Alternate Worlds: The Fallen Read Free Page A

I’d already given them credit for being some of the craziest
fuckers not caged.
    Something blue had been splashed onto him in
several places. It dripped, forming small puddles beneath him.
    Swallowing the bile in my throat, I moved
closer.
    Long black hair hung across his shoulders
almost down to his pecs and pretty much obscured a look at his
face, but the body—my, my what a beautiful specimen of the male
anatomy! I moved around him, studying the wings, and discovered
with a strange flutter in my belly that they were not only real
wings, they were growing out of his shoulder blades.
    The flutter of excitement became a tremor of
revulsion. The blue hadn’t been splashed on him. It was dripping
from his veins where they’d wounded him. Bracing myself, I looked a
little closer and saw that there was very little coagulation. It
was blood, blue or not, and fresh. He hadn’t been here long—like
this. Otherwise he would definitely be dead as a door nail and I
could see he was still breathing.
    Obviously he’d fought like a demon—and made
a good accounting for himself if they’d thought they had to stake
him down and still bind him with wire.
    He wasn’t human, but he was an intelligent
being.
    Black hair, black wings, I mused. White, of
course being the color of purity, it just naturally followed that
black was sin.
    Crazy, stupid, backwards mother fuckers!
    When I’d made a circuit and stood in front
of him again, I discovered he’d lifted his head. His eyes were
open. The irises were the color of ice, that next-thing-to-white
sometimes but very rarely seen in humans, except his also had an
iridescent shine to them like the eyes of a nocturnal animal. I
shivered.
    The face went with the body—masculine beauty
personified.
    So he had to be a demon because he was
gorgeous and had black hair and wings?
    Give me a break!
    There was pain in his eyes—which I’d
expected to see—but it paled beside the absolute fury in them—which
I hadn’t actually expected and was surprised to discover made me
more than a little uneasy even though he was trussed securely and
couldn’t get his hands on me.
    Those, I saw, were balled into fists.
    My stomach clenched again.
    That explained the wire. He’d pulled free of
the stakes.
    “Speaky English?”
    His eyes narrowed. “Not that version,” he
responded tightly.
    I felt my face redden. It pissed me off.
    “All right smart ass, so tell me—demon? Or
angel?”
    His gaze slid over me speculatively.
“Elumi.”
    My brows popped upward in surprise.
“Alien?”
    “Elumi.”
    This was getting me nowhere fast. “I’m not
with them.”
    That time his gaze moved past me. The hairs
stood up on the back of my neck, but I discovered he was looking at
the neon yellow rope I’d used to climb down. Apparently he’d been
playing possum and had noticed my unorthodox arrival.
    That realization pleased me. I figured it
meant he was in a lot better shape than I’d thought, which meant
alive enough to give me what I needed.
    He was still breathing, after all. I figured
he wasn’t that much different from a human male.
    Time wasn’t on my side. I couldn’t afford to
finesse the deal. “I heard of this woman who did it with one of you
guys and got pregnant, even though she couldn’t conceive. Was that
a fluke? Or can you do that?”
    He gave me a speculative once over. I
decided that meant yes. Otherwise, he would’ve looked at me like I
was a fruitcake, right?
    “Hell, I’m willing to try anything at this
point or I wouldn’t even be here. So—here’s the deal. You do me and
get me knocked up. I’ll let you go.”
    His lips curled back in a sneer that made my
palms itch. “I will free myself, or I will die. I will not taint my
line with the blood of a lesser being. It would be a blood
sin.”
    Shock hit me first, but I recovered quickly.
I gave him a drop dead look, which he actually weathered better
than most men, but that only pissed me off even more. He talked
like