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Perhaps seeing me in this state, he’d think twice about giving one of the other girls to him.
It was a futile hope.
I suspected Paul had taken it out on me because I had the nerve to show up instead of Heidi, so perhaps he dished out additional punishment. Tyson must have realized it had never been this bad before.
Tyson must also have realized this couldn’t continue. I’d be out of the cycle for a while as I healed, and that was money that wasn’t coming to him.
I’d like to think he wouldn’t serve Heidi to Paul on a platter anymore.
Then again, I’d also like to think Tyson might help me, given I couldn’t even move enough to lift my head off my shoulder.
But did he come across the road to get me?
Yeah, right.
Minutes, I think. I believe that’s as long as I lasted. It felt like hours because of the pain, but I’m sure it was only minutes. Nothing stirred in the night—no cars, no foot traffic—only the murmurs of music, chatting from the bar, and the faint moans from the rooms in the hotel behind me.
How the fuck was I going to get home?
My eyes fluttered closed, and the last thing I remembered was someone’s legs in front of me and heavy military boots.
ZAQIEL
I’d seen some terrible things in my time on Earth, but this, I wasn’t prepared for.
I had made a habit of wandering around the city streets at night. It seemed that’s when most people required assistance. My first few days at the other end of the city had been pointless, and it was only through asking around had I realized the people who needed help the most were unlikely to live amongst the high-rises and penthouse apartments or even the suburbs. Although I’m sure there’s always someone around who could use a leg up everywhere I went, they just had different issues there—money and family concerns. But here, there were people who required real help.
This is where I was needed right now.
As a Watcher, I was supposed to simply do that—watch.
But my brothers and sisters and I had decided that was no longer enough. What good does watching do when there’s so much pain and suffering? We could help, even if we only helped in small, indirect ways. If we guided the people, found places for them to go where they could get a head start, feed the hungry and house the cold, and encouraged them to help each other, we could help them.
God won’t solve your problems for you, but he’ll give you the tools to do it yourself.
If that made us angels tools, then so be it. I was happy to be used if it meant helping where it was needed—anything to ease the ache in my heart after watching humanity fall. Surely, helping was better than sitting back and simply watching them.
So here we were, my brothers and sisters and I, stationed at different cities around the world, moving on often, helping where we could.
But it was hard.
People were resistant to help, especially from strangers. They were stubborn and fiercely independent, and on several occasions when I had managed to get people out of a dire situation, they had simply returned to where they were.
I couldn’t help those who didn’t wish to be helped.
It was hard not to get angry at them.
So, walking around at night, I wasn’t prepared to find a woman in such dire straits—slumped against a wall outside a seedy hotel, barely dressed, and beaten to within an inch of her life. Her eyes were swollen shut, and large, angry bruises were forming on her neck and face. What little clothing she had on wasn’t buttoned or zipped up as though she had been hastily dressed. Her arms and legs were covered in a series of small, thin cuts—by a razor, I assume—and unsettling red stains were bleeding through her clothes in several places.
What was worse were the people in the bar across the street. From this distance, even in this lighting, I knew they could see her.
But for whatever reason, they left her there.
It would be a waste of my time to go into that bar and put the fear of God into the people who were doing wrong. By allowing evil to happen, they were no better than the perpetrator. What I needed to do now was find this woman somewhere safe and let her heal.
I knew the people here well enough to know the hospital was out of the question. If I took her there, she’d leave the moment she could walk, and no doubt end up more injured than she is now.
Her eyes fluttered briefly as I stood in front of her, but she was unconscious by the time I scooped her up, ignoring the pained groan that escaped her bloodied lips, even though the sound made my heart ache.
