And when she belched loudly, and then blushed and hid her beautiful face behind her sleeve, he actually found himself laughing. Sophie Bryce was definitely full of life. And soda, it would seem. She truly did brighten his night.
Like sunshine.
Uro and the others said their good-byes to Sophie and headed out of the arena ahead of her and Azrael. For the sake of keeping up appearances, the others pretended to have to take an exit route that would bypass the crowds so they wouldn’t risk being recognized and mobbed by fans of Valley of Shadow. Azrael led her out after them.
At once, upon leaving the confines of the arena, Az could feel the presence of the vampire minds of his band mates. They were nearby and would remain so unless directed otherwise. If Az hadn’t been with Sophie himself tonight, the edict he’d charged Randall with would have seen several other vampires as her guardians.
But for now, she was with their king.
A black Lincoln Town Car limousine pulled up to the curb as Azrael and Sophie neared it. He stopped and waited while the driver got out and opened the rear door for them.
“Whoa,” Sophie whispered beside him. “This is our ride?”
Azrael turned to regard her. She was obviously impressed—but he didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We can walk if you’d prefer. I believe there’s a Panera just around the corner.”
She let out a breath and laughed softly. “No way,” she said. “I’m riding in the limo.”
Azrael smiled again. He couldn’t remember the last time he had smiled so much. Or at all, really. Yet Sophie managed to land the expression on his face with amazing ease.
Sunshine, indeed.
Chapter Nine
“What is her name?” Samael repeated, his tone still undeniably calm, despite the agitated scene before him.
“I don’t know!” Daniel cried, his hands curled into fists at his sides, his body bent under the agony it was enduring. “I told you,” he almost sobbed, “I don’t know. I can only see her face.”
“He’s in pain.” A soft female voice spoke from near the doorway. Sam looked up to find Lilith standing beside the open door to his sixty-sixth-floor office. The door had been shut moments ago. Lilith was not invited.
“Yes, I know,” he replied, shoving his hands into the pockets of his charcoal gray suit pants and turning toward the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined his office in the former Sears Tower. The view of Chicago and the lake beyond was breathtaking. When the sun reflected off the water, it almost never failed to calm Sam’s nerves. However, right now, his reflection gazed back at him instead, unsettling him. “It happens when he attempts to divine something,” the tall, imposing reflection said. His dark gray eyes looked like pending storms, his ash blond hair brushed the collar of his impossibly expensive suit, and his strong jaw was set with determination, despite his controlled tone.
“If he were an archess, you would take the pain away from him,” Lilith calmly accused.
“Would I?” Sam asked, glancing at her over his broad shoulder.
“You know you would.”
Sam chuckled and shook his head, turning back to face the petite dark-haired woman and the man who knelt on the office rug, his forehead covered in sweat. “I think we can both plainly see that he isn’t an archess.”
Lilith shot him a dirty look and started toward Daniel. Daniel’s real name was Xathaniel, and at one time he had been an Adarian. However, two weeks ago Daniel had been tricked into signing a contract that locked him in eternal servitude to Sam. And now he was paying the price.
“I know what you’re up to, Sam,” Lilith said as she knelt beside Daniel and placed her hand on his back. “You think that he can find Michael’s archess for you before Michael does.”
Sam stilled. He was impressed. Of course, Lilith was a very smart woman. She was so much more than her small frame, librarian-style clothing, and porcelain skin led the world to believe. Lilith was ancient. She was the oldest being Sam knew. And her secret was darker than most. She had eons under her size twenty-two belt to back up her inherent wisdom and intelligence.
Lilith straightened and went on, pinning Sam now with her big, dark eyes. “Do you really hate Michael that much?” she asked. Her tone was barely more than a whisper.
That was a good question. Sam’s knee-jerk reply would have been yes. Thousands of years ago, Samael had been the Old Man’s favorite archangel. It was widely known and universally accepted. And then the Old Man created Michael and his three brothers . . . and Michael quickly and smoothly usurped Sam’s place at the Old Man’s side.
The Warrior Archangel never would have admitted it, of course. The winged bastard may not have even been aware of it. Michael was good. He was the epitome of good. Even now, the archangel worked as a police officer for the NYPD, and Sam was sure that the department had never seen a better cop. Samael had never hated a being more.
So, in short—yes. He did hate Michael that much. He wanted to cause the former archangel as much pain as possible, and he could think of no better way to do it than to take Michael’s archess as his own.
The idea had first occurred to him when a report on Abraxos and his Adarians had come in through one of Sam’s many channels. Samael now went by the name Samuel Lambent. Lambent was a billionaire media mogul who controlled the airwaves with puppet-master expertise. Sam’s fingers were in everything these days. Not much went on that he didn’t hear about before anyone else did.
He had people working for him all over the world. Some were human and knew him only as Mr. Lambent. Others were more.
Samael glanced up at the man in the dark blue suit who stood against the bookcases at one end of the office. Jason watched the proceedings with a detached air, careful blue eyes, and a silent tongue. He was Sam’s assistant—handsome, efficient, impeccably dressed, quick-witted, fast to obey, loyal to the end. He was also an incubus, a creation of the Old Man’s that had gone horribly awry and ended up on Earth with the rest of his faulty or frightening creations.
Speaking of Michael and frightening creations . . . “The serial rapist loose in Manhattan,” Sam said to Jason, abruptly changing the subject and more or less ignoring Lilith’s question. “The one our archangel in blue is fighting so hard to find—he’s one of yours, isn’t he?”
Jason’s blue eyes glittered like crushed sapphires. He nodded once.
Sam considered this. Michael had been tracking a serial rapist through New York City for months now. It was unlike the former Warrior Archangel to let a criminal slip through his fingers. Sam didn’t like rapists. Any creature so weak that it had to prey on the physically weakest beings ever created was a worthless abomination in his book. But what Jason was—what he had once been—was different.
Humans referred to them by many different names. In Germany, they were known as alps—perhaps giving rise to the famous mountain range’s name. In Chile, they were known as trauco. In Hungary, they were liderc. In Ecuador, they were tintin. They were called boto and tokolosh. And in the United States they were known as incubi. However, among themselves and those old enough to be aware of their true origins, they were simply referred to as Nightmares.
These male demons fed off lust and sex in the same manner that vampires fed off blood. There was no physical force involved when they attacked. It was a subjugation of the mind, a bending of the will, and a toss in the sack. And then the woman was left behind, often pregnant, and the Nightmares continued to feed—and to spawn.
Nightmares were normally careful enough to go after women who had had intercourse with other men so as to hide any resulting and otherwise unexplained pregnancies. They were also smart enough to imbue in their children a genetic likeness to their human “fathers,” further protecting the mother from scrutiny.
The serial rapist in New York wasn’t leaving a bloody trail behind him like most rapists did. He wasn’t killing his victims. There were simply more than fifty women with a vague but slightly disturbing recoll
ection of a strange, handsome man in their beds. And they were all pregnant. It was driving the NYPD crazy because blood tests on the fetuses all showed that the babies belonged to the women’s sexual partners, even though they swore under oath and lie detector tests that they had been impregnated by strangers.
“He is beginning to figure it out,” Jason said, interrupting Sam’s thoughts. “Michael, that is.”
Sam nodded. “I imagine he is.” It was only a matter of time before the archangel would put two and two together and come up with supernatural. What troubled Sam was that a Nightmare was on the rampage in the first place. Those particular demons hadn’t shown their handsome faces for centuries. Like most supernaturally aligned creations of the Old Man, such as dragons, wraiths, and phantoms, they had more or less gone into hiding long ago in order to prevent themselves from fighting with one another and ending up extinct.
It seemed to Sam that the world was coming to a boil just now. Someone or something had turned up the heat. The hidden had been gradually coming out of hiding for the last two decades or so, and the archesses were appearing one after another. Now. After two thousand years. It was for this reason that Samael had been confident Daniel would be able to determine the location of the fourth archess.
“Sam,” Lilith said, her soft tone laced with disappointment and impatience. He glanced at her as she rose from where she’d been kneeling beside Daniel. Samael hadn’t given the Adarian permission to come out of the divination yet, and so he hadn’t. He was truly at Sam’s mercy, body and soul.
Samael strolled slowly toward the kneeling man and considered him for a moment. Daniel hadn’t been able to give him the name of the fourth archess. But knowing which archangel she belonged to had been enough for the man to at least call up an image of her face.
“What does she look like?” Sam asked calmly.
Daniel swallowed hard, clearly in agony. “Beautiful, of course,” he hissed. “Red hair . . . brown eyes. She looks . . .” Daniel trailed off and Samael felt his patience beginning to slide.
“She looks what?”
“Angry,” Daniel said at last. “She’s fighting someone.”
Sam’s brows rose. An archess? Fighting? Interesting.
“Give me more,” he commanded, never raising his tone. Across from him, Lilith inhaled deeply and stiffened. He could feel her dark gaze cutting into him, but he chose not to address her anger, instead focusing on the archess in Daniel’s mind.
“She’s in an alley,” Daniel said. “Skyscrapers above her. She’s moving fast. That’s all I can see.”
“Very well,” Sam said with finality. “You’re finished here. For now.”
Daniel fell forward onto the rug, curling his hands beneath his forehead as he obviously attempted to get his body back under control. Sam watched him for a few seconds and then looked up to catch Lilith’s gaze.
“Jason, help our friend to his quarters,” Sam instructed, not looking at his assistant. He felt Jason moving behind him and then watched as the assistant offered his hand to Daniel. Daniel refused the help, just as Sam had known he would, and got his feet under him on his own. He was a strong man, Xathaniel, and Samael had been abusing him horribly. The truth was, he felt a touch guilty for his treatment of the Adarian. But there was something he desperately wanted and only Daniel could give it to him.
He waited until the two men had left his office, closing his door behind them, before he again turned his attention to Lilith. “Whatever fire is waiting on your tongue, Lily, have out with it. Before it burns you.”
“You’re wrong about him,” Lilith said, not bothering with pretense.
“Who?” Sam asked, making his way to the liquor cabinet against one wall and popping the heavy cork out of a crystal decanter. “Daniel?” he asked, though he knew damn well that Lilith wasn’t talking about Daniel.
“Michael.”
“Oh?” he asked, raising a brow and shooting her an inquiring glance.
“You’re more wrong about him and the Old Man than you can imagine,” she said, her tone so soft now that it sounded laced with guilt. This was more interesting to Samael than what she was actually saying. He put the decanter back on the marble top of the bar and straightened, regarding her carefully.
She looked pale, and when he tried to capture her gaze with his—she looked away.
“What aren’t you telling me, Lily?”
But Lilith didn’t answer this time. Instead, she crossed the room and opened the door, giving him one last enigmatic glance before she stepped out and closed it behind her, leaving him alone with his thoughts.
* * *
Her favorite music is classic rock, her favorite color is orange, her favorite movie is Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, her favorite chocolate bar is the Violet Crumble, her favorite food is Thai spring rolls, her favorite place in the world is . . .
Azrael blinked. Sophie was shyly downing her tomato soup in the booth seat across from him. He’d managed to convince her that he was eating his as well by using an ability that inherently came with vampirism. He was able to make his food vanish without consuming it, and as ridiculous as it sounded, that particular power actually turned out to be quite handy on many occasions.
As they “ate,” Azrael stared fixedly at his archess, unabashedly absorbing everything he could about her. As usual, he’d had to steer clear of the deeper, darker memories that were blocked off, not only to him but to herself as well. He told himself that in time he would know them. When she decided to let him in.
He’d been drilling her with questions about her plans for school, for the dance program, for the future. Randall McFarlan had come to him several nights ago to tell him that the Adarians had been poking around in San Francisco. The former archangels had free rein of the entire world, of course, and could go where they pleased, but Azrael wasn’t foolish enough to consider their sudden renewed presence in Frisco a mere coincidence. He had no idea how they’d come upon the knowledge, but however they had, they were there because they knew that Sophie soon would be. Now Azrael wanted to know every single detail about his archess’s planned move. Knowledge was power.
She’d been telling him about Berkeley and the campus, when her spoon stilled in her hand, her expression changed, and her eyes took on a far-off cast.
“Sophie?”
She blinked and looked back up at him.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
But she smiled and shook her head. “Yeah, it’s nothing.”
The reply was obviously either an outright lie or a half-truth and completely unacceptable to Azrael, whose protective instinct was perhaps stronger than that of any other creature on Earth at that moment. Without hesitation, he slipped once more into the warm, comforting embrace of her mind to see what she was seeing.
Sophie had returned to eating, but her inner eye was suddenly focused on a single, very vivid memory. She was standing on the pier at Fisherman’s Wharf. It was a quiet Tuesday night and the bay was shrouded in fog. There were a few stragglers, street performers folding up for the night, weekday tourists making their way lazily back to their hotels. But for the most part, it was just Sophie . . . and her parents. She was five years old and leaning heavily on the wooden barrier overlooking the rising tide. Seagulls cried out and the occasional bell sounded from somewhere in the thick mist. The Alcatraz lighthouse sliced through the gray soup, flashing for an instant before it once more disappeared.
There was a stillness to the wharf in that moment that was rare and precious and true. Little Sophie closed her eyes and inhaled the salt and the sea, smiling at the way a few strands of her hair clung to her cheeks in the wet air. She was cold, just a little. And she loved it.
It was her fondest memory. Her parents used to take her to Fisherman’s Wharf every few months. Her mother loved San Francisco; the city by the bay was her favorite city.
Azrael suddenly understood. Sophie wasn’t necessarily driven to become a dancer or even to teach dance. She wasn�
�t going to school out of pride or guilt or fear. Going to Berkeley was simply a way to revisit the one place on Earth where she could be close to the spirit of her parents; and a higher education—especially at a prestigious school like Berkeley—was, to her mind, the only thing worthy of her parents’ inheritance.
It was a moving realization, but it wasn’t what stunned Azrael at that moment and blew a disrupting breeze across the desk of his thoughts. Rather, what amazed him at that moment was the realization that Pier 39 in San Francisco was Sophie’s favorite place in the world. And it was his as well.
Just as Azrael was realizing that he shouldn’t have been surprised by this commonality, his senses pricked and were shoved into hunter mode by the sudden static in the air.
They’re here, he thought, sending the notice out on strong mental waves. His band mates would hear it immediately, but it would also surpass them, reach far and fast, and the vampires closest to his location would rush to answer the call.
Without hesitation, he shoved his will upon his archess, subjugating her mind and sending her into a state of compliance. It was much more difficult than he’d expected; her mind was unusually complex. Taking it over was like stationing guards at the billions of crossroads that made up the map of her consciousness.
But he accomplished it in seconds, and when she set down her spoon beside her bread bowl and stared straight ahead, Azrael stood, moved around the table, took her by the elbow, and led her from the restaurant.
As he stepped out into the night, he felt the weight of his band members’ attention, as well as that of the others of his kind who had heeded his call and were there to protect their future queen.
Azrael was struck with a cocktail of hard emotions as he led Sophie into the nearest alleyway and called Uro to him. He hated that the Adarians were ruining this night. He was furious that Abraxos would dare to interfere. He was filled with wrath that Sophie should be subjected to any more danger at all in her youthful life. But most of all, he was regretful that he had been forced to impose his will upon his precious archess in this manner.
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