His Grace (The Ethereal Book 1) Read online

  She released him, and the man fell to the sidewalk whining as no one at all cheered.

  Yeah, because that’s what happens in real life.

  We all just stared in surprise as she huffed, wiped her hand on her hip, and then turned and marched toward me. Half the people in line had a phone almost to their ear as if asking themselves if they should call the police because they just witnessed a hundred-pound woman assault a hundred and ninety-pound man. Some probably wondered if it would be sexist of them to call. Perhaps some even wondered if it would be best not to draw the ire of someone who had just physically and emotionally assaulted a man on the street.

  A few may have had camera phones out, recording as much as they could as Lilly grabbed me and started pulling me away.

  We got into the vehicle, and I pulled away from the curb as she huffed and puffed and began to go on and on about the man. I made the required sounds in response, finding my way to her place easily enough.

  “I’m still on the clock,” I said as she tried to get out of the vehicle.

  “Oh, sure, I’ll text Danny, and he’ll send someone to pick up the car,” she said with a dismissive wave.

  “Lilly, I need the money.”

  “You’d earn a whole twenty dollars in the next three hours,” she said sternly. “I will pay you back the twenty dollars. Come on. I’m agitated. You just had sex. We need wine.”

  “Lilly, you can’t just pay my bills,” I protested.

  “I know that. But last time you drove me, I tipped you fifty. This time I have seventy-five on me, and you’ll take it, and I won't accept any complaints. I’m texting Danny.”

  “Lilly...”

  “You’re the only person in the world that I can talk to without you blabbing to someone else, or backstabbing, or sicking your boyfriend on me. I need that relaxation time.”

  “Fine,” I sighed out.

  “I’ve got a nice bottle of white wine chilling.”

  I glared at her because she only ever had a bottle of white wine chilling when she wanted me to visit.

  As if by magic, my phone beeped to life. I checked it and found a text from Danny, my boss, saying that he’d pay me for the remaining hours because Lilly was paying an exorbitant fee to have me escort her to her apartment and make sure that ‘bastard of an ex’ wasn’t there.

  To me, Lilly talked about how much she missed her ex. Others, when she talked about him, said that he was obsessive, a creep, a stalker, and abusive.

  Lilly didn’t talk like that. She had said that her ex had been all consuming, that once he decided he wanted something, he would capture and keep it, but she had never felt like he was too controlling.

  “I am not a bodyguard,” I protested.

  “He could be up there,” Lilly said in response. “It’s our anniversary tonight and I—I may have drunk texted him. Because I’m weak and stupid and he’s just devilishly handsome. Why are those always the guys that I end up falling for?”

  If he was up there, I was pretty certain she’d toss me out the door on my ass and then jump his bones. She was not inviting me up to keep her ex from her bed.

  “Lilly.”

  “We discussed this,” she said sternly.

  “Yes, we discussed that you’ve never had friends before and don’t know the boundaries, but this is a boundary. You can’t buy me.”

  “I’m not buying you, I’m buying your time from your job. That way, you can do something more enjoyable,” she said.

  “Now I sound like a prostitute.”

  “Prostitutes get paid better than drivers and waitresses, honey.”

  “I'm serious,” I said.

  “Five hundred a go, I’m pretty certain you could manage that. That’s like three times a month to make all your bills? Okay, four if you want to eat. Six to eight if you want to upgrade from the cockroach infested closet you call your apartment. Ten and you’d be made for life.”

  “I’m not that kind of girl!” I protested.

  “Sell your eggs,” she said. “No sex involved.”

  “There’s still a giant needle being shoved through my cervix. Donating eggs is not as simple as donating sperm, damn it.”

  “They should make it that easy, but that’s also why it can be as much as, what’s the going rate now? Whereas sperm is—what, a hundred per? Donating eggs is the way to go.”

  “They’re also a lot more selective about eggs, and you need to know your genetic history,” I growled. Lilly turned to look at me, and I groaned. “Okay, so I did look into it.”

  “Write a book,” she said.

  “Write a... you looked into writing a book, and what was it that you said, again?”

  “For every book written, depending on my price, I’d receive between thirty cents and like two dollars.”

  “And then I did the math for you, and what did we conclude?”

  “For a book to make enough to live off of, I’d have to sell between fifty and two hundred copies a day, and most authors are lucky to sell one,” she said in a resoundingly bored fashion.

  “Right, not writing a book, not donating my eggs, and definitely not whoring myself out. I’ll just stick to my jobs if you don’t mind. My paying jobs, which you are currently mucking about with, I should add.”

  “Fine, last time I muck with your work schedule. Since I’ve already done the mucking, come up and drink a bottle of my wine, pass out on my couch, and try not to bite me in the morning when I serve you breakfast.”

  “I wouldn’t try to bite you, if you weren’t fucking perky at six in the morning, damn it.”

  “It’s not that early.”

  “It’s now one in the morning, and we won’t go to bed until four. It’s early.”

  “Fine,” she grumbled. “It’s early. I’ll wait until seven?”

  “Nine, wait until at least nine before you try to wake me,” I demanded.

  “Fine.”

  “Good.”

  “Good!” she said loudly. “Now come drink my wine.”

  I am Samael. Mortals know me as Sam Angelica, and know that I have three brothers. I had built, and continued to run, an international business that was a parent company for many different things. That work paid for anything that myself, or my so called brothers, could ever want while my brothers did their work and reported back to me.

  Which was what I was doing in my office that day, waiting for a report.

  I looked over my glossy, black desk as Gabriel walked into my office. Gabriel’s dark skin often drew the curiosity of the ladies. His deep voice would lull them into a sense of security as he slipped a hand into their pants.

  As that was our main purpose on Earth, these were all important qualities for one of us to have.

  He stopped on the other side of my desk and slipped his hands into his pockets as he studied me.

  “She was there again,” he said. “They were right. The pull is strong.”

  “Did you fix it?” I asked.

  He hesitated.

  Gabriel hesitating was about the same as having a doctor hesitate when reporting to a family after surgery. It was never a good sign. Of us all, he was usually the fastest, most able to bring about the results that we needed.

  If he was hesitating, then something had happened that I should have known about before he entered my office. Something that I should have felt. That made me wonder if I had been neglecting my duties too much for the business empire I had been building for the past decade.

  I’m not that guy.

  I was never the one to lose track of my duties. If there was something going on in my city, I should have known about it right away. Of all of us, I was most sensitive to that which we had to keep watch for. I was the only one with such intimate knowledge of the problems we faced.

  “I don’t believe so,” he said finally. “The moment the door closed, a window was opened.”

  I hated that saying, and I always told the others to just close the damned window too. That was what we were meant t
o do, close the door and window and seal up any other entrance we might find. Fill in all the holes, as it were.

  And suddenly I was thinking in sexual euphemisms.

  I’m not that guy, either.

  “Quoting Father?” I asked, standing as Gabriel took a step back. “What did I tell you about quoting Father?”

  “To do it properly,” Gabriel rumbled out. “But it was a metaphor. You are familiar with those, are you not? A break was fixed, only to be replaced with a fracture. They did not lack in skills, as you claimed. Perhaps you should recall them.”

  “Michael is enjoying himself too much,” I said, taking my seat once more as I brought up a web browser on my computer. “Ralphie is—well, you know Ralph.”

  Gabriel bristled at the nickname, imitating a motion that I had seen Michael do many times. The two bickered and fought, but when it came down to it, Michael stepped in to protect Raphael.

  As long as Raphael wasn’t in the room.

  Just as I knew that Raphael’s most recent bad habit was a way to elicit a response from Michael.

  “Raphael is our brother. We must accept him as he is,” Gabriel said sternly.

  “I accept that he will bed men and women alike, what I don’t accept is his making gay porn to pay bills that he doesn’t have,” I responded in the same acidic tone. “We are supposed to be keeping ourselves out of the spotlight, not broadcasting our image across the web as we get fucked and mauled by six men.”

  Though I would never tell Ralph that, let alone allow any of the others to bring it up in his presence. We all coped as best we could, sometimes we developed bad habits, but, eventually, we got bored of them and moved on.

  Like the drug addiction Michael had, trying to feel closer to our Father. Or the alcoholic phase that we had all gone through.

  “Have you stopped to count how many we’ve flushed out with that?” he murmured.

  “I have not,” I said, keeping my attention focused on the web browser.

  “Seven thousand.”

  “A drop in the bucket,” I said with a shake of my head. “What’s her name?”

  Gabriel reached across the desk, a little silver and green card holder in his hand. I reached and took the card holder, opening it to remove the items inside. A bank card, credit card, library card, university identification, and driver’s license.

  “Organ donor,” I grumbled. “Not if we can help it.”

  “Already jumping to that?” Gabriel asked.

  “Three attacks in three months?” I asked in response, looking at Gabriel. “Somehow I doubt that we want her body spread further than it already is. Contact your man, have that removed from her file. Make it impossible for her to donate blood or anything else for that matter. I don’t care if she has a very special blood type or could save a baby dying of cancer. Keep her in her body.”

  “And Mike and Ralph?” Gabriel asked.

  “Recall them,” I said. “We obviously have a need. Something is going on. We need to find out what before a gate to Hell is opened up. Oh, and contact the witch who wrote the spell. Be sure that she is properly rewarded for a job well done.”

  “Why?” Gabriel asked.

  “This license was issued six months ago, two weeks after the spell was laid. Along with the library card. I’ll dig into it, but I’m betting she was living someplace else and decided to move on a whim. Pay the witch.”

  “When you say, pay the witch?” Gabriel asked. “How exactly would you like me to pay her?”

  I sighed loudly. “Gabe, I’m sending you to pay the witch instead of Mike, who you know she loves, what do you think I mean when I say pay the witch?”

  “If I remove her ability to rewrite the spell, I might cause damage to her knowledge, which would hurt us in the future. She’s still young. She has a long life of magic ahead of her.”

  “Why are you bartering for her magic, Gabe?”

  “Why are you trying to destroy her magic, Sam?” Gabriel snarled in response. “That’s a low thing to do, something we’d expect from the enemy, not from you.”

  “If they get their hands on her, they will make her talk. If she talks, they will find us. They will find her. They always find the witch who made the spell. Wipe her memory. Either of us or of her magic. I don’t care which, because at the end of the day, they both work. The other option is to kill her, but then the Grand Coven might not let us work with them again.”

  “Removing a part of a mind will guarantee that we are blacklisted,” Gabe growled.

  “Only if she remembers that it was us she did the magic for, and only if she reports working under the table and against Coven rules. The punishment for that is the loss of her magic. Think beyond your personal experiences, Gabe. We must do what is necessary, and this is necessary. Do as I command you.”

  He grumbled about it, but he’d do it. He grumbled all the way to the door of my office, but he didn’t slam the door behind him. Which meant that while he didn’t agree with my decision, he did understand that it was a necessity and I didn’t ask him to do so lightly.

  Alone in my office, I picked up the phone and called the university, inquiring about the woman. No one could comment on her. She paid her tuition on time, had a clean attendance record, remarkable grades. She had yet to see her advisors or professors.

  Upon asking for the professors, I found that they were unable to say anything about her. She was simply a name in a very large lecture hall. Her courses were handed in. They were all well done.

  One of them kept an attendance, and was able to tell me that she missed several classes without explanation, but still maintained her grades and assignments.

  Her tuition was paid in full, and no one was listed as an emergency contact. I got the feeling that she worked multiple jobs, and had missed classes because she had been on shift.

  I had to dig deeper.

  I called around, found out where she had come from thanks to the DMV and then called there. Got put on hold for almost an hour, but then got through to her caseworker.

  A B-student in high school, great attendance record, played no sports, attended no clubs. Missed out on walking the stage at her graduation ceremony and didn’t attend prom.

  She had no family to speak of, having been passed from one foster home to another through no fault of her own. One family had their status as foster parents revoked. Another died in a car crash, yet another gave her up because they took on troubled children and she was just too cute to keep around boys and girls like that.

  None of the removals were her fault, simply strange coincidences that were out of the control of mortal hands.

  She had been moved around so much that she had asked to be emancipated and then worked her way up from there. Multiple jobs, good work ethic, slowly clawing her way out of poverty and building a life for herself. All in all, Grace had plans for herself and was making those plans work.

  There was nothing about her at all.

  That information told me that she was a responsible, hard worker. As an employer, I wanted to hire her after hearing that. I just had to find an open position. Given her history, I was relatively certain that she could work her way up in my company and be a loyal worker who could help transform the way the division I placed her into worked.

  But it didn’t tell me about Grace, not what her goals were, or desires. I didn’t know her as a person, what kind of music she liked or if she drank wine.

  So, I headed to social media. I found her on all the sites and then backed out and found a friend of hers and hacked their account.

  Hacking hers would have been too noticeable. I revisited and looked at all her status updates over the past few months.

  Mainly passive aggressive whining.

  But it was nothing more than the frustrated outbursts that I was used to seeing from the newest generation. Those of the past thought those things to themselves or told friends. Now it was all online.

  Nothing overly negative or different. Most were bitter outlooks o
n things that had happened. Though, I did agree with her, one should not smoke in public and give attitude to someone who started coughing around them. I did believe that such an act should be treated as assault or attempted murder.

  Which is to say, I found her status updates amusing but knew that others would not see it that way.

  Very few forwards or shares. None of those quirky little photos with the sayings on them, or the sayings with an inappropriate photo.

  Just her, rambling in an awkward fashion like she wasn’t too sure what social media was used for.

  I slipped into her pictures and scrolled through. I hesitated on one, then another, and another. With each successive image, my pants tightened.

  I’m not that guy.

  The pictures were completely appropriate. She was fully clothed and not even smiling in most of them. No skin was showing, there was nothing provocative about the way she was positioned or what she was doing.

  I shifted uncomfortably as I looked at the identification I had before me, then up to the pictures on the screen.

  The government images were different than those on her social media. She smiled in neither of them, but there was more life to her in the social media.

  As I continued to click through, I rubbed my hand on my pant leg.

  I’m not that kind of guy.

  Oh, but the further into her pictures I got, the more I wanted to be.

  Don’t get me wrong, I liked pornography and had masturbated before and often. Being a living, breathing, creature with genitals, I was no stranger to self-pleasure and found no shame in it.

  But doing it to pictures on social media was not an appropriate thing to do.

  It would have helped me if she had done something stupid and popular, but her pictures did not involve a ridiculous face or making a sign with her fingers. She was not trying to look cute, and somehow that just turned me on.

  I slipped from her pictures to the ones that had been tagged with her in them. There were only three. In the most recent one, she held a wine glass in one hand, a book in the other and seemed to be giggling at something in the book. I read the book’s covered, snorted at the dirty genre, and then looked her over.