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He tried again with the other side. “Get off of me!”
At a crackling sound in the distant woods, he snapped to attention, and as he scanned over the forest, he heard the slicing sound from before. He turned just in time to see the wings collapse into him on a violent spasm that had him squeezing his shoulder blades together, as the wings disappeared, as quickly as they’d unfurled. To be sure, he reached back, his fingertips brushing only over the tattered threads of his torn tunic and smooth skin where the odd protrusion of bone had just been. Frowning, he ran his palm over the span of it, palpating flesh that was smooth and lacked any strange deformity.
How?
The crackling sound from before stole his attention again, and he lifted his gaze to find a small doe just beyond the trunk of a thick oak. He hoped that had been the source of the noise from earlier.
Because if anyone had happened to see what had taken place, he would surely be hunted. Aberrations were considered evil in his world.
And, without doubt, there was something very wrong with him.
1
FARRYN
One month ago …
She’s judging me. I know it.
The excessively pregnant woman stared back at me from her bright and perfectly posed world on the face of the magazine that sat out in the doctor’s dreary waiting room. Wearing a lime-green strappy dress and a jubilant smile against a glowing complexion, she was certainly a far cry from my ripped jeans and T-shirt, hair pulled back in an unbrushed ponytail, face-lucky-to-have-been-washed-that-morning look. I hadn’t slept the night before. Or the night before that. Or the week before that. Not since that horrible night nearly two months ago.
I closed my eyes to the flashes of memory slipping behind my eyelids–Jericho on his knees, staring up at me. The look in his eye. The sound of the sword slicing through his wings with ease. The flames. God, the intensity of the heat given off by the hellfire that claimed him. I could feel it then–the scent clogging my throat. He was gone. It seemed impossible that a simple flame could’ve extinguished something so powerful as him, but I’d watched it happen. I’d watched it happen every night in my dreams since then, and I was determined to find a way to bring him back.
Opening my eyes to a shield of tears, I blinked them away for fear someone might ask me what was wrong. After all, how did one explain a story like ours? In my world, Jericho was a myth–an impossibility. I not only carried his child on my own, but the weight of his loss, too.
Sleep was just one of the many normal human functions that I’d been lacking as of late. The dark circles and relentless fatigue had become as much a part of my lifestyle as the chalky nutrition drink I forced myself to guzzle three times a day for the sake of the baby growing inside of me.
Jericho’s baby.
The very thought of him had the rims of my eyes tingling again, and my focus instantly returned to the woman on the magazine. Behind her stood an equally cheerful man, his arms wrapped around her, palms resting against her belly.
Jaw shifting, I sneered and looked away from them and their happy smiles. My world had grown darker. Colder. And unlike the couple on the magazine, or any of the patients in the doctor’s office, I wasn’t incubating a regular human child. It’d be half Sentinel, and what the hell did I know about that?
Frowning, I clutched my stomach, imagining all of the things that I’d have to learn on my own, because not even the doctor to whom I’d come to confirm the pregnancy could offer any insight. He specialized in human babies, after all. My mind was so wound around finding a way to bring Jericho back from Ex Nihilo that I really hadn’t considered much about the pregnancy, at all.
Jericho. Even in the silence of my thoughts his name sent a stab of pain to my heart.
I couldn’t think of him right then.
Desperate for distraction, I looked around the office, catching sight of a painting of what appeared to be a naked woman standing in flames, chains hanging from her hands that were outstretched above her.
What the ever-loving hell?
“Anima sola,” a silver-haired woman said beside me, her thick Spanish accent smothered by the crackled sound ofCrimson & Cloverplaying on the speaker overhead. She appeared to be staring in the same direction as me, confirmed when she nodded toward the painting and said, “The woman in purgatory.”
“What’s her story?”
“She gave up eternal salvation for temporal love.” With a wistful sigh, she tipped her head. “Not the most romantic of endings, yes?”
Sliding my gaze back toward the image, I frowned. “What the hell does that have to do with the gynecologist?”
“Miss Ravenshaw?” another voice interrupted, and I turned toward a slim blonde whose flawlessly made-up face had me agonizing over my dark circles again, as she stood in the doorway leading to the exam rooms. “Please follow me.”
Mind still wracked with uncertainty of the appointment, I pushed up from the leather chair, debating whether, or not, to bolt out the door, or follow after her. A thick stack of paperwork clipped to the board in my lap nearly fell to the floor, but the older woman next to me caught it, and with a smile, handed it to me.
“Thanks.” I offered, avoiding her long, yellow nails as I took the papers from her. Once I reached the nurse, I handed her the clipboard, and she took only a moment to flip through all the documents that had taken me a good thirty minutes to fill out. “Hope I didn’t sign my soul away with all that paper.”
With a mirthless chuckle, she tucked the clipboard under her arm and jerked her head. “This way.”
