Death's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels (18 page)

He had always been able to do this. As the Angel of Death, he had looked into people’s hearts and known their deeds—both good and bad. For him, the past was as much a living, breathing thing as the present.

And Sophie’s past was a veritable snarling beast.

As he grew closer to her, the warmth she shed grew, but the atmosphere tore at him more. It was trying to rip him to shreds, trying to drain him dry—it even felt as though it were trying to kill him.

How ironic.

Azrael shoved through the boiling fury of her memory, concentrating harder than he’d ever had to in his incredibly long life. And then he felt it. . . .

Here?
he thought, bewildered. But just as he had out on the bay beneath the bridge, he recognized the scent, the feel, the sensation of pure, emotionless evil.

A phantom was in the cemetery. Since phantoms could not enter a person’s mind, much less view a person’s past as Azrael could, the fact that Az sensed one now meant that a phantom had been present on this day in Sophie’s past.

The improbability of such a coincidence paled in comparison to the foreboding he felt creeping across the gravestones. It was too real to ignore. It nearly brought him to a halt.

Azrael had heard humans talk about the strange, slow-motion run they often got trapped in while dreaming at night. That sensation of trying as hard as they could—and still not getting anywhere—haunted many mortals. Yet he had never fully understood how frustrating and dire the sensation was until tonight.

Now he struggled, fighting tooth and nail to cross the valley of the dead amid screaming souls that only he could hear and the terrible nearness of a heartless assassin. Until finally, he came over a rise in time to hear the unmistakable sound of a gun going off.

Azrael stopped short and scanned the mists. They parted on a hill fifty yards away. There, a young Sophie Bryce, perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old, lay beneath the bulky, immobile body of a middle-aged man.

Azrael’s senses were pricked by the sharp smell of gunpowder, fear, and freshly spilled blood. Sophie’s sobs were dimmed by the fog, but still echoed across the small valley between them. Az tried to move forward, to reach her as Sophie frantically heaved the large, heavy body off her, but he was frozen in place, locked in the static importance of this particular moment in Sophie’s past.

Who is that?
he wondered, wishing he had power over the strands of time. He closed his eyes and backtracked through the channels of Sophie’s mind. There. The man’s name was Alan Harvey. He was her foster father. One of many.

Here, in this cemetery eleven years ago, Harvey had tried to rape and murder Sophie Bryce. But before he could do either, she’d killed him instead.

Azrael’s eyes opened as Sophie unsteadily got to her feet. She was covered in blood, none of it hers. The stench wafted across the graveyard, assaulting Azrael in its profuse abundance. He watched, in stunned silence, as Sophie looked down at the gun in her hand.

All around Az, the sense of wrongness, of evil and danger, was nearly overwhelming.

The mists parted behind Sophie. A phantom stepped into the clearing.

It had been so long since Azrael had seen one, to look upon its form now was mesmerizing in the same manner as was an accident scene on the freeway. The phantom smiled at Sophie’s back through teeth that were black, in sharp contrast to the milky white of its long, skinny body. It stood more than seven feet tall, and its skin writhed and swirled as if it were coated with the same fog that blanketed the cemetery.

Azrael’s lips parted, his instinct to yell at Sophie to look behind her—to turn around—to run. Not that it would have done her any good. He knew that any attempt he made to interrupt the flow of her memory would prove fruitless. He was here as an observer, despite the very real pull of the dead on his now weary body. The dead had no concept of past or present. Their essences existed in all times, in all places, and in every one of those instances Azrael remained the former Angel of Death.

He watched as the phantom floated toward Sophie, its body moving in strange conjunction with the rest of the world; it walked as if it had feet to push along the ground, but those feet did not touch the earth. Instead, it hovered several inches above it and moved at a speed that belied its odd gait.

Azrael’s entire body tensed, his muscles bunched, and the monster in him rushed to the fore, all fang and claw and hunger as the phantom closed in on Sophie and raised its white, withered, semi-material hand. In one clean swipe, the phantom sliced its hand across Sophie’s body. But there was no destruction, no open, gaping wound in her torso where the phantom’s hand had passed through her. Instead, she simply went limp and fell to the ground.

The gun she’d held in her hand tumbled across the wet grass and slid to a stop a few feet down the hill. Then the phantom moved to the dead body of her foster father and stood over it, looking down.

What the monster did next would have given any mortal a bone-deep chill. The phantom threw back its head and laughed. It was the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard amplified by the hollow-lunged evil of the creature that made the sound. Azrael’s heart hammered hard, and his body ached where he fought the petrifying effects of Sophie’s memory. But all he could do was watch as the phantom lowered its head and then moved over the dead body.

Its own form began to dissolve into the mists that seemed to make it up. Those mists covered Harvey’s corpse, enveloping it in white.

A few seconds later, the fog began to drift away, and Harvey’s body was gone. It was no more than the rest of the mist that coiled and eddied and parted across the rolling hills of the New York cemetery.

Chapter Eighteen

W
hen Azrael came to, he was lying on his own bed and Sophie was lying beside him, her golden hair spread across his chest and the black satin comforter.

Azrael gazed down at her; his eyes burned furiously in his skull, his teeth ached painfully in his gums, and his body shook—trembled uncontrollably—with need. His golden archess was still unconscious. And he was in agony.

Only twice in his life on Earth had he ever felt this weak and this hungry for blood. Twenty centuries had passed since the initial, hellish moments of his life in this realm. He’d had two thousand years to get over the pain he’d suffered during his transformation. It had barely been enough.

The second time he’d felt this suffering was several months ago. Samael had cast that spell upon Azrael in the cemetery, awakening the spirits so that they clawed at him and ripped apart his spirit. The physical pain it had caused was immense. It had taken days and many feedings to heal.

And now that pain was back.

Azrael rose from the bed in one fluid movement and forced himself to take a step away from it. His entire body ached,
throbbed
. He could actually feel the emptiness in his veins. It was as if they were drying out, cracking, sending searing pain through the very fiber of his physical being.

Sophie stirred on the bed. Her head turned so that she faced him. She frowned in her sleep, and then the lines of her beautiful face smoothed out as if she’d found peace once more. Az’s gaze traveled from her plump lips to the smooth curve of her chin and the long, graceful line of her throat.

He caught the beat of her heart, heard the small sounds of her breathing, and smelled the temptation of her blood where it flowed, innocent and waiting just beneath the surface of her neck.

He’d wanted her before. Out on the bay, at the hockey game, as he watched her sleep in her Pittsburgh apartment. He’d wanted her at the wedding, at the restaurant, out on the pier, where she’d strolled across the boardwalk and fed the seagulls what remained of her lunch. Azrael had wanted to taste Sophie from the moment she had appeared in her maid-of-honor gown and walked down that aisle behind her best friend.

And now he was going to have her.

Azrael was already bending over his archess when he heard the distinctive sound of a footfall in the darkness behind him.

“My lord, please believe me when I tell you that you do not wish to do that.”

Azrael froze, the presence of the other ancient vampire rolling over him in all its power. Only Uro could have followed Azrael through the shadows. Only Uro knew of this cavern.

Slowly Azrael straightened. The pain was making him mean. Every ounce of him was the monster now. There was no room for anything else. Uro may have been his best and oldest friend, but he was getting in the way of what Azrael wanted more than anything he had ever wanted in his ancient, worthless existence.

He slowly turned to face the other vampire and then cocked his head to one side. “Wanna bet?”

There was no warning then. Neither of them was a speaker of unnecessary words. Their bodies blurred into motion and, at the center of the enormous cave, they met, a clash of growls and snarls, fangs bared, claws out, bodies spinning with insane momentum.

No human eye would have been able to follow the progress of their struggles. Several seconds later, something hard hit the wall of the cave and Azrael had Uro pinned, a hand around his throat, his fanged face inches from that of his closest friend.

“I took you from death’s clutches, Uro, but I can throw you back just as easily.”

“I know,” Uro said, grinding the words out through clenched teeth. His red eyes flared and his fingers grasped Azrael’s wrist tightly. “If that’s what it takes to save you from yourself, so be it.”

Azrael looked into those red eyes and saw the fire of Uro’s spirit. It raged and roared and yet only now did it show itself. Only now, when his king and maker needed him most, did he break the facade of calm that composed his outer shell.

Uro had always been there for him.

If you take her now, you will kill her. And then you will kill yourself
,
Uro told him, his words spilling into Azrael’s mind with desperate clarity.
You will lose your queen—and we will lose you both.

Azrael’s body shook under the assault of his fierce hunger. It needled through his nerve endings, forming stars on the outskirts of his supernatural vision. His grip on Uro’s throat tightened.

Leave her blood
,
Uro told him, clearly refusing to give up. “Take mine instead.”

Az stilled. He replayed what Uro had just offered through his head. And as he did, he thought of Michael. Two thousand years ago, Michael had given his blood freely so that Azrael would suffer less. Now Uro offered to do the same.

Azrael considered it for a split second more, and then he moved his hand up so that it tilted his friend’s head to the side, and he sank his fangs into Uro’s neck.

Uro tensed; the bite hurt. A vampire’s blood was not meant to be drained in this manner. But he remained steadfastly silent, and as his pain increased, Azrael’s subsided.

He pulled and swallowed, and after a few seconds clarity began to return to his world.

Soon, he withdrew his fangs and took a step back. Uro swallowed hard, remained on his feet, and turned his face to look at his sovereign. The fire in his eyes had retreated to two smaller pinpoints of red light. He looked a tad pale.

But otherwise, alive.

“Thank you,” said Az. He meant it from the bottom of his heart. He turned to glance at Sophie where she still lay sleeping and unsuspecting on his bed.

He’d almost done something terrible.

He turned back to watch as Uro stepped away from the wall and his eyes returned to normal. The wound on his neck had already healed. Uro glanced at Sophie and then back at his king. “What happened?” he asked.

It was an excellent question. Azrael was still in some discomfort; he felt like a human would feel after not eating for a few days. But he was sane, and now that he was sane, he was able to reflect upon Sophie’s memory and the way it had drained him so thoroughly.

“I don’t know,” he replied softly. He looked at her sleeping figure. He
didn’t
know—not yet. It was one thing to have to fight his way through his archess’s mind; she was complicated and intricate and her thoughts went as deep as her beauty. It would have been difficult for him to pull something out of any archess’s mind; with Sophie, it was astronomically so. Still, that alone would not have had such a severe effect upon his constitution.

What had done him in was the cemetery. Even in the supposed safety of her memory, the graveyard’s spirits posed a threat to him. And something had awakened them.

Azrael thought of the phantom’s presence in Sophie’s past. He thought of what she had been forced to do—and how the phantom had covered it up. He wondered what Sophie had done once she’d regained consciousness on that misty, fateful day.

Whatever it was, he was willing to bet the phantom had orchestrated many of the things that had happened to her, and influenced her choices. A path had been built for her, and whoever had hired the phantom—for the creatures were always the employees of those more powerful and more secretive than they—had led her down that path with terrible accuracy and skill.

There were forces at work here that Azrael did not understand. His first instinct was to blame Samael. The spell in the cemetery of Sophie’s memory and the spell that Samael had cast on him in the graveyard months ago were so similar that it was a natural assumption. But it felt wrong.

Granted, it wasn’t as if any of the four brothers ever really had any idea what the hell Samael’s game was, but the phantoms and the accident on the bridge—those weren’t like Sam. In the two thousand years that he’d been making life miserable for Azrael and his brothers, Sam had never been known to cause humans undue suffering. He’d never killed anyone. He’d never actually even come close.

Either the Fallen One had gone through a major personality shift or this was the work of someone else.

The Adarians?

Azrael moved to the bed and stood over it. He took a deep breath and raised his hand, palm down, to slowly trace Sophie’s outline in the air. As he did, her clothing took on a different cast; its threads shimmered and changed, becoming woven through with gold. It never hurt to play it safe, and this was a trick he knew Gabriel and Uriel had both used on their archesses. According to Juliette, gold no longer had a caustic effect on Abraxos, no doubt due to his new vampiracy. However, he was only one Adarian.

When Az was finished, he ran his hand through his hair and realized his fingers were shaking. He turned back to Uro, who was still watching him in silence. There was a companionable warmth to the man, even now, after all he’d been put through that night, that was priceless to Azrael. Uro’s dark gaze was as ancient and vast as the night sky. He was the only one of Azrael’s created vampires old enough to travel through the shadows and find this cave.

“How many did you have to go through before you found me?” Az asked. His voice was deep and beautiful, but it lacked the strength it normally had. He needed to feed again, and soon.

Uro offered up a small smile and shrugged. “A few.”

Az returned the smile. “We have a few hours before sunrise,” he said. “We could both use more sustenance.” He and Uro could move with incredible speed. They could find a soul to feed from and be at the bridge in very short order. Sophie would be safe in the cave. No one who wasn’t able to walk the darkness of the shadows would be able to find her here, a hundred feet belowground, in a space with no windows and no doors and only magically created oxygen. “And I need to check in with my brothers.”

“They’re still at the bridge,” Uro told him.

“I’m sure they are.”

* * *

Michael ran his hand through his hair and fisted it there, frustration riding him hard and mean as he stood on the Golden Gate Bridge. He’d already been under an undue amount of stress. Between the Adarians and Samael—wherever he was—and this rapist making his way across New York, Michael’s cortisol levels had been on the heavy side of late.

But there was an edge to this night that cut through him like jagged glass, fracturing reality in such a way that he almost couldn’t tell the difference between what had happened and what he was
afraid
would happen next.

Randall McFarlan had met Michael and his brothers, the archesses, and Max on the bridge after they’d used the mansion to transport themselves to San Francisco. While Michael had to admit that he felt less than comfortable around a lot of Azrael’s “creations,” he liked McFarlan well enough. As usual, he was accompanied by the thin, younger-looking Terrence Colby and the Hispanic Casper MonteVega. According to McFarlan, Azrael had been out on his boat with a woman when an eighteen-wheeler had broken through the cables and guard rails on the Golden Gate Bridge above them and then sailed through the air to crash into Az’s boat. The
Calliope
, which Michael
did
feel comfortable around—he’d been on the boat a few times himself—was completely destroyed. The truck had sunk like a rock to the bottom of the bay, and the driver would have been dead if not for the quick thinking of Azrael’s vampires—and Michael’s healing powers.

Everything had happened so fast.

Michael was in New York, just getting off work when Max called him on his cell phone. He’d just receive a telepathic message from Azrael informing him that their help was needed at the Golden Gate Bridge.

After he hung up with Michael, Max called the others. Within minutes Uriel, Eleanore, Gabriel and Juliette, and Michael had all managed to convene in the foyer of the mansion. They stepped through its swirling portal of a door and into the San Francisco night together.

They were met at once by one of Azrael’s band mates, Uro. Seconds later, several other vampires showed up and together they led the archangels to the accident scene.

It was a horrible mess.

Michael had seen a lot of devastation in the course of his existence. If that wasn’t about destruction, nothing was. However, he’d gone after evildoers and “mistakes” that the Old Man had created and tossed to Earth to forget about. He’d fought demons, things so ancient and wrong that their names were eventually forgotten because people had refused to utter them for so long.

Human destruction was different. Whether it was caused by man or it
involved
man, it was always . . .
worse
, somehow.

Michael and his brothers never turned their backs on human suffering. Not when they could help it. There was too much pain in the world, all of it happening at once in too many different places, for them to deal with all of it—or even
most
of it. But they did what they could, when they could.

As a peace officer for various countries and states, Michael had actually witnessed more loss and heartbreak than he’d taken in during all of his years as the sword arm of the Old Man. Humans were a tragic lot, trapped in the enormously cruel dichotomy of having minds that allowed them to feel beyond the boundaries of necessity and brains that pushed them to create situations in which these emotions were put into play. They were naturally unnatural.

And the thirteen-car pileup on the Golden Gate Bridge that night was testament to that. Though it was clear that the crash had not been initially set in motion by a human, its ultimate capacity for tragedy was
entirely
human.

A kind of quiet hysteria had taken over the bridge. The stalled vehicles on either side of the massive accident shone their headlights on the scene, outlining the horrors of it in all their gory detail.

Mothers were sobbing, fathers were shouting, and bystanders were wandering aimlessly, too much in shock to know what to do other than call 911. No amount of extra telephoning was going to help at this point; the rescue crews could only move so fast, and Michael was more grateful than words could say that two of the archesses had been found so far. He needed the help.