Immortal (Fallen Angels #6)(28)
Author: J.R. Ward

When he went to lift his head sometime later, he discovered he could not. Nor could he release his hands.

Moaning, he attempted to rock from side to side and was denied the latitude.

Frozen in position, even as his heart pounded in his chest, he—

“—gel!”

The shock of hearing another voice made him jerk. It didn’t lift his head, however.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” The voice was off in the distance, the syllables carried upon the cold wind. “Nigel! Is that you?”

“Jim?” he breathed. “Jim…?”

“What the fuck!”

Yes, it was in fact the savior.

With the last scrap of energy he had, Nigel ripped his head up, and the pain caused his vision to go watery on him. Blinking away the blindness, he saw … yes, it was the savior, trudging across the dusty ground cover, his body pitched forward as if he were dragging a sleigh or mayhap a castle’s weight behind him.

He was holding the bottom of his thin shirt up over his face, but he dropped it to yell once more. “Nigel! I’m here!”

Nigel reached out, cleaving his arm off his legs, extending it stiffly. “Jim…”

His voice carried no farther than the inside of the robe that covered his nose and mouth, but there was no strength to spare to bring the fabric down.

Was this a mirage?

All he could do was wait to find out, and yet even still, he knew this was real—and the sight before him brought true tears to his eyes. Against common sense and self-preservation, Jim Heron had arrived in the desolate landscape, looking as if he were single-handedly capable of reversing the domino effect Nigel had put into motion with a crystal dagger and been questioning ever since.

It was possible, he thought, that he had in fact chosen well.

“Nigel!”

As Jim hollered that name again, the yelling was wasted energy—it wasn’t like the guy was going to get up and run away. Hell, it looked like the archangel could barely move. And yet Jim was afraid this was a lie … or part of the torture.

If the latter was true? Well, at least the shit wasn’t monotonous and gray.

As he came up to the colored silk robing, that rhythmic beacon quieted as if its job were done, and for a moment, all he could do was stand there and try to get his breath back.

But it was the archangel. Although, damn, the guy was a shadow of his former self, a pathetically small bundle in this endless wasteland, weakened and cowed. And staring down, Jim found that this was yet another outcome he would never have predicted.

Why couldn’t they be surprised by good news?

“Ah, shit, Nigel.” There was a temptation to fall to his knees with the guy, but he couldn’t afford to risk getting trapped in that position. “How you doing?”

Dumb-ass question if there ever was one.

“Why ever have you come,” the archangel whispered hoarsely. The English accent remained, but the hauteur was gone—and Jim found that he missed it.

“I gotta get you back, my man. You don’t belong here.”

He braced himself for an argument. Something along the lines of the-rules-are-this-and-that, or I-am-my-own-destiny.

“Thank you, blessed savior.”

Jim closed his eyes briefly. This was bad, very bad, if Nigel was going the gratitude route.

Snapping into action, he looked around—and then wondered why he bothered. Just the landscape and nothing else—no structure for shelter, no relief from the monotony. The only thing he could do was get Nigel moving, and he feared that was simply masturbation for their feet.

Clearly, the archangel didn’t have a bright idea for getting out of here, or he wouldn’t have ended up on the ground like this. Or accepted the help. Such as it was.

“Come on.” Jim bent over and grabbed hold of the archangel. “Let’s get you up.”

With a burst of strength, he pulled Nigel off his ass, and had to groan—which was what you did when you tried to lift a piano: The archangel wasn’t a fatty, but he offered worse than no help: His bones were snapping as his position was forcibly altered, the breaks like the cracks of twigs under feet while, against his chest, Jim felt Nigel jerk and gasp in pain … but the hard-headed bastard didn’t put up any kind of protest.

When they were finally on the vertical, Nigel clung to him, and for an instant, Jim just held on to the guy. But he couldn’t waste much time with the softie shit.

“Come on, walk with me.”

Okay, that was not going to happen. Nigel couldn’t even keep himself upright, his legs a disjointed tangle that flopped in the wrong places. Fucking hell—

The first clue that something was wrong was that the wind abruptly stopped blowing around them. Then the cold began to dissipate.

Jim shifted Nigel’s deadweight to his left side, freeing up his right hand to fight if he had to. After however long in this gray landscape of WTF, he knew better than to think any change was going to work to his advantage.

And that was before the swirl in the sky appeared directly over his godforsaken head: High above the ground a circle formed, the pattern demarcated by movement, slow at first, then gathering in speed.

“We gotta get the fuck out of here,” he muttered.

But there was no running to be had. The fluffy, dusty ground didn’t offer good traction, and keeping Nigel from becoming a flower bed in the shit was requiring all the strength he had.

A crack of thunder was so loud it made him wince, and he did the best he could to protect the archangel. Fucking A, he’d asked for a break in the monotony and what did he get? A tornadic supercell. Great improvement. Thanks, Mother Nature—

There was another momentous clap overhead and then the utterly inexplicable happened.

From out of the center of the storm, a large object was birthed from the sky, falling free from up above and landing with a great mushroom cloud of that ash.

“What the…” Jim rubbed his eyes in case he’d lost his mind or his vision.

Nope. It was, in fact, the Victorian couch from the parlor. And right after it? The huge rug. Books. The velvet sofa and the coffee table and the candlestick Sissy had brained Colin with …

“It’s our fucking ride home!” he yelled. “Jesus Christ, they did it!”

He offered a quick prayer of thanks to the Creator—after all, it was kind of hard not to believe in the guy, considering Jim had met Him and this was, or at least had the potential to be, a frickin’ miracle.

Except how were they going to—

A sense of lift grabbed him by the hair and shoulders, and he could feel a sudden buoyancy in his body, that super-heavy gravitational hold easing up its drag coefficient on his bones. And abruptly, Nigel’s weight wasn’t so heavy either.