grandparents and I had been so close. For ten years they, along with Brooke and Glitch, were my world. But now all the communication in our house was strained and full of hurtful innuendo and resentful glances.
“He’s the Angel of Death,” my grandmother would say. “The most powerful angel in the heavens.”
Then my grandfather would join in. “He’s not a teenaged boy, despite his appearance, pix. He’s dangerous beyond your wildest imagining.”
The fact that he’d saved my life—twice!—apparently didn’t matter.
As he got closer, I tried to subdue the adrenaline rush I felt every time I looked at him. His dark hair fell over his forehead, emphasizing the sparkling depths of his coffee-colored eyes. The wind molded the T-shirt to the expanse of his chest, revealing the fact that he was cut to simple perfection. And he had this way of moving, this animalistic grace, that mesmerized even the stoutest minds.
“How was your last class?” he asked, stopping in front of me but avoiding my gaze. His voice, deep and smooth like warm caramel, caused a fluttering deep inside me, a flood of heat to my face. How could any being, supernatural or otherwise, be so perfect?
“Pretty boring,” I said, pretending to be as uninterested as he. I hoped and prayed he couldn’t feel the pain his presence caused. The humiliation would be too much.
He nodded and looked into the forest behind the school. I couldn’t help a quick glance at his arms. The bands of symbols that lined his biceps were visible underneath the edges of his sleeves. The designs were ancient and meaningful, symbols that stated his name, rank, and serial number in a celestial language. Or that was my impression. I loved looking at them. Thick dark lines that twisted into curves and angles. A single line of them wrapping around each arm. To me, they looked like a combination of Native American pictography and something alien, something otherworldly.
“Are you okay?” he asked, still looking toward the tree line.
“Me?” I pretended to be surprised. It was his job to check up on me. It didn’t mean anything. “I’m great.”
“We’re both great,” Brooklyn said. She put her phone away and draped an arm over my shoulders. “And we have to get to class.”
She offered Jared a hard glare, and I felt bad for him. He was only obeying my grandparents’ wishes. He watched us leave, his face expressionless, and it was hard to look away from the dark brown depths of his eyes shimmering beneath his thick black lashes, or the full mouth that had been pressed to mine on several of my more memorable occasions.
With a heavy sigh, I turned back toward the gym. Still, a person would have to be blind not to notice all the attention Jared drew every time he made an appearance. And I couldn’t help but notice that when he headed back to the main building, more than one girl at Riley High stopped to watch.
* * *
Sadly, PE was going to require effort. We were ordered to run the Path, which was a footpath in the forest behind the gym. Fun for some, life threatening for others. I was about as coordinated as overcooked spaghetti. This was not going to end well.
But even the pain and sweat of the Path couldn’t take my mind off the enigma that was Jared Kovach. Ever since he arrived in Riley’s Switch, he’d been kind of undercover as a student. Partly because we didn’t really know what else to do with him without drawing unwanted attention, but mostly because he had to stay close to me, to keep me safe. My status as a supposed war stopper carried enough weight to warrant a guardianship by way of the most powerful angel from heaven.
But my arrival onto this plane also warranted a protector of another kind. The angels had created a nephilim—a part-human, part-angel boy named Cameron—sent to protect me long before Jared arrived. And he was normally right on our heels. Part of that could be explained by his crush on Brooke. But he took his job very seriously and had hardly let me out of his sight. I scanned the area, wondering where he was. I hadn’t seen him in days, and after having him as a constant shadow every minute for the last two months, I found his absence a little disconcerting.
I thought about Jared. They hadn’t exactly been the best of friends. In fact, they’d torn a goodly portion of downtown Riley’s Switch