Messenger's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels (3 page)

Eventually, and unfortunately, despite all of Kevin’s careful watching and planning, Uriel happened upon Eleanore as well—and recognized her as his. The ensuing struggle to secure the archess eventually culminated in a terrible battle on a turbine field in Texas, ending in the Adarians’ defeat.

In Dallas, where that battle had taken place several months ago, Uriel had proved himself at a distinct advantage by sinking his fangs into the throats of Kevin’s men and draining them. In doing so, he temporarily absorbed their powers and was able to use them against the Adarians.

Since that telling battle, Kevin and his men had lain low. They’d recuperated, regrouped, and reassessed their goals. Or Kevin had. He had also never stopped thinking about what Uriel had accomplished.

Nor had he stopped thinking about the
fifth
archangel. At least, that was what Kevin assumed the man was. He’d been unstoppable . . . and oddly familiar to Kevin.

Uriel’s transformation and the stranger’s unexpected appearance had been troubling enough to warrant several months of idle planning before attempting anything further on the archangels or their precious, irreplaceable archesses.

But at the moment, Kevin was touching upon something that might amount to a real plan. This little experiment had proved his suspicions.

Just as Uriel had been able to do, Kevin was capable of absorbing the power of another Adarian by drinking his blood. Already, he could feel the power he’d taken from Ely waning.
It’s temporary,
he thought. That made sense; Ely was the true owner of the ability and Ely was still alive. The power did not reproduce but was lent through the taking of Ely’s blood.
And now that I’ve used it once, it has returned to its rightful owner,
he realized.

Kevin turned his hand over and looked up at the door through which Ely had disappeared. Three of his Adarians had died on the turbine field in Texas. But nine remained, including himself. Eight of them waited for him beyond that door. Kevin pondered their individual powers and the implications of what he’d just learned. And he wondered. . . .

He pulled a tarp over the prisoner’s withered body and stepped back. In a moment, Ely returned and Kevin approached him. “Bring Xathaniel to me.”

Ely nodded again and left once more. Xathaniel, also known as Daniel among the Adarians, was what Kevin would consider the weakest member of their group. His only power was the power of invisibility. While invisibility certainly had its uses from time to time, Kevin was more interested in offensive powers that could be used in battle, and that one didn’t cut it. However, it wasn’t unworthy of consideration for what Kevin had in mind.

If he was able to absorb an Adarian’s power temporarily through the taking of his blood, what would happen should he drain the Adarian dry? What if he killed the man he drank from? Would the power he absorbed remain his?

“Sir, Daniel is not in his room. He seems to have left the complex.”

Kevin turned to face Ely, whose large frame was once more eating up the space in the doorway. “Oh?” He pondered this a moment. Daniel may have stepped out for coffee or a beer or even to get laid. His men had needs, after all. “Bring him to me when he returns.”

Ely nodded and left.

Kevin considered Xathaniel and his invisibility. If his little experiment worked, that invisibility would soon belong to Kevin permanently—and Daniel would be dead.

* * *

Samuel Lambent was a man of many secrets, not the smallest of which was the fact that “Samuel” was not his real name, and being the richest, most powerful media mogul in the world was not his full-time job.

Samuel Lambent was actually Samael, the incredibly tall and handsome, ash-blond archangel with charcoal gray eyes, known to a select few as the Fallen One. Right now, the notorious archangel was staring at a photograph that had been given to him months ago by one of the many “men” he employed around the world. It was a photograph of Juliette Anderson, the second archess. She was bent over the unconscious form of a man who had just been pulled from the sea after a surfing accident. She’d had no idea that she was being caught on film. She was dangerously unaware that her little secret could so easily fall into the wrong hands.

The archess was beyond precious, able to heal with no more than a touch, control the weather, influence fire, and move objects with her mind. However, it was unclear whether Juliette was aware of the extent of her powers.

Samael had thought long and hard about what he planned to do with little Juliette. The five-foot-three archess posed several options to Samael. It all depended upon which direction he wanted to go from here.

He could take her. He could make her his. It wouldn’t be difficult; it never was for him. Plus, she was innocent—and he had something he could offer her. Juliette Anderson’s bank account was on the shallow end of the pool, and always had been. Her parents were professors, but in fields that paid inadequately, and they squandered their money on travel, backpacking trips, camping expeditions, and the like. Neither of them knew how to save anything, and Juliette had learned long ago not to ask them for financial assistance. They would give it, but they couldn’t afford to, and it was hard on Juliette’s ego.

Oh, he had something he could offer. Sam had walked among the human race for a good while. And he knew well that, of money and sex, money was the more powerful lure. It truly was the root of all evil.

Anderson was gorgeous. There was a smoothness to her healthy, tanned complexion that normal humans did not possess; her archess’s soul was hard to hide, just as it had been for Eleanore Granger. Juliette’s hazel eyes shifted from light brown to stark green with the slightest provocation, if Samael’s photographs were any indication. Her lips were full and pink, her teeth straight and bright white, her thick shining hair a mass of fantastic waves the likes of which Sam had only ever seen once before. On the first archess.

Juliette was beautiful, and as of yet, the four favorites were unaware of her existence. Making her his would forever deny at least one of them his match. That, in and of itself, was an incredibly tempting proposition. The warmth and pleasure he imagined he would feel with her in his bed made the idea of claiming her himself nothing short of a blissful win-win situation.

But . . .
no
.

Sam had other plans.
Broader
plans—that, thus far, were coming to delightful fruition. Of course, it helped that he was able to so easily manipulate events from behind the scenes. Strictly speaking, Juliette Anderson wasn’t the one Sam was after at the moment. But if she somehow wound up in his bed anyway, the universe would get no complaints from him.

CHAPTER THREE

“G
reat.” Juliette scowled at the darkening sky through her windshield. “
Juuust
great.” She pursed her lips and clutched the steering wheel until she was white-knuckled. It was hard enough gauging the distance between the tires and the side of the road when you were seated on the right side. But the traffic was bumper-to-bumper and the car felt like moldy plastic around her, and she hated the fact that she was even sitting
down
again, much less stuck on a foreign road with no hope of reaching her hotel anytime soon.

Should she even be able to find it. Luckily, she had a GPS on the dash to help her with at least that much. And it had the most wonderful British voice to tell her she was going the wrong way.

Again, Juliette chanced a glance up and was a little surprised to see lightning spiderweb across the sky. The peal of thunder followed two seconds later.

Personally, Juliette enjoyed a good storm. But what it did to traffic was never a good thing. The roads sucked enough as it was; there were strange signs everywhere, the streets were basically shoulder-width narrow, parking was parallel or nothing, and there were simply too many vehicles that needed accommodation on a road system that had been built a thousand years ago. Throw in wet conditions and what you had was a big fat slow-moving mess.

It would be hours before she got to the Radisson Blu. She was suddenly grateful that British cars got about a thousand miles to the gallon. She hadn’t seen a gas station anywhere along the road since she’d left the airport.

Christ, you’re in a good mood, Jules,
she told herself as she took a minute to rub her eyes while the cars in front of her came to a full stop once again.
Lighten up. You landed safe and sound. Everything else is trivial.
But the stupid airline had lost her luggage, and her right butt cheek was numb from sitting, and she was terrified that she was going to get into a wreck and wind up in a foreign jail before the end of the day.

The car behind her began honking. Juliette looked up and peered at the driver through her rearview mirror. Past her own honey-brown-haired, hazel-eyed reflection, she caught sight of the man in the BMW behind her. The man was middle-aged, from what she could tell. Gold wristwatch? Maybe silver; hard to tell in this light. Balding with glasses. He had a cell phone to his right ear.

Juliette frowned. What the hell was he honking at?

Up ahead, traffic began to crawl forward once more. Jules reached a good five miles per hour, before it once again slowed to a halt and she sighed.

The driver in the BMW behind Juliette leaned on his horn. Jules glanced up, caught him in the rearview mirror, and shot him a dirty look. In response, he palmed the horn and kept it down.
What the hell?
she thought.
Does he think I can make the three hundred cars in front of me move faster? Does he actually think I can go anywhere?

Thunder rolled across the highway, rumbling the windows in their panes and temporarily drowning out the sound of the BMW’s horn. Lightning crashed to the right of Juliette’s car, somewhere not too far away, and when she began to count the seconds, she didn’t even reach the number one before the sky erupted with a bellow of sound.

She jumped a little and ducked instinctively. Somewhere over the green hill, in the neighborhood of the suburbs, car alarms went off.

Juliette turned on her car radio and got nothing but static on every station. She tried to swallow and found her throat a little dry. Her head was aching now as tension rode up through her arms and into her neck.

Her car was presently stuck underneath an overpass and the damp gray cement had been decorated by no fewer than ten different gangs. Juliette frowned at the visual cacophony of paint as a man dressed in shabby clothing came slowly lumbering around the corner of one of the overpass’s support columns. His shoes had no toes and he was holding a hat. There were a few coins in the hat, not much paper. However, in Britain, the coins tended to be worth a lot more than they were in the US, so that wasn’t necessarily telling.

Juliette automatically began rummaging in the backpack beside her in the passenger seat of the rental car. She knew she had some two-pound coins in one of the outer pockets. She checked ahead as she dug around; the traffic still wasn’t moving, so she was safe. Once she found the coins, she rolled down her window and called out to him. At first, he didn’t seem to hear her. Thunder once more rolled over the traffic jam, making it harder for her to gain his attention. She tried again and again, and on the third attempt, he looked up, his blue eyes stark against his ruddy face and stubbled chin.

Juliette waved him over and the man hobbled to her window. She handed him every coin she had and the man took them gently in his stained fingers as his weathered lips cracked a grateful smile.

Behind her, Mr. BMW laid into his horn a third time.

Juliette’s eyes widened. She raised her head to look at him through her rearview mirror. He glared at her and her blood began to roar through her eardrums. She slowly narrowed her gaze, glaring back at him. She was normally a nonconfrontational person, but this guy was pushing the envelope with her.

In response, he flipped her the British rendition of the bird: a backward peace sign.

And then the hood of his car erupted into white sparks and flame as a bolt of lightning shot through it like a massive white-light tree trunk. Juliette saw the strike as if in slow motion. Time slowed down, allowing her to witness the billions of minuscule tributaries of electricity that shot off the massive main column of the bolt. It reminded her of one of those glass balls that you put your hand on and the static electricity shoots from the ball toward the center of your palm.

But the sound was deafening. There was a blast, like a bomb, and then a high-pitched ringing and little else. Juliette knew that somewhere, just outside this little bubble of reality that the lightning bolt had affected, even more alarms were going off, horns were being honked, and people might be getting out of their cars now.

But for her, there was only time, slow and impossible—and the man behind her, who now literally could not let go of his cell phone as the electricity from the bolt shot through his car and into the cabin, zapping his glasses until they singed his eyebrows and nose, and melting his wristwatch onto his arm.

I did that,
she thought suddenly. Mr. BMW was screaming now, but there was no sound. Only the ringing and a muffled reality. He clutched his arm and fumbled for the door handle and Juliette could only watch, in stunned realization.

She knew it in the core of who she was. It was a certainty, like the knowledge that the sun would rise in the east and that thinking took place in the brain.
She
had called the lightning on that man’s car.

That was me.

Reality freezes at points in a person’s life. Time is like everything else—relative. It took years for the man in the BMW behind Juliette to come to his senses and feel for his slightly melted door handle, open it, and scramble out into the street to topple over. It took another year for her to open her own door and rush out into the street after him.

With guilt heavy on her shoulders, she propelled herself forward, through the waning gale to the unconscious man’s side. She saw her fingers at his throat, checking for a pulse. A century later, she was leaning over him, hoping to feel his breath against her ear.

When she did, she sat back on her heels and looked down at his melted watch and scorch marks. Then, without premeditation, she placed her hand to his chest and closed her eyes.

It was what she had done in Australia. But she didn’t have time to contemplate the madness of it. Her body was acting of its own accord.

All around her were the sounds of people stirring. Someone was yelling about calling ambulances and someone else was yelling back that an ambulance would never make it through anyway. There was still thunder, but it had settled a bit. There was the crackling of a fire and Juliette knew that it was the interior of the BMW she was listening to as it smoldered and popped itself into oblivion. A thrum of hard fear rushed through her at the sound. She didn’t mind fires when they were contained, and even enjoyed a warm blaze in a hearth, but fires on their own were ravenous, unpredictable forces that belched poison and consumed everything in their paths.

She heard rain falling, though, and also knew the fire would soon be put out. She was soaked through and growing cold just as the familiar heat gathered beneath her palm, spread up her arm, and seeped into the sleeping body of the man beside her.

This isn’t happening,
she thought, as weakness stole into her body while the man stirred in front of her and his burn marks melted away.
I can heal . . . and I can call lightning from the skies.
It was a floating realization, a faint voice whispering in the halls of her conscious mind. It was a verity, though, real enough that it couldn’t be ignored.

She opened her eyes to find the man she’d given money to standing across from her, watching her silently. Her heart thudded hard in her chest and she froze, feeling as paralyzed as a deer in headlights.

Beneath the light touch of her palm, the injured man rolled over a bit, turned his head, and opened his eyes. Juliette glanced down at him, blinked, and then hurriedly removed her hand and slid back a few inches.

She felt tired, more weary than she should have. She now recalled feeling the same way after healing the surfer in Australia.
This is real. What I did in Australia was real. Not a breakdown. It was real.

The man looked up at her, blinked when rain fell into his eyes, and threw his arm over his face. Then he frowned.
“You,”
he said, his features filled with disdain. “Are you robbin’ me or somethin’?” he asked in a heavy Scottish accent.

Juliette was taken aback, despite the impossibility of the situation. But she was not one to be mistreated. His words instantly got her ire up. Once she recalled the rudeness he’d displayed only minutes ago, she recovered and met his look of disdain with one of her own. “You
fainted
,” she told him, “like a little girl. I was only trying to help you out.”

He blinked again, this time not from the rain, and then glanced at his burning car. Black smoke curled up from the shattered sunroof and billowed above the street before the rain and clouds ate it up.

The man looked back up at Juliette. And then, in a most unexpected move, his face broke a broad smile and he began to laugh. It was a pleasant laugh: a chuckle, deep and true. “Figures,” he said. “I finally get somethin’ worth a shite out o’ me divorce and God goes an’ takes it away again. He really does like me ex-wife better than me.” He sat up, and because Juliette was there in front of him, she found herself helping him.

Once he was upright, he looked at her again. “You look like her, you do,” he said. “When she was a younger lass.” He ran his hand over his bald head, washing away a bit of the rain, and then sighed. “She was too good for me. She knew it—I should’ve.” He shook his head. “I’m sorrae I’m such an ass.”

Juliette blinked. That was why he had honked at her and flipped her off?
Wow,
she thought.
Must have been a rough divorce.
She licked her lips and tasted rain. “It’s okay?” What was there to say to that? She was trembling, but she managed a small smile.

He shrugged helplessly. “You
really
look like her now that I don’ have me glasses. Everythin’s blurry.” He glanced around at the ground and, not finding them, seemed to give up. “The name’s Albert.” He held out his hand.

Juliette hesitated briefly and then grasped it firmly, never one to give a limp handshake, no matter what the circumstances. “I’m Juliette,” she replied. Then she glanced at the cars around them. Sirens could now be heard in the distance. Someone was arguing over a fender bender about twenty cars down. Juliette and the BMW guy were starting to acquire an audience.

“Oy! Are you okay, there?” A pair of teenage boys was peeking tentatively around the car behind the smoldering BMW. They appeared genuinely concerned.

“Do we need the paramedics?” one asked.

“One’s already on the way, James. Can you no’ hear it?”

Their conversation continued and Juliette ignored them. She leaned a little closer to Albert. “Can you stand?”

“I think so. I thought the lightnin’ had done me in bu’”—he looked at his arms and felt his face—“I guess I was wrong. Me ears are no’ even ringin’ or anythin’.”

Juliette knew why. As the storm quieted around her, reflecting her own emotions, that truth stomped its foot and banged on the door of her consciousness, asserting itself blatantly. Albert had been
plenty
hurt by the lightning and she’d been the reason for that damage, not any deity. She was also the reason he wasn’t hurt now.
That
was the truth.

However, what she said was, “Maybe God doesn’t like your ex-wife better than you, after all.”

Albert met her wry smile with a lopsided grin of his own and she helped him stand.

Twenty minutes later, the police arrived and managed to get everyone back into their cars—except of course for Albert, whom they forced into an ambulance on the sheer principle that he’d been inside of a car struck by lightning.

Juliette caught his good-bye nod, returned it, and got back into her own car at the behest of the police. As she settled, still shaking, into the driver’s seat and looked over the steering wheel, her gaze met one of stark blue.

It was the man that she’d given money to. She’d forgotten about him. He’d watched her heal Albert.

Juliette swallowed hard and peered into the man’s eyes. Slowly, he lifted the coins she had given him for her to see. Then he nodded once, slowly and surely, as if to say
I understand
, and
Thank you
. And then he put the coins back into his hat, turned around, and walked away. She lost sight of him as he rounded the corner beneath the overpass.

A few seconds later, Juliette followed the car in front of her as traffic began its slow crawl back to life. The rain had all but stopped and the sun peeked through the clouds up above. And Juliette was no longer uncertain of her sanity. Now she was uncertain of just about everything else.