Darkness Splintered by Keri Arthur, now you can read online.
Chapter 1
I woke up naked and in a strange bed.
For several minutes I did nothing more than breathe in the gently feminine – but totally unfamiliar – scents in the room, trying to figure out how, exactly, I'd gotten here.
And where the hell "here" was.
My brain was decidedly fuzzy on any sort of detail, however, and that could only mean my mission to consume enough alcohol to erase all thought and blot out emotion had actually succeeded. And that surprised the hell out of me.
Thanks to our fast metabolic rate, werewolves generally find it difficult to go on a bender. I might be only half were, but I usually hold my alcohol fairly well and really hadn't expected to get anywhere near drunk. I certainly hadn't expected to be able to forget – if for only a few hours – the anger and the pain.
Pain that came from both the worst kind of betrayal, and my own subsequent actions.
My eyes stung, but this time no tears fell. Maybe because I had very little in the way of tears left. Or maybe it was simply the fact that, somewhere in the alcohol-induced haze of the past few days, I'd finally come to accept what had happened to me.
Although it wasn't like I had any other choice.
If I had, then I would have died. Should have died. But Azriel, the reaper who'd been my follower, my guard, and my lover, had forced me to live and, in doing so, had taken away the very essence of what I was.
Because in forcing me to live, he'd not only ensured that my soul could never be reborn, but he'd made me what he was.
A dark angel.
The next time I died, I would not move on and be reborn into another life here on Earth. I would join him on the gray fields – the unseen lands that pided this world from the next – and become a guard on the gates to heaven and hell.
And that meant I would never see my late mother again. Not in any future lifetime that might have been mine, because he'd stolen all that away from me.
What made it worse was the knowledge that he'd saved me not because he loved me, but because he needed me to find the lost keys to the gates.