Page 45 of Angel's Temper

Molly could honestly say she’d never given thought to just how hot the water in her baseboards got until it started pummeling her ankles with unrelenting pressure. Despite the thick denim cuffing her legs, the water still managed to soak through with surprising speed, searing her skin with pain rivaling the hottest grease fire.

“Aah!” Molly made to jump back, but before she could get her legs out of the spray’s range, both her feet were off the ground.

With inhuman swiftness, Brass maneuvered his body between her and the water and lifted her onto the counter. Trays of maple hard taffy cluttered to the ground, their golden gem-like passengers abandoning ship into the puddling water and melting on contact.

“Do you know where the heat shutoff is?” Brass roared as steam rose around them and water continued to pulse from sheared pipes.

“Uh, yeah. There’s a utility room near the back door.”

“Go! Turn the heat off now!”

“But your legs!” she cried, watching with panic as the steaming water crept higher against his khakis.

Her next words of protest were swallowed up by a growl so inhuman, she was sure it would reverberate in her dreams for nights on end. Brass had her off the counter and clutched her high against his chest, sloshing through steaming water that was now ankle-deep. He must have been in excruciating pain, but even as she clung to him, he showed no signs of discomfort or agony.

How the hell is that possible?

Instead, a different mask consumed his features. One of cold, calculating anger that vied for airtime with ferocious worry and concern.

Over her.

Once he reached the edge of the kitchen, he set her on her feet where the water had not yet spread to the hallway and pressed firmly against her shoulders. “Go!”

Molly ran to the one room in the building she only ever entered when she needed to show the service technicians where to go for scheduled maintenance. She shouldered through the gray door and scrambled on slippery soles for the HVAC cheat sheet she’d typed out when ownership of the building officially passed to her.

“Baseboards . . . Baseboards . . .” she breathed as she scanned her color-coded instructions with a shaky finger. “Ah, there!” Once she located the appropriate lever and the ancient pipes churned to a foundation-rattling halt, she flew down the hall back to the kitchen.

What she found stole the next breath from her lungs.

Wings. Two floor-to-ceiling wings burnished with dusty gold feathers curled inward into a metallic column thick enough to rival Grecian architecture, facing the wall gap in between the ranges where the pipe had burst. Though the water still hadn’t been contained, its sprays were less forceful and pattered, rather than pelted, against the lower feathers that formed a watertight seal against the ceramic floor.

Impossible.

As if the damn things heard her, the wings shifted slightly outward, scraping the water away like a giant squeegee, revealing Brass on his knees with his hands around a baseboard pipe . . .

And his entire body was covered in the same gleaming metal as the wings cocooning him.

Holy. Freaking. Shit.

Brass hunched over a length of pipe that he’d yanked out from beneath the baseboard. With the heat off and no longer pumping hot water through the old building, the steady stream had slowed to a trickle, which allowed Brass to grasp each jagged edge more securely. Molly took a step closer and watched in terrified awe as blue flames engulfed both his arms before skating down his hands with an eerie controlled efficiency. He didn’t scream or run or do any of that stop, drop, and roll stuff she’d been taught as a kid.

Instead, the fire raged on, consuming his arms and hands and, by extension, the pipes, as if the flames were merely following orders instead of incinerating everything in their path.

And Brass was most definitely not being incinerated. The copper pipes in his hands, however, glowed molten orange as the blue flames around them burned brighter. Even from where she stood by the door, she could feel the heat being given off by the fire. Was that even normal? What kind of small soldering fire could be felt from ten feet away?

The kind that arced painlessly in electric blue waves over a winged man made entirely of metal.

The stuff was so hot, it warmed her cheeks and she had to blink several times to keep her sweaty tears at bay. No freaking way was she risking one blind second of whatever she was witnessing.

As quickly as any metal worker, Brass brought the softened pipes together, and with a final roaring blaze upon where the metals had been joined, the fire extinguished as fast as it had ignited. Molly waited for the black smoke to waft up from the welding job and trigger the fire alarms, but none ever did. It was as if the flames existed in heat only, with no carbon footprint.

How the hell was any of that possible?

It wasn’t. None of this was real. It was all some cosmic joke the universe got its jollies from. She racked her brain to think of the last thing she ate. Had she eaten any fish from the walk-in? Was this a symptom of that histamine poisoning thing Mrs. McCall nearly had her shut down over?

No, no, no . . . This isn’t happening.

She felt around for the nearest chunk of wall that wasn’t taken up by sheet pan racks and promptly slid down it until her butt hit the damp floor.

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