“So you want to tell us you don’t need help against Gregori?” Eleanore demanded, crossing her arms over her chest defiantly. “If I’m not mistaken, you’re mortal now. Just a man.” She waited for emphasis, as Sam’s laughter died. “Whereas Gregori is a monster.”
Sam’s gaze narrowed, and his entire countenance changed. “News travels fast.”
“It was Hesperos,” shrugged Max. “I guess he felt it was necessary to share.”
“Besides, you smell mortal now,” said Mimi. “And I’m sure anyone with a ton of magical power is gonna to be able to tell that you don’t have it any more.”
“There’s a storm approaching,” said Sophie, who was gazing out the window. She’d managed to change the subject and gain everyone’s immediate attention. “It’s almost here.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
There was almost no time between them. There was a hiccup of a moment and nothing more between Sophie’s cryptic announcement and the shattering of the tree house’s glass dome overhead.
Angel shrieked and ducked, instinctively covering her head. But the part of her that was used to helping in situations like this rather than hiding was immediately looking for Mimi. She was only a child. She might be a dragon child, but she was a child nonetheless.
Lightning crashed, the sound deafening and discombobulating. She felt glass crunch under her feet as she attempted to run toward the location she’d last seen Mimi. She got two steps in before an arm was slipping around her waist. She was lifted off her feet and spun around.
She started to scream, and instinct kicked in, forming her hands into claws and her knees into bludgeoning devices. “It’s me,” Sam said in her ear. Angel froze. He took them both to the floor behind one of the couches, and Angel looked up to find him rising once more. “Stay down,” he commanded.
Then he was gone.
But Angel scrambled to her knees, her instincts and her brain at distinct odds. She peeked over the back of the couch at the scene beyond. From the top of the tree house, through the broken glass, figures swooped downward. They were large and dark, with bat-like wings and snake-like bodies. Spikes trailed down their backs, and four arms ended in razor-like claws. Wyverns. She’d seen them before, but it had been a very long time.
They moved like sharks through the air. At one time, before they’d taken to hiding like the majority of Earth’s supernatural beings, that’s what they’d been considered – the sharks of the sky. They were terribly agile, blurringly fast, and their teeth were laced with a poison that prevented blood clotting.
Appearing in the tree house itself within intermittent flashes of transport spells were other creatures. Some caused the floorboards beneath them to creak with their weight. Those were gargoyles. Others were tall and lanky, with skin as white as snow that rippled like fog and was covered in scrolling blue symbols like magic spells. Those were phantoms.
Polka dotting the increasingly tight space like a Dalmatian’s coat were monsters of pure black with skeletal hands and yawning faces. Wraiths.
The appearance of the wraiths drew Angel up short. They were terrifying creatures, capable of opening up every old wound a being had ever suffered. Cuts, scrapes, bruises, concussions, poisonings, broken bones, torn muscles and ligaments, self-made holes such as pulled teeth or openings for surgery, and even truly dangerous and deep wounds such as those caused by gun shots, swords, and daggers would reappear, build up, and pile atop each other until the body was as riddled as Swiss cheese. They were bad enough if you were immortal and blessed with healing powers or the strength of a hundred men. As a mortal, you wouldn’t last seconds.
Not that it much mattered after the wraiths appeared, but as if to add insult to injury, still more monsters infiltrated the tree house, appearing at the doors, crashing through the glass, and transporting out of nowhere. Tunnels were opening up left and right. They were being attacked from all sides.
Angel caught sight of a few slinking Icarans who clung to the shadows now afforded by the storm swirling like a massive tornado overhead. They were waiting to feed on anything picked off by the battle. Because of their ability to locate large quantities of cast magic at any given point in time and converge on the location in order to dine upon it, the monsters were often derogatorily referred to as leeches.
There’s no hope, Angel thought. Strangely enough, even as she thought it, she was searching for a way out. Maybe it was mortal instinct, this need to survive at all costs, because her mind was rapidly calculating as she rose from behind the couch. She glanced left and right, determining angles and distances, factoring in people and their powers. She couldn’t not do it. It was as natural as breathing.
Mimi was the first person she sought out. She just needed to know the child was okay. On one end of the shattered tree house was Rhiannon Dante, the warrior archess that Mimi had obviously attached herself to. The dragon child was with her, and from the palms of her outstretched hands, she produced fire – which Rhiannon then manipulated into massive roaring fireballs. The archess then used telekinesis to throw them at her enemies.
Angel was suddenly very glad she’d made the tree house fireproof ages ago.
Sam was the second person she looked for, though she didn’t have to look hard. He was distinctive, even now, even among the archangels and their enemies. When she saw where he was and what he was doing, she rose completely to her feet, astounded and terrified.
His jacket had been taken from the back of the couch by one of the Wyverns. Maybe it liked the smell of him, she didn’t know. But the flying creature had dropped the jacket on the cherry blossom tree railing of the loft, and the Icarans were closing in on it. They could no doubt smell the magic of the transportation orbs remaining in his pocket.
There were more than a dozen monsters between them and the jacket, but it appeared as if Sam had decided to go through all of them single-handedly to get to it anyway. She watched as he hit the glass wall of the tree house, one of the few remaining panes still intact. His body shattered it and he landed on the outer walkway. He rolled, narrowly managing to grip the outer railing before he would have fallen off and into the canopy of trees below.
As he hastily got to his feet, the gargoyle who threw him went after him, closing in fast.
More creatures continued to pour into the tree house. It really was a hopeless situation. The archangels and archesses were having a difficult enough time. Even the Guardian, Max, was in hand-to-hand combat with two different monsters and looked as though he were losing. There was no way a mortal could fight most of these creatures. Claws and teeth sent poison into the blood, dragon breath would burn you alive, a phantom’s touch would freeze you, gargoyles would crush your skull like a snow globe under a cinder block.
At the thought of gargoyles and skulls, Angel returned her attention to Sam. The Fallen One ducked under the gargoyle’s reach, locked his leg with the gargoyle’s ankle, and took his enemy down to the wrap-around porch. The gargoyle hit the wooden planks with tremendous force; Angel would have felt it herself, she was sure, if it hadn’t been for everything else happening at the same time.
The wooden planks cracked under the collision, and part of one slipped away from its casings to tumble into the trees below. A half-second later, a column of white hot electricity sizzled its way from the darkness overhead and scorched its way through the very same wooden planks of the walk way.
Sam rolled furiously out of the way moving further down the porch. He covered his ears with hard hands as the lightning scorched the already weakened area around the gargoyle and blasted the gargoyle itself. The monster may have screamed on his way down to the forest below, but Angel couldn’t hear it. All she heard was the popped air nothingness of the aftermath of a point-blank bolt of lightning.
Sam had little time to be grateful for the remarkably timed errant bolt of lightning. As soon as one monster disappeared, another came in to take his place. A blue dragon, one of the worst kind in Angel’s opinion, swooped down on massi
ve blue wings that put the Wyverns’ wingspans to terrible shame. His blue-yellow burning eyes focused on Samael; she could actually see the irises spin, and the pupils expand.
Angel glanced from Sam, who was quickly getting once more to his feet and staring the dragon down, to his jacket, which the Icarans had now torn to shreds. If the transportation orbs were anywhere at this point, they were probably in the leeches’ bellies.
She touched her throat, desperate for a way out, and that was when she felt the smooth surface of her necklace.
The locket! She’d forgotten all about it! It had transport orbs inside!
Chapter Forty
Three massive dragons, red, green and blue, hovered over the tree house like dark angels in their own right, their wings so large, they shadowed the infrastructure even more than the swirling clouds did. Wind whipped through the shattered remnants of the house’s windows and picked up every loose object it could find to toss it about like confetti. Blasts of fire, cold, and acid changed the temperature in the tree house like seasons gone errant.
The noise was a deafening cacophony of thunder, screeching, screaming, blasting, and shattering. It had become one solid din that was slightly muffled by the constant ringing now going on in Angel’s ears.
She ignored it all, shoved away from the back of the couch, and headed in Sam’s direction. She ducked under a swooping Wyvern as she ran; they were like bats, incessantly diving for people’s heads. It made a crying sound as it just missed her with its mouth, and managed to land a hit with one of its claws across her right shoulder. She hissed against the pain, but was grateful it hadn’t been the teeth.
Up ahead, Gabriel the Messenger Angel was transforming dragon breath, freezing fire into columns of ice. They hit the floor and shattered into sprays of white that went everywhere. Further on, Uriel the Angel of Vengeance had his hand around a gargoyle’s throat. He was glaring at it, and little by little, as Angel watched, the gargoyle changed. His fingers, which appeared as normal human flesh, first switched from skin to granite. Then from granite to gold. The gargoyle howled in pain as that gold spread throughout its entire body, at last encompassing his face and head. The howl of pain ceased, the wood beneath him cracked – and then the gargoyle fell straight through the floor into the forest below.
There goes my home, Angel thought wistfully as she dodged a fireball. She was forced to leap over a scrambling form as several leeches shuffled toward the new hole in her floor and peeked over, obviously wondering whether they should go down after the gargoyle. It may be dead, but it was still a dead magical beast, and there were always yummy remnants of magic to suckle from.
Angel slipped on something and went to one knee. Looking over her shoulder as she hurried back to her feet, she caught sight of a puddle of what looked like black-blue goo. It was wraith blood maybe. Or dragon. It didn’t matter.
Only one thing mattered. She turned back around and pushed on. Out on the balcony, Sam dropped to his stomach, flattening himself out to avoid the swoop of a blue dragon’s barbed tail. He rolled and shot once more to his feet to avoid the dragon’s teeth as the animal then dove for him. A roar of frustration shook the building just as Angel was gingerly pushing through a broken pane in her glass ceiling.
The shaking caused her to lose her footing, and she reached up to grab hold of one of the structural frames of the dome to catch her balance. The broken glass still embedded in the frame sliced through her palm, but she gritted her teeth and ignored that too. The wind threw her hair in her face, confusing matters further, and she could feel it standing on end as well, signifying that the air was charging for another lightning strike.
Fear thrummed through her veins, pushed along by her rapidly pounding heart. She stepped over the frame and onto the outer walkway.
Then she froze.
Her vision, her attention, everything focused on one single point. A man stood before her. A tall, black-haired man dressed all in white.
“Angel. We meet at long last.”
The noises of the world around her, the fighting, the chaos all faded. The wind died down. The electric heat in the air calmed. She gazed up into irises that looked like dandelions of black, and felt well and truly lost.
She knew who he was. “Gregori.”
He smiled. “I’m so pleased you’ve heard of me.” He moved toward her, and she lost track of Sam. She had no idea what the rest of the universe was doing. It didn’t seem to be connected to the two of them. “I’ve heard of you as well. Though no one told me you were so….” He stopped and blinked, and Angel felt a hiccup in his power over her. His expression was unreadable for a fraction of a moment.
Angel took a step back. She was amazed she could move.
But then the intensity was back, she was terrified again, and she froze in place, trapped in the pull of that dark gaze.
He continued to draw closer. “Tell me Angel, have I made an impression on you?”
“Oh yeah.” She nodded, her heart banging so hard, she thought it might just get tired of her shit and give up on her. “You could say that.”
His smile was back, and his eerie eyes sparkled. “Good.” He nodded. “Very good.”
“You’re going to kill me.”
He cocked his head to one side, considering her with painful keenness. “I had planned to, it’s true.” He paused for a long time, and Angel had no idea what to think. “But honestly, I would rather not.”
She waited.
“However, I’m uncertain you are going to leave me a choice.”
“I…” Angel swallowed hard. Her voice was trembling too much. “I’m open to suggestions,” she finally said. Her whole body was shaking now.
“I’m sure you are.” Another step forward. And she tried to move back, but couldn’t. He was closing in. “I can’t allow the Culmination to take place,” he told her frankly.
The air was charging up again around her; she could feel the humid electricity building. It felt like tiny snakes writhing along and nipping at her skin.
“I can’t allow the Old Man to return to the angel realm. And I’m afraid you and the Fallen One here,” he said as he stepped to the side and turned slightly so Angel was afforded a clear view of Samael. “Have the power to bring it about.”
Gregori seemed to have literally almost stopped time. Everything was moving in slow motion, including Samael. Angel tasted the metal of horror in her mouth, and her legs went numb. A heavy weight settled in the pit of her stomach like a brick. Was such a thing even possible? By any supernatural creature at all?
“However.” He turned back to her, once more blocking her view of Sam. His presence filled her world and blocked out eternity. He towered over her, less than two inches away.
Her breath stilled. Everything stopped as he leaned in.
“If you come with me, I’ll let you both live, Angel. Forsake the Fallen One. Be mine forever and you don’t have to die.” He glanced up at the frozen-in-time tree house with its menagerie of destruction. “None of them do. I will spare them all.” He looked back down again, his black-star gaze searching hers. “Even the little red dragon.”
The air around Angel was now so hot with held-back lightning, it was starting to burn.
“Angel,” he said, almost conversationally. But his tone was too low, his voice too smooth. “Have you never wondered why the Old Man would even bother to create an archess for the Fallen One? Has it always simply made perfect sense to you that he would give an angel who betrayed him something as precious as a perfect mate?”
Angel felt the dread in her stomach spread outward to her limbs. The truth was, it had occurred to her. She had wondered why the Old Man would create her for Samael when he’d cast Sam out of the angel realm the way he had. Why would he bother, when Michael had taken his place as favored? But she’d just figured the Old Man had made her before Sam betrayed him. And in a fit of anger, he’d simply thrown them all out at once. Nothing else made any sense.
“Maybe the answer is q
uite simple,” Gregori said. “Maybe… you weren’t made for him.”
Was he telling her… what? Was he actually saying that… she was made for him instead? For Gregori?
His smile was like spider’s silk in the dew, so beautiful and so deadly. “Join me, Angel. And you don’t have to wonder about any of it anymore.”
“W-why?” She meant to ask why he would choose her, why he would let her live all of a sudden, but it was too hard to speak. He was paralyzing her. Her mind was closing down.
He must have understood though, because his hand came up, fingers curled. “Because you remind me of someone.” She winced as he brushed the backs of his knuckles across her cheek. It was tender.
Almost – loving.
The touch hurt. It was unnatural. It was so painful, in fact, it felt as though she’d stuck a fork in a light socket. Her soul screamed, and the universe heard her.
Time lurched forward, the sky opened up, and at long last, the bolt of lightning that had been held back was set free. Gregori looked up just as the white-hot column encompassed him like a searing cocoon.
Angel went deaf as she tore herself from her spot, and in the eerie, painful silence of the blast’s aftermath, she ran to Samael, took hold of the locket in her right hand, and grabbed his arm with her left. He looked down at her, understanding and recognition of the situation dawning on his face. Sam pulled her into his arms, freeing up her hands. She pried the locket open and grabbed one of the transport orbs, curling it into her fist before she snapped the locket shut again.
She closed her eyes and concentrated amidst the wind and rain that pelted her. And the Brazilian rainforest and its monsters melted around them.
Chapter Forty-One
Max hit the floor hard in the wake of the lightning blast that had speared directly through the top of Angel’s tree house and into the middle of her living room. It engulfed the space where Gregori had been standing moments before. Max had seen him appear before Angel, but his presence had come and gone blinkingly fast, as if he’d been there for a split second and nothing more.
Samael Page 18
