I’m so excited! For almost the entire month of
October, Carina Press is having a HUGE sale on lots of their PNR titles, and
guess what? NOBODY’S ANGEL is one of them! *happy dance* For just ninety-nine
pennies, you can have the novella that kicked off the idea of creating the 4
major archetypes in the paranormal world—the superhero (NOBODY’S ANGEL), the
warrior (SAVAGE ANGEL, and a woman!!!), lost powers (WOUNDED ANGEL), and the
reluctant hero (DANGEROUS ANGEL).
All four stories have their own story arcs in
addition to a story line that ties them together, and all four books have their
HEA (since I’m not a big fan of cliffhangers, heh).
If that doesn’t intrigue you enough, how about a
sampling of NOBODY’S ANGEL? Here’s the opening chapter for you to enjoy. :)
*****
Chapter One
“I
can’t believe it…”
“There was so much blood.”
“What happened?”
Fragments of conversation hit
Kendall Glynn from all sides, but the words were no more than an irrelevant
buzzing in her brain. She was just as oblivious to the emergency vehicles
scattered outside San Francisco’s top-rated KPOW TV station. Some of her
colleagues were crying, while others spoke to police. The sea of people behind
the yellow crime-scene tape all looked the same—eager spectators hoping for a
glimpse of more blood, more madness.
She’d had enough of both to last
a lifetime.
“Miss? Have you been treated?”
Kendall’s zombielike shuffling
halted at the deep melodic voice close to her, and she turned to discover an
EMT had appeared at her side. For a long moment she stared at him while his
words slipped across the frozen surface of her mind without leaving a mark.
“I’m not hurt.” Her voice came
from far off, unrecognizable and rough around the edges. Which made sense. The
last time she’d used it had been to scream.
And scream.
And scream.
“You might not be hurt, but you
are in shock.” Somehow she was moving again, heading for the back of an empty
ambulance. It wasn’t until he helped her into it that she realized he’d pulled
her along like a lost two-year-old. “I’m going to check you out, okay?”
“This blood, it’s not mine.” Amazing,
how calm she sounded.
“I understand.” After settling
her on the side of a gurney, the paramedic lifted her chin with a gloved hand
and flashed a penlight across her eyes. “You’ve got lovely eyes, just like
emeralds. Do you have a name?”
“Kendall Glynn.”
“My name is Zeke Reece. I’m going
to take your vitals now, okay, Kendall?”
“I’m not hurt.” He had to
understand she wasn’t the one who needed his attention. “The others, Dave
Beamer and Jane Walters, they’re the ones who...” Oh, God.
“They’re being taken care of.” A
blood-pressure cuff slipped over her arm. Began to squeeze. “You were close to
them when it went down, right? Can you tell me what happened?”
“I don’t know.” Confused, she
shook her head. “One second Dave was doing his job—smiling into the camera and
reading the copy I wrote about a couple of murder-suicides. It was my first
lead story.”
“Congratulations.”
“Maybe he didn’t like how I wrote
it.” She couldn’t seem to stop shaking her head. “The next thing I knew, Dave
was choking our anchorwoman so hard I thought he’d snapped her neck, before he
took his pen and…”
“Easy.” Zeke moved to sit beside
her and pushed her head between her knees. “You’re not allowed to go that
white, Kendall. Makes me think you’re going to faint.”
“I don’t know what happened,” she
said again, closing her eyes and willing the queasiness to pass. “Everyone was
screaming. It wasn’t until I got close to Dave that I realized he was yelling
the loudest. It’s like he was possessed, jamming his pen into his own neck
while he screamed for someone to stop him. I jumped on top of him, but…” She
gulped in air until the ringing in her ears went away. “I think he’s dead. I
think Dave is dead.” She trembled on the verge of admitting she’d seen the
essence of Dave’s life drain away, just as she’d witnessed her grandfather’s
life essence drift from his body in the hospital when she was a child. She’d
told her mother about it, and had been reprimanded for letting her imagination
run away with her like crazy Aunt Maggie, a woman who read palms and talked to
spirits for a living. But deep down Kendall had always suspected what she’d
seen that day was real, and Aunt Maggie probably wasn’t as crazy as her family claimed.
After tonight, though, she
couldn’t help but think she might not be standing as securely on the stable
ground of sanity as she’d once believed.
“I’m sorry to say you’re right.” The
EMT’s deep voice brought her back with a jolt. “Dave Beamer didn’t make it. Jane,
though, is still alive. That’s something.”
Kendall let out a shuddering
breath as the nausea passed. “I’m fine now.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.” But
he let her straighten up, his hand on her back. It felt sturdy and warm, but if
this was what it took to get a hot guy to sit next to her, she was all in favor
of eternal spinsterhood.
Lord. How awful she must be,
thinking that at a time like this.
“Your color sucks.” With that
professional assessment, he reached into a duffel bag and fished out a flask. “Let’s
try some non-regulation emergency medicine packed just for such an occasion. Do
you have any allergies to seventy-five-year-old brandy?”
“I have no idea.”
“No time like the present to find
out.” With that, he tipped the flask into her mouth. Fiery liquid scalded her
throat, but the sting brought the world back into sharp focus. “Better?”
“Maybe.” She gasped after downing
what felt like half the flask. That had to be what it felt like to chug jet
fuel. “I think I can now breathe fire.”
“Sounds like a cool super power
to have.”
Kendall half-laughed, then was
shocked she was capable of such a thing. “Did they teach you that technique in
EMT school?”
“Nah, Boy Scouts. Always be
prepared.”
Kendall trembled on the verge of
laughing again and glanced at the man seated beside her. She must be in some
serious kind of shock, was all she could think. That was the only way she could
explain overlooking a square-jawed, raven-haired behemoth of a man with the
most mesmerizing golden-brown eyes she’d ever seen. His chin was shadowed with
a cleft at the point, and the arch of his brows had an elegant curve that made
her fingers itch to trace them. She almost lifted a hand to follow through with
the urge, and had to look away to stop herself from getting touchy-feely with a
complete stranger.
“Your color’s coming back.” To
her surprise he indulged in some face-touching of his own, laying the back of
his gloved hand against her cheek. “Nice and warm. Brandy does have its
medicinal merits, doesn’t it?”
“I think I’m going to make it.”
“I never had a doubt.” Tucking
the flask back in the duffel bag, he pulled out a packet of wet wipes. “Once
you get some of that blood off you, you’ll feel even better. May I?”
“Oh. Uh, I can do it—”
“Yeah, but I can see it.” Clearly
not a man who took no for an answer, he began to massage her face with the cold
wipe. “No one else is as covered as you, did you know that?”
“I’m not sure I want to know
that.”
“Seems to me you were the only
one who dived into the fray.”
“Oh?” Kendall frowned, oddly
distracted by his touch. “Does that make me weird?”
“Depends. Were you and Dave
Beamer close?”
“I’m not close to anyone here,
yet. I’m a transfer from a small-market radio station in Half Moon Bay.” She
leaned into his hand without thinking, almost nuzzling him. “I’ve only been at
KPOW for three months, working as a researcher and assistant editor.”
“So you didn’t know him?”
“I didn’t say that. Dave was the
first real friend I’ve made here, and he was the one who gave me a shot at the
lead story tonight. He wasn’t threatened by me, my ambitions are in
investigative journalism rather than anchoring. We hit it off right away, so
much so that I’m comfortable in saying that wasn’t Dave tonight. It just wasn’t
him.”
“Did he look different?”
“Since he’s never stabbed a ballpoint
pen into his jugular before, I’d have to say yes.” Fearful she might puke at
any moment, Kendall focused on his soothing ministrations. “There was a light
in his eyes.”
“A light?”
“Light isn’t the right word. More
like a veil. Like cataracts.” This man had some serious magic in his hands. In
an alternate universe—a universe where he wasn’t wiping a dead man’s blood off
her face—she would have done just about anything to keep him touching her.
“What color was it?”
Her closing eyes snapped open. “What?”
“That veil must have had some
color. White or red, perhaps.” He continued to wipe at her cheeks, before
sliding down to her neck. “Maybe you didn’t see anything.”
“It was white.” She arched her
neck as luxurious warmth spilled from where his gloved hand lingered over her
pulse point. “Milky white. Guess that sounds kind of crazy, huh?”
“Witnessing death puts a
tremendous amount of pressure on people—violent death even more so. Who knows
what really went down tonight? There we go.” He balled up the wipe and tossed
it before he crooked a finger under her chin. “Feel better?”
“Um.” His heavy-lidded eyes were
soulful, looking into hers as if she were all he could see, and her nerves beneath
his fingers tingled as though from a lover’s caress. How appalling. A colleague
killed himself right in front of her, and here she was getting overheated by a
calendar-worthy first responder. “Yes, thanks. I should be able to drive home
now,” she added, nodding toward her car not too far from where the ambulance was
parked.
“Yeah. No.” He moved to hop out
of the back before offering her a hand. “You’re getting a ride home.”
“Oh, please don’t bother—”
“If you don’t agree, I’ll follow
you in the ambulance, lights on and siren blaring. At least then everyone would
know to stay away from a potential hazard on the road.”
Something in his eyes convinced
Kendall he wasn’t kidding. In the end, she followed along in his wake when
docility wasn’t part of her nature. Her brain spun its wheels in an effort to
think of a way to keep him by her side a few minutes longer, the need to simply
be with him inexplicably powerful. But all she could do was thank him when he
handed her off to a police officer, who did some hot and heavy ogling of her
own when he walked away.
“With paramedics like that, I’d
be willing to suffer a little emergency every now and again,” the woman
muttered, eyes trained on Zeke’s firm backside.
Despite being in wholehearted
agreement with her, Kendall gave her a sharp look. “I’d say one dead anchorman
qualifies as more than a little emergency.”
The other woman arched her brows.
“Both victims were breathing, last I heard.”
As the affronted cop led her to a
patrol car, Kendall frowned. Obviously her shock-benumbed brain conjured up the
impossible image of Dave’s spirit drifting vaporlike from his body; that made
total sense. But why had Zeke sounded so sure Dave Beamer was dead? As they
drove off, she searched the triage area for the paramedic with soulful eyes and
gentle hands, and suffered an almost mournful pang when he was nowhere to be
found.
“…the date for memorial services
for David Beamer, San Francisco’s favorite news anchor, has yet to be
determined, as the police investigation into this incident is ongoing. . . Co-anchor
Jane Walters was taken to St. Francis Hospital—”
“Excuse me, would you mind
turning that down, please?” Kendall met the cabbie’s eyes in the rearview
mirror. “I’m sorry, I have a terrible headache.”
The volume decreased to where
Kendall could block out the words, but she wasn’t nearly as successful at
blocking out the memories. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the gruesome
scene flashing before her. The screaming, the blood, the madness.
If it were possible, she’d never
close her eyes again.
That, of course, made for a
sleepless night. With nothing better to do, she decided to pick up her car left
at the station. Who cared that it was two in the morning? If she was going to
go for the sans-sleeping way of life, nocturnal errand running was something
she might as well get used to.
At least the rubberneckers had
left, Kendall noticed as she paid the cabbie and made her way to her trusty hybrid
still in KPOW’s parking lot. It was a mystery why they’d shown up in the first
place. The horror show they’d wanted to see had already played itself out on
live television. Heaven only knew what else they’d been expecting to happen.
The hell of it was, none of it
made sense. Kendall’s mouth flattened as she found herself turning her car
toward St. Francis instead of home. Dave’s behavior hadn’t given any hint that
he was about to go postal in front of a half-million shocked viewers. He’d been
fine, reading her copy, and she’d been listening to every word. Her
words, her story that she’d dug up a mere hour before they’d gone on air, with a
gut feeling that this was an important story churning away inside her. Everything
had been going beautifully, with Dave reading about the two murder-suicides
like the professional he was. Then, in a blink of an eye, he began screaming as
he turned into Freddy Krueger.
Not exactly how she’d imagined
launching her first lead story.
There was a veritable forest of
satellite antennas stabbing up from a fleet of news trucks around St. Francis
Hospital, including a couple from her own station. Eager to avoid anyone she
knew, Kendall drove to the back and parked beside an empty ambulance bay, only
to freeze at the sound of a voice just as she shut the car door.
“You can’t park here.”
Guiltily she started and looked
around. Under a porte-cochère and
illuminated by harsh sodium lights, she spotted a gray-haired, scrub-clad man
leaning against a wall by the automatic sliding glass doors. Clearly on a
cigarette break, he looked at her as though she were something that had crawled
out of a sewer.
She waved a vague hand toward the
front. “I’m trying to avoid the news crews. Is there somewhere I can get in
without being seen?”
“Why? You famous?”
“No, I…” She shrugged a little
helplessly. “I write copy for KPOW TV News. I was the one who tackled Dave
Beamer.”
“Oh yeah. Thought you looked
familiar. Your wrestling match with that anchor guy is all over TV.” The man
flicked his cigarette away and wandered toward her, a bluish-white haze of
smoke swirling around him. “You here to get a scoop, or are you injured from
tackling a crazy-ass guy twice your size?”
“Neither.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
Good question. “I want to
know why my friend is dead. Whether it was a dose of bad drugs, or a brain aneurysm,
or a hitherto-unknown funky allergic reaction to shellfish, I want to know why.
Whatever the answer is, I’m not going to be able to rest until I find it.”
“The only answer I can give you
is that you’re not allowed to park here. We’ve got emergency vehicles coming in
and out of…” The man stopped and craned his neck far to the left, as if he had
a bad crick in it.
She frowned. “Are you okay?”
There was no warning. A muffled
grunt escaped him as he lunged at her, hands outstretched. And his eyes…
His eyes were white.
A scream ripped from her
already-abused throat, only to be abruptly choked off as his powerful fingers
closed around her neck like a living vise.
This can’t be happening, this
can’t be—
Her sneakered feet left the
concrete with the force of the impact. If her airway had been open, the breath
would have been knocked out of her as she landed flat on her back, with the man
landing hard on top of her. The back of her head smacked the pavement hard
enough for her to see stars shoot across a darkening expanse. By the time her
vision cleared, her assailant was looking down at her with a contorted face,
his eyes milky white.
Oh no…
Wildly Kendall clawed at the
fingers squeezing her neck so hard she felt bone grind against bone. An
alarming buzz droned in her ears, while her eyes pulsed with the pressure of
trapped blood, until that throbbing was all she knew and everything else faded…
Another violent impact rocked
her, and it took her a few dazed moments to grasp that she wasn’t the one who
had suffered the hit. Gagging, wheezing, not sure if her throat could even
function after being so viciously abused, she sucked in precious gulps of air
until the world came back into focus. She rolled to a wobbling sitting
position, driven by the instinctive need to find her feet and run. But
what she saw made her freeze in dumbstruck amazement.
The figure looming over her
attacker was shrouded in black. It was as though the harsh artificial light
itself couldn’t penetrate the darkness surrounding the masculine outline
dressed in what looked like a long fitted coat straight out of The Matrix.
His head was also covered in darkness, complete with a black, Zorro-like cloth
that covered not just his head, but the upper half of his face as well.
A mask?
The sight of a masked man was
certainly more than enough to stop anyone dead in their tracks, but then the
seemingly empty black sockets behind the mask’s eyeholes shimmered. Then they glowed.
Then they burned with the ethereal whiteness of pure light, and his hands…
His hands were on fire.
Only it wasn’t like any fire
she’d ever seen. It was a rolling, vaporous flame that matched the white flare of
his eyes. The sight of it, along with his whitely lit eye sockets, was enough
to lock the breath up in her abused throat.
Dear God, I’ve lost my mind.
Her attacker swiveled his head
around so hard Kendall heard the man’s neck pop before he swung at the man in
black, and she had to blink at how his movements smudged together. The newcomer
jumped back, only to unleash a crescent kick the moment he landed, and again
her eyes couldn’t quite see the movement in the stark sodium lighting.
No. Wait.
It wasn’t the lighting. And it
wasn’t the whack she took on the head, or being choked half to death. Though
she knew it was impossible—like everything else she’d seen tonight—the
movements of the two combatants were so fast they were blurring before
her eyes.
The kick tagged her attacker, who
spun with it and took a swipe at her savior’s middle even as an ominous snap of
something in the hospital worker’s body rang out. With one of those
too-fast-to-see-it moves, her savior evaded, spinning low and into her
attacker’s body. Before she could fully register the move, he brought one of
his glowing hands up to the aggressor’s chest, while the light where his eyes
should be intensified until it was like looking into the sun.
“You’ve done enough damage for
one night.” The masked man’s voice rolled forth like a cold wind across a
barren plain; harsh, unforgiving. Inhuman. So terribly inhuman it made her want
to curl up in a tight ball and never come out again. “I’m ripping you out of
there once and for all, you unclean bitch.”
Before her disbelieving eyes, the
vaporous white flame encasing his hand flowed into the man’s chest. The attacker’s
white eyes bulged as though overfilled with the flame, his mouth opening on a
soundless scream before he collapsed as if someone had suddenly pulled his
power cord. A blue-white haze—the same haze she’d thought was a cloud of
smoke—erupted from him and zipped off into the night.
*****
Sound intriguing? Well then, why not one-click NOBODY’S ANGEL? For $0.99, you can’t go
wrong. ;)
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