Aziel

Contents Introduction Prologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Epilogue Also by Eve Langlais Copyright Aziel © Eve Langlais Cover Art © Covers by Julie Produced in Canada Published by Eve Langlais http://www.EveLanglais.com eBook: ISBN: 978 177 384 3933 Print ISBN: 978 177 384 3940 Copyright # 1197852 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This book is a work of fiction and the characters, events and dialogue found within the story are of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, either living or deceased, is completely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced or shared in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including but not limited to digital copying, file sharing, audio recording, email and printing without permission in writing from the author. Introduction IT TOOK AN ANGEL TO MAKE ME BELIEVE IN LOVE. As a woman of science, I am an unabashed, agnostic atheist—until I meet my first angel. Aziel, with big, beautiful wings, claims he’s here to stop humanity from being annihilated. Sounds impressive, but I have questions. Full of arrogance and demands, he wants access to my life’s work while blaming me for the coming apocalypse. It seems my innocuous signal seeking life beyond our galaxy succeeded. Someone heard my invitation, and now the world is in grave danger. At least according to Aziel. As I get to know him, I find myself reevaluating everything I thought I knew. More surprising than my sudden belief in religion, though, is my irrational love for an overbearing angel. But will he defy Heaven’s orders to save me? Elyon’s Warriors will steal your hearts. Be sure to check out all four books featuring celestial aliens. More books at EveLanglais.com Prologue Like many stories, our heroine’s tale begins with tragedy… They pulled the sheet over Mommy’s face, and I struggled not to cry. Everyone kept telling me I had to be strong. I didn’t want to be strong. I wanted my mommy to open her eyes. For her to be alive. For someone to hug me. Not Daddy, though. He was downstairs drinking again. He’d been doing that a lot since Mommy went to the hospital. I really wished he’d stop, though, because he stank and yelled about how he hated the world. I was pretty sure he also hated me. I just wanted everything to be like it was. Instead, I got a lecture from my grandma. “Don’t be sad, Lilith. Your mother is in a better place.” Better? I was six. I wasn’t stupid. I grimaced. “She’s dead.” Soon to be in the ground, rotting. I understood how nature worked. I’d seen the worms that devoured dead things in the garden when I discovered the remains of a cat under the bush. “She is with God. An angel in Heaven, looking down on you.” “God’s not real.” Even at my tender age, I had a firm response to that. Because if God existed, he wouldn’t have taken my mommy. No matter how much Grandma argued, I wouldn’t change my mind. As I got older—and watched my father literally drink himself to death—we argued even more strenuously about religion. Grandma insisted on believing in the invisible man in the sky and just about had a heart attack when I said, “You’ll never convince me there is a God. But aliens, now that’s a different story.” Poor Grandma went into apoplectic shock when I wrote an essay for my English class in high school about how Jesus was an extraterrestrial, tortured by humans until he gave up on us and beamed himself up to his mother ship. My very liberal and progressive teacher liked it enough to give me an A-plus. Grandma, on the other hand, grounded me. It only strengthened my stance. Oddly enough, the arguments where I had to defend my beliefs led to me deciding to major in astrobiology, which also included software programming and computer hardware design. The robot I built to fight in underground battles—where the money flowed fast and furiously for killer machines—paid enough for me to live in my own apartment loft and buy pretty much whatever I wanted while my many scholarships paid for university. When I graduated with top honors and a couple of degrees, I joined NASA—a lifelong dream until I encountered the reality. Their rules and restrictions chafed. Non-disclosures meant I couldn’t collaborate with my friends around the world. No more bouncing ideas. No more bringing work home and playing with it while listening to Beethoven full blast. It stifled my creativity and passion. But worse was the constant nattering of activists who thought we shouldn’t rock the world’s axis by reaching out to extraterrestrial life. As if an evolved species who’d achieved proper spaceflight would be violent. I blamed Hollywood for always painting aliens as the bad guys. During my tenure at the space agency, I wrote opinion pieces for scientific publications that got ridiculed by people like my grandmother. I truly believed life existed beyond our narrow world and wasn’t shy about stating it. Which was how my benefactor, Mr. A., found me. A rich believer who headhunted the top in the field, he offered the financing required for me to design and construct a communication device that could reach past our galaxy. And gave me carte blanche in my quest to contact alien civilizations. That kind of freedom wet my panties. But my work didn’t stop with just building a giant space telephone. My benefactor wanted to do more than just make contact. He sought colonization of other planets, which required spaceships capable of making trips in a timely manner. Weapons, in case we had to defend ourselves in the