But she took a step back. “First the wolf, and now you. Where do you get off touching me? Getting all familiar? I don’t know you from Adam. Not really. You offered me a safe place to sleep and so far—”
He had to interrupt her before she made a drastic decision. “This is still the safest place for you.”
“Way I see it, nowhere is safe anymore,” she said, voice rising. “I can’t even dance.”
“Of course you can. But now you know that you need to master the magic as you would any other movement. Now you know why the greats were the greats, and that you can be, too.”
She put her hands over her ears and gripped her head. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore!” I can’t.
Custo swallowed back everything he wanted to say. The words burned in his throat just as his arms burned to hold her. He held his hands up in surrender. No more tonight.
She dropped her arms. “Now is there a frickin’ bed in this place for me or not?”
He tried not to smile at her tone. “Yes. Adam has let us have his apartment while he’s with Talia.” Obviously, Custo would be sleeping on the floor his first night back.
He signaled the door to open and glanced out. The guards were in place. Everything still. No wolves waiting. He’d have liked to put his arm around her—they’d fit so well before—but he resisted the impulse. Annabella came up beside him, also peeking out into the tunnel. Her lips pressed together, probably summoning her courage, and then she stepped outside the lab.
“Elevator?” Custo asked the guards.
The guards led the way and would be stationed outside Adam’s place for the night.
As they neared a conventional pair of silver sliding doors, Custo felt a hand on his elbow.
“Wait,” Annabella asked, expression again filled with confusion, “what were you doing in the Shadowlands?”
Considering her last request, Custo went with the truth. “I was crossing them, heading back to Earth.”
She stopped midstep before boarding the elevator, frowning while she tried to figure out what he’d said. He wasn’t about to offer an extended explanation, not after she’d plainly said she didn’t want to hear it.
“The Hereafter?” she asked.
Custo nodded, pulling her inside. “Heaven. I’m your guardian angel.”
Chapter Seven
ANNABELLA ran, a pack of wolves snarling and snapping at her heels. Her mind’s eye saw them clearly, though she didn’t dare look back: bristling black fur, yellow eyes, sharp white teeth too long and jagged for any mouth—wolf or otherwise. Her heartbeat and footfalls combined to form a gallop of sound, the rhythm of the chase.
Somebody help me! she sobbed through gasping chokes of air.
But the forest was silent. She sprinted through widely spaced trees—no place to hide—their great trunks rising like columns to hold up the nonexistent sky. Where was the sky?
She pushed her body harder, faster, channeling all her fear and strength into her stride. She felt the distance between her and the wolves lengthen. Felt their interest suddenly shift, the pack swarming on a rise, ears pricked.
Saved?
Then, an infant’s cry, a new-world wail made with a lusty first breath. A second cry signaled the twins’ birth.
Annabella tripped and fell, gouging the earth, and turned her head in time to see the wolves alter their direction, a river of furious black rushing down the hill, making for the innocents.
No! Here! Not the babies. But she had no voice.
She clawed a tree trunk to stand and lurched to follow, but her muscles had hardened, betraying her, blood chug-chugging through collapsed veins. She pushed forward, crested the rise herself when a mother’s scream pierced the air. A banshee’s scream.
“Annabella!”
A low voice filtered through Annabella’s darkened consciousness, but she refused to wake. The babies, my fault.
“Annabella!”
She felt herself gathered in a warm embrace, heat pouring into her shaking limbs.
“You’re okay. It’s just a dream,” a rumble of a voice told her. “Wake up, Annabella.”
The nightmare went gray, diluting, spreading into the absent sky. Her heart still pounded; her throat was raw.
Annabella cracked an eye and gazed dumbly at the gray-blue wall opposite her. The solidity was mundane, real. Yet a trio of imaginative paintings hung in the center of the flat expanse. Black tree trunks stretched across the foreground of the canvases like a wicked gate, but beyond was a magic swirl of indistinct figures, dancing. If she let her eyes blur a little bit, the picture seemed to move. The composition evoked ghostly Giselle, but was more mysterious than mournful.
Annabella triple blinked her bleary eyes. Where was she?
She shifted in place, turned to find Custo holding her. He smelled fresh, like soap and shaving cream, and his hair was spiky wet. He leaned against the headboard, her body across his lap. He smiled down at her like a lover who had beaten her to the shower.
“Morning,” he murmured when her eyes focused on him.
She was tempted to curl into his chest and borrow the tempo of his heartbeat, slow and steady. His arms felt like the safest place in the world. So strong. A lick of desire had her core tingling as he nuzzled her neck.
“Everything’s okay. You’re awake now,” he said.
And it all came crashing back: The dress rehearsal, Custo, the cab ride to some storage basement, her subsequent capture and imprisonment in that frightening cell. Sweet Talia, and her babies. The wolf.
Nothing was okay. And nothing ever would be again.
The world as she knew it had turned upside down. Monsters were just as real as she was. A nightmare stalked the shadows of her life. And the man holding her was not human. Or at least not anymore.
Angel.
Annabella sat up and slid off Custo’s lap. The shadows in the corners of the room seemed to throb.
He let her go, and his expression sobered. “What time do you need to be at the theater?”
What on earth was he doing cuddling her like that? He was a frigging angel, for crying out loud. She’d stopped going to church a long time ago, but she was pretty sure getting intimate with an angel was a one-way ticket to hell.
Angel. The whole thing made her head ache.
“The theater, Annabella? It’s past noon already.”
Last night she hadn’t been able to let the angel comment pass, so she’d pressed him into some half-assed explanation about how he’d died and his mission on earth: save her and save Segue. Seemed to her like he was making it up. If she hadn’t seen his first clash against the wolf with her own eyes, she’d have never believed him. His fair eyes, dark blond hair, and olive-gold skin pretty much defined angel, but the way he moved—which in Annabella’s opinion said more about a person than anything else—told a completely different story. His smooth prowl and tense bearing suggested a brute strength of sweat, blood, and violence. Not angelic.
She knew he wasn’t telling the whole truth.
Now he was bent on ridding the world of her wolf. The one who’d killed Rudy and almost made Talia lose her babies. All because of her. She couldn’t let anyone else get hurt.
The insanity of the situation burned through Annabella’s body, scorching her dreams, destroying her hopes. This wasn’t happening.
Reality was worse than her nightmare. Shadows were everywhere. In most light, she cast one herself.
Annabella dragged a twisted ponytail out of her hair to cover the return of her shakes. “I have to make a call so the director can make a substitution.”