And then, with such unexpected and violent force that it actually caught the Warrior Archangel off guard, something slammed into him, knocking him to the side. Michael caught a whiff of faint perfume and saw a flash of red as he stumbled slightly, regained his balance, and turned to face what had hit him.
I was right, he thought. But it was a fleeting, disturbed, and confused thought. Before him indeed stood a tall man in a black leather jacket that was encrusted with countless sapphires and aquamarines. A blue dragon.
But between the dragon and Michael stood someone else. She was tall and lean, with the build of a woman who trained several hours a day. Her long red hair was filled with waves that made it look as though she’d just come in off the sea. It whipped around her figure in the building gale, the thick carmine locks falling clear to her waist. She was dressed in black jeans, a black T-shirt, and black boots.
He couldn’t see her face because her back was turned to him, but her stance was broad and defiant, her arms out at her sides as if she were preparing to cast some sort of sorcery.
Michael was divided among several equally strong and equally distracting reactions. That the woman had shoved him aside as if to protect him from a man she clearly recognized as something more than a man was enormously perplexing. How did she know the man in the blue jacket was so dangerous? He wasn’t as large as Michael. And Michael was armed—every tall inch of him screamed undercover cop.
And what gave her the impression that she would be more capable of fighting the stranger than Michael would? Who did she think she was?
And that was perhaps the most confounding distraction of all. The issue of who she was.
There was something so fundamentally familiar about the woman, even from behind, that a part of Michael was transfixed by the image of her. It spoke of storms and ancient promises and eons of searching. There was a component of him that knew what that thing was—it really did. The knowledge was branded on him. But it would take more time to fully realize that knowledge. And time was something they did not have.
Even as Michael attempted to rush forward, intent on facing off with the dragon himself, the beast struck with the incredible speed of its kind. It was clear at once that the monster’s mark had never been Michael; it was the woman all along. The dragon completely ignored the archangel and had yet to even make eye contact with him.
Lightning scorched the ozone nearby, and Michael’s progress was roughly halted as he was once more slammed into, this time by a third party. This impact was intended to deal harm, and the brutal force sent the archangel flying back several paces to contact with the pole of a park lamp. The metal bent beneath his body, groaning as it crumpled inward. Overhead, the bulb hissed, flickered, and just before it went out he saw the auburn-haired woman duck beneath an attempted backhand and then jump to kick her dragon opponent squarely in the chest.
The lamp popped and went out, casting the area into darkness as Michael again got to his feet. From this inky black came the sounds of horrible battle, painful impacts, and grunts and hisses of agony. Michael had barely righted himself before whatever hit him before was on him once more.
By the cold of its touch, the sudden frost in the air, and the icy stench of its breath, he labeled it immediately. Phantoms had once been called upon solely by those most powerful in the supernatural community. They were the elite assassins, difficult to come by and almost impossible to pay. Yet they seemed to be coming out of hiding in droves lately, pooling together in impossibly large numbers and working toward a goal as impossibly elusive as the man in charge of them. Gregori.
Was he at the heart of this attack?
As Michael sent the phantom flying with a single strike, he couldn’t help but wonder—and if so, were the phantom and dragon working in tandem?
Were they all there for the woman?
A sudden spike of sharp ripping pain in Michael’s right shoulder brought his thoughts to an agonizing halt. He looked down to see the claws of a second phantom extending from his chest, the shirt and skin around the open wound crackling to fleshy rime with horrid, unbearable speed. Gritting his teeth with the effort it took not to cry out from the pain, Michael grabbed hold of the appendage and tried to break it clean off. However, the phantom was well ahead of him, switching into incorporeal form before Michael could get a firm grip.
To his left, the night parted and a third phantom made its untimely appearance, creeping ominously closer. As if sensing the coming meal, a fourth intruder arrived almost on its tail, skulking near the ground. It slipped from its magic invisibility to a more comfortable, goblin-like appearance. Catlike eyes reflected back at Michael as it slithered toward him. It was an Icaran, a “leech,” no doubt drawn to the scene by all the magic.
If Michael’s luck didn’t change rapidly, it would get the meal of a lifetime.
Lightning slammed into the ground not fifty yards away, sending a burning, buzzing kind of silence into Michael’s ears. His head felt light and puffy in the aftermath of the blast. But the phantom behind him cruelly yanked its claws from his chest, bringing his attention back into sharp focus.
The Icaran in front of him bared his glowing, neon-white teeth, crawling ever hungrily closer as the phantom he’d sent flying picked itself up off the ground and rushed him. The phantom to his left attacked at the same time, and the one behind him grabbed him by the back of the neck, sending a popping, crackling frost down his spine. In the near distance, the woman who had initially attempted to protect him continued to fight her own battle, moving with incredible speed and agility. That she wasn’t yet dead was mind-boggling.
And also . . . it wasn’t. He understood. Deep down. But if he allowed himself to come to grips with the truth, he would be numb with fear for her—and they would both die.
Instead, Michael allowed his blood to sing an ancient tune. He remembered who he was and where he’d come from. He was the Warrior Archangel. He closed his eyes, allowing this age-old truth to infuse his body like an elixir. When he opened his eyes again, he could feel the heat of their glow. The park spun around him as his body moved of its own accord. He was no longer consciously in charge of his actions, and the world moved out of time and space as it, too, remembered.
Within seconds, two phantoms lay dead, the Icaran had turned invisible in fear once more and had no doubt slunk away, and Michael was facing off against the final phantom as the red-haired woman continued to battle her dragon opponent.
But then the shadows bulged, as if filled to the limit with new inhabitants, and suddenly those inhabitants were pouring into the park, dark shapes closing in with unbelievable malice. Among them were black dragons, at least a handful, sending a rivulet of fear like a hiccup of doubt through the Warrior Archangel’s attack.
Michael faltered, missed a block, and felt the return of agony as a second wound was opened in his body, iced at its core, and crackling with a spreading, frozen pain. Yet he tried to keep the dragons in his sights. The dark, dangerous group moved slowly, gauging the scene, their attention clearly focused on the redheaded woman.
He wasted no strength in calling out a warning. Instead he pulled in his power, redirected it once more toward the enemies around him, and let loose with everything he had. Bodies fell at his feet in quick succession. Michael made his way through the opposition like a whirling blade, his movements so fast there could be no conscious thought before them. There wasn’t time.
The black dragons had divided and were concentrating on him now, recognizing him for the threat that he was. Michael took them on without pause, without hesitation, and the fearsome beasts went down before him. The night filled with the sounds of combat: bone on flesh, grunts of pain, and the sickening sound of skin tearing. But the noise of the battle had no effect on Michael. Not until he heard the woman scream.
It was a gut-wrenching wail of defeat, hopeless and final. It shattered the night and brought a temporary halt to the turning of Earth. It was the sound a person made before dying.
Electricity split the heavens a final time, striking a nearby tree and rending it in two. Michael didn’t know exactly what happened next. Sound left. The world became a buzzing strangeness. Time skipped and life blurred. The woman’s attacker stepped from her fallen form and slid back into the shadows, the only remaining enemy yet standing. It escaped, its job done, as Michael made his way with both supernatural speed and horrible, dream-like slowness, to where the woman lay, half on the grass and half on the trail. Her hair spilled across the park walkway like a waterfall of shimmering blood.
Her head was turned away, and for an eternity Michael still couldn’t see her face.
And then he was kneeling beside her, taking her chin gently in his hand, and absorbing everything at once.
Oh God.
Something had him in its clutches. It was invisible, inaudible, and left no viable trace, but it was as real and as physical as the monsters he’d just battled. It squeezed his chest, crushing his heart in its merciless grip, and sent a torturous frisson of emotion careening through his soul.
She was breathtaking. Her eyes were closed but he knew what they looked like. He knew as if he’d always known. He knew every curve of her delicate features as if he’d drawn them himself. He knew what her voice would sound like should she ever speak his name. And what her touch would do to him.
She looked like an angel.
Because she was one.
She’d been bitten by one of the dragons; there was air in her veins. Her full pink lips darkened to purple before his eyes. Air poisoning was a sensation he was well familiar with. There wasn’t much time, and unfortunately the damage of this kind of wound took precious seconds—sometimes minutes—to reverse.
“She needs to be healed.”
Michael tore his eyes from his archess’s face to look up. A second woman stood beside him. He hadn’t heard her approach and hadn’t seen her arrive. But for some reason it wasn’t strange that she was there.
She was medium height and had an average build and was dressed in jeans and a Chicago Blackhawks jersey. She had shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes, and Michael knew at once that it was a disguise. This was not what she really looked like. Something greater, something incredibly different, rested beneath the woman’s facade. There was an unseen power wrapped around her that was so great, it actually reminded Michael of Samael.
He didn’t ask who she was. At the moment, he barely cared. The entire universe lay at his feet, everything he had ever wanted, dying, and his mind was busy taking in what the stranger had just said. He inwardly recoiled at the word “heal.” It stabbed through him like an ice lance, sharp and cold.
“I can’t,” he whispered. He couldn’t heal her. Samael had stolen that ability from him and given it to Azrael. Michael needed a door to transport across vast distances. But he was in the middle of a massive park, nowhere near any doors of any kind. He couldn’t reach his brothers or their archesses in time, and even if he phoned them now and any of them picked up, they would still have to travel the same distance. It was too far and time was too short.
What were the chances of that? Why had this happened here? Why now, and like this? It was as if he were being punished, as if everything he’d begun to suspect about falling out of the Old Man’s favor was true.
“I can’t,” he repeated.
“I know,” said the woman. Then she knelt beside him and looked down at Michael’s fallen archess. “But I can.”
Michael froze. Had he heard her right?
She smiled at him. “Her name is Rhiannon,” she told him. Then she leaned over, placing her palms on Rhiannon’s chest in much the same manner that Michael would have.
Before his eyes, Rhiannon’s lips faded to blue.
He didn’t have to tell his mysterious companion to hurry. The woman seemed to know the urgency of the situation. The world went still as the stranger closed her eyes and her hands began to glow.
Rhiannon, Michael thought. It was a beautiful name, wild and strong and perfect.
He felt the surge of magic leave the woman beside him to enter Rhiannon’s form. It was just beginning to repair the damage, doing away with the deadly air in her veins, when suddenly the brown-haired woman stiffened and her eyes flew open.
She dropped her hands, cutting the healing spell short long before it’d had a chance to do its job. Alarm shot through Michael.
“No,” the woman said, shaking her head. Her gaze slid from Rhiannon’s still unconscious form to meet Michael’s eyes. “He’s coming. He can’t find me. I can’t stay. I’m so sorry!” She looked desperate, even stricken. And in the next instant, she wavered—and vanished.
Numbly, Michael stared at the space where she’d just been. His body felt as if it wasn’t there. Reality was sawing him in half. His very last hope had literally just disappeared. This wasn’t happening; agony was filling his world.
He looked down. The blue tint returned to Rhiannon’s lips. “No,” he said, choking on the word. And then, as if to make up for its lack of volume, for its lack of righteous rage, Michael gripped the front of her warm shirt in his fists, threw back his head, and cried out into the night, “Nooooooo!”
“Really, Michael,” came a cool, familiar voice from the shadows in front of him. Michael’s voice hitched, his body going immobile in trembling disbelief. “Such drama.”
The Warrior Archangel watched as Samael stepped out of the darkness, tall and calm and dressed as ever in the most exquisitely tailored suit money or magic could buy. His hands were in his pockets, his composure that of a man completely at ease. From behind him stepped Jason, his “assistant.”
Samael gave him a look that was neither friendly nor unfriendly, and then both he and Jason turned their attention to Rhiannon’s prone form.
“You need to heal her soon, Michael, or you’ll lose the archess you’ve been searching centuries for.”
“You son of a bitch,” Michael whispered. “I will die trying to kill you.”
Sam seemed not to hear him, or perhaps he just didn’t care. “If you hurry, I believe there is a twenty-four-hour X-rated video shop at the end of that walk there. It has a door. I think it’s the closest one.” His stormy gaze slid from Rhiannon’s face to Michael’s and held there. “At your speed it should only take you a few minutes.”
Beats of silence passed between them. A more pregnant silence had never existed. Michael had never felt more suicidal, and the night had never been so dark.
“Or I could heal her for you,” Sam said.
The shadows perked their ears. The moon turned to listen. The world waited.
Michael straightened, his cheeks wet, his heart bleeding out into his chest. Please, he thought wretchedly. “Do it,” he said, his voice quaking.
Samael’s smile was slow and utterly devoid of kindness. He took a step forward, coming to Rhiannon’s side, and then gracefully lowered himself to one knee. There were fathomless secrets behind the storm clouds of those eyes. Michael experienced the terrible urge to rip them out of his head and pop them between his teeth like caviar.
But his life was slipping through his fingers—through the fervent, white-knuckled grip he had on his archess’s shirt. “Please,” he added. There was no pride here. Not for him. Not anymore.
Samael held his gaze for a moment longer, and then he cocked his handsome head to one side. The steel of his eyes glinted in the moonlight. “There’s a price, Michael,” he said. “But you knew that, didn’t you?” His smile seemed almost sad now. “Nothing in life is free.”
Michael’s blue eyes went to ice. Fury and helplessness warred within him. Neither he nor Sam was under any illusion. They both knew that Michael’s consent to do whatever the Fallen One asked had really been given the moment Sam appeared on the scene.
Samael placed his hand to the archess’s chest, and the breath stilled in Michael’s lungs. Sam’s gaze cut to him again.
“Now then, Warrior Archangel,” Sam said, his words dripping with the triumph
the implied vengeance of this long-awaited moment symbolized. “What is she worth to you?”
See how it all began with
ALWAYS ANGEL
Available as an e-book.
And read on for a look at the first full-length novel in the Lost Angels series by Heather Killough-Walden,
AVENGER’S ANGEL
Available now in paperback and as an e-book from Signet Eclipse.
They were there for a signing. The movie Comeuppance had been such a hit with vampire fans around the world, it had been turned into a book—and then a series of books—and cast members from the movie were signing autographs in bookstores across the globe. It was late in the afternoon and Uriel’s signing as “Christopher Daniels,” the actor who had played Jonathan Brakes, the gorgeous vampire in Comeuppance, was about to begin.
They’d pulled up to the back of the bookstore in order to prepare. Across from him in the back of the limousine sat Max Gillihan, Uriel’s manager. He was also Uriel’s guardian—and guardian to his three brothers, Michael, Gabriel and Azrael. Max was good at the job; he was an ace at donning the multitude of different hats it took to deal with four very strong male spirits in an ever-changing world.
Just as Max was reaching his hand through the break in the separation glass to signal to the driver that they were ready to go to the front of the store and meet Daniels’s fans, a harsh shrieking sound drew Uriel’s attention to the limousine windows.
His vivid green eyes grew very wide. “Is that what I think it is?”
“I’m afraid so,” Gillihan replied.
“They’re blocking the exit,” Uriel said, his tone laced with shock. A throng of teenage girls had amassed on the Tarmac that ran around the side of the bookstore and were racing toward the limousine at breakneck speed.
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