DEATH BRINGER NOVEL

Chapter Four

The screaming still echoed in her ears. Even days later Grace could still hear it. It’d wake her from sleep. The poor cleaner had almost had a heart attack.

It’d taken what seemed like forever for the body to be discovered by the elderly woman who had looked in through the little window on the door. Grace had been relieved, the blood had started to try in her hair and her skin had crusted with it.

Grace tried to picture what the cleaner must have seen. Doctor Edgar lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood, with her sat on her bed, covered in it. It was like she’d showered in it, it soaked her entirely.

No wonder she’d screamed.

Two big, burly male nurses came shortly afterwards, opening the door cautiously, one of them armed with a needle. They’d edged around her as she sat perfectly still. She didn’t fight them as they grabbed her, smacking her face off the metal pole that served as the footboard to the bed as they did so. Grace laughed, even as her face barked with pain.

He was dead. She didn’t care what they did now because he was dead.

She’d woken up alone in a room of pitch black. No windows, no light. Her hands were bound and she raised them to her face. She hissed in pain, her eye was swollen shut.

Every so often bread would be pushed through the slat in the door at the opposite end of the room.

It didn’t matter though. She wouldn’t eat it. She had done what she’d intended to do. She’d sent that doctor straight to hell and that was all she cared about.

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Azriel had woken from a fitful sleep. He had tossed and turned in the bedroom of the apartment he’d rented.

It wasn’t luxurious, it was barely decorated but he didn’t need much. His bed was probably the nicest thing he owned, he’d had to get the biggest bed that the company supplied, his wings didn’t fit comfortably in any other.

The years had simply disappeared for him. Time was like that for immortals, if they didn’t pay attention to it’s passing, then it passed far quicker.

His skin was relatively blemishless. It had gotten to a point where every inch of him had been covered in scars, and then one morning he’d woken up and he was a blank slate again. Maybe he should’ve been happy that all of that pain and suffering had disappeared but instead it had infuriated him.

It was like being trapped in a prison and marking off your days, only to have someone come by and wash the wall clean.

Even the scars he treasured most, those matching vertical lines from that night when he’d first met Grace. Even they had disappeared.

He still thought about her. Sometimes he’d fly past a group of girls laughing and talking, and he’d wonder if she was among them. He’d wonder if she’d remember him too. And then he would shake that thought from his head and convince himself that letting her go had been the right thing.

Just as he’d made the decision to get out of bed and grab some coffee, a substance that was bitter but comforting, he got the call.

Something seemed different with this one. It didn’t feel like the others. There was no sobbing, no crying or gasping. There was only calm.

Azriel wrapped himself in darkness and spread his wings, following the thread that called to him, he flew.

His eyes adjusted as he landed in the pitch black room. The scene before him was so familiar and yet...

He took in the girl’s bound hands, he took in her grubby clothes and matted hair. He took in the blood on her wrists and the blood running down her chin. Her breathing was laboured and her heartbeat slow but she was still there.

It wasn’t until he knelt beside her, preparing to take away the pain, that he saw her face.

Azriel stopped breathing. Her honey coloured eyes assessed him wearily in the dark. Even with her too-pale skin, even with the aging and the years that passed between them, even with the eye that was purple and swollen…

“Grace?” he rasped. She already recognised him. She already knew who he was and yet she still looked at him wearily.

“Hey, stranger” she said weakly.

Nausea rolled through him. He was here to… He had to...

Grace’s head rolled to the side as she struggled to maintain that grip on consciousness. If she continued to bleed that way, she only had minutes.

He knew what he had to do. He didn’t have a choice.

KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR CHAPTER FIVE!