Samael (23 page)

“He means business, Angel,” said Rhiannon, who stepped forward to join Max at the front of the group. “Trust me.”

Angel noticed the blood on Rhiannon’s jeans, and her vision refocused. Now that she was looking, she could see that all of the archangels and archesses looked a little worse for wear. A shirt or two were ripped, most jeans were stained with blood or mud, and hair was tousled. It wasn’t something you noticed at first because the lot of them were so beautiful. But she saw it now.

“What happened?” she asked.

Mimi came forward now. “It was righteous,” she grinned. “We fought some serious bad guys and saved a mermaid.”

Angel’s heart skipped. “What? Mimi, you
fought
someone?”

Rhiannon put her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “She can hold her own,” she said calmly and resolutely. But her gaze never left Angel’s. “But what we faced was a meager handful of trouble compared to what Gregori has at his disposal.” She looked at Sam now. “I’m sure you’re aware of the situation with Jason.”

Sam nodded, just once. His expression was grim.

“Then it was Gregori after all. No’ you,” said Gabriel.

Angel looked from him to Sam and back again. “What situation with Jason? Who’s Jason?”

“He was my assistant,” said Sam calmly. “Gregori killed him, reanimated him, sent him out to do his dirty work, and Azrael put him out of his misery.” He turned to Az. “Does that about sum it up?”

Az didn’t reply. There was a line of tension between the two a mile thick.

Angel was still confused, but she was guessing that whatever had happened with Jason had something to do with Sophie. If Sam was right, then maybe Jason had attacked her? That had to be it. Because nothing else could give a seasoned man of death like Azrael the look he had right now.

She also had a feeling Sam was more than a little bitter about the murder. She just wasn’t sure who Sam was more angry with – Gregori for killing Jason the first time, or Az for killing him for good.

“The problem is, Gregori didn’t stop with Jason,” said Max, taking up the reins like a wise man who detected an oncoming disaster. “My sources have confirmed that people are disappearing from every supernatural faction across the board.”

“He’s recruiting,” said Sam, who’d obviously put the pieces together.

“Do you mean to tell me we can expect reanimated corpses of everything from seelie fae to dragons to come banging down our door?” Angel asked, fear forcing her words to tremor slightly. She was mortal now, after all. The thought was rightly terrifying.

All Max did was nod.

“Oh crap,” she breathed, running a hand through her white-blonde hair.

“No dragon worth her salt is gonna join Gregori,” said Mimi. “But, you know… not everyone is worth their salt. By the way, you look really beautiful,” she added, nodding at Angel. “You shouldn’t hide hair like that.”

Angel blinked.

Come to think of it, how had Mimi even recognized her?

As if she’d been reading Angel’s mind, Rhiannon said, “Dragons recognize scents once they’re trained to do it properly. Mimi’s been doing an awful lot of training.”

Mimi beamed, even though her smile was respectfully small given the dire situation.

“What do we do now, then?” asked Uriel, his voice hard. Angel would be willing to bet the Angel of Vengeance wanted to attack Gregori first and get on the offensive side for once. A glance at Michael told her the Warrior Angel was right there alongside him in that respect.

Hell, they
all
were.

“Well, the truth is, I’ve been asked to keep you safe, Angel,” said Max.

At which point, Sam began laughing. It began as a chuckle, but quickly rose to a full-throated sound that was both beautiful and mocking. “Let me guess.
Lilith
.” He shook his head, still laughing. “The woman has an incessant habit of butting in where she isn’t needed.”

“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 massive 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.