Free Night's Darkest Embrace by Jeaniene Frost

Partial or a Pureblood. Fallen .
    Ashton flung me away from him as he ran. With my hands and feet still bound, I landed face-first on the sandy indigo ground instead of catching myself. Something whooshed over me, punctuated by a scream from Ashton. It took a second or two of awkward twisting, but I finally managed to flop over—and then stared.
    Rafael had Ashton in his arms. Between the fog and the incredible span of his wings, I couldn’t see everything clearly, but it looked like Rafael had his mouth pressed to Ashton’s in a chilling parody of a kiss. Ashton bleated in terror, kicking and flailing against Rafael’s ruthless embrace, but to no avail. After several long moments while I watched, transfixed, Ashton’s movements slowed and his head fell back. When Rafael let go of him, he fell to the ground with a limpness that spoke of permanence.
    Lights seemed to flicker in a spiderweb pattern over Rafael’s skin before they faded, vanishing into his natural creamy skin tone. Part of me was howling that now would be a really good time to attempt running , bound feet or no, but I didn’t move as Rafael turned and began to walk toward me.
    “Am I next?” I rasped, mildly surprised that I could still talk after what I’d just witnessed.
    Those unbelievable wings fluttered once before Rafael reached down, breaking through the duct tape around my wrists as though it were tissue paper. He did the same thing with my feet, until the sticky substance still clung to my skin but no longer restrained me.
    “I told you before, Mara; if I wanted to eat you, I would’ve done so years ago,” he replied, no emotion in his tone or in his gaze. Then he hauled me into his arms, his grip unyielding, that lovely, killing mouth mere inches from my own.
    I stared at him, barely able to breathe, thinking that if my heart beat any faster, it would burst.
    “But now you know what I am, so you know what I do eat,” he whispered before brushing his lips over mine.
    Then the air exploded around us as his wings lifted and fell, vaulting us upward into that deep violet sky while Ashton’s lifeless body lay below on the ground.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    From the glimpses I caught when I wasn’t fighting off nausea from the dizzying dips and ascents, this realm looked like a cross between Antarctica and the Grand Canyon, except in different colors. Rows of crystal formations—or their mineral counterparts—littered the ground, interspersed by streams, that bluish sand, and something that resembled a forest of tumbleweed trees, of all things. We seemed to be the only people in the sky, to my relief. If I’d seen swarms of flying Fallen, I might have passed out on the spot.
    Rafael was a Fallen . The proof of that was winging us to who-knew-where, yet I still had a hard time reconciling the fact. Fallen were ancient beings supposedly so twisted that they were banished to the middle dimensions because neither the highest nor the lowest ones wanted them. They were said to remain small in number because they ate their young. I’d even heard that the Pureblood species had come about only because the Fallen were so promiscuous that they hadn’t managed to destroy all their offspring before they’d interbred enough to form into their own race of demons. Purebloods interbreeding with humans later resulted in Partials, but by then, the bloodlines had been altered enough to make my race able to survive without feeding off the essence of others.
    If the history of the Fallen was true, then I should have been paralyzed with terror right now. But, inexplicably, I wasn’t. Rafael’s arms were tight around me, but not with the careless, bruising force Ashton had used, and the knot of bitter despair that had resided in my gut since I’d woken up in the river had eased into a nervous fluttering. Rafael might take out some payback on me for drugging him, but I didn’t feel in danger of being murdered. That had been my first thought when I’d seen his wings,