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  Each of them knew every detail of the other’s history, even their mortal lives, so all his friend could be asking for was what lay between the lines, the nuances, the matters of the human heart. Pascal was as French in his angelic sensibilities as he had been in his mortal life as a leader of the French Resistance in the Second World War.

  But then, Angelo had been an Italian prince in his mortal life, more fiery, hot-blooded and passionate than any overweening Frenchman by far.

  Pascal smiled and shrugged elaborately for an angel without form. The two were old hands at these harmless, macho human vanities. “Will you play these games all day, my friend, or will you reveal your true self?” he asked with a patience that galled Angelo endlessly.

  His remark irritated Angelo on another level as well. Pascal didn’t believe it possible for human beings to reveal their “true” selves—or even to tell the truth at all, since he himself had never done so as a mortal.

  But this was Pascal’s charm. Angelo gazed out upon the Pacific, wishing it was instead his view of the Rockies. At last he answered the question. “I was thinking I have rarely been so…uneasy.”

  Pascal’s focus narrowed still more. “Since Isobel was about to be murdered?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Angelo nodded without form. He went much further back than Pascal in his mortal life, and Isobel Avedon was his only story. “I loved her more than life. Shakespeare himself could not have dreamed or penned such a passion.” In his soulmind, no couple, not Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde, not Lancelot and Guinevere or even Katherina and Petruchio, held a candle to the love of Angelo and Isobel. Ill-fated, yes. Angelo had been the target of an assassin’s knife, and Isobel…Dear God.

  Isobel.

  Images of her plight came to him, images so powerful and immediate he felt swallowed up whole, knew he was seeing her in the present moment. He saw her witnessing the seedy Los Angeles neighborhood…her incredible focus on the baby…the woman murdered on the street…the baby falling from its mother’s arms.

  And then Angelo watched as Isobel plunged out of her heavenly dimension and into a human form. A howling protest formed in his soul, but he had no power to stop her.

  Isobel.

  In all the ages, there had never been a woman so precious to Angelo as Isobel Avedon, but she was a heavenly being now, and her monumental foolishness in hurtling into the earthly dimension filled him with a terrible anger.

  She was a Guardian Angel, and she should never again have been in such mortal danger. Her reckless actions changed all that, and the howling inside him pitched higher. She could suffer and die, and for no good reason. There were many, many ways she might have protected the baby’s life without doing what she had done.

  As hastily as she had gone over the edge into her human form, Angelo departed the company of his compatriot, Pascal, and moved to protect her from what evil pursued her in the earthly dimension. He spread his mighty wings, and in a burst of energy he was there, hovering above her in the barrio churchyard.

  Isobel was fully mortal now. She could bleedwas bleeding. Oddly afraid to look closely at her, Angelo, who feared nothing and no one, who had taken on the worst humanity had to offer countless times in his service as an Avenging Angel, was afraid.

  He feared distraction if he looked at her, and more…he feared his own feelings for a mortal Isobel.

  Refusing to truly see her, he cut a swath, what humans would call a force field, to protect Isobel and the baby from any more bullets as she made her way to the gate of the abandoned churchyard and from there to the safety of the sanctuary door.

  Then he turned his avenging might on the murdering mortals. Bullets lost their speed and trajectory and fell quite ridiculously to the ground. He would have been amused at the confusion of the gunmen had he any sense of humor remaining.

  He transformed his essence so that he appeared in all his fearsome glory, with his white, powerful, feathery wings stretched wide. An aura of the most brilliant light surrounded him, and a terrible silence commanded the void.

  Hovering above the fray, he awed the innocent and flooded the minds of the murderers with a terrible, roiling fear. His lightning bolts made their weapons so hot, their mortal flesh blistered. And when they ran away in terror, they ran straight toward cops descending upon the intersection from every direction.

  At the end, Angelo used the heat to twist and warp the weapons so they could never again be used to take other lives.

  And then, still from above her, he saw Isobel, still holding the baby, sink to the ground by the locked sanctuary door. Tears of relief streamed down her cheeks as she cradled the man-child close to her altogether human female form.

  She knew her prayers had been answered, but not how. He knew that. She had seen him, but she was mortal now and would not have recognized him.

  He could not avoid seeing her now, or recognizing her physical human being as the one he had known in every sense, save having bedded her.

  He had ached then for the unfulfilled need of her.

  He ached now.

  In his pure and angelic consciousness, Angelo wanted the earthly time back when he could have had Isobel in the manner of a mortal man. He wondered that he was not instantly banished from the ranks of angels, for lust and all the Seven Deadly Sins were forbidden.

  His indiscretion didn’t end there. He told himself he only wanted her to see how reckless she had been, what danger she had been in, but in truth, he wanted her to know he had saved her life and the life of the baby. He wanted Isobel to know that without his intervention she and the babe would be dead.

  He tried to excuse himself, to find justification for these ridiculously silly and trivial human longings. The fleeting desire might be forgiven; to act upon them he would be laughed out of the corps of Avenging Angels.

  Most avengers knew what it was to deal in the real world with humans, even suffer attractions to them. But no mortal needed to know, as he wanted Isobel to know, who had come to her rescue, or why.

  Lying, even to himself on such a private matter, was never an option for an angel. He knew better, as all angels must. He knew that he ached with his sensual, human memories of Isobel and of what they had been and done together half a millennium ago. He wanted to hold her in mortal arms, as a man.

  He wanted to dry her tears. However noble the goal, his motives were not.

  To go to her now, in that way, flew in the face of every value he had held for all his centuries as an Avenging Angel. Not the fact, but the power of his desire shocked him. He felt relentlessly drawn toward an action as dangerous as Isobel’s plunging back into her mortal shape had been, as if he were being sucked into the vortex of a most immense and intimate hurricane.

  He felt afire. Going to Isobel in any form was the last thing he must do.

  He had driven off the attackers and made certain that in the confusion and disarray the police might search the grounds and look upon the exact spot where Isobel had concealed herself, but they would see and hear nothing of her or the babe.

  Isobel was out of immediate danger. He could see to it that the murder of the baby’s mother was avenged. He had duties, responsibilities, the charge of dozens of Avenging Angels in a city desperate for peace and justice. He could never forget those vast obligations.

  Still he lingered, watching Isobel from a perspective unknown to her or any humans. She sat with her legs tucked under her in a flowing skirt that might, but for its immodest modern length, have served her well five centuries before. The baby’s weight lay cradled in her lap, his head in the crook of her delicate arm. His wispy curls lay darkly against Isobel’s porcelain-colored flesh. Her blood still flowed from her shoulder.

  A human possessiveness took hold. Still, he delayed departing—as if rooted in place, though no such restrictions on him were even remotely possible.

  He could not take his gaze from her.

  In the same small-boned and voluptuous body that had been hers over five centuries before, Iso
bel stared into the little one’s big brown eyes.

  She hummed softly and, after a while, Angelo stumbled upon the terrible truth—the power of the emotion that had overcome Isobel’s angel sense.

  She’d been utterly transformed by the ancient magic of a mother’s love for her child. He saw that in the primitive mortal brain stem she had taken in exchange for infinite consciousness, Isobel had already committed her love and her being to the babe. She had claimed him for her own child in her woman’s heart.

  He saw that she would never willingly surrender her human form and give up the babe to his family or anyone else for any reason.

  He found her utterly unfathomable.

  Watching her stroke the babe’s cheek, he also found her unimaginably beautiful. Her sable-colored hair spilled in gentle waves over her shoulders, her delicate features filled with emotion. Her eyes, like the silvery pools of moonlight on a glacial Alaskan river—the same silvery blue color that had once sent the great artist Michelangelo himself into raptures—shone with adoration for the babe.

  And though her brave-heartedness in defying Heaven and Earth to rescue the babe touched him deeply, Angelo bent his will against her. He hardened his perceptions, refusing the excuses—what Grace would have called compassion.

  He believed with all his being that what Isobel had done in forsaking her angelhood was not only unwarranted, and foolish, but worse, it was unforgivably selfish of her to take such risks.

  He wanted to snatch her up by her beautiful neck and shake her. If it were within his power to make her resume her angel existence, he would have. What Isobel had done had never before, in Angelo’s experience, been done within the ranks of the Guardian Angels; he knew that her act—in taking human form—was irrevocable.

  He suspected she knew as well.

  The consequences staggered even his imaginative powers. The babe was the target of some deadly human intent, some twisted passions Angelo knew in-stinctively had only just begun. And in her human form, Isobel could no more protect the babe or herself than she could fly.

  Isobel Avedon might love the human child to the depths of her now mortal soul, but she was illequipped to keep him alive.

  Angelo stanched the flow of her blood and departed from Isobel’s presence. Deeply angered at her reckless choice, he knew all that was left to do was to seek dispensation for himself to protect Isobel’s life, as well as the babe’s.

  For all his ruthless self-examination, he refused to question why he shouldn’t give the assignment to another one of what the Avenging Angel Ezekiel had always called “the other halos.”

  Chapter Two

  Seth finally cried himself to sleep.

  Sitting deep in the shadows of the sanctuary entrance, Isobel rested her head against the carved wooden door. Her arms ached with the weight of Seth’s small body, but it was a very long time before her mind began to examine the enormity of what she had done.

  Flies droned by. In the sweltering heat of the day, sweat gathered between her breasts, at her nape, in the crook of her arm where Seth’s head rested. Her sleeping limbs prickled beneath her. She hadn’t thought to take his mother’s purse, and she’d carried no diaper bag.

  Isobel had no money, no clothes for herself, no change of swaddling for Seth—nothing. Worst of all, she had no earthly idea what she should do or where she should go.

  She hadn’t just fallen off any heavenly cabbage truck. She had heard tales of avenging angels conjuring whatever was needed to pull off a human façade.

  She knew that in these cases, such accoutrements accompanied belief.

  Ask, and ye shall receive.

  She might have forsaken her calling in heaven, but Isobel believed. She bowed her head and asked for guidance. She asked for a place to go, a place no one would think to look for her and Seth. She asked for instruction on the way to get there, and then she asked for savvy to pull it all off.

  The answering silence in her mind terrified her. Her heart pounded. She could hear the blood rushing past her ears, and she equated the sound with the panic flowing nearer and nearer her mind.

  Dear God, what had she done?

  How was she to protect this innocent babe when she couldn’t even cope with leaving the shadows of the sanctuary?

  A thousand times…ten times a thousand, she had rushed in to nudge assistance for women and children in trouble. She believed she knew every facet of the fear and isolation and despair felt by women throughout the ages in such straits.

  It must have been true that she understood. How else could she have served her mortal charges in her role as Guardian Angel? But there was an immense gulf between the experience of Isobel the guardian and Isobel the woman. She had never been in such desperate circumstances herself. What would happen when those men came looking for her? For Seth?

  Someone wanted the babe and his mother dead, and she couldn’t accept on blind faith that no one else would come to end the sleeping child’s life.

  Pray, Isobel, she commanded herself. Pray and move your feet.

  Seth stretched in his sleep, settling still closer to her side, and Isobel dashed away her tears. Love for the tiny boy swelled in her heart. Whatever else happened, she would not sit here wallowing in her fears. She had chosen this destiny, and she would take the very human responsibility that went along with what she had done.

  Her legs had fallen asleep beneath her. She stood carefully, shocked by the prickling sensation she had forgotten. Shifting Seth’s weight to her other arm, she knocked on the sanctuary door. It was a useless gesture. Had anyone been there, they would have at least checked outside the door when the gunfire began.

  She breathed deeply and turned away. Following the overgrown path around the church to the street intersecting the one where the attackers had murdered Seth’s mother, she considered what she must do.

  Worn-out storefronts lined the opposite side of the four-lane street, but should she go there?

  A bus? A cab? Seth whimpered in his sleep and scrubbed a tiny fist over his eyes and nose. He needed a more restful place than in her sweaty arms, she thought, as she stood on an unsavory corner of the barrio neighborhood. But she had nothing to give in exchange for a ride to a shelter for women and children.

  She would simply have to walk. She screwed up her courage and crossed the street, then walked towards the closest storefront. All she needed was directions to such a shelter. Unfortunately, the shop she chose was the last one she would have picked had she had a dram of real-life experience. Or if she’d still had her angel’s perspective.

  A sign on the door read Shoe Repair Shop, so when she spotted a woman through the window and then walked in, she was surprised to find that the place reeked of oddly pungent smoke.

  Dread coiled around her heart. Saliva pooled in her mouth. The deal being negotiated on the countertop had nothing to do with shoes or repairs. She had never imagined herself walking so stupidly into the middle of such a transaction.

  Either or both parties would have a gun, a weapon just as deadly at close range as the ones she’d only barely escaped by the grace of some heavenly intervention. How could she be so unwitting?

  For the second time, Isobel wished she had the powers of an Avenging Angel, because this deal would hit the streets next, and then the veins of innocent kids too scared or angry or pressured to walk away.

  She plastered what she hoped was a consummately ignorant and naive look on her face. Given the fact that she was standing here at all, naive didn’t seem like much of a stretch. “I’m very…very sorry to interrupt. I’m looking for the nearest shelter for women and children.”

  The woman behind the counter straightened. Her lip curled unbecomingly. Her jaded eyes swept the small dirty store, then fixed on Isobel. “This place look like social services to you, honey?”

  She wore a skintight black outfit that left her arms and most of her breasts bare. There were awful bruises on her upper arms. Isobel felt a flicker of recognition. This woman was someone she
had watched over! Someone she had helped out of a scrape with a man who thought women were either for sex or punching out, depending on his mood.

  Focusing only on the slight woman, Isobel willed her to remember the times when she’d needed an out quite desperately, and Isobel had been there for her, diverting angry blows.

  “I know this isn’t social services.” Instinctively, Isobel held the woman’s angry stare. “But you can help me, if you choose.”

  The woman looked torn, angry to be interrupted, scared that her buyer was getting antsy, yet still wanting to respond with whatever instinct was left in her to Isobel’s appeal for help.

  The moments stretched unbearably, until suddenly it no longer mattered. The unkempt, tattooed dope buyer swore and pulled a nasty-looking gun out of his leather jacket, jabbing it unsteadily in Isobel’s direction. And worse, at Seth, who was somehow still sleeping against her shoulder.

  “Stupid cow! You get it, lady? There’s a deal goin’ down here? Take a rocket scientist?” he snarled, spitting an ugly four-letter epithet at Isobel. “Get the hell outta here before I blow you ‘way!”

  Fear pounding through her, Isobel turned to protect Seth with her body and then bolted out the door, heading for the street corner as quickly as she could without jostling the baby awake.

  Her heart wouldn’t stop thudding painfully in her chest. She had been so close! If the woman had been alone, she might have helped.

  But she hadn’t been alone, and the deal she was involved in wasn’t innocent; in fact, Isobel had been closer to no escape at all than to any real help.

  Had she been an angel, she would have known what to do. Now, she had no clue, and she was terribly lucky the woman’s antsy buyer was more interested in his next fix than in calling the cops down on his head for blowing her away with Seth in her arms.

  If this was what she was to find in these run-down storefronts, she would be better off waiting until someone, anyone, turned up at the church. Approaching the corner, Isobel watched a child race ahead of a group of teenage boys to punch the button to cross the street.