Always, Ange

by Heather Killough-Walden

  Twenty years later . . .

  He couldn’t see her face. He never could.

  These dreams that came to him now, after thousands of years of darkness and silence, were both the bane and the immeasurable pleasure of his nighttime existence. Whoever she was . . . she haunted him. The feel of her taunted and teased and fed his hunger with flesh so supple, so perfect, it defied reality. Her hair was so soft, it brushed his chest like feathers. She was warm, real, and tender. She was strength and passion and surrender all in one.

  The smell of her reminded him of fresh fallen rain, clean and promising. The sound of her was . . . sighs so soft and moans even softer. A touch and a gasp and a pounding heartbeat later and Sam was in heaven. And hell.

  He awoke that morning as he always did of late, his sheets soaked, his breath catching, his hands fisting in something that was no longer there. Once more, she had slipped through his fingers.

  Gone. Like the wind. And he wanted to lash out in anger, in desperation, and shove himself back into sleep. He wanted to fall into a coma. If only for the slightest hope of having her in his bed once more.

  Whoever she was.

  A knock came at the massive double doors across his chamber and Samael ran his hand over his face. He felt hot, as if he had a fever––which was impossible. He closed his eyes and caught the faintest hint of rain. His eyes flew open again and thunder rolled in the distance. With a flourish of frustration, Sam threw back his covers and rose from the bed. As he came to his full height, clothing materialized over his body, outfitting him in charcoal gray Armani all the way to the tips of his shining black shoes.

  The knock came again, this time more pronounced.

  “Come in,” he replied, knowing well who it was on the other side of the door. Only two of his multitude of employees would dare intrude upon Sam’s solitude in such a manner, and only for matters of great importance; Lilith or Jason. Lilith would have simply entered Samael’s chambers after the first knock. That left Jason. Whatever it was that Jason wanted to show him, it was clearly substantial.

  As if to prove him right, the doors to Sam’s chambers swung outward and in stepped a tall, dark-haired man dressed in a blue suit that matched the cobalt spark in his eyes. “My lord, I’m sorry to bother you. However, I think you’ll want to see this.” He carried in his hands a manila folder which he offered.

  Samael didn’t bother responding. He simply met Jason at the center of the vast, richly appointed room and took the folder from him. He flipped it open and gazed down at a photograph of a very beautiful woman.

  She had long, thick raven black hair, fair skin, and piercing blue eyes. His instinct was to ask who she was. But he had the answer almost at once and never had to give voice to his question. Her beauty alone was nearly enough to give her away, but there was more to her than that. It was in the depth of her gaze, the almost sad quality to her small smile, and in the way the world paled around her image. It was there, plain as day.

  “An archess,” he whispered, his slim fingers gently touching upon the picture in his hand.

  “Yes, my lord. The first. Her name is Eleanore Granger.”

  Chapter Three

  Angel stared at the computer screen before her. She was torn between two strong and opposing emotions at that moment.

  One was elation. The other was stone cold fear.

  On the screen was a chat page graced with the names of two people. One was her own. The other belonged to Eleanore Granger.

  E: You wouldn’t believe who’s here right now, signing autographs in my store.

  A: Okay—autographs? I’m officially on the edge of my seat!

  E: Christopher Daniels.

  Angel swallowed hard, her eyes scanning each individual letter of the man’s name. Christopher Daniels was the very handsome green-eyed actor who portrayed the “good” vampire, Jonathan Brakes, in the ridiculously popular movie Comeuppance. He was talented and charismatic and incredibly famous. He was also more than he pretended to be.

  Angel took a deep breath and poised her fingers over the keyboard. With some concentration, she slipped back into the roll of friend, because she’d been Eleanore Granger’s online friend for some years now, and began to type. The least she could do was figure out how bad the damage was.

  You’re shitting me, she wrote, remaining in the persona she had presented to Eleanore from the beginning.

  E: lol Nope. I’ve been off work for two hours, but Mister Jonathan Brakes is probably still there, wondering which of his adoring fans he can sink his teeth into for dinner. Or would it be breakfast?

  Angel pictured the actor and shook her head, just once. Neither, she thought. Christopher Daniels isn’t a vampire. He’s an archangel. But he’s just as dangerous to you, little archess. Slowly, she closed her eyes and forced herself to take another deep breath. She’d known this was coming, of course. It was destined. It had to happen. It was fate.

  She just hadn’t realized how little time she’d actually had. Things were coming to a head. The Culmination was beginning, whether she liked it or not, and once each of the archesses was reunited with her archangel . . . it would be that much more likely that Samael would find Angel. In fact, there would be nowhere on Earth she could hide from him then.

  Angel bit her lip, exhaled a shaky breath, and lied through her fingertips.

  A: I have never been more jealous of you than I am right now.

  E: I thought you hated that movie.

  That made Angel smile. It was true. She had hated Comeuppance, but only because she knew what vampires were really like—and she knew that “Christopher Daniels” knew it too.

  She typed.

  A: Oh, I do. With a passion. Am I the only one creeped out by the thought of someone several hundred years old going after someone who’s barely twenty??? Talk about robbing the cradle. But Christopher Daniels is freaking HOT. Did you get to talk to him at all? Get his autograph?

  How close to him had Eleanore gotten? I’m really laying it on thick, she thought to herself. Part of her felt a little sick. She hated dishonesty. And yet, here she was, delving so deeply into it, her spirit at once felt unrecognizable.

  As far as Ellie Granger was concerned, she and Angel had met in an online chat room for vampire romance novel fans several years ago and had become fast friends, though they’d never met face to face. Eleanore had no idea that Angel had been more or less watching over her since she was a child. She had no idea that Angel had once saved her life.

  Angel knew that Ellie had been on the run from the Adarians since shortly after that first encounter with the notorious General Abraxos twenty years ago. Because of this, she had moved from town to town, city to city, her parents constantly and desperately scrambling for ways to disguise her amazing powers and hide them from the world.

  In effect, Eleanore had been shut off from society, and the only friendships she truly knew were the ones she fostered online. Her strongest was with Angel.

  Angel was Ellie’s best friend.

  It was a dichotomy that was proving itself to be far more painful than Angel had ever thought it would be. She wanted to be the friend she’d always been. And at the same time . . . she was terrified of what Ellie’s happiness as far as Christopher Daniels was concerned might ultimately bring.

  You there? she typed.

  E: Yeah, I’m here. Sorry. Just thinking.

  A: About Daniels?

  E: Sort of, but not really. More of a general spacing out, I guess.

  A: That’s my Ellie.

  E: What’s it like in the North Pole right now?

  Eleanore Granger was under the impression that Angel lived in Minnesota. You couldn’t be too careful. If Samuel Lambent ever learned that she was actually in the same city as he was. . . .

  A: Cold. White. Caught the change of subject, btw. Nice try. I still want all of the juicy details about vampire boy.

  E: Okay. Fine. The truth? He asked me out on a date.

  Angel’s heart hit th
e inside of her rib cage with tremendous, painful force. And here it is, she thought hopelessly. It’s begun.

  It was a while before she was able to type a response.

  A: He what?

  E: He asked me out. To some sort of event on Thursday. But I turned him down.

  A: He what?

  E: Very funny. You heard me the first time.

  Angel couldn’t believe what she was reading. The archangel had found his archess. And she’d turned him down? No fucking way, she thought. Ellie was playing hard to get, but it wouldn’t work. Angel was far too aware of the overall, driving attraction and need an archangel had toward his archess. It was the reason for his being here on Earth to begin with. There was no way in hell that Christopher Daniels—otherwise known as Uriel, one of the four favored archangel brothers—was going to let that slide.

  But Angel wasn’t supposed to know this. She wasn’t supposed to know anything as far as her friend, Eleanore Granger, was concerned. So, she shook her head quickly, cleared her throat, and began to type once more.

  A: Okay, now I know you’ve gone around the bend. I can’t freaking believe Christopher Daniels asked you out. I really can’t. And you turned him down? I’m leaving the computer now to go and scream into my pillow. My eyes are turning green.

  She logged out of the chat program and pushed back her chair. Her skin felt prickly, her body both cold and hot. She was not a mortal, but at the moment, she could have sworn she was edging dangerously close to a very human panic attack.

  She needed something—some kind of reassurance that the world was not quite yet coming to an end.

  Jules, she told herself. Check on Juliette.

  With that thought, she shoved her chair forward again, clicked on to a completely different email account, and checked to see whether one Juliette Anderson was online. She was.

  A few minutes later, she and Juliette were enjoying an uplifting conversation about Juliette’s ethnographic research and her plans to travel to Scotland in the coming months. The change of subject from archangels and vampires was welcome. It soothed Angel’s nerves enough that her skin stopped hurting and the panic she’d felt creeping in around the edges seemed to have receded. It was like someone had turned on the defogger in her brain, clearing her thoughts of ill omens.

  When they’d spoken long enough, she wrapped things up and signed off as she normally did with her online friends: Always, Angel. And then she once again pushed back her chair, this time coming to her feet.

  She made her way to her master bedroom and began peeling off her clothes, her mind now on one of the long, hot showers that were both a luxury and a stress-reducing necessity for her of late. The window in her bedroom was open; except on rainy days, she never bothered closing it, much less locking it. Her apartment was on the seventh floor and had no balcony, so there was little point.

  The moon beyond the gauzy white curtains was nearly full. It cast a blue white light across the window ledge and the carpet below.

  Angel gazed longingly at the night sky and then turned away from the window to continue toward the bathroom. But as she passed the full-length mirror beside her dresser, she stopped. Slowly, she turned to face the looking glass, the expression on her face troubled.

  There was something decidedly different-looking about her tonight.

  Over the years, Angel had taken on many different guises. It was one of her more potent abilities to be capable of changing certain aspects of her appearance. Her hair, her skin, and her eyes were malleable. If she wanted, she could have short hair, blond hair, black hair, long hair, curly hair, red hair—any hair. She could possess green eyes, gold eyes, blue eyes, brown eyes, violet eyes or a mixture of any colors she chose. Her skin was dark some days and light others and, depending upon where she was, she blended into her surroundings like any local. Hiding.

  Always hiding. She was good at that. It was essential. Angel never allowed her real hair, eyes, and skin to take hold. Those, she kept secret, stashed away in the veritable closet of the masks she wore day in and day out.

  Tonight, she wore the skin and hair of an African American woman. Her amber eyes were stark in the lovely frame of her perfect face. Her bone structure, height, and body type always remained the same. She couldn’t have changed them if she’d wanted to. She would forever be tall and slim and strong. Luckily, most people never saw past color when attempting to identify someone.

  However, tonight . . . Angel could swear there was something beyond the basic—beneath the surface—that had been altered. She gazed at her reflection, frowned, and then blinked. There was almost a . . . glow about her.

  “Oh no,” she whispered, a new kind of fear blooming within her.

  Angel had never been under any misconceptions about her looks. She was well aware that she was what many would consider almost impossibly beautiful. Her appearance was otherworldly. It always had been. She was not of this world, so that made sense. But, she’d managed to keep it under wraps, for the most part, through either her ability to change her secondary traits—or through her stealth. She kept to the shadows, wore hooded jackets and sweat shirts, and stayed out of the way until her powers were needed.

  Now, however. . . . “Crap,” she muttered.

  “You know you shine like a beacon,” came a deep voice behind her.

  Angel froze. Her amber eyes cut to the figure in the mirror. He was standing on her window ledge. Despite the clear view of the window her mirror’s reflection afforded, she hadn’t seen him approach. She hadn’t heard him—or even felt him arrive.

  It had been a very, very long time since someone had managed to sneak up on her like this. In fact, it had been thousands of years.

  And it was the same man.

  Chapter Four

  “Hesperos,” she whispered, nearly out of breath with the shock of him. Memory was a strange thing. Most people couldn’t recall what they’d had for lunch the day before, but they could remember events and people from decades past. It was that way for Angel now.

  The man on her window ledge looked the same as he always had, just like she remembered. His clothing had changed. Instead of the armor of a soldier of ancient Athens, he now wore black jeans, black boots, and a black leather vest over a bare chest. But his appearance was as it had always been: tall, strong, and chiseled. Perfect.

  Hesperos may not have been quite as otherworldly as Samuel Lambent. No one was, and for good reason. But Hesperos was a king.

  And it showed.

  Maybe he won’t recognize me, she thought desperately. Her mind was spinning end over end, her heart thumping painfully in her chest. Angel was far from defenseless, even when it came to battling things not quite human. However, Hesperos was special. If it came down to a struggle, she would lose.

  The last time he had seen her, she’d been sporting long red hair and hazel eyes. She’d been wearing the robes of a Celt. On the outside, she had looked nothing like she did now. Maybe, if she was lucky, he wouldn’t see past her outer shell any more than a human male would.

  But even as she hoped it, she knew she was fooling herself. Hesperos was an incubus. The incubi, or “Nightmares,” as other supernatural creatures referred to them, were notorious for hunting beauty in its purest form. Outward appearance often meant little to them. They appreciated it, to be sure. But if a woman was not as lovely on the inside as she was on the outside, they quickly lost interest and went elsewhere.

  Nightmares could easily tell what rested in a woman’s heart. Despite the fact that Angel had become very good at hiding her true nature over the decades, Hesperos was their Nightmare king. Two thousand years ago, he had managed the tiniest peek at her real form. And now? If anyone could see her, or at least glimpse her, as she truly was, it would be him. Well . . . him and Samuel Lambent, anyway.

  Very slowly, Angel turned from the mirror, her fingers clasping the thin spaghetti strap of her slip where she’d been about to let it fall off her shoulder. It was her last remaining vestige of cloth
ing. It was all that remained between herself and the literal lord and master of the sexiest men on the planet.

  Hesperos watched her from where he stood on the ledge, framed by the light of the moon and her slowly swaying curtains. His raven black hair was shot through with streaks of blue beneath the illumination. He bore an intriguing black tattoo on the left side of his neck, and another across the swell of his right bicep. A third peeked from beneath the leather edge of his vest. To most people, they simply appeared to be tattoos, “manly” perhaps, intricate and well drawn. However, to Angel, they were symbols of his power, his status, and a reminder of the fact that he was king.

  After a few moments, he stepped down from the ledge and the moonlight struck the steel of his eyes. It had always been his eyes that turned Angel’s head the most and weakened her to the point of danger. They were a mixture of green and gray that she had never seen before. They looked like jade shot through with metal, and their powers of perception were incredible.

  Nothing escaped Hesperos.

  That was perhaps what scared her the most.

  She swallowed hard now and watched with a wariness she hadn’t felt in centuries as the incubus king moved from the window, his boots sounding loud in the hollow silence between them. It wasn’t that Hesperos was a bad man. He never hurt women—not that he would ever need to—and he never let his seed impregnate anyone as did the majority of the incubi. Compared to his minions, the Nightmare King was a teddy bear in those regards.

  But he hadn’t gotten to be king by accident.

  Hesperos possessed a great deal of power. In fact, Angel was a little surprised that he hadn’t yet attempted to subjugate her mind in order to make this easier for himself. It wasn’t that he necessarily needed to be able to control the minds of his victims to get what he wanted. Most women melted at a single glance from him. But he wasn’t stupid. He never left anything to chance. Another reason he was king.