Death's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels (36 page)

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.

T
hey 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.

There was no time to formulate a plan. He could either stay inside the car indefinitely and wait for the cops, or he could escape from the car and run.
Fast.

Uriel threw open the door of the limousine and bolted out of the backseat. Behind him, he heard Max calling, but he ignored the guardian and headed directly for the bookstore.

Later, and in retrospect, he would realize that heading
toward
the bookstore instead of
away
from it was, at the very least, a bizarre decision. Especially considering that the slew of fans now racing toward him like a medieval village mob was coming from said store.

However, there was little thought involved. The girls were coming around the corner from the front of the store, which gave him a clear shot at the back door. It was mostly instinct that propelled Uriel across the lot to the locked back exit of the establishment. And it was superhuman strength that then allowed him to wrench the door open against the lock and rush inside.

He sensed that the alarm wanted to go off. He used his powers to silence it and pulled the door shut behind him, making sure to yank it in tight enough that it warped a little and held.

The girls outside reached it just as it shut and their fists pounded furiously on the metal of the barred exit. They were getting soaked out there. He was more than a little damp himself.

He wondered if they were also hurting one another as they shoved toward the door. He sincerely hoped not. But whatever was happening, the sheer number of them suggested that the door wouldn’t hold for long. All they had to do was work together and it would come open.

Uriel passed the restrooms on his left and strode toward the science fiction section of the store just beyond the exit foyer. There, he stopped and grimaced. Another mass of girls, nearly as large as the first, was grouped around the front of the store. There must have been a hundred of them. . . . Maybe more.

The door behind him creaked and then scraped.

Uriel thought fast and ducked into the women’s restroom. Once inside, he closed his eyes, pressed his back to the wall beside the door, and listened. The exit door of the bookstore gave way beyond and he could hear the group of girls rush into the hallway. They raced by, their Converses squeaking with rainwater on the linoleum tile.

“You have to memorize a script to act, and the movie you starred in was also turned into a book, so I assumed that you could read.”

Uriel’s eyes flew open to find a woman and a little girl standing a few feet away, beside the door of the first stall.

“I was obviously wrong,” she continued. “Because you’ve mistaken the women’s restroom for the ridiculously famous sex symbol restroom—which is next door.”

Uriel’s heart stopped beating. His jaw dropped open.

He couldn’t be seeing what he was seeing in that moment. He
couldn’t
be feeling what he was feeling. Not now. Not here, in a
bathroom
—after two thousand years. Maybe he’d slipped in the rain outside and hit his head.

No, that was impossible. He was relatively invincible. Being hit on the head would do nothing to him but make him a little cranky.

She was really standing there before him. She was real; he could see her, hear her—he could even smell her. She smelled like shampoo and soap and lavender.

Jesus,
he thought, unable to refrain from letting his gaze drop down her body and back up again. She was everything that he had ever imagined she would be, from her tall, slim body to her long jet-black hair, and those indigo blue eyes the color of a Milky Way night. Her skin was like porcelain. Her lips were plump and pink and framed perfect white teeth. She was an
angel
.

She was his archess. And she was . . .
scowling
at him?

He frowned.

* * *

The door to the bathroom had shut firmly behind Christopher Daniels, and he clearly had heard what she’d said, but he still just stood there like he was frozen and Eleanore could not figure out why. “Mr. Daniels, is there something I can help you with?” Eleanore asked.

She had to admit to herself that when Daniels had first entered the women’s restroom, she’d been taken completely and utterly by surprise. First of all, he was even more handsome in real life than he was in his plethora of press photos. And that wasn’t supposed to be the case at all. Wasn’t there supposed to be loads and loads of makeup involved? Tricks of the light? In real life, didn’t actors have acne and scars and wrinkles and undyed roots for miles?

In real life, an actor’s eyes didn’t seem to
glow
the way they did in the movies. But Christopher Daniels’s eyes did. It was nearly eerie, they were so intense. They instantly called to mind the dreams she’d had of him. It was always his eyes she saw just before she woke up. All of the pictures he had plastered across the nation didn’t do them justice. His eyes were the color of arctic icebergs, so very, very light green that they seemed . . . more than human. They were incredibly beautiful.

She was standing in a restroom, face-to-face with a famous actor who was, quite literally, the most attractive man she had ever seen. And yet he was looking at her as if
she
were the gorgeous movie star instead.

And so she was more than a little surprised at herself when, instead of feeling faint and falling all over him like all of the other girls in the world seemed to do, her first instinct had been to stand up to him. For what, exactly, she had no idea. For coming into the girls’ restroom, she guessed. Of all things! What kind of crime
was
that, exactly?

Eleanore’s subconscious mind knew the truth. She wasn’t mad at him for coming into the wrong restroom, of course. She was mad at him for being who and what he was. Gorgeous—and famous. It was an old brain kind of thing.

He was obviously hiding. That was clear. And from the sound of the giggling schoolgirls beyond the door, she would wager a guess that it was his
fans
he was hiding from. The nerve! First, these guys fought tooth and nail to climb their way into fandom and then they balked at being loved by the masses.

What was up with that?

Meanwhile she’d forgotten Jennifer, the little girl she’d come into the bathroom to help in the first place. But Jennifer had clearly noticed Daniels as well. Her hand slipped out of Eleanore’s own as she spoke up. “Miss Ellie made my stomach feel better!” she chimed in, completely out of the blue. “I was throwing up, but she touched my tummy and made it stop.”

Eleanore paled.
Oh no,
she thought.
Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet—don’t say any more!

“Which is a good thing,” Jennifer went on, nodding emphatically, “because the throw up made me want to throw up some more.” Jennifer was only about five, but she wasn’t shy. She grimaced and seemed to want to push the memory away with her little hands. “It was
so
gross.”

Eleanore felt herself blanching further. She pulled her gaze off the famous actor and looked at the wall. She needed to compose herself. She needed to get a handle on the situation—take control.

Finally, she rolled her shoulders and looked back up at him.

She blinked. He was still staring at her in abject fascination. That
was
fascination, wasn’t it? Not amusement? Maybe he just thought she was mental. . . .

“Mr. Daniels, I’m going to find Jennifer’s parents and then I would be happy to announce your arrival over the intercom, if you’d like—”

Daniels pushed himself off the wall and stepped toward her. His motorcycle boots made a heavy thud on the linoleum floor. It sounded dangerous. A warm, erotic warning thrummed through Eleanore’s body.

“You’re the reason it’s storming,” he said. “Now it makes perfect sense.”

Eleanore’s world tipped on its axis, and fear gripped her. Her vision began to tunnel. “P-pardon me?” she asked. Her voice sounded hollow to her own ears.

What is he talking about? He can’t know.

She almost shook her head against the possibility.
She thought about taking a step back, suddenly needing space. But there was a tiny hand in hers, squeezing tight, and she couldn’t escape.

“You’re a man and this is a girls’ bathroom,” little Jennifer said.

Christopher Daniels glanced down at the child. Jennifer’s nose was scrunched up and her gaze was reprimanding. The actor seemed to be considering the girl for a moment and then he looked back up at Eleanore.

“Ellie,” he said softly.

Eleanore swallowed hard. Her mouth and throat had gone dry. “It’s—it’s Eleanore,” she stammered. And then, realizing that she’d just given out her name and that perhaps she shouldn’t have, she looked away from him and shook her head. “Mr. Daniels,” she tried again. “Excuse me. I really do need to find Jennifer’s parents. She’s just been pretty sick.”

She brushed past him to push open the door, and as she did, the air seemed to thicken around her; it suddenly felt cloying and confusing. It took forever to get by the actor; she could feel him watching her as she came near and he made virtually no move to get out of the way. His nearness was electrifying and disarming, his body tall and hard and very real. Time seemed to slow down as she opened the door and stepped out into the store.

But once she was past him, she walked as quickly as she could with a five-year-old tethered to her arm, which wasn’t very fast at all. She heard footsteps behind her and glanced back to see that Daniels was following her. He kept pace easily, a small, determined smile playing about his lips.

Christopher Daniels is behind me,
Eleanore thought.
The famous actor, Christopher Daniels, is behind me! He’s probably looking at my ass.
She tried not to groan out loud at that thought. As if it mattered!

She wasn’t sure what her bottom looked like from his vantage point; she never bothered with the mirror that much in the morning. And she was nearly as horrified by the fact that she
cared
what she looked like to him as she was by the fact that he seemed to be
looking
at her. Was he looking at her butt?

Of course he’s looking at my butt,
she thought.
He’s a guy! That’s what they do!

She berated herself for the internal monologue of
Clueless
-worthy concerns and once more wondered what he’d meant by his storm comment. Did he know that she’d caused the storm? If he did—how?

There’s no way
, she thought.
He must have meant something else.

Eleanore stopped beside the customer service desk and bent to whisper into Jennifer’s little ear.

“This is our secret, okay?” she said, hoping against hope that the child would catch the urgency with which she made the request.

Jennifer looked up at her and then glanced over at Daniels, who was leaning against a bookshelf a few feet away, his arms crossed over his chest, his expression both bewildered and amused. Then she nodded and smiled up at Eleanore, and Ellie’s fear dropped down a notch.

Eleanore straightened and picked up the phone at the customer service desk. She saw Daniels peek over the racks at the crowd by the front doors. A woman dressed in a suit with a name tag glanced nervously at her watch and then stood on her toes as if to look for someone. They were wondering where their star was.

There was a tall man in a suit with them. He was pushing his way through the women—and a few men—to the front of the store. Eleanore wondered vaguely who he was, but let it go as she made a “lost child” announcement over the intercom to get the attention of Jennifer’s parents.

When she’d finished, she put the phone back in its cradle and turned to face a harried-looking couple who instantly knelt before Jennifer to console her. Jennifer’s mother scooped her up into her arms, and with a quick thank-you to Ellie, they were on their way out of the store.

Now Ellie turned to face Daniels, who was still leaning against the bookshelf, watching her. In the next split second, he straightened from the shelf, closed the distance between them with two purposeful strides, and pinned her to the customer service desk, one strong arm braced against the counter on either side of her.

Eleanore inhaled sharply and her heart did a somersault in her chest.

“I have to go to a big party Thursday night. Come with me,” he said. He was so close, his breath whispered across her lips—it smelled of licorice and mint.

“W-wha . . .” she stammered. Then she dry-swallowed and tried again. “What?”

She heard a faint cracking sound and glanced down to see that his grip on the desk behind her had tightened. She turned back to face him and watched as his gaze flicked to her mouth and back.