turned with a pair of leather pants in one hand and a black tank top in the other. On the top were skeletal hands flipping the bird with the words “No Bra Club” between the raised fingers and scooped neckline. She looked at the shirt, then at my chest and shrugged. She didn’t say anything. She simply waited to see if I was paying attention.

[1] Demoki: Sweet flower

[2] Irish: n. Vulgar, Bitch.

[3] Demoki: A pure Angel

[4] Demoki: Fucking Attacker, Abuser, Rapist.

[5] Demoki: Sister

Thank you fore reading! If you liked it leave a comment and let me know!