“SHE’S MINE!” he roared in my head.
He was claiming her.
No. No way.
“Didn’t that JD guy mention that she’d have enough money to move out soon? Something like that?” Quint sounded genuinely curious, which only pissed me off more.
I never fucking cared about girls. Never. I fucked them, I let them suck my dick, then I kicked them out of the bar. Never let them in my room, never in my bed. Never once cared. But her?
This situation, my feelings, my beast’s reaction to her…it was all looking too much like the one thing I knew it couldn’t be. The one thing that was fucking impossible. And yet…
No.
No…no way.
I turned to my best friends, my brothers, the only two guys on this earth that I trusted. All of us were twisted fucks, mentally, morally, emotionally, but we were almost always on the same page.
The feelings, my reaction—it couldn’t be what I thought it was—but the symptoms, the pit in my stomach. It was all there.
Was I the only one feeling it? The bond beginning to stretch across the space between us?
Cabe had known about this girl for eleven years, so he was already at least a little bit in love with her. He saw her every day, experienced her emotions, her fears, her life.
And it royally pissed me off.
“It doesn’t matter now. We make sure she gets to the party. One of those hellhounds will try and take her, we play knights in fucking shiny armor, we get her to trust us enough to take her to the penthouse. She stays with us until your father tells us the next step,” I spat, wanting the conversation to be over. No more talking about her. No more for tonight.
I turned to walk away before I felt a hand on my bicep. Cabe.
I looked down at him. We were almost the same height, but I had both him and Quint beat by two inches. His eyes searched mine, trying to figure out what was going on with me.
“Lan, why are you so worked up?” He had those blue eyes trained on me, searching to find an answer for why I was acting so crazy.
When Quint’s father told us to find her, I wanted no part in it. I had nothing to lose if I said no, but I said yes because I was fucking bored and restless. I needed something to take my mind off the fact that I had no answers to my most important questions. But now…
I was worked up and so was my beast.
“Go and fucking find her,” he said slowly in my head, his voice otherworldly and full of warning.
“Lan?” my brother asked, calling me back to his attention.
“I don’t know, I don’t know what’s happening to me,” I said, feeling too vulnerable. I never would have admitted defeat if I wasn’t so fucking terrified of how my beast reacted to her. He wanted her. Bad. And because he’s a part of me…
“Your beast?” he asked, knowing too much. Being too damn smart.
That beast I’m talking about? All Nephilim have one, as we are half Angel and half Human. The dark spirit that lives within us is the source of our power, the very thing that makes a Neph what they are. When a Neph is in danger or needs assistance, the beast comes out in the form of white wings, showing off our Angelic side. Beasts can communicate with their Human counterpart after they’ve gone through the Transition, but mine has always kept relatively quiet. He had no reason to speak to me, not unless I was attacked or was about to walk into a trap. But I’d kept my head down for years, quietly searching for a way out—a way to change what I was and become one of the Fallen.
I couldn’t allow myself to become attached to my beast, not after seeing four Nephilim rip my father to shreds on the front lawn of our home.
Fuck being Nephilim.
I was going to become one of the Fallen.
In order to do that, I needed to find my mate, but the mating bonds between Nephilim stopped forming over twenty-one years ago, meaning that all of us who wanted to Fall were stuck until someone could find the reason they stopped in the first place. I’d been searching for years.
Done waiting, done pussy-footing around the higher powers of our world.
Cabe didn’t care about the mating bonds going missing, he wanted to lay low until he could find Annalise. He ignored his instincts entirely, never shifting into his Angel form unless absolutely necessary, never drawing attention to himself.
And Quint? He was the odd man out in our group. As a Warlock, he was half Demon, half Human, and his demonic side took over more than he liked. Cabe and I both knew he battled his instincts every day, though he never talked to us about it. He was fifty shades of fucked up after being alive for over three hundred years—spending most of it alone.
Unlike Cabe and me, he didn’t have a beast. He simply was the beast. When he shifted, when he let his beast out, he turned into a seven-foot-tall Bull with horns the size of my forearm and fangs bigger than my fingers.
“Lanier, is it your beast?” Cabe asked again, getting frustrated.
I felt dizzy, the whining in my head getting louder. My beast was fucking whimpering, looking around the alley, sniffing out her scent.
“Yes, he wants her,” I whispered, not wanting to admit it. “Why does he want her, Cabe?”
My brother visibly paled. Looking at me like I kicked his puppy or took his favorite toy.
He was realizing the same thing I was.
No…
“You two can’t really be thinking what I think you’re thinking…right?” Quint laughed like it was no big deal, but his smile didn’t reach his eyes.
“And how are you feeling?” I questioned, giving Quint a hard look. He thought I wouldn’t ask, wouldn’t address him, but I had to because if I was feeling this way and Cabe had come to the same conclusion, then I had very little doubt that Quint was in the same position as we were.
“I’m feeling,” he snapped, all humor gone, “like I need to drop an invitation off at Annalise’s house. Beyond that is none of your fucking business.”
Fuck.
I walked home quickly, trying not to stumble on the uneven ground that made up the streets of my neighborhood.
I had replayed the encounter with the three guys over and over in my head, filtering their words through as many avenues as I could think of.
I questioned everything.
“…what she is…”
What I am? What the fuck did that mean? I was…Annalise. I was a girl? A Human?
For some reason, I couldn’t help but link those few words with the realities of my life. My rapidly increasing strength, my ability to heal quicker than I’d been able to even a month before.
But what stood out the most was the animal that lived in my subconscious. Was she somehow connected to what they thought I was? Did she make me something other than Human? Was that even possible?
I first noticed her when I was a young girl, and at the time, her presence terrified me. I could see her in my mind as clear as I could see a person in front of me; I could run a mental finger down her body and feel it all the same. One day I’d been alone inside my head, the next I wasn’t.
It didn’t take me long to see that I had no reason to fear her.
I was nine when my foster father first came for me, dragging me by the arm from my room one afternoon after I got home from school. In the beginning, the beatings were tolerable. They hurt, of course—they hurt so bad I thought my frail body would crumble beneath his fists—but once I learned that he liked my screams, I stopped screaming.