Angel Burn by L. A. Weatherly Page B

water. Alex took a silent step closer to the kitchen door and watched unseen as Willow spooned instant coffee into a pair of mugs. With another yawn, she scraped her hair off her face and stretched. She looked so entirely human, so drowsy and sleep-rumpled.
    For a moment, Alex just gazed at her, taking in her long tumble of hair, her wide green eyes and pixieish chin. Fleetingly, he imagined her eyes meeting his, wondering what she’d look like if she smiled.
    Irritated with himself — why the hell was he even thinking this? — he shook the idea away and checked out Willow’s aura. Angelic silver, with soft lavender lights shifting through it: again, like a mix of angel and human. But unlike an angel’s aura, there was no bluish tint to its edge, no indication of when she had last fed. In fact, it looked as if she didn’t need to feed at all, at least not in the same way angels did. Drawing his energy back to his heart chakra, Alex regarded the girl in confusion. She was angelic  . . .  and yet she wasn’t.
    A framed photo on a dusty bookcase caught his attention; he moved closer and picked it up silently. A small girl with long blond hair was standing under a tree, her face tilted up in delight as its feathery leaves brushed across her face, framing it.
    A willow tree. Willow.
    Alex stared down at the small photo. If he had needed further confirmation that this girl was something bizarre, then this was it. An angel’s human form was always that of an adult — they didn’t have childhoods; they didn’t breed. If Willow had been a child, then she wasn’t an angel of any type he’d ever encountered before.
    So what was she?
    He ducked into the shadows again as Willow suddenly returned to the dining room and plucked a purple sweater off one of the piles. She pulled it over her head as she walked back into the kitchen, then smoothed her long hair with both hands and tied it into a loose knot at the nape of her neck.
    God, she’s beautiful.
The unbidden thought whispered through his mind as Willow grabbed the mugs of coffee and headed back outside. “Here you go, Nescafé’s finest,” he heard her say as she went out onto the porch. The front door closed.
    Alex shoved the photo almost harshly into his jacket pocket. Of course she was beautiful, he reminded himself — she was part angel somehow. He headed quickly through the kitchen and then out the back door, easing it shut behind him. In seconds, he’d jogged across the crumbling patio and shouldered his way through a pair of tall, winter-smelling arborvitaes. The chain-link fence felt cool as he grasped it; he scaled it swiftly and dropped into a neighbor’s backyard. From there, he climbed into the next. A few minutes later, he was on the street again, walking casually toward his car. Glancing at Willow’s house, he could see the two girls talking, their heads bent in earnest conversation.
    No. He shook his head as he slid behind the steering wheel and started the engine. Not two girls —
one
girl and one something that he didn’t understand at all.
    When the CIA had taken control of Project Angel after the Invasion almost two years earlier, a lot of things had changed. One of the main ones was that each Angel Killer now worked alone, with no contact from the others. Alex didn’t even know where the rest of the AKs were; he hadn’t been in touch with them for over twenty months. Anonymous texts arrived on his cell phone from unknown angel spotters; there were no names involved, no way for him to link the information he received to an actual person. Though his longing for the old days — the camaraderie, going on the hunt together, even the boring, endless days at the camp in the desert — was like an ache inside of him, he knew that the secrecy was necessary. This was war, even if its millions of casualties were too blissed-out to realize it. If he were caught by the angels or any of their human followers, he wouldn’t be able to give them any