Adrian: Bonus Material for A Touch of Crimson by Sylvia Day Page B

you so
fluidly, like a cape, when you’re in battle.”
     
    “I’m not a sideshow amusement. Find someone
else. Or let me kill something. Your choice.”
     
    She looked at me with compassion I didn’t
want. “You don’t how much longer you’ll have those,” she said
gently. “Not now that you’re with Lindsay.”
     
    There was no need to say more. I knew what I
risked by loving a mortal, but I wouldn’t change how I felt about
Lindsay even if I’d been given the option to. She was everything to
me. The reason I pushed through every day and looked forward to
every night. The reason I might one day lose my wings.
     
    “All right,” I said, holding out a hand.
“Give me the address.”
     
    So here I am. Who’s ready to get
wing-slapped?

The following vignette was originally posted
on AllThingUrbanFantasy.blogspot.com, Oct 2011.
    BLACK AGNES
    Adrian Mitchell
     
     
    “ What’s spookier than a graveyard a
night?  One full of vampires, warrior angels, and statues that
come to life.  Sylvia Day’s Adrian Mitchell from the first
book in the new
Renegade
Angels
series, A TOUCH OF
CRIMSON (available now from Signet Eclipse), is telling
us a suitably scary and sexy version of the Black Agnes urban
legend.”
    ~ AllThingUrbanFantasy.blogspot.com
     
    Adrian Mitchell tossed the crime scene photos
on the dining table in his hotel suite, watching them fan outward
as they slid across the glass. “We’ll be staying a while.”
     
    The two lycans seated at the table reached
for the images, dividing them between them.
     
    Unable to look at them anymore, Adrian
pivoted and walked to the massive window overlooking the city of
Phoenix, Arizona. Fighting his unwelcome agitation, he unfurled his
wings, the pristinely white feathers with their crimson tips
emerging first as tendrils of smoke, then solidifying into shape.
He stretched and flexed them, the only sign of his disquiet hidden
in what would be perceived by the lycans as a simple bid for
comfort.
     
    “Black Agnes,” one of them said behind
him.
     
    “Excuse me?” Adjusting the angle of his
position, he looked at the two men examining the photos. One was
stocky, built for brute force. The other was taller, leaner yet
stronger. He’d watched them work, noting their strengths and
weaknesses. They were a good team and a good match for him.
Together they’d taken down three rogue vampires in less than two
weeks. He expected to add this latest one to their kill sheets
before they headed home again.
     
    The taller one—Elijah—lifted his head and
looked at Adrian with the luminescent green eyes of a creature
tainted with demon blood. It was that touch of demon that enabled
the lycans to shapeshift between man and beast. It also indentured
them to Adrian. “An urban legend. There’s a cemetery statue—two of
them actually—of a hooded figure. One was rumored to have
supernatural properties. College kids used it as a pledge to join
sororities and fraternities. The initiate was supposed to spend the
night sitting in the statue’s lap, but one of them was found dead
in the morning, with bruises and marks that suggested the statue
had come to life and held her until she croaked.”
     
    “That’s not a shrouded figure,” Adrian
pointed out, his voice kept carefully neutral to hide his roiling
fury. He was a seraph, a Sentinel. He was expected to stand above
the vagaries of human emotions. But he couldn’t fight his reaction
to the pictures spread out before him, those of a once beautiful
young woman laid dramatically upon the lap of a massive marble
statue of an angel. An angel whose head was bowed as if weeping
over the bloodless body draped across its thighs.
     
    A taunt. An undeniable “fuck you” from the
vampire who’d taken the very last drop from a promising life.
     

    “No,” Elijah agreed. “This rogue is a young
one. Too stupid to know better.”
     
    Only one who was young and foolish would
deliberately attract the attention of a