Jovah's Angel Read Online Free PDF Page B

just melted away. Noah took advantage of the unoccupied tables to snag an extra chair, and asked the waitress for another wineglass and a plate of cheese and fruit.
    â€œShe’ll be hungry,” he said to Caleb.
    â€œI would be.”
    Despite these preparations, Caleb harbored a secret doubt that Lilah would actually join them. She seemed too rarefied to settle even briefly among the ranks of men; it would be like holding a conversation with a fire. Or with an angel, more accurately. Something he had never done.
    But there she was, a graceful shape against the patchy darkness of the bar. She wended her way through the clustered tables and pushed-back chairs as delicately as if she were stepping a path in a rose garden. Still she carried her great wings tightly behind her, as if they were bound back; their feathered edges trailed on the floor behind her, and she seemed not to care that they swept through spilled ale and scattered crumbs.
    â€œFood and wine—I knew I could count on you,” she said by way of greeting, dropping into the empty chair with a deliberate crumpling motion. “Those fools think I can cavort up there all night without rest or sustenance. I’m utterly famished.”
    â€œYou were marvelous, of course,” Noah said.
    She laughed and quickly ate a bite of cheese. “Bar songs,” she said mockingly. “A child could sing them and bring the house down.”
    â€œYou don’t have to sing bar songs,” Caleb said. “I think they’d listen to serious music even more happily. For myself, I preferred the first piece you did, though it nearly broke my heart.”
    She turned wide, black, marveling eyes on him—as if astonished that he had dared to speak, or possibly as if she had not realized until this moment that there was someone else at the table. Up close she had a rich, dark beauty, white skin laid hauntingly against velvet black hair. Her wings repeated the same chiaroscuro motif, each blindingly white feather edged in shadow-black. “And what are
your
credentials for determining the proper musical mix to provide for the discriminating Luminauziaudience?” she asked. “You own a music hall, perhaps? You are yourself a musician? You have another venue to offer me where songs of spirituality and mysticism will be greeted with sober acclaim?”
    Amazing; she could do with her speaking voice what she could do when she sang, and that was whip up any emotion she wanted in anyone who listened. But Caleb was stubborn, and on guard against her now. He would not allow himself to be derided. “You must have been to Giordano’s and La Breva,” he said coolly. “They offer music on the classical scale, and they’re always packed to overflowing. Anyway, I think you could sing anything you chose to here, and people would come to listen. You have an awesome voice.”
    â€œThank you,” she said, still taunting him. “And I sing what I choose to sing, anyway. So don’t pity me for my song selection. I choose what makes me happy.”
    Clearly untrue; anyone less happy than Lilah, even on brief acquaintance, would be hard to locate. The full red mouth fell of its own accord into a pout more sad than sullen; there was a troubled weariness deep in her dark eyes that even the mockery could not disguise. “Well, what you sing seems to please your audience, at any rate,” Caleb said quietly. “I have never enjoyed a concert more.”
    â€œThank you,” she said again. “Do please return sometime.”
    It was at this point that Noah intervened to make introductions. “Lilah, this is my friend Caleb. The engineer I told you about.”
    â€œOh, yes, the one who builds flying machines,” she said, turning her gaze back to Caleb. “Tell me, how does the project go?”
    Caleb was suddenly acutely aware of her own folded wings, held rigidly behind her as if they were not part of