has been noted,” he added with the smallest glimpse of a smile.
“Oh.” Speechless again, I clasped my hands behind my back. “Well, thank you.”
With nothing in his body language to read, I reached out with my senses. His emotions were clamped down, only the flavors of mild curiosity and amusement coming through. It seemed his giddiness over the angel had sobered into caution.
“Really, I should be thanking you.” He blurted it out with a faint blush rising in his cheeks. “So, thanks, Daisy.”
That fucking nickname again. “For what?” I sputtered.
“Let’s see, repairing a wing despite your reservations about our new guest.” He counted off on his fingers. “Gracefully dealing with the townspeople’s suspicions, our own included. And,” he paused, looking at me pointedly, “giving Stavros something good in his life. Lord knows he needed it.”
“Um, what?” I stared at him, certain that I hadn’t heard him correctly. “You’re not upset with him? Or me?”
“How I feel doesn’t matter,” he shrugged. “It happened. I gather it’s going to continue happening. Yeah, you have horns and you don’t need to eat or sleep but,” he drew in another long breath, “you’re one of our people now. It’s on us to look after you. Stav’s the happiest I’ve seen him in years, and you?” He sucked his lower lip between his teeth and I felt hunger spark through me, despite feeding less than an hour earlier. “You’re a completely different woman from the bleeding, skittish little thing we found. It’s…good to see you thriving too.”
Kais grinned sheepishly, the shy flirtatiousness and heady desire bleeding through the emotions he tried so hard to clamp down.
“Kais?” I angled my body toward him, reaching a hand out tentatively. Did he want to…?
The moment I did, he stepped away. Out of reach. The sting of how Stavros saw me was one thing, but this outright rejection hurt.
“I’m just glad you two have something that’s working out,” he said in a single breath. “For the time being, anyway.”
I laughed, dropping my hand. My turn to feel sheepish. He thought Stavros and I were a thing and he was just staying out of his friend’s way.
“We don’t have something,” I said. “He’s purely doing it to feed me, to prevent me from becoming a danger to the community.”
Kais got an odd look on his face, like he was trying to hide a smile. “I don’t think that’s entirely true.” With that he turned, heading back toward the chapel as he called out, “Goodnight, Daisy.”
12
Swords of God
Kais
I woke with a start, my ears ringing and sweat stinging my eyes, the sounds of mortar explosions, bestial snarls, and the screams of dying men buried under the high pitched warning tone in my head. My chest heaved and my heart stuttered as I catalogued my surroundings.
The cross over my mirror. The black robe hanging from the hook on the back of my door. The rosary over the lamp by my bedside. The puckered scar running down the inside of my leg.
Bethel. I was in Bethel, in the priest house, after the Rising.
My men were long since dead.
Three years into this routine of night terrors and waking with the sense that I was in the wrong place, and I still had to sort through the panic and collect my bearings every time.
The house was quiet, which meant Stavros was on guard duty and Zach had probably carted Azariah off to see the town. I frowned, and oddly enough it was Deyva in my head, her wary eyes on Azariah, the defensive hunch of her shoulders as she moved around the angel. It had to be crazy to be so suspicious of an angel, to trust...whatever Deyva was, but I couldn’t shake the feeling.
I groaned as I stretched out of bed. I’d pushed a little too hard yesterday, working on reinforcing the old veterinary office so we could start building a proper (for the apocalypse) hospital, and my body wasn’t thanking me today. But wearing myself out in the day was the easiest way of making sure I slept through the nightmares, too tired to fight my way out of the horrors.
I showered quickly, dressed in jeans and a black button down with my white collar, and went in search of the succubus.
She’d been petty and petulant and jealous the night before with our reaction to the angel and it had been fucking adorable. Not that I would tell her so. I was determined to keep Deyva at arm’s length, but there was a