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“So.” Shade kept his senses wide open for Uriel reaching for her power as he took a seat on the battered old leather couch. He barely suppressed a wince as he sat. Combined with his former injuries, the showdown with Uriel had him wishing he could plug into Eddie’s delicious lust again. But she’d probably stab him if he tried, and Uriel would hold him down while she did. “It’s been some time since I last saw you.”
Uriel narrowed her eyes and studied him. “You look awful.”
“Why, thank you very much.” He grinned just to irk her. “You’ll be super concerned to know I feel even worse.”
“What happened?” She perched on the table. “How did Wrath’s horde manage to ambush you?”
Admitting a weakness to another supernatural was a dangerous proposition, but he liked Uriel. Or came as close as he could to liking any archangel. Uriel was all right. She didn’t molt feathers over the insignificant and inconsequential. As his balancing force, she was as near as he had to an ally. “Wrath’s been growing more aggressive.”
Uriel raised an eyebrow.
He understood her skepticism. Wrath had come into being with fury and vengeance pounding through his veins. “His horde have been attacking settlements throughout my demesne. They’ve been growing steadily braver too, and I’ve had to deal with several incursions into my palace.”
“To what end?” Uriel frowned.
“That, my dear Sophia, is what I would like to know.” Their normal wars were one thing, business as usual. “It defies logic even for Wrath.”
She tapped her hand against her thigh. “Not even Wrath is angry enough to end himself to end you.”
“Exactly.” Shade shifted to ease the pain in his ribs. “But he seems determined to end me. If he persists in this vein, it can only result in one of us ending the other.”
“Hmm.” Uriel stood and paced the room, her shoes sloshing through the mess on the floor. “That’s why you breached the hell gate?”
Shade would love to take the easy explanation, but the stakes were too high for lies and half-truths. “To be honest, there wasn’t a lot of thinking about it. I acted on instinct in coming here.”
“Which brings us back to Eddie.” Uriel’s gaze sharpened on him. “She dream walked you?”
“More than once.” So many times that he’d almost become accustomed to her popping into his awareness.
“You know that humans can’t do that,” Uriel said. “Even witches who can summon us cannot dream walk us.”
Shade didn’t dignify that with a response and waited while Uriel reached the same conclusion he had.
Her eyes clouded and she frowned. “You know what that means.”
Shade nodded. Tension coiled into a knot in his belly. They understood each other perfectly. Where they could differ was in how they wanted to handle the truth about Eddie. And Shade was not about to step aside and let Uriel do what the rest of her angelic assholes would demand.
“You haven’t told the others?” Sophia studied him as he shook his head. Then she surprised him by saying, “Good.”
“Good?” They were in dangerous territory here, and he needed to move carefully.
“Yes, good,” Uriel said. “That gives us time to come up with a plan to keep her safe.”
Chapter
Fourteen
How exactly was this her life? Eddie left the two feathered dickheads to it and stormed out of the greenroom. She had shit to do. This theatre didn’t run itself. Snatching up her script for Macbeth, she stomped into the lighting box and fired up the system. Somebody needed to program the lights Dean had set up for this cursed show, unless Tweedledum and Tweedledummer still glaring at each other and looking like they might start on her greenroom again, could go full lightning bug and shine their asses at the stage.
She sent Dee a text to update her. Dee needed to know what she was walking into.
“Edme,” Sophia spoke from the lighting box door. How she’d gotten there so silently, Eddie added to the growing list of shit she didn’t get and didn’t care to.
Eddie grabbed a plot sheet. Peter and Dean wanted to open with a moody, cold atmosphere. For Macbeth. Revolutionary. Not! “I’m busy, Sophia. And unless you’re here to tell me you’re going to pay—”
“Shade and I have repaired the damage we did.”
Okay, well that was good.
