Fallen Angel: An Urban Fantasy Reverse Harem Bully Romance (Dark Hearts Academy Book 1) Read online

  My thoughts cut off as the sound of glass smashing echoed and bounced off the graffitied brick walls of the narrow street I was on. Glancing over my shoulder, I searched for the source of the noise but there was nothing to see but my own long shadow bobbing behind me on the sidewalk.

  I gripped the can of pepper spray a little tighter and suddenly regretted not springing for the larger version. A car alarm started up a couple of blocks over, the sound setting my teeth on edge.

  If I didn’t relax soon, I was going to give myself a stroke.

  I picked up my pace, the can of pepper spray in my pocket gripped tight enough that part of me worried I might leave indentations in the metal. The car alarm cut off suddenly, and it took a couple of seconds for my ears to adjust to the silence that swamped me.

  A growl cut the night air and I hesitated. Had I imagined it?

  Casting a look over my shoulder once more, I searched the shadows, half expecting to see a stray dog lurking in an abandoned doorway. For one split second I could have sworn that from out of the darkness, glowing yellow eyes watched me.

  Swallowing hard, I blinked and the eyes were gone.

  I was definitely imagining things now. Was I really that tired? Or was it stress messing with my head?

  Turning, I started to jog and another growl caught my ear. I definitely hadn’t imagined it this time.

  Footsteps started up, heavy but steady footfalls that seemed oddly in time with my own.

  Don’t look back. Don’t look back. Don’t look back. The words started as a mantra inside my head.

  Something kicked a glass bottle, sending it skittering across the asphalt and without meaning to, I glanced back over my shoulder.

  The man that followed me had eyes that glowed in the half light cast by street lamps overhead. But that wasn’t what really caught my attention. His gaze caught mine and a low growl trickled from between his lips. He seemed to grow in size in the time it took me to draw a breath. Doubling his size in seconds.

  The creature started toward me and I didn’t hesitate any longer.

  Turning, I ran.

  3

  I ran for my life. I wasn’t much of a runner, I’d never been particularly athletic in school but that had been different. If the teachers had found some kind of creature that had crawled out of my nightmares to chase me around the track in high school, I’d inevitably have won every gold medal on offer. They might even have sent me in for the Olympics.

  Air burned in my chest, making it harder to draw enough breath into my lungs. Something sharp raked across my back, the force of the blow sent me tumbling into a pile of garbage heaped next to an overflowing dumpster. My vision swam and tiny starbursts of lights exploded in my line of sight as I scrambled to pull myself out of the foul smelling food waste.

  The creature loomed over me, shrinking back to its human size as it closed the distance between us. His raven coloured hair, fell across his face like a dark curtain, his skin was sun kissed almost bronze in the streetlights. His broad shoulders blocked out everything beyond my line of sight and beneath his black military style jacket I could see the faint outline of his muscular physique. But his eyes were what mesmerised me the most. They remained yellow, the glow I realised as I stared into them, wasn’t caused by the overhead lights but it came from within.

  He reached out for me, wrapping his hand around the lapel of my denim jacket and tugged me effortlessly free of the garbage.

  “You have hidden yourself well,” he said, his voice reminded me of stones grinding off one another and I flinched away from him.

  Tugging the pepper spray from my pocket, I jerked my arm up but he was faster. He knocked the can from my grip before I could even depress the top.

  Drawing me in against its chest, the creature pressed its face against my hair, drawing in my scent as though I was something particularly tasty.

  “I don’t have much money, but you can have what I’ve got,” I said, fear causing my heart to hammer against my ribs.

  “I don’t want your money,” he said, drawing out a long silver blade.

  “I don’t want to die,” I said, my voice sounding pathetic even to my own ears. What was wrong with me? I had to fight; if I didn’t at least try then he would kill me.

  “I can see why they consider you dangerous,” he said, watching me with his strange yellow eyes.

  “Dangerous? I don’t understand, who are they?”

  The creature, or man, as he now appeared stared at me, studying me closely and I suddenly realised he was trying to determine whether I was telling the truth or not.

  “You know who they are, the ones that sent me here…” he said, trailing off. His hold on my jacket loosened a little and I didn’t waste the opportunity. Jerking free of his grip, I stumbled away from him, quickly regaining my balance as I scanned the area for a weapon.

  A glass bottle lay on its side where it had rolled from the garbage pile he’d tossed me into just moments before.

  “Deceiver,” he said, diving toward me as I threw myself onto the ground and wrapped my hands around the bottle. I swung it toward his head, as he fell across me, the heavy thud and the sound of the glass shattering as it connected with his skull reverberating through my body.

  He rolled off me, in one fluid movement. Despite me hitting him with the bottle he never missed a beat. He was back on his feet before I had the chance to draw breath. He crouched just a couple of feet away from me and I clutched the remnants of the bottle in front of me. I aimed the jagged ends at him as he eyed me with his strange yellow eyes. It was then I noticed the trickle of blood that made its way lazily down his temple.

  “Come near me again and I’ll stick this in your neck,” I said. I’d seen it once in a movie and it had worked then but I had a nagging suspicion that if it came down to it—even if I was lucky enough to stab him—it wouldn’t stop him from killing me.

  He raised his hand and swiped at the blood trailing down his face so that it smeared over his bronze skin.

  “You think this will stop me?” He glanced down at the blood on his hand. When he looked back up at me and captured me with his yellow-eyed gaze, I realised the cut on his head had closed. The blood was still fresh but without an injury it could have belonged to anyone.

  “How…” I stuttered as he pushed up onto the balls of his feet.

  “You are an enigma,” he said, brandishing his long blade once more. “And there is a part of me, a forbidden part that regrets what I must—”

  Something dark and formless darted from the shadows and crashed into the man with the blade. He screamed, a wordless cry that chilled the blood in my veins as I scrambled to my feet and ran for the mouth of the alley. Whatever had attacked him wasn’t something I was going to hang around to get to know, even if it had just saved my life.

  I crashed out onto the street and straight into the arms of the handsome stranger from the nightclub. His strong arms wrapped around me, holding me steady as I struggled to draw breath and my head fought to come to terms with the creature in the alley.

  “It’s my lucky night, isn’t it?” He said, momentarily tightening his grip on my arms.

  “There’s something back there, something attacked me,” I said, my words fighting to get out of my mouth fast enough.

  “Attacked, by who?” The handsome stranger said, raising an eyebrow at me before he glanced over the top of my head. “I don’t see anyone,” he said.

  “He was there, he had a knife and…”

  The stranger cut me off as he cupped my face and tilted it up toward the streetlights. “You’re hurt,” he said, his fingers sliding up to my cheek. The moment his finger brushed against the cut, I winced and flinched away from his touch. It burned like a son of a bitch.

  “I told you, I was attacked,” I said.

  “Are you injured anywhere else?” He turned me around, slowly examining me from head to foot and heat slowly spread into my face. Clearly I was in shock or something because allowing a strang
er to force me into a slow twirl in the middle of the street definitely wasn’t normal behaviour.

  With my back to him, I tried to pull away from his hold but he held on and breaking free would have meant physically ripping myself away from his touch. As twisted as it seemed, the last thing I wanted to do was lose the feel of his hands on me. Despite being a stranger, he made me feel safe, as though whatever had attacked me in the alley couldn’t ever get to me so long as he was touching me.

  I was definitely losing my mind. I didn’t even know his goddamned name and here I was imagining that he could protect me from that thing that had attempted to eviscerate me.

  “Shit,” he swore under his breath as his hands brushed against my tender back.

  The creature had tagged me when it had knocked me into the garbage heap. It had hurt but with my adrenaline pumping and the blood thudding through my body, I hadn’t fully registered just how much it had hurt. Until now.

  No sooner had his fingers found my injury, than I could feel blood trickling down my spine, all the way to the back of my jeans. The wound started to burn as though the creature in the alley had used a hot poker to score my flesh.

  Tears stung at the corners of my eyes and I bit down on my lip in an attempt to prevent a whimper from escaping me. Pain wasn’t something that particularly bothered me. When I’d been a kid, I’d climbed the tallest tree in my backyard when my brother Jake had bet me that I couldn’t. I’d gone all the way to the top but getting down had been the problem and instead of the graceful descent I’d had in mind, I’d taken a nosedive from it and broken my leg in two places. Jake had vomited when he’d seen the bone poking out through the skin but I hadn’t even cried. My lack of reaction had drawn more than one or two curious stares in the ER. It wasn’t that it hadn’t hurt because it had, but I’d felt almost removed from the pain. As though it was numbed somehow.

  But whatever the creature had done to me in the alley wasn’t numb. The burning intensified so much so that I was certain my skin was peeling away from my spine.

  “It hurts…” I whispered, afraid that if I tried to speak normally I would start screaming and not be able to stop.

  “I can help but I need you to trust me,” the stranger said, turning me back to face him. His eyes had been dark grey in the club, I was certain of it and yet as I stared up into his face now, his eyes had changed to molten silver.

  “I don’t know you,” I said, a wave of pain tearing through me hard enough to cause me to dig my nails into the strangers arms.

  “My name is Azael,” he said. I wanted to question him on where he’d gotten such a weird name from, or at least what his parents had been thinking of when they’d given it to him but another wave of agony swept through me and I buckled at the knees.

  “Do you trust me?” He asked again, as I clung to him, my vision going dark around the edges.

  I opened my mouth to ask him whether I had a choice or not but all that escaped me was a whimper.

  “Yes, yes,” I whispered, heat seared through my flesh and I cried out as my vision went red and I buried my face against the soft leather of his jacket, smothering the scream that ripped from my throat.

  The pain in my back increased and as the world went black, I wondered if the searing agony would rip me in half the way it was threatening to.

  4

  The darkness was the all-consuming kind that came after a nightmare. The sort that kept you trapped, holding onto you as your heart hammered in your chest, threatening to erupt straight out through your ribcage like an alien creature. In the end it was the cold that helped me push it back. My body felt frozen, stiff, and unfamiliar as I struggled to open my eyes.

  It took me a few seconds to even register that I’d succeeded in opening my eyes. The ceiling was painted a blue so dark it was practically black. Small pinpricks of light that grew in intensity the more I stared up at them came slowly into focus. It wasn’t a ceiling I was staring up at but a large glass window that took up most of the roof, the night sky visible with its millions of stars spread out before me.

  My mouth was dry and felt as though someone had stuffed it with cotton wool before gluing my tongue to the roof of my mouth.

  Turning my head to the side, I realised I was lying in the middle of a huge bed, the satin sheets whispering against my skin as I moved against them.

  “You’re awake,” a voice said from out of the darkness that surrounded me.

  “Where am I?” I tried to keep my voice steady but I couldn’t stop an edge of panic from creeping into it.

  “Safe.”

  One word that held so much weight and power. How could the stranger promise that I was safe, when I didn’t even know where I was? How had I gotten here? Shifting in the bed, I struggled into an upright position as the satin sheet slithered down off my body.

  “Where are my clothes?” I said, clutching the sheet against my body in a pointless attempt at keeping my modesty in tact. I hadn’t undressed myself, which meant the stranger in the dark had already seen me naked.

  What else had happened while I was unconscious?

  Scooting back over the covers, I didn’t stop moving until my back struck the cold leather headboard, the second it touched me I winced. Pain flared across my skin with such ferocity that sparks danced in my vision.

  “What do you remember?” He asked, taking a step out of the dark corner of the room. It wasn’t enough that I could see his face, the shadows in the room still played across his features, making it almost impossible to read his expression.

  “No. You answer my questions first,” I said. “Where are we, and where are my clothes?”

  “Is that an order?”

  I stared at him, shock made my brain sluggish. It was a weird question, there was no denying it but if that was what he needed to hear to answer my questions then so be it.

  “Yeah, that’s an order,” I said, struggling to put as much authority into my voice as I could.

  He moved further out of the darkness, slowly getting closer to the end of the bed with each step he took. The smirk on his face told me I’d failed with my attempt at sounding authoritarian.

  “You sure about that?” He asked, his words dripping against my skin like sweet honey. With nothing more than a sensual twist of his lips, his smirk became a smile and I could suddenly imagine the feel of his mouth against my body, trailing fiery kisses over my collar bones, dipping between my breasts as he licked and nipped his way down across my skin.

  “Stop,” I said, my voice icy and alien to my own ears. The moment the word left my mouth, he froze. His smile sliding away, until there was nothing but a melancholic longing in his eyes.

  “This is the Aery,” he said, he paused and searched my face. Did he expect me to recognise the name? If he did then he was going to be sorely mistaken. He sighed and moved away from the bed, his disappointment palpable. “Your clothes were ruined and I didn’t want them to stink the place up. I’ll have new ones brought up.” He’d gone from teasing me, to being so utterly dismissive that I couldn’t help but feel hurt. Clearly, there was something I was missing but I had no clue as to what it might be.

  “If you’re worried about me undressing you, rest assured I did not molest you. I had the doctor on call come and tend to your injuries, his nurse helped you out of your clothes before you passed out.”

  I stared at him in shock. Nurse. Doctor on call. Just what the hell was he talking about.

  “I thought it would be better for you to stay the night here, considering your condition…”

  “Thanks,” I said awkwardly. At least he hadn’t been the one to undress me but my memory of the night before was still more than a little cloudy which didn’t bring me any comfort.

  “Wait, we’re still in the city?” I asked, staring at my surroundings. I hadn’t realised it before but the walls weren’t really walls at all, but were made of glass and I could only assume they were windows. But the fact that I couldn’t see the city lights surrounding us, s
uggested we’d left the city behind.

  “We’re right in the middle of the city,” he said, moving off the dais that the bed appeared to be sitting on. As soon as he moved into the next room, the lights flicked on automatically, illuminating a large bar area. A bar that from the looks of it was better stocked than the bar in Ultra.

  “I don’t understand…” I said, staring out through the glass. “Where is the city?”

  He gestured to the glass walls. “Go ahead and have a look.”

  Awkwardly, I made my way across the bed, keeping the satin sheet wrapped firmly around my body. Placing my feet on the floor, I dug my toes into the plush cream carpet that covered the floor before I pushed up onto my feet. The carpet was deep enough, that each step made me feel as though I was springing across the floor rather than just walking.

  I reached the window and stared out, the sky was beginning to lighten. Faint purple and pink streaks gradually weaving through the indigo surrounding us.

  “It’s beneath us,” he said, as though he could read my mind.

  I looked down; the drop was enough to send my stomach and heart tumbling downwards.

  His words left me stunned; there was only one building in the city tall enough to do what he was describing. And there was no way I could be inside it. But I couldn’t deny the proof right in front of me.

  He wasn’t lying.

  Surreptitiously I pinched my arm, hard; but the view remained unchanged. I wasn’t dreaming.

  The city spread out beneath us, the lights giving the air a distinct glow, as though everything below us was made from gold.

  “Beautiful,” I whispered.

  “You have no idea,” he said, his words sending a shiver racing across my skin as I turned to face him again.

  He stood on the opposite side of the bed, his grey eyes raked down over my body slowly, before they travelled back up to my face.

  “You found me.” My memory of the night before was hazy but the terror I’d felt when the man in the alley had attacked me slammed into me, sealing my breath in my lungs.