Angelic Hearts (The Angel's Guardians Book 1) by Callie Stone

Author:Callie Stone [Stone, Callie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

A Taste of Paradise

Natasha

It was dark, and then I opened my eyes.

“It won’t be daylight that soon,” I heard a voice carry through the pines around me. It was a safe, friendly voice, maybe Troy’s, and things felt so strangely calm.

Like none of it had actually happened.

“We have enough time to shelter; I’m not worried about that.”

Hearing Alexander’s reassuring, sonorous commentary only reinforced the disconnect as we wandered calmly through the increasingly thick forest.

There was evidence that it had all happened, namely the security, warmth, and speed of the rental car being replaced by the open, frigid air of some alpine forest. But, for lack of a better way to describe it, I had never felt so calm, so at ease, so centered.

“It can’t start snowing now,” Michael complained.

And yes, there were a few large, fluffy snowflakes fluttering among the pine branches above us. I couldn’t tell if it was fresh snow falling or the leftover remnants of some past storm blown down from the frigid heights of the Alps, but the message to me was clear: the danger was still with me, still with us, and it did not care how centered or calm I felt.

“Is it getting lighter?” Craning my neck, I took in what seemed to be an increase of starlight or moonlight making its way through the needles and branches of the forest.

“That’s...impossible,” managed Kieran, sounding sure despite his hesitation.

Though it had the distinctly muted, narrow qualities of natural nighttime light, there was more of it.

And fewer trees.

“We better not be leaving the forest,” I heard myself mumble, my eyes fixed on the sky.

“We are, in a way.”

It was still so strange to hear Michael’s voice without a hint of detachment or irony, but it was crystal clear when he was dead serious.

“This used to be a town or something.”

Finally, I let my head fall from its skyward position and saw what should have been obvious to me minutes earlier. It was a clearing of sorts, a large, rectangular treeless area less than a square kilometer. There was the effluvia of decades of neglect: rotted tree stumps dotted here and there, fallen branches from endless years of wind, browning pine needles scattered about, and several ghostly, forsaken buildings, whose structural damage divulged years of solitary decay.

“There hasn’t been a soul here in years, decades even...” Listening to my own statement of the obvious, it still sounded like a sad story, as if these structures had feelings and their abandonment had left them with emotional scars carried within their bricks and their wooden frames.

“Perfect.” As was becoming usual, Alexander’s was the voice of pragmatism.

He was the reason we had to hide from the daylight after all, so it made sense for him to be focused on the practicality of whatever plans we hobbled together.

Alexander had come to walk by my side, keeping apace with me. He craned his neck to an inhuman position and adjusted his posture so he could gain a better vantage point of the handful of small, dilapidated buildings in front of us.

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