Angel Strikes by Leslie Claire Walker

Author:Leslie Claire Walker [Walker, Leslie Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter 9

MY MAGIC KNIFED INTO Luna before she could raise defenses. The inside of her mind looked nothing like it had before. Gone were the memories of her walk home from her bar shift, of her first encounter with Gabriel. In their place, a hum of distinctly non-human energy, the buzz like a swarm of wasps, stingers at the ready.

The Angel’s wings fluttered inside my chest. His icy magic rose to join mine, chilling my blood and slowing my heart, frosting my skin and hair. We gripped the intruder’s spirit tight, our magical hands wrapped around its throat. It struggled against the hold, but didn’t have the power to break it.

I rifled through its memories, grasping one of its arrival in Portland earlier tonight, the wind and rain wrapping it in loving arms, drawing it to Addie’s yellow two-story house atop a steep yard set with rosemary and lavender to ward against evil. Minor magic, that. Not nearly enough to drive it away.

It climbed the steps and paced the wide porch, its movement gently rocking the creaking wood chairs and frightening away the big black-and-white tomcat who slept on the railing. Holiday lights strung overhead shone bravely against the dark. The sweet scent of life—of cooked meals, perfume, friendship, dreams, tears, and laughter—permeated the air, enticing.

To be alive was the best thing.

The spirit could look through the windows. Study the occupants. But it couldn’t enter. Not with the house spirit guarding the place and the Watchers inside.

The flashing colored lights of the tree in the corner of the dining room hypnotized. A boy slept on the sofa that faced away from the door, but the spirit recognized him from a previous encounter in another time.

The boy didn’t have the juice to hold the spirit. Too bad—the boy’s time magic held endless possibility. The idea of being able to travel back or forward in time, to be able to search for the what it wanted more than anything—but the boy couldn’t hold it. The boy was not the promised vessel. There would be another.

It knew that deep in its magical heart, just as it knew there would be an opening in the protections that wrapped the house and kept it safe and free from intrusion.

To be on the outside looking in—that sliced at an old wound that had scabbed over, but never fully healed. The sleeping boy felt safe enough to let go of his conscious awareness in the company of others. The blankets he slept beneath spoke of the care of others.

That had to be an illusion. It could not exist. If it were real, Pestilence would have experienced it in all of the millennia since creation.

Pestilence’s heart hardened as it looked at the boy, glad of the soul sickness it had imparted.

A spell had been woven into the sickness to stave off its worst effects, at least for a time. Pestilence recognized the serpent’s signature in the magic. Powerful stuff. But not powerful enough to hold the sickness at bay forever.

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