My second ride in Lucian Drake's car was only a slight improvement on the first. I wasn't wearing magical handcuffs, and I no longer believed he meant to torture and murder me; on the other hand, I'd lost Ro to who knew what and where, and I had no idea how Janelle would react to my betrayal.

I hoped she'd understand and forgive me, but I wouldn't blame her if she 'wasn't home' when she saw who was with me when I showed up.

Lucian had advised me not to warn her we were coming, saying that convincing her to help and trust us would be easier in person than over the phone. Considering that I barely trusted me in this situation, I followed his lead.

On the way, Lucian turned the conversation to angels once more.

"The more I know, the more I can help you, Ellie," he said. "Perhaps you don't know this, being new to the witch world, but the power you demonstrated earlier was not human magic. If I didn't know better, I would say it was demonic. So, why did your father keep you such a secret? And what does it have to do with angels?"

With little left to lose at that point, I told him.

"Did you know my dad raided an angelic cult once before?" I asked.

Lucian nodded. "The Brackenmere Incident, yes. My predecessor was in command then, and Oscar was still a young man. There were rumors of a ritual gone awry — of angels burning people to ash." He glanced at his bandaged hand and at the scars lacing mine. "I remember."

I took a breath and turned towards the window. We'd left Lucian's comfortable estate far behind and re-entered the city, and I recognize some of the streets in a hazy, nightmare way. Unheimlich, as the Germans would say: images from another life; familiar, yet strange.

"According to my dad's diaries, the rumors were true," I said. "The cult summoned an angel against her will. She destroyed them, but ended up trapped in the body of the sacrificial host."

"She?" Lucian asked, his jet brows arched with curiosity.

I nodded. "She wasn't thrilled to be trapped here, obviously, but she made the most of it. Got along with my dad alright, I guess; at least at first."

"Your father..." Lucian trailed off, and a sharp, nasal inhalation signaled his surprise. "You're nephilim, then."

Turning away from the window, I looked over at him. "Neffy... what?"

"Nephilim," he repeated. "The offspring of an angel and a human. Usually destructive and monstrous, and historically rare. Perhaps the fact that your mother was confined to a physical form, in addition to the fact that your father was a high witch, aided the good fortune of your birth."

"Good fortune?" I laughed, but Lucian's expression remained sincere.

"High witches are typically 'fruitless trees.' The inherent power they pass along is often too potent for human forms to bear: the woman miscarries, or the man's seed fails to take. But with your mother's nature bound and your father's as strong as it was, I suppose they must have achieved an unholy balance of some kind."

His jet-black brows climbed at least a half-inch up his forehead as he considered these new and apparently profound implications.

"Where is she now?" he asked. "Your mother?"

I turned back to the window as Lucian pulled to a stop at a red light. "Dead. Or... whatever happens to angels when their human host dies, anyway."

"I'm sorry. When did she pass?"

"A long time ago. I was nine."

Silence lapsed for a moment, and my mind drifted as I watched people on the sidewalks and in the other cars, as blissfully oblivious as I had once been, not all that long ago. Lucian's voice startled me as he spoke again.

"Forgive me, but... given what she was, I feel I must ask. How did she die, exactly?"

A humorless laugh escaped me; the answer was almost comically mundane.

"A car accident," I said.

"So, Oscar raised you, then," Lucian mused, "but taught you nothing of this world. Interesting."

Another laugh, this one bitter, rose to my lips. "He hardly 'raised' me. Tormented, terrified, and neglected, maybe. But 'raised?'"

I shook my head.

"Oscar was a complicated person," Lucian allowed evenly. "I can't say I liked him much; but then I am hardly so likable myself, so I cannot judge."

The light turned green, and I turned towards Lucian again as he accelerated, surprised by this evidence of self-reflective candor, when something else caught my attention.

A sleek red sports-car sped towards us along the cross street, and showed no sign of slowing down. A cold tingle crawled over my scalp as I realized it had no intention of doing so, and then time slowed to a crawl.

Something black escaped the red car's driver's side window, and then, in an explosions of glass and a crunch of twisting metal, my world fell apart.

❧

The red car crumpled against the black behemoth of Lucian's sedan. Glass shattered in a brilliant cascade, metal crunched and screeched in torment and both vehicles disintegrated in a glorious burst of kinetic energy as past, present, and future collapsed to a single point.

In the fraction of reality in which Lucian and I remained suspended in space and time — as yet uninjured but milliseconds from destruction — I saw my entire existence captured like the tiny world in a drop of water suspended in air. In it was everything I had ever been, everything I was, and everything I could ever be; and at the heart of it all, a spark of brilliance, ready to ignite.

With the pure instinct of self-preservation, I reached for it and let its light set fire to my veins.

When the hyena-thing attacked, pure reflex triggered by fear had saved me, and when Lucian's dogs came after me, desperation had lit the flame. Earlier at Lucian's, I'd unleashed raw power with simple rage.

This was different: more controlled, and strangely calm; as if even while the conscious part of me froze in mortal terror, some other part moved with the practiced grace of a dancer or the ease of an athlete — motion and action as natural as breathing.

The magic flared within me, and recalling everything I'd learned since the moment I'd tripped over a little black cat and my bad luck began, I envisioned a circle of light protecting me with a barrier of impenetrable heat. As the world around me fell apart in slow motion, I grabbed Lucian by the collar of his jacket and pulled him into my protective sphere.

And then, with a silent BANG, time exploded into motion again, unearthly fire seared through my bones, and my vision went white.

❧

"Ellie?"

I blinked, surprised to find myself still standing, and stared into Lucian Drake's wide, dark eyes. His face was pale and his hair was a wild mess, but except for a thin streak of blood on his brow he appeared uninjured.

"Ellie?" he called again, and laid his hands on my shoulders gingerly, as if touching something that might still be hot enough to burn.

"I'm... okay, I... think." I looked past him to the wreckage surrounding us, and wondered how my words could possibly be true. The remains of both cars lay scattered around us in a ring, several pieces in flames. "Are you?"

He nodded. "I'm unhurt, thanks to you. That was... quite the impressive display, but as the danger's past, I think you ought to put those away before someone notices. I imagine only witches and our ilk can see them, but still..."

"What are you talking about?" I swayed a little, feeling oddly off-balance and dizzy. Lucian's words made no sense, but I wasn't sure if that was his fault or mine.

He simply lifted his dark, soot-streaked brows at me and pointed up. I followed the direction of his finger, and felt my face go slack with shock.

A pair of enormous wings, seemingly made of solid light, stretched above us in a protective arc. The transparent feathers ruffled in a barely perceptible breeze, and when I lifted an aching shoulder, the corresponding wing moved.

"What... the... hell?"

"I'm not sure 'hell' is the word you're looking for," Lucian said dryly, "but we'll have time to discuss that later, I hope. For now, we're drawing stares, and it's best not to stand in the middle of the street for too long when people are trying to kill you with cars. Can you, er... fold them, perhaps?"

"I have no fucking clue," I breathed, and stumbled back a pace in surprise as I flexed the muscles in my back and the wings — my wings — moved.

It hurt, the skin beneath my shoulder-blades feeling cracked and split as if badly burned, and I barely contained a scream as I fell to my hands and knees.

Ironically, the pain did the trick, and like a creature that instinctively withdraws into itself to avoid such stimuli, the wings folded against my back and melted through my skin like liquid fire.

I gasped and nearly blacked out, and couldn't hear past the ringing in my ears as Lucian half-carried me away from the scene.

"It seems you've not escaped unscathed, after all," he murmured, careful not to touch my back as he led me to the sidewalk. "You've got two parallel burns on your upper back, and your shirt is melted through. Your physical body may be more resilient than those of other mortals, but it's clearly not immune to the potency of angelic power. You must take care in choosing when and how to use it."

"I didn't... choose... to do anything," I gasped, "except try not to die."

A crowd had already gathered around the scene, and though the intersection and surrounding streets had been mercifully empty at the time of the collision, a few eye-witnesses babbled and pointed at us excitedly. A few held cellphones, but I wasn't too worried about that. Janelle had explained that magic had a way of not getting recorded, and I imagined the biggest mystery would be how anyone could walk away from such an accident.

It was the nonhuman element that worried me.

I cast my mind back to the moment before the collision and tried to replay what I'd seen. I wanted to be wrong, but unless my eyes were playing tricks on me, I knew what I'd seen.

Right before impact, a dark shape had shot from the red car and up into the air on black wings.

"Come on," Lucian said, guiding me along the sidewalk. "Our destination is only the next street over, I believe. Let us hope your friends will receive us and grant us shelter there."

"I'm... not sure that's such a good idea... anymore," I said, wincing against the searing pain in my shoulders.

"Why not?" Lucian asked, turning into a small side-street that hid us from view of the main thoroughfare. "In case you missed it, someone tried to assassinate one or both of us just now. I'm almost certain that car had no driver — no human driver, anyway. We need to get somewhere safe, and quickly."

I bit back another gasp of pain as I pulled Lucian to a halt. "I know. I'm just not sure that..."

I trailed off as a black shadow dropped from the roof above. 

It was a raven, as I'd suspected, but it was a woman when it reached the ground.

I stared at Kyrie as a sick horror congealed like cold blood in my core.

"It was you," I whispered, my lips numb and my heart stricken. "Why?"

She took a step towards me, and I raised my hands. The raw power remained within easy reach, but I wondered what the cost would be to call it forth again so soon.

Rather than attack, though, Kyrie merely stared at me, and after a moment I realized her face was wet with tears, and that she appeared as horrified as I felt.

"Ellie..." she whispered, her eyes wide and shining as she slowly shook her head. "Ellie, please... I didn't know."