Nobody's Angel (The Earth Angels) by Stacy Gail Page A

as shock robbed her of breath. The long black coat her masked savior always wore had vanished, and in a numbed sort of way Kendall realized it had never been a coat at all, but wings tucked around his body. His torso was covered in a black bulletproof vest that buckled around his back in such a way that it gave his wings total freedom of movement, while still protecting his upper body from harm.
    No wonder he’d claimed a cape would get in the way.
    I’m dreaming. This has to be a dream.
    The speed he achieved was phenomenal, to the point where it was like trying to breathe in a windstorm, and her eyes streamed until she had to tuck her face into his neck in surrender. That somehow made the surrealism worse. With her eyes closed, she was more aware of the faint dip and lift with each wing beat. The muscles in his chest, shoulders and back worked with a power that spoke of absolute supremacy of an action that should not be within his grasp—the power of flight.
    He has wings. Dear God, why does he have wings?
    Though she was sure she didn’t want to, Kendall peeled her face away from its hiding place against his neck. The bejeweled lights of the city below spread out like a carpet across the land. It was breathtakingly beautiful, the sparkling outline of where the edge of the earth met the absolute darkness that was the Pacific Ocean, broken only by the delicate web of lights that were the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay Bridges. But it wasn’t the spectacular view she was interested in. There was simply no way to stop herself from peering over his massive shoulder to where the trapezoid muscles flowed on either side of his spine into wing base, the shoulder blades somehow acting as an extra joint that provided flexibility to a place that didn’t exist anywhere in Gray’s Anatomy . She tucked her face into his neck once more, but this time it was much harder to hide from the reality of seeing how human flesh blended and blurred into black feathers. Even with her eyes closed she could see it. See it, and know that this man couldn’t possibly exist.
    Yet, this...this impossibility had saved her life three times.
    Her stomach dropped as they executed a descent worthy of a WWII dive-bomber, before the sensation of hovering snapped her averted gaze back to their surroundings. A low, hulking mound rose out of the darkness, a craggy shoreline ringed with the whiteness of the crashing surf she could hear above the rush of wind in her ears.
    An island?
    Stunned they had traveled so far so fast and alarmed she had no clue where she was, Kendall searched through the blackness of night as they descended. The island’s center pointed upward like a shark’s jagged tooth, with a semicircular structure jutting out on one side of this craggy outcropping. Though it was bathed only in the weak light of the moon, she could still see this was a modern building that had come from the mind of either a genius or a madman. It seemed to grow out of the side of the jagged point like a living thing, all curved glass and natural stone with a semicircular balcony overlooking the forbidding surf below, wide enough to land a small plane on.
    Or, a single winged man.
    As light as the breeze itself, he touched down on the balcony, activating motion-sensitive lights around them. With one last whoosh of his powerful wings, he tucked them back against his body. The steely muscles in the arms that held her bunched as he set her down as if she were made of glass, before he backed away as though fearing she’d haul off and attack him. She could have told him not to bother. It was hard to even think, much less move.
    She’d always known The Guardian Angel wasn’t like anyone else. She’d just never imagined how profound that difference was.
    “You can’t be near a populated area while that geist is on the loose,” he said, stepping into the shadows that existed in between the mellow pools of light spaced along the balcony’s low wall. “You’ll stay