Avenger's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels Read Online Free Page B

off. He used his powers to silence it and pulled the door shut behind him, making sure to yank it in tight enough that it warped a little and held.
    The girls outside reached it just as it shut and their fists pounded furiously on the metal of the barred exit. They were getting soaked out there. He was more than a little damp himself.
    He wondered if they were also hurting one another as they shoved toward the door. He sincerely hoped not. But whatever was happening, the sheer number of them suggested that the door wouldn’t hold for long. All they had to do was work together and it would come open.
    Uriel passed the restrooms on his left and strode toward the science fiction section of the store just beyond the exit foyer. There, he stopped and grimaced. Another mass of girls, nearly as large as the first, was grouped around the front of the store. There must have been a hundred of them.... Maybe more.
    The door behind him creaked and then scraped.
    Uriel thought fast and ducked into the women’s restroom. Once inside, he closed his eyes, pressed his back to the wall beside the door, and listened. The exit door of the bookstore gave way beyond and he could hear the group of girls rush into the hallway. They raced by, their Converses squeaking with rain water on the linoleum tile.
    “You have to memorize a script to act, and the movie you starred in was also turned into a book, so I assume that you can read.”
    Uriel’s eyes flew open to find a woman and a little girl standing a few feet away, beside the door of the first stall.
    “I was obviously wrong,” she continued. “Because you’ve mistaken the women’s restroom for the ridiculously famous sex symbol restroom—which is next door.”
    Uriel’s heart stopped beating. His jaw dropped open.
    He couldn’t be seeing what he was seeing in that moment. He couldn’t be feeling what he was feeling. Not now. Not here, in a bathroom —after two thousand years. Maybe he’d slipped in the rain outside and hit his head.
    No, that was impossible. He was relatively invincible. Being hit on the head would do nothing to him but make him a little cranky.
    She was really standing there before him. She was real; he could see her, hear her—he could even smell her. She smelled like shampoo and soap and lavender.
    Jesus, he thought, unable to refrain from letting his gaze drop down her body and back up again. She was everything that he had ever imagined she would be, from her tall, slim body to her long jet-black hair, and those indigo blue eyes the color of a Milky Way night. Her skin was like porcelain. Her lips were plump and pink and framed perfect, white teeth. She was an angel .
    She was his archess. And she was . . . scowling at him?
    He frowned.
     
    The door to the bathroom had shut firmly behind Christopher Daniels, and he clearly had heard what she’d said, but he still just stood there like he was frozen and Eleanore could not figure out why. “Mr. Daniels, is there something I can help you with?” Eleanore asked.
    She had to admit to herself that when Daniels had first entered the women’s restroom, she’d been taken completely and utterly by surprise. First of all, he was even more handsome in real life than he was in his plethora of press photos. And that wasn’t supposed to be the case at all. Wasn’t there supposed to be loads and loads of makeup involved? Tricks of the light? In real life, didn’t actors have acne and scars and wrinkles and undyed roots for miles?
    In real life, an actor’s eyes didn’t seem to glow the way they did in the movies. But Christopher Daniels’s eyes did. It was nearly eerie, they were so intense. They instantly called to mind the dreams she’d had of him. It was always his eyes she saw just before she woke up. All of the pictures he had plastered across the nation didn’t do them justice. His eyes were the color of arctic icebergs, so very, very light green that they seemed . . . more than human. They were incredibly