by L. A. Banks
He released a shuddering breath and kissed her temple with force. “Don’t you understand that is why my brothers so adore you, Celeste? Your forgiveness and lack of judgment allow them to be human, to live and love and not be near perfect as long as their spirits stay in the Light, all without being denied access to returning home. Warriors that have known centuries of banishment can now go home, but chose to stay here and fight in the flesh because of you.”
For a while they just stood there absorbing the magnitude of his words, her spirit and skin soaking in the warmth of his. She thought of Jamaerah, the angel of manifestation, who had seemed to her like a beautiful teenager, a lover of music and art … and whose heart was breaking because he could not love, yet could never go home simply because he’d lain with someone he’d once cherished long ago. His sad, melodic guitar had stirred her conscience that fateful morning they’d met when she’d witnessed him tearfully playing a Carlos Santana ballad, “Put Your Lights On.” She would never forget it.
Maybe it was because the others were so battle-toughened that she hadn’t as readily seen their pain. But she hadn’t truly considered how deeply conflicted the others had to be. Jamaerah had been the only one that had taken up Azrael’s offer to go into the crystal column of Light to return home to heal. That had also made her not understand how deep their wounds were. But she suspected after they walked across the sands of their past, others might elect to leave the earth plane to return home just as Jamaerah did.
Not knowing what to say, she simply tightened their embrace, pulling Azrael closer against her as she rubbed his back with broad palm strokes. He’d once told her that her touch was healing, and she prayed with all her might that it was now.
“It’s going to be all right, baby,” she murmured against his chest, not knowing how in the world it would be. “I promise.”
Chapter 3
Under any other circumstances, their small group would have been flagged by Homeland Security. They were traveling to Africa with tickets purchased the same day as the flight, with only carry-on luggage? And with a bunch of dudes with five-o’clock shadow, a couple of them standing six-two, six-three, six-four, and all looking like military commandos, just by their sheer size, and with foreign-looking women in tow? Get serious.
Only angelic intervention had allowed them to run the gauntlet of heightened airport security, but the guys took the pat-down rather than the body scanner, not sure if the wings in their shoulder cavities might show up.
On the whole, if it weren’t for their connections with the Source, getting a flight to Egypt for eight people leaving the same day, with couples able to sit next to each other at that, would have been impossible. But by 6:00 p.m., the four couples had made it through the onerous security screening and were in line as their boarding zones were called.
Azrael squeezed Celeste’s hand and kept his gaze slowly roving the restless crowd. She noticed that the other brothers were doing the same, as though expecting a supernatural gang war to break out at any second.
Babies were crying, women in traditional garb, with youngsters and packages destined for family abroad, jostled them. Impatient tourists huffed and puffed, while businessmen looked at their expensive watches and eyed the gate agent to get a move on for first-class passengers. The line snaked forward and Celeste’s attention fractured all over the place wondering who could be a human in cahoots with the dark. Full paranoia set in as she monitored the brothers’ tension, not sure of its source.
When the gate agent asked for her ticket, Celeste almost jumped out of her skin. Clearly the wait to get on the evening flight had worn her nerves down to a nub.
“You okay?” Azrael murmured discreetly once they were in the Jetway.
“Yeah,” she said, glancing around.
“You see something, you say something,” he said in a low rumble just for her ears.
“All right,” she whispered, “but you guys are freaking me out!”
“In the Egyptian Museum in Cairo? Really. And to think it survived a local uprising because human protesters barred the doors to protect their own national treasures. How perfect.” Asmodeus threw his head back and laughed hard, causing his rich, dark-brown mane to flow over his broad shoulders. “All this fucking time? The demons never cease to amaze me!”
Flawless and handsome, save for the nasty holy-water burn that marred his left cheek, Asmodeus’s tall, muscular body gave birth to raven-hued wings as Forcas nodded and ripped open the dusty storeroom crate. Antiquity surrounded them but their focus was singular.
“Asmodeus—”
“Nathaniel,” he corrected. “Only my modern name, lest you invoke it around those who would know me from the old world.”
“My apologies,” Forcas said with a sweeping bow, causing a cascade of platinum tresses to momentarily curtain his alabaster face and intense, icy-gray eyes. “But do take great care, milord.”
Going to the opened crate, Asmodeus quickly discarded the packing hay and stared down with reverence at the golden bones ensconced in a clear coffin. After a moment he reached out toward the crystal sarcophagus, but then drew back.
“It would not be like Krespy or Salahuddin to have left this to chance. I am sure it is booby-trapped for the darkness.”
Forcas nodded and remained silent, but tossed the crowbar he’d just held on to the top of the crystal encasement. The second the metal object connected with it, a blue-white light surrounded the sarcophagus, turning the crowbar first red- and then white-hot.
“That was just from me holding the bar and sending my energy signature into it. Had that been one of us …” Forcas brushed off his black leather coat and adjusted his sleeves.
“Get a human,” Asmodeus ordered, fangs slowly lengthening in his mouth as his mood turned dark. He stared at Forcas now with coal-black eyes, no whites to surround his expanded irises. “Then make the bastard struggle and bleed on the sarcophagus. Innocent human blood and tears always break the prayer-barrier charge.”
“From there, milord?”
“Bring it to the desert under your province of invisibility. I have an army to heal. Once my inner circle is raised again, we can go about the business of finding the missing tablet to raise an army.”
Forcas smiled and nodded and looked out past the rows of cases, zeroing in on the closest human energy he could find. “I think the guard, Salim, wants a smoke. I think Salim is so anxious that he’ll come back here to take it, rather than go outside on the lawn where he normally goes. Maybe his manager is hassling him, maybe he needs to hide away back here. What do you think, Nathaniel?”
Nathaniel laughed and walked deeper into the metal shelving, becoming a thin mist of dark smoke.
Azrael looked down at Celeste as she drew in slow, easy breaths. She created a wonderful warm spot against his side. After hours of watching old movies with Arabic subtitles, she’d finally stopped fighting her need to sleep. The entire flight had settled down, even the cabin crew was seated and lightly snoozing. Everyone except him and his brothers.
Each man was lost within his own thoughts but alert. Azrael tried to envision what it would have been like to actually live through that span of history his brothers had endured. Try as he might, he couldn’t conceive of what it must have felt like to see the first cornerstone of the first pyramid laid, or to watch entire civilizations vanish … or perish.
Survivor’s guilt lacerated him. He’d been one of the lucky ones, like Gavreel, to have been called back before the alignment ended. He didn’t have to incarnate and experience the agony of the earth plane for millennia. He’d had to deal with it for only a few months. The Angel of Death and the Angel of Peace had been called back in unison, because death and peace were inseparable and could not be sacrificed as a resource then.
The others would remember the thousands of years of agony they’d suffered while trapped on earth, and naturally that reality would leave a bitter taste in his brothers’ mouths, even if they tried not to show it. This missio
n would take them all back to the beginning, and the key would be to make sure the team didn’t turn on itself.
But as much pain as he’d experienced in human form, he’d also experienced ecstasy that he didn’t know existed. It began with her touch, the radiating warmth she’d sent into his back when he’d first arrived and she’d tried to hug away his pain. His wings had been shorn from his body upon entry to earth, and Celeste had seen the thick, raised scars at his shoulders and thought someone had abused him. That had made her weep inside her soul for him, made her graceful fingers play over the injured tissue as her spirit cried out against the injustice.
Somehow that had ignited the dormant strands of DNA within her, lighting each one and fusing them with the angel code within his. In return he’d siphoned all the poisons out of her system and nourished her back to health, which only strengthened her Light. From there she became a sweet addiction. Just touching her skin while holding her hand literally got him high on the etheric energy that pulsed between them … and built the desire to join with her to a frenzied ache that had no rival.
No, he could never pass judgment on his brothers, nor any beings that joined physically and fused souls for the sake of love. Perhaps that had been the one thing to save them both, that he loved her so deeply and she’d returned that to him—her heart innocent of the depths of that emotion until they’d met, he a virgin to the entire experience, yet adept in how to please her by hearing the requests murmured by her every cell.
With her warmth coating him and her inner Light lazily threading through his, he could feel renewed desire begin to stir. The blue-white cords of her energy laced with the slowly pulsing silver-gold threads in his and dueled just under the surface of their skins. He could see it if he concentrated hard enough, just as he could see the light auras of mortals and predict their health. But her light tangling with his in a barely visible, sensual dance had been maddening at first.
After months of being almost unable to keep his hands off her, finally their energy synced up enough to allow them a calmer coexistence. The flame was now a constant, steady, but manageable burn between them. Sometimes just a caress was enough to sate them, or a kiss, or, as now, just a gentle embrace. She no longer got him inebriated as before, but her touch had definitely changed his system and added to his power. The sum total of her being bonded with his created a synergy, a force of nature to be reckoned with, and the dark side had learned that the hard way.
When he’d first crashed to earth, his back was bloodied and scarred where his wings had once been—shorn off for a lesson in humility. He was broken and flight hobbled. It had been the first time he’d ever seen himself as marred. But she saw completion, she saw him whole, and through her eyes he began to envision himself as that until he was. His wings had returned and he’d been able to literally pull his blades of death through the ether into his hands in the material, physical realm. Fury, belief, a call to his brother Jamaerah on the other side, and sheer white Light energy driven by the need to protect his beloved had put the twin handheld battle-axes made of titanium reinforced by Light into both palms to once again take demon heads.
She’d given him a cause more profound than the one he’d had before, a personal aspect to this battle that took his death-dealing against the darkness to an inspired new level. All of this ignited by the selfless love of one woman. All of this due to learning what it was to ache for a human being, to revere and respect what they meant to each other. As he watched her sleep, he was reminded just how fragile a human’s life was compared to his and his brothers’. Her existence was as fleeting as a mayfly’s in comparison to an immortal’s, just a frenzied gulp of life that ebbed all too soon.
Azrael glanced down at Celeste again and gently kissed the top of her head, wishing that he could drift away into the abyss of peace for a few hours, yet accepting how impossible that would be from now on.
The urge for a cigarette slammed against Salim so hard that it made his hands shake. The Egyptian Museum guard glanced around and slowly eased his way to the back storeroom and slipped inside it. If he went out back or out front, his supervisor would see him and there’d be consequences. It didn’t matter about the edict regarding smoking inside. He’d be careful and no one would know it was him.
A wan stream of mote-filled sunlight filtered through the high, dusty windows. Rows of cataloged pieces lined the shelves as he moved to the very back to where old crates and refuse that had yet to be sorted were stored.
Leaning against a crate that was pulled out into the aisle, he extracted a pack of Camels from his khaki uniform chest pocket and dug into his pants pocket for a box of matches. Without proper ventilation and the day in full blast, sweat trickled down his temple as he brought a butt to his lips in the insufferable heat.
But an icy chill made him look up from the flame and glance around. He quickly put it out and hid his unlit cigarette and matches. A draft like that maybe meant someone had come in from a back exit. If it was a coworker, fine. But if it was a supervisor—shit.
He moved away from the crate quietly, turned the corner, and a huge foreigner blocked his path.
“No! No!” he said with a frown, pointing at the blond, who just smiled at him. “You go out!” He hated tourists. The bastards were always wandering into areas they shouldn’t be! But at least it wasn’t a supervisor.
“I say you go!” he repeated, becoming more agitated as the blond man extracted a fresh pack of Camels from his long, black coat.
“No, no, no! You cannot smoke here! You must go!”
The blond coolly regarded him and defiantly placed a cigarette between his lips, then struck something that Salim couldn’t see between his fingers and lit the butt anyway. As angry as that made him, he was also entrapped by the scent and sight of the luxurious smoke that wafted toward him. Never had the urge to smoke been so powerful. Just smelling the burning tobacco made him briefly close his eyes and lick his lips. Sweat made his shirt cling to his body, and unable to resist any longer, he snatched his pack out of his pocket.
Quickly fumbling with the half-crushed pack, he pulled out a cigarette and hastily put it between his lips and lit it. He dragged so hard that he started coughing on the initial inhale, but then dragged on it again, hands shaking. The ecstasy that filled him on each drag brought tears to his eyes, and he didn’t care that this stranger saw him break the rules.
“Every man deserves a last smoke before he dies,” the stranger murmured.
The comment made Salim stare at the unarmed man as though he were mad. But just as Salim was about to take a step forward to challenge him, something grabbed him from behind. A hand covered his mouth; whatever held him had a viselike grip. Twisting and turning, he struggled to break free. A burning cigarette lay on the floor, his pack strewn, matches scattered, and still the foreigner smoked, regarding him with a smile.
“You have a choice—you always have a choice. Touch the contents of the crate of your own free will or have a supervisor find out you’ve been smoking back here with all this hay.”
Another, deeper voice said from behind him, “How much antiquity is in this museum? I heard that if a person were to spend one minute looking at each piece that was housed here, it would take them a full year.”
The blond before him smiled wider, revealing eerily long teeth. “There’s more in the British Museum, and in France and in Italy, than here, but I think if your supervisor came and saw this smoldering on the floor, you’d lose your job.”
“Touch it,” the deep voice whispered, giving Salim gooseflesh from fear.
He nodded quickly, not sure of the odd game the European tourists were playing with him, but they frightened him and he just wanted to get away from their sick folly.
The force released him and he spun to see who had held him. A tall man with deeply tanned skin, brown hair, and strangely dark eyes smiled, then nodded toward the crate beside them.
“I will touch this, then you go,” the guard said, summoning courage
to speak. “This is not for tourists.”
“When you’re done, we will go,” the darker of the two men said.
Salim reached out and placed his hand on the crystal top of what had to be a coffin. But as soon as he did, a black charge that looked like a dark current welded his hand to the surface. When he tried to draw away, it yanked him in hard, slamming his cheek against the top of the crate. The current was coming from the blond foreigner’s hands.
“It was his free will,” the blond said calmly as Salim struggled and fought against the building pressure.
“Indeed it was,” the other foreigner replied with a smirk as Salim’s ears and nose began to bleed. “A human sacrifice does the trick every time.”
Soon the guard could taste the warm, salty ooze of his own blood in his mouth as he heaved and thrashed against the crystal surface, unable to scream. Then with a loud crack, the blond snapped his fingers and the pressure suddenly stopped. Salim sank to the floor, exhausted, but to his horror, what seemed like hundreds of tiny gargoyles scuttled between the shelving and crates toward him. Razor-sharp claws extended and mouths filled with twisted, yellow fangs, the gray, little beasts dashed in his direction as he began screaming and pushed himself up to run.
In seconds they were on him. His wails went unnoticed as the demons dragged his body up onto the sarcophagus, biting, scratching, goring him, sloshing his blood everywhere until it covered the crystal case. Soon everything went quiet. His screams were no more. His body lay desecrated, a bloody mass on top of the ancient coffin.
