Samhain Publishing

The road to hell is paved with heavenly desire…

Angelic Avengers, Book 1

Fetch a soul? No problem. Quell a little shape shifter rebellion? She can do that, too. Just an average day in the afterlife of Arabella “Bella” Morrison. Or, what she hopes will become an afterlife after restoring the cosmic imbalance caused by her suicide over a love affair gone bad.

Protect a willful fallen angel? That takes a little more teamwork than she’s accustomed to. Especially when the team includes Gray Devereau, a sexy, half-breed angel who’s got an eye on her—in more ways than one. Their attraction could set fire to Heaven itself. Normally not a problem for Bella, but Gray’s sights are set on something more than a fly-by-night affair.

Save mankind from chaos? Bring it on. Let her heart trust a man enough to love again? It’ll be a cold day in hell…

Copyright © 2009 Kaye Chambers
All rights reserved — a Samhain Publishing, Ltd. publication

The lights and bustle of Atlantic City have always bothered me. Strolling down the sidewalk three streets away from the casino strip, I remembered why. In the daylight, the neighborhoods were shady enough with their testament to the tourist industry marked by pawn shops with bars on the doors and windows. Add in the shadows, and it made a girl wonder about the things that go bump in the night. As if he could read my thoughts, the werewolf I was following threw a very telling glance over his shoulder. I tried to look like a casual tourist, but knew I’d failed when he ducked into the recessed doorway of one of those shops.

Why did they always have to be stupid?

I walked by it as if I didn’t notice and couldn’t care that he was hiding deep in the shadows. At the last second, I sidestepped into the doorway, sliding easily into the opposite corner to face him across more than the dirty sidewalk. I was here to deliver a message I knew he wasn’t going to like.

“Really, Evan—” I sighed and let the pity show in my eyes, “—has it gotten so bad that you think I’m that careless?”

The whites of his eyes showed and he darted a look to the only escape. Bold of him, all things considered. With my heightened senses, I could smell the fear mingled with the alcohol wafting off his skin.

“Please tell me you’re not going to run.”

The words came out with another sigh and in the back of my mind a part of me registered how tired it sounded. I’d been doing this gig for way too long. Pushing the thought away, I straightened to my whole five feet six with a yawn.

“You know I hate to chase. I’m only here to talk, but if you run, I’ll have to chase and we both know where that usually ends up.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

His voice echoed with the slow gravel of the change.

I blinked and narrowed my brown eyes at him even as I flipped the rubber band into my dark hair to hold it back out of my face. It used to be dark brown, but it’d been so long since I’d been around a lot of sun most people thought it black these days. I’d never been a beach bunny. With my current profession, most of my work came at night. It was simply logistics because that’s when most of my charges were likely to wrap themselves into mischief they had no business getting into, like the werewolf standing in front of me.

What in the hell had Gavreel and Gabriel not told me that would have Evan threatening to change because I popped up to talk to him?

Yes, that’s Gabriel as in the Gabriel, my link to the Powers That Be and where I get my assignments. I’m no angel. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to be. I’m the one who does what needs to be done to keep their hands lily white. Of course, it really doesn’t matter for me.

I’m going to Hell. I know it. They know it. My fate is sealed. I took an innocent life. Oh, don’t get all shocked and melodramatic on me, it was mine. Do you have any idea how pissed off the Powers That Be get when you go screwing around with your fate? You’re liable to find yourself on the banks of the Chattahoochee tasting that vile water with Suriel glaring down at you before he starts that pacing and yelling thing he has down pat about cosmic destiny. It’s not a fun feeling, let me tell you.

My punishment for jumping off that bridge? I had been granted the privilege to work off my slight to the cosmic balance by working as a Reaper, as in Grim. I collect souls for a living, with a side of running errands for angels, and riding herd on the population of shifters. It’s not a bad living, all things considered. I could just be dead.

“Now, Evan—” I turned my attention back to the task at hand and called his bluff, if it was a bluff. I didn’t know him well enough to know if I was starting trouble or not,
“—that’s rude. What have I done to you that’d you risk dying right now instead of letting me pat you on the head with your friendly warning and slipping away? It’s not your time yet.”

“Like that would stop you,” he snarled.

I narrowed my eyes at the way his teeth were suddenly pointed. Damn dog really was going to shift on me. I hate it when they do that.

He had a point, though. I was known for bringing in more than one soul ahead of its time, if the situation warranted it. I had this thing about fairness. It didn’t seem fair some people thought that they were above a little basic decency. I knew better than to call it human decency. I rarely dealt with the simple human. Of all the people I did deal with, the human contingent were the least decent of the bunch. Besides, the only time I was ever sent to talk to humans was when I was trying to be all nice and sneaky with the ulterior motive of finding out some nice tidbit of information. I wasn’t very good at it and that was how I’d garnered a reputation for being prone to picking off those big men who thought size and strength gave them the right to pick on women, children, and animals. Guess what? They may be bigger, but I was dead already. They couldn’t hurt me. The good thing about bullies is that they were often too stupid to realize when they’d met their match until it was too late.

“You’re right, I don’t care. But old Pete and Marty get pretty pissed at me when I try to turn in souls early. It screws up the scheme of things or something appropriately divine. What are you so afraid of?”

The last was barely a whisper. I really wasn’t trying to taunt him but his eyes darted back to the opening. I had a heartbeat of warning before he was gone. Cursing, I bounced off the wall a second later, but his enhanced speed put him several yards ahead of me as I ran after him, praying the shadows around us both would be good enough camouflage. Thankfully, the only people who saw us were those close enough to brush against us as we darted down the sidewalk. Luckily, the only people out were the late gamblers and most of them reeked of the alcohol from the casinos. They’d write off what they saw as a side effect of that last drink over the slot machines.

Evan must have realized he wasn’t going to lose me on the street because he darted into an alley with me only steps behind him. I pulled up and matched his glare as it dead-ended. His eyes flashing blue in the dim light was the only warning I had as he threw his head back in a cry and shifted, his clothes ripping from him. As experienced as I was, it was still an impressive sight. His body swelled and changed with a blur of motion. No matter how often I saw it, it still managed to make my breath instinctively catch in my throat. Some instincts are hard to shake, breathing being one of them.

“Come on, Evan.” I drew the enchanted short sword from the sheath sewn into the lining of my coat with a heavy sigh. This wasn’t my favorite part of the job, that’s for sure. “You don’t want to die today any more than I want to kill you. No one saw you like this but me. It’s not too late to fix this.”

I truly didn’t want to kill him. Shifters, as a rule, were incredibly hard to kill. Since I certainly wasn’t big enough to beat him until his body couldn’t heal itself fast enough, the only true way for me to take him out was to take his head. Humans, a Reaper could touch and harvest, but most magical beings had to have a little help to part the corporeal body and the soul.

Mentally, I cursed the turn of events. I was supposed to be the messenger today, not the avenger. I realized with a sinking heart that the Powers That Be probably expected him to run rogue if they were sending me to him as the bearer. It pissed me off, but there was no help for it, now.

It was times like this that I seriously hated my job. For all practical purposes, I’d traded my humanity for a one-way ticket as the lackey of the people who held my parole. Personally, I think I would rather have that nice crematory vault I’d paid for.

The look on his face in the halfman form could only be called regret as he turned toward the brick building. The effort to launch himself into the wall made his grunt echo in the cold night only to be drowned out by the sound of his claws digging into the aging bricks for handholds halfway up the wall. I put my regrets aside as I drew the pistol from its holster at the small of my back and sighted it on him one handed. The silencer held as the body stiffened and fell to the ground. Striding to him, I knelt beside him.

“Talk to me…”

“Finish it,” he whispered. The defeat in his voice only managed to prick my conscience further. I didn’t know him, but the sight of him laying there waiting on me to deliver that killing blow was like a knife in the back. Laws were laws and he’d left me no choice, but the why lingered in my mind. I had to know. Shaking my head, I stepped toward him.

“Not like this.”

Anger flashed in his face as he struggled around his useless legs to get his body under him to kneel.

“Finish it!”

His voice echoed and I glanced for spectators. A drunken homeless man hovered around the mouth of the alley and I realized I’d run out of options. I closed off the part of me that still longed to be human, and brought the sword in the arc to behead him in a clean stroke. I watched his head fly to the side dispassionately and turned to see his body shudder back to the human form. The bullet wound was already half healed. Shifters tended to heal quickly and if that myth about silver bullets were true, my life would have been a lot easier.

With a sigh, I couldn’t help but wonder what could have made death more desirable than talking to my superiors. I stepped back and watched as the soul of the shifter rose out in a fine mist. It hovered expectantly as I held out my hand and recited the ritual words. His face was almost peaceful as he stepped toward me, and then I jerked as our hands touched.

The cold traveled up my arm as I became the vessel for the displaced soul. I shivered and wondered how I would ever get used to being soulless despite the couple of decades or so that I’d been doing this. Putting my weapons away, I stepped over the body without a glance and strolled into the street as if nothing had happened. The authorities would find the body and it would go down as an unsolved homicide. If I’d had time, I would have seen to it, but the feeling of him crawling around in the empty cavern where my soul belonged was too much to deal with. Some souls rest easy and give you a chance to give their bodies dignity. Evan wasn’t one of those souls. He wanted me to leave his body for the front page, so that’s exactly what I did.

Walking out of the mouth of the alley, I strolled down the boardwalk behind the casinos to the beach and called for my ride. The thin line of moonlight bathed the sand of the beach in front of me and I stepped into it without a glance. To anyone who was watching, one minute I was just a woman strolling on the beach and the next, I had disappeared into the shadows. Ever hear of those suicide women in the legends who haunt beaches and leave footprints in the sand that disappear?

I don’t think I was really surprised to see Gavreel standing at the other end of my cosmic train ride with the perpetual frown on his face. Falling in beside him, I shook my head. I’m average. Comfortably average, in fact. I stand five six and can only be grateful my fit of depression that led up to me jumping off that bridge into the Chattahoochee River had cured me of my yo-yo weight issues while I had been on the downside. The best thing about not being alive anymore is no more diets. I had the body that I died in. Even so, I looked up at the towering angel and held up my hands defensively.

“Don’t even look at me that way.” I shook my head emphatically. “I didn’t have a choice. He’s the one who went for exposure rather than conversation. Law is law. I didn’t have a choice, so whatever cosmic destiny he toyed with isn’t my fault.”

“You were supposed to talk to him, not take his head.”

There was something about my boss that always made me think he should be the poster boy for the angelic propaganda experts. He spoke in a low bass that made shivers run up a woman’s spine and looked like the Adonis of legend. It would be very easy to imagine him standing wrapped in clouds with his wings flowing behind him and a golden trumpet in one hand and a flaming sword in another. Personally, I’d never seen those famous magical swords, but I wouldn’t put it past them to be holding out the big guns on me. They seemed to like doing that these days.

“I know, but why don’t you ask yourself why you sent a known avenger to deliver the invitation to come chat with the Council of Angels?” If my tone was a little sharp, I didn’t apologize. Under the circumstances, I felt I had a right to be a bit snippy.

He glowered down at me and I shrugged as I marched up to the ‘gates’. This is the lowest tier of heaven which coincidentally mingles with the highest level of Hell. Trust me when I say that it’s not all white and pearly like the legends say. It looks a lot like a good, old-fashioned courthouse anywhere in the South, if you overlook the marble floors and gold inlay around the doorways. All around me, people were strolling about doing their jobs, some in groups, some alone. There were no robes and wings, conservative suits were by far the norm. A few looked like they’d been snatched from Brooks Brothers or worse, Italian designers. They looked frightfully like lawyers, so they fit the scenery. No one said angels had to have cheap tastes. I suppose immortality leads to an appreciation of the finer things. The hum of angelic voices, just so you know, was actually the drone of conversation. There wasn’t any singing going on as the cosmic negotiations commenced in private chambers behind nondescript doors.

I’d been here enough not to even blink at the giants that opened the large doors of the courtroom for me. They’d changed the guard to a pair I didn’t recognize, but the faces still possessed the ageless calm I’d come to expect from the lower level residents. All angels were pretty, but the lower levels weren’t as perfect as the higher ones. I’d come to appreciate the slight imperfections that made them more personable than their higher-ranking peers. I winked at the dark one as I strolled in and he was new enough to hesitate, earning a glare from Gavreel.

“Be nice,” I chastised with an irritated glance up. I swear these giants were enough to give anyone a complex. He opened his mouth to say something I was sure would be scathing, but snapped it shut with the effort curling his mouth tightly. I would have ribbed him a bit about giving in so easily, but the piercing blue eyes of Saint Peter caught me.

“Hiya, Pete…Marty.” I yawned to cover up the shiver he always caused. There’s something about knowing that the golden-haired angel in front of me could see the shadow of my soul and recite every mischief I’d ever wrought. It was such a disconcerting feeling that I nearly missed the glower from the dark man who was standing behind Hell’s bench.

“You’re not Marty.” I blinked and put my hands on my hips. “Just who the hell are you?”

I narrowed my eyes on him and cocked my head as black wings with the bluish sheen of raven’s wings unfurled behind him, each feather tipped thick with gold. The color matched his hair, I couldn’t help but think as his dark-eyed stare tried to pin me. The decades of standing before Pete came in handy as I met his glare. I felt Gav’s amusement and knew he and Pete were sharing a private joke at my expense.

“Martin—” the silky voice purred, “—was a temporary replacement. You—” he sniffed disdainfully, “—are being disrespectful to your betters. That is not wise.”

Only an angel would call over twenty years ‘temporary’.

“Okay—” I shrugged as I let my gaze flip over to Peter and saw his face carefully devoid of expression. Only his eyes were kind, which let me see his amusement. Oh yeah, it was definitely a set-up and I’d walked straight into it, “—I ask again, who the hell are you?”

“I am Lucifer.”

Oh.

Well, hell. No pun intended, of course.

Suddenly, I understood his indignation at the lack of bowing and scraping. Oh well, might as well start as you mean to go on, I always say.

“Nice to meet you, Luke.” I grinned as I walked up between them and cut off whatever he might want to snarl at me by dumping the soul I had carried up for judgment out onto the space provided.

Okay, I tried to dump Evan out for them to judge, anyway. Evan, true to the form of the evening, didn’t want to go anywhere. I really hated the stubborn ones. Because I still clung to my mortal coil, as the angels liked to put it, and I had enough humanity left for him to cling to, preventing the forceful ejection I was working for.

“A little help here, please,” I muttered through gritted teeth and refused to look at the smug look on Lucifer’s face as Gavreel reached in and ripped the soul out to toss it onto the floor before the judges.

Evan landed on his knees about the same time mine hit the marble. My vision swam, but I refused to scream. Having a soul ripped from your body hurts, even if it’s not your own. I suppose that would hurt worse, now that I think about it. The abstraction of the thought helped me to distance myself from the pain that was quickly fading. Gav’s hand came back to rest on my shoulder, absorbing some of it into himself. Gavreel, for all of his temper tantrums and ultimatums, wasn’t a bad sort, for an avenging angel persona.

For good measure, I stayed on the floor a moment to let my vision clear. Low and behold, Evan crouched before me in his halfman form. It always fascinated me about shifters. Some reverted to the form they died in while others reverted to their natural form, be it human or animal. Evan, I suppose, was going out with a bang on all counts concerned. I stood up and sighed, only to blink as the third door opened behind him. Apparently, Evan was a better man than I’d thought he was.

Zachiel strolled out with a wide smile. Unlike most angels, he wasn’t light or dark by coloring or cosmic orientation, but a stunning redhead the way a redhead should be. He presided over the nice little den where souls rested while they were awaiting rebirth. Unlike his partners, he didn’t have a bench here because most souls destined for rebirth ascended directly to him without the aid of a Reaper.

“Arabella.” He greeted me with a sweeping turn of his head. “You’re looking lovely, as always.”

“Zack.” I smiled even as the other three angels in the room turned to glower at Zachiel’s charm. “Can I talk to your soul before you take him home?”

“For you, darling—” his voice was singing beauty that made me shiver for a whole different reason than the other angels in the room, “—anything.”

“A girl can wish,” I muttered, and shrugged when the three glares of the other angels angled my way. “Hey, come on. I may be dead, but I’m not buried.”

Zachiel and I shared a smile as I stepped forward and knelt beside Evan.

“Talk to me, Evan.” I smiled encouragingly and tried to look harmless. I was pretty good at it, usually. Unfortunately, I guess he knew better than to believe it. “I can make the difference here. You see, this is the Archangel Zachiel. He’s here to take you to Purgatory. That means you’ll be reborn. Think about the harm that you ever did anyone in life and know the next time around, you’ll get it back on you in triplicate. Come clean. It could tip the scales one way or the other. Trust me when I say eternal rest over rebirth is a much better option.”

“You’ll have to wonder.” He snarled at me, but I could see the fear in his eyes. It made me wonder what he was so afraid of. Obviously, it wasn’t me, anymore. You can’t fear what may kill you once the deed was done, after all. “I’ll take my fate as I’ve earned it.”

He stood up as if surprised that his feet would hold him and took a tentative step toward the third door. Zachiel smiled at me over his head, his mirth spilling out of his green eyes even as he raised a brow at me. I had the grace not to fight the sheepish blush that crept up my face.

I’m sadistic enough to push an edge when I think I have one to get the job done. The angels in the room cannot lie. Literally. I’m not so unfortunate. I don’t have to tell the whole truth or even a partial truth. In this case, what I’d neglected to mention was that all the good Evan had done would also be reaped on his soul threefold in his new life as well.

“Well hell,” I muttered as I stood up. “That didn’t work.”

Zachiel blew me a kiss as he closed the door behind him and Evan, leaving me alone with the three glowering angels.

“Why do you put up with her impertinence?” Lucifer demanded as if I wasn’t standing right there.

“You’ll find—” Peter paused and looked down at his book as he scribbled a note with a pen he was suddenly holding, “—that she is—” he hesitated again without looking up and I knew I was dismissed for all practical purposes, “—refreshing. She grows on you after a bit because she doesn’t exactly bend to the rules.”

The higher two angels no longer cared if I was there or not, so Gavreel gently touched my shoulder. With a quiet turn, I found myself out of the judgment chamber and into the foyer. It always disoriented me to be kicked out that way. The only thing that kept my feet moving was Gavreel’s hand on my shoulder.

“A ride home?”

Like all the other Reapers, I was encouraged to stay out of the mortal world when I wasn’t working. I ignored the suggestion and they had yet to force the issue. Someday, I supposed they would, but it wouldn’t be today. Normally, he walked me out of the sacred halls before providing my cosmic train to my apartment. Today, we went from the outer hall to outside in a heartbeat. He didn’t even try to argue as he waved his hand and my transporting shaft of moonlight appeared in front of me.

“Thanks, Gav.”

I turned to say something to him, but found myself alone. I knew he was still there because the ride was waiting, but he’d just taken himself out of my sight. I rolled my eyes. He always hated the way Zack flirted. With a sigh, I stepped into the moonlight and found myself standing in my bedroom, which made me blink. I usually ended up in the living room, but decided not to knock it today as I let myself fall across the soft cotton comforter.

Having a soul ripped out of you to end your day was the icing that made it a truly bad day, and that always meant it was wiser to go to bed early. So I did.