Darkness Rising (Dark Angels 2)

He smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant sight. “Orders can change, you know.”

“Whether they’ve changed is not the point.” Heat swirled across my skin. Azriel had taken form on the other side of the lockers. Was he taking care of the second man or at least running interference? I hoped so. I said to the first man, “And I’m hardly going to hand you a note I haven’t even read yet.”

“That,” he said softly, “is unfortunate.”

And with that, he sprang. His leap was high, graceful, and fast. I threw myself out of the way, twisted around, then lashed out with a booted foot. The blow missed by inches, catching the end of his foot and little else.

I brushed my fingertips against the concrete, steadying myself as he leapt a second time. But the rage surged again, becoming a haze of heat that would not be denied.

This time I held my ground until the last possible moment. And when he lashed out, I let the blow hit me, his claws cutting through my jacket and into flesh. But the anger inside was burning so bright that I didn’t feel it, even though blood pulsed, rich and warm, down my side. I grabbed his arm, wrenched his claws free, then twisted him around, flinging him as hard as I could into the lockers on the far side of the room.

There was no response for the second man. Azriel had to have stopped him.

The first man hit with a resounding crash, denting metal as he fell. As he scrambled to his feet, I launched at him, twisting around in the air so that I hit him feetfirst, knocking him back into the lockers again. When I hit the ground, I lunged forward, shoving one hand against his throat to hold him in place as I kneed him hard in the balls. He wheezed in pain and tried to double over; it was only my grip on his neck that kept him upright. And my fingers were shaking with the urge to squeeze harder, deeper …

Fuck, where is this coming from?

“Tell me who you’re working for.” My voice was edged with the madness within, my face mere inches from his. His scent clawed at my throat, stale and unpleasant.

He took several gasping breaths then wheezed, “Handberry. It was Handberry.”

“Handberry’s dead.” My grip tightened on his neck, and it was all I could do not to keep on squeezing. God, I so wanted to wring the life from him, and I think it was only the fear of that need that kept it in check. “So tell me the truth.”

“Fuck! I don’t know,” he spat out. “We got a call from a guy saying he was our new handler, and he told us to come here and wait for you to collect the letter. We’ve been waiting for fucking weeks.”

I hadn’t expected that. “When did you get that call?”

“A month ago.”

“And he hasn’t contacted you since?”

“No. He just said to keep watch and to call when we retrieved whatever was in the locker.”

“If all you wanted was the note, why didn’t you just break in and get it?”

“Because it wasn’t in there, was it? We checked yesterday.”

“So how did the new handler know something would be there?”

“He’s getting orders from someone, isn’t he? Why can’t it be the same someone as Handberry?”

Why not indeed? I guess it was lucky they’d checked last night rather than this morning, because my father must have had it placed there after he’d talked to me. “If you’ve been stationed here for weeks, why didn’t you sense the Razan who delivered the note?”

“Because we haven’t seen another Razan for weeks. I told you, we’ve been stationed here.”

So how did the note get into the locker? “What about an Aedh?”

He snorted softly. “An Aedh doing his own dirty work? That’s likely.”

For a man who was all but a slave to an Aedh, he was pretty damn critical of them. “Do you have a contact number for this new handler of yours?”

He nodded as well as he could with my hand pressed against his throat. “On my phone, in my top pocket.”

I reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out his cell phone, and shoved it into mine. “What name is your handler under?”

“Handberry. I figured it was as good as any.”

Fair enough, I thought, and then hit him, as hard as I could, with my free hand, knocking him out. Then I let him drop to the floor.