AN: Here's chapter 2! I promise I'm definitely working on Drink Carefully too! I'm taking that one in a very specific direction though which requires a lot of planning, especially as I'm re-reading some chapters to decide how I want to execute it. Crimson-Kiss: I've posted it on my profile!, Zynali: thank-you! I hope you like. TheElegantFaerie: I hope I don't go too far from an angel for you! I'll be bringing her angelic-ness more in personality, I think. Sachmet: Glad you liked! SternAmBauch: Believe me, I was sceptical too! I had to think about how to tackle the idea for a while…and yes, blood :D! parchment faery17: Yay! I'm so excited to be writing again after my dry spell, so hopefully there will be lots to read!
"An Angel?" Damon asked in clear disbelief. "You mean to tell me I almost had a chunk of my neck ripped out by a harp-playing, god-worshiping, saint-saving Angel?" He couldn't believe it. His life was turning into a constant string of disbelief and he stared at Ric like he'd lost his mind.
"Yes, an Angel." He pulled the trigger on a second tranquilizer and closed the door to the modern dining area, being rewarded with a powerless hiss and a thump that confirmed that it had worked. He looked at Damon and Elena and motioned them into the den. Damon signed but sat back, lounging comfortably. Ric looked from one to the other and picked the conversation up again. "Definitely not harp-playing, god-worshiping and saint-saving, though."
"A fallen angel?" Elena asked, not understanding.
Alaric shook his head. "Humanity has had angels completely wrong for centuries. They have nothing to do with the common concept of religion…in reality they're more closely related to mermaids and sirens than they are to anything holy. There are different bloodlines of angels, but none of them will lead you to 'god'."
Damon tilted his head. "How did they get mixed up with the bible, then?"
"I have no idea, you'll have to ask her." Ric motioned over his shoulder to the dining room.
"I doubt she'll be that forthcoming" Damon quipped. He didn't feel like being snagged by two sets of fangs again.
Ric smiled. "She doesn't have much choice really, she can't leave with a half-formed wing which means she'll have to be a little bit angelic to get away with taking a chunk out of you."
"Ric, sometimes I wonder if you understand how horrible your jokes are." Damon mused. "Should we put her downstairs?"
Ric shook his head. "Her wings won't fit."
"Fine. She'll stay in there until she wakes up. After that we'll figure something out.
There was a deafening pounding in her head and she rolled over slowly, raising a hand to it and whining. She was alive, but she had no idea where she was. As she cracked her eyes open something red and fluffy caught her attention; someone had tranquilized her. She pulled the darts out and haphazardly stretched her wings out, groaning as she realized that one was broken and the other was…ripped off? It didn't have the deadly pain of injury, but it was too light and flapped quickly through the air too quickly to be full size. She looked over the edge of the table and gasped as she saw one of her wings propped up on chairs…from the looks of it the wolves had torn it clean off. She reached her hands above her head and felt the length of her wings and confirmed her guess: one was much shorter than the other, and her full wing was broken in two places. She must have fed; the bones were half fused together already.
She ran her tongue along her teeth and sighed as she felt the four razor points of her fangs and tasted the sweet full taste of…vampire blood? She really needed an explanation of what had happened now. A groan held in her throat as she slid to her feet and she focused on pulling her wings back into her body. It was something incredibly confusing to outsiders, but the giant feathery limbs could be pulled into sheer nothingness with concentration, it's what allowed her to move freely among humans. Her fangs slid back into her gums and she assumed that the piercing red of her eyes faded back to a sharp brown. She walked to the door of the room and carefully slid it back into the wall (looking around, she'd done some major damage to the modern dining area) and took a step out.
"Hello?"
There was no response. She stepped onto the cold granite floor of the kitchen hallway and crossed to the living room. Apparently she'd lost her shoes and when she looked down she realized that her skirt was ripped haphazardly up the side and her blouse was ripped in the back from the explosion of her wings. Dark brown bloodstains wrapped around both garments and she hoped someone was home so she could change and clean up. As she walked she felt wobbly; the change in her wings had made her misbalanced even though they were hidden away (she did after all feel the weight of them constantly, not that they were terribly heavy to her). She looked around what appeared to be a den and took note of the various items in the room. Some were new (the iphone left on the table, a laptop, a set of magazines that let her know a woman had been spending a decent amount of time at the house) and others were clearly old (toys from the 1800's, pistols on the wall, and medals from the civil war). The variety of items let her know that she was most definitely dealing with a vamp, and her nose also pieced the clues together. She could smell old blood on the rugs and the scent of two vamps hung in the air.
She'd look around later, for now she'd need a shower and to find a set of clothes.
Damon had a spring in his step as he stepped back into the boarding house. He'd cleaned out the carefully monitored supply of blood in the basement and had just gotten back from the hospital with more. Alaric had warned against leaving, but he'd also mentioned that the tranqs wouldn't wear off until mid-morning, which it now was. He flashed down to the basement and dropped the blood into the freezer. He separated the bags quickly by type and closed the giant white chest again, locking it shut. The lock had always been there but he hadn't felt the need to lock it in the last month. Now that he knew that the "angel" drank blood he wouldn't take any chances; speaking of the angel, he hadn't checked on her since he left. He flashed up the stairs and picked up the rifle Alaric had left full of Tranquilizers. It had been a long time since he'd been very vulnerable, but that didn't mean he would be careless. He cautiously opened the door and looked inside, and if he'd been breathing his breath would have caught in his throat. The dining room was empty and as he looked around he felt both annoyance at the damage done and the cold shiver that he assumed humans had when he was loose in the house. He definitely wasn't enjoying the feeling of being prey. He closed his eyes and listened in the house for a clue as to where she was and his ears picked up the rushing shower and….humming? Yep, she was singing in the shower; his shower. He took his time heading upstairs as he was unsure about what to do. Under normal circumstances he would be thrilled by the idea of an attractive woman showering in his room, but the fact that he was apparently her prey didn't make him feel warm and fuzzy inside. He opened the door a little louder than he normally would, bouncing it off the wall and uneasily peering inside.
"Oh my god!" a female voice yelped. He looked to the shower and saw her dart for a towel and disappear behind the partial wall of the bath, the sound of her slipping and catching the counter making him smile. The second he'd gotten was enough of a look to confirm his suspicions: she was gorgeous. She stepped out from behind the wall (towel wrapped securely) and looked at him with a light blush.
"I'm sorry, I didn't hear you come up, I was just…I was taking a…I was washing the blood off." Her eyes darted to the ground.
Damon smiled. "At least I don't have to smell myself off you now."
"You're the one I bit, then?"
Damon nodded. "And what do you have to say for yourself?" He watched her look him over slowly and smile.
"Well done."
"You don't remember biting me?" he asked. He'd been lost to bloodlust before, but never to the point where he didn't remember who he'd killed.
"No" She said from behind the wall. "When I'm that badly injured I go on a kind of 'auto-pilot'. Normally I wouldn't feed off a random stranger (especially one who had helped me), but when I'm in need I don't hesitate." She peered around the corner. "So you can stop being as tense as a corpse, I'm not going to attack you."
Her reddish-brown hair clung to her, still wet, and he realized that his assumption of black hair had been wrong. He let his body relax and looked at her sideways; he had so many questions, but he'd save the important ones for when Alaric and Elena were back. "So you have two sets of fangs?"
"Yes, but only when I need them to be out or when I'm hungry." She stepped out from behind the wall and stepped lightly across his room to his closet, looking this way and that for something to pull over her head. He watched her bump into the doors and almost fall over.
"What do you feed on besides dashingly handsome bachelors?"
She pulled one of his black button-down shirts from the closet and slipped it around her, dropping her towel when it was safely buttoned. "Vampires, werewolves, witches….anything supernatural really."
"No people?"
"No people." She confirmed. She stood up as she pulled a pair of boxers on (that she'd found while rummaging through his drawers) and almost keeled over again.
"And are you always this well balanced?" he raised an eyebrow. He'd always expected angels to be more….graceful? From their brief conversation he'd already determined that she seemed more than standardly clumsy.
"Normally I'm very well balanced, but since my wing is half its normal size I'm a little off kilter." She saw him open his mouth to speak. "Before you ask, I can hide my wings. They're still on my body, they just can't be seen right now which means I still feel the weight of them" Truth be told, her back was killing because of the pain in her broken wing.
"So they're invisible? Why aren't things smashing in my room, then?" he thought of the destroyed state of the dining room and tilted his head.
"It's complicated. Maybe tomorrow morning I'll show you."
"Tomorrow morning?"
"So many questions!" she said. "I'll answer them, but first I need to take a look at my wing downstairs." She headed to the door, apparently assuming that he would follow.
Damon sighed. "Fine. There are some people who will have more questions than I will for you anyways."
She turned in her tracks. "How many people saw me?"
"Just three of us"
"When you say us, do you mean vampires?" She quizzed. Damon put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around to start again towards the stairs. It wasn't hard to turn her, she only stood to his nose at best.
"One thing at a time, Tinkerbell." He said. Once Elena and Alaric showed up they'd have to figure out what to do about her, but for now his boredom was cured and that was what mattered.
"Wait, we're forgetting one very important thing." Damon said as he followed her down the stairs.
"What's that?"
"Your name."
They reached the bottom of the stairs. "Sasha" she held out her hand.
"Pretty normal for an Angel" he said. He was met with a laugh from her.
"Hun, I'm not an angel."
He tilted his head as she bent over her giant white severed wing. "Then what are you?"
"a Seraph."
"What's a Seraph?" Elena asked, looking at Sasha who sat lightly on the edge of the couch. Elena and Ric had shown up shortly after Sasha had deemed her wing useless, and now they lounged in the den. Elena had brought clothes with her, not really sure if they would be needed or not, and based on Sasha's dress shirt/boxer combination she was definitely in need.
"A division of the angels, right?" Alaric asked.
"Wrong. Humans would characterize Seraphs as angels (and have for hundreds of years) when really we're simply a relative of vampires."
"What?" Alaric asked. Elena raised an eyebrow and continued listening.
"When supernatural beings were introduced to the world, the witches realized that although humans could travel to the other side on their own after death, supernatural beings could not. The job of a Seraph is to help supernatural souls fade to the other side."
"And that makes you related to me how?" Damon asked.
"When the 'original witch' (as you call her) created vampires she used Seraphs as a base. You were made to be our opposite. Where you hate the sun, I lose my powers in the night. You feed on humans, we on the supernatural. Vervain hurts you and heals us, and where you turn your emotions off, we turn ours on."
"What about the wings?" Elena said.
"She decided that they hurt more than they helped, and it's true. Vampires are better off for not having them."
Damon raised an eyebrow. "Why?"
"As you've noticed they were the reason the wolves got me, they take a significant amount of time to heal, and they affect my balance at all times. They're also massive which makes day-to-day activities impossible."
"But you don't have wings right now." Elena pointed out.
Sasha opened her mouth and pointed to a solid gold molar in the back of her jaw. "I had a witch do me a favor; I can hide them whenever I'd like. Every other Seraph that I've met is cursed with them daily."
"What else can you do?" Alaric asked.
She smiled. "I've got quite a few fun tricks, I'm sure you'll see them over the next few weeks."
"And why would you be staying here that long?" Damon asked, annoyed by her self-invitation.
"Because I need help completing my most recent assignment now that my wings are useless."
"And what exactly would your homework be?" Damon quipped, noticing that her eyes had sunk to a warm caramel gold, not the red of the night before.
"Just to move some local vamp over to the other side." She said.
Elena spoke immediately, alarm in her voice. "His name isn't Stefan, is it?" Damon hadn't seen her eyes burn with worry in the last few days and it made her sudden nervousness just that much more apparent.
"No, not Stefan. Carl? Clark? Something like that."
"Klaus?" the three of them guessed out loud.
"Yes! That's it. God I can hardly remember my own name sometimes. Do you know him?" she asked.
Elena shook her head. "Do we ever."