A Caress of Wings Read Online Free PDF Page A

working on while she’s gone?”
    “Absolutely.” He followed close behind her as she moved over to the infirmary monitors on the far wall. “By the way, your wings are way prettier than hers.”
    He couldn’t see it, but Siobhán smiled.

Chapter 5
     
    Trevor bent closer to the color monitors and rapped his knuckle against the frame of the LCD screen. “Is that some vampire thing that they show up in black and white? Like being invisible in front of mirrors?” It was weird looking at bright crimson intravenous lines plugged into grayscale bodies. “And why are you wasting good blood on them?”
    “First off, they’re really that color—totally gray from head to toe. Not all vampires look like that. Most of them pass for mortals. These guys, and two gals, are infected with a disease.”
    He glanced over to where Siobhán sat perched on a metal barstool with her hands on her knees, looking adorably serious and crazily sexy. Crazy because she was
an angel
, for chrissakes. Angels weren’t meant to be sex objects. He was pretty damn certain that even putting “angel” and “sex” in the same sentence was a major sin on his part.
    “Second,” she went on, “I’m not trying to save their asses. I’m trying to save mine and those of my fellow Sentinel angels. My blood healed you, because it heals mortals. It also, unfortunately, heals these guys. They haven’t figured it out yet, but they will. When they do, we need to have a viable cure in hand to hold them off. We’re severely outnumbered. If they started hunting us, it’d be bad news. Not just for us, but for everyone on the planet. We keep the vampires in check.”
    “In check?” His arms crossed. “Do you mean culling?”
    “We hunt the rogues, yes. The ones that pose the biggest danger to mortals.” She shook her head, sending the sleek black ends of her bob sliding along her jaw. “I know you’re thinking we should just let them all die from the illness. But they’d wipe out the mortal population before they ran out of food.”
    “Why not just kill them all, like you did the other night?”
    “Well . . .” She told him a story about two hundred Watcher angels falling into trouble and turning into vampires. “We can’t take out the Fallen, but we—”
    “Why not?” he interjected.
    “Their punishment is to live with what they’ve become.”
    He snorted. “It’s not much of a punishment when they’re having a damn good time!”
    “The vampires who kept you captive weren’t the Fallen. They were minions, Trevor, humans who were turned into vampires by the Fallen. We can take the minions down, and we do, but since the source of vampirism is the Fallen, it’s very much like addressing the symptoms but not the disease.”
    “So everything that happened to me . . . all started because some angels fucked up somehow? I’m just collateral damage?”
    Her gaze lowered. “I’m sorry, Trevor.”
    “Don’t ever apologize to me,” he said gently, going to her. He caught her hands and squeezed, marveling at how delicate they were when he knew she could kick some serious ass.
    “Siobhán.” The emotions that swamped him when he touched her . . . gratitude and guilt, affection and awe, reverence and raw need. But through all of that, one thing remained vitally clear—it felt
right
to touch her. As if he’d been waiting his whole life to do so.
    And she felt some of it, he was sure. It was there in the soft catch of her breath, the parting of her lips, the confusion that filled her beautiful eyes.
    “Trevor, you’ve been through a terrible ordeal,” she said in a low, hesitant voice. “It’s natural to feel somewhat confused about me—”
    “That doesn’t explain what you’re feeling in return.”
    “I don’t experience emotions like you do. We weren’t created that way.”
    He cupped her face in his hands, his thumbs brushing over her cheekbones. “You feel something for me, Siobhán. You know it. I know