The Fallen 03 - Warrior (8 page)

It was already getting darker. What time was it in Italy? Did the contessa know Pedersen was dead, and that I had killed him? Did it even matter?

The sea breeze was blowing in, and I could taste the salt on my lips. Part of me longed for it, to feel the water on my feet, my skin. But I was exhausted by all I had been through.

I looked at the bed longingly. There was no reason why I had to escape immediately. It would be better if I acclimated myself to this strange place first. Besides, I had never been so weary in my life.

I took a third can of soda and walked over to the bed. It was bigger than my narrow one in Italy, but smaller than the beds in the movies. It was more than big enough for me, and I stretched out on it, setting the open can of soda on the side table.

It was sinfully, divinely comfortable. Could something be both? Then again, that would describe a fallen angel perfectly. Sinful and divine. A fascinating contradiction, and if things were different, I’d be more than happy to stay here and explore it. It
wasn’t as if Michael was any threat to me—this marriage was a formality, nothing more. He kept insisting he was celibate, and he had no interest in either my body or my blood. There was no real reason to be in such a hurry.

Except I was finding the celibacy thing a little hard to believe, assuming he had all his equipment. There was something about him, the tightly coiled intensity, the way he moved, the way he looked at things, at me, that felt . . . sexual. Not that I had a great deal of experience in the matter, but I knew the difference between creatures who displayed a sexless presence and those who exuded sexuality. Michael, for all his protestations, was definitely the latter.

And whether I liked it or not, when I looked at him I felt something. I couldn’t identify it, didn’t want to, but it made me uneasy, irritable, unsettled. As if I wanted something from him and I wasn’t sure what.

Not my type at all. I liked sweet, gentle men who didn’t try to tell me what to do. I’d had enough of that with the contessa and Pedersen. The last thing I wanted was a stern, cold man bossing me around.

But right now our plans coincided. He had told me to stay put and go to sleep, and I was exhausted, with a comfortable bed beneath me. I stretched out, kicking off the sandals Allie had given me and wiggling my toes. I’d need to find out what they’d done with my clothes and the euros I had stashed in an inner pocket of my jeans. I’d have to find a bank where I could trade them in, but that shouldn’t be
difficult once I reached civilization. Depending on how far civilization was.

I could hear the rough cries of the seabirds above the rush of the surf. The sound of the ocean had to be the most soothing noise in the world.

I closed my eyes and slept.

“S
HE’S GOING TO WHAT
?” Michael demanded, furious.

“She’s going to die,” Martha said in a tight voice, clearly distressed. “On her twenty-fifth birthday. One month from now.”

“And why the fuck did you wait till now to tell me?” Michael snarled.

“Behave yourself, Michael,” Allie said, sitting next to Martha at the table. “It doesn’t do to badger people.” The six of them were alone in the vast meeting hall: the two ruling couples, Raziel and Allie, Azazel and his wife, Rachel, otherwise known as the demon Lilith, plus Michael and the seer.

“I don’t badger people. Am I badgering you, Martha?”

The seer looked up at him out of troubled gray eyes. “You’re trying,” she said quietly. “You know I can’t control these things. Visions have been coming to me in bits and pieces, and sometimes they are simply shadows at first. The last one was clearer. She’s going to die on her birthday, in battle. You will bed her, blood her, train her, and she will then die for us.”

“No,” he snapped. He wasn’t sure why. She was an albatross, an unwanted complication in his life when he desperately needed it to be simple. They were telling him it was finite, yet he refused to accept what was plainly a reprieve from a life sentence.

“I don’t see why it bothers you so much,” Raziel said from his seat at the head of the table. “You fought this from the very beginning. You don’t want her in your life. This should make it all very convenient—in a few weeks’ time, you get to be the grieving widower. And this gives us one very crucial piece of information. The key words are
she dies in battle
. We’ve had no idea when Uriel is planning to strike. Now we know.”

“Now we know,” he echoed tonelessly. “Is there anything else you’d like to share?”

“Nothing I haven’t already told you,” Martha said, bearing up under his intimidating glare. He could usually scare the pants off most of the inhabitants of Sheol. Unfortunately, the five people in the room were impervious to his fierce temper. “You must consummate the marriage for the prophecy to come true. If you don’t bed and blood her, everything changes, and I can’t see what changes those are. They are so full of blood and darkness that I might as well be blind. You have to take her, Archangel.”

“You mean if I
don’t
take her, she won’t die?” he demanded.

“I don’t know. It’s possible we may all be destroyed
by Uriel’s armies if you don’t fulfill the prophecy. The only way we know we’ll be safe is if you complete the bond.”

He felt cold inside. “No,” he said. “It was one thing bringing her here to help us. I was willing to make that sacrifice. But I’m not going to sign her death warrant by completing this ridiculous marriage, one I never wanted in the first place.”

“She’ll almost certainly die anyway,” Raziel said, his voice even. “And she would have died if you hadn’t brought her here. We simply changed the place and manner of her death. And we’ve given her four more weeks.”

Michael whirled on Martha. “Is that true?” he demanded. “Can you guarantee she’s going to die no matter what I do?”

“No,” Martha said, and he felt a measure of relief. Martha was incapable of lying. “I believe her to be doomed no matter what, but my vision hasn’t shown me what would happen to her if you refused to complete the bond.”

“I do refuse. For one thing, I’m celibate. For another, I won’t take blood from anyone but the Source. And I’m not going to sentence her to death when there may be alternatives.”

Martha, practical as always, sighed. “I tried to say something at the ceremony, but no one listened, and the girl looked shell-shocked as it was. If you weren’t supposed to bond with her and mate with her, then why did you bring her all this way?”

“Because you told me to, goddamn it!” Michael snarled. “You didn’t tell me it would kill her.”

“I told you my vision said the only way we would vanquish Uriel was with the help of the Roman goddess of war, and that you needed to bond with her. Which means
bond
with her, Michael,” she said, a trace of annoyance in her usually soft voice. “It means have sex with her and take her blood.”

“We fuck and then she dies. No.”

“Her destiny will follow her. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t see her death before. It was only after she was brought here that the prophecy became clear. I firmly believe she will die on her twenty-fifth birthday no matter where she is, Michael, and there isn’t a thing you can do about it.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. She won’t die if the prophecy isn’t fulfilled, and I’m not touching her and bringing about her death. Tell me what your visions tell you.”

“It’s not that simple—”

“Tell me.” He didn’t raise his voice—he didn’t have to. When he used that tone, everyone obeyed.

“I see you bedding her and taking her blood, making the union complete. I see you training her with the others in the big room. I see you . . . cherishing her.” Martha’s voice shook a little bit at the words, as if she remembered her own grief. “And I see her falling beneath the sword on the blood-soaked beach. On her twenty-fifth birthday, twenty-six days from now. So it is foretold.”

There was an unhappy silence in the room. Finally Rachel spoke. “It’s unfortunate, Michael, but it must be done. It’s not like it’s a huge sacrifice on your part. You may have given up sex for who knows how long, but you must remember how to do it. And like everyone else here, you’re ridiculously gorgeous. All you have to do is be a little bit more charming—”

Azazel’s derisive laugh stopped her. “We’re talking about Michael here. He’s a warrior, love. He doesn’t understand charm.”

“He can learn it.”

“Not in one month’s time, trust me.”

“I’m not raping her,” Michael said flatly.

“Of course not,” Raziel said.

But Martha was still looking troubled. “You can’t afford to wait, my lord. You need to explain things to her.”

“And of course she’ll flop on her back and spread her legs.” He was brimming with fury. He had brought her here to watch her die. If he touched her. “It doesn’t matter. I refuse to take her blood.”

Allie looked at him without pity. “Look at it this way—she’ll be dead in no time and you won’t have to be inconvenienced by her.”

He pushed away from the table, pacing the room. “Go to hell, Allie. I told you I’m not doing it.”

Raziel froze in swift anger, then began to rise, but Allie simply tugged him back down. “Don’t pay any attention to him. He’s just having a temper tantrum.”

Michael stopped short. He had always prided
himself on his self-control, and right at that moment he wanted to hit something. He quickly centered himself, taking a calming breath. “No,” he said again. “I brought her here, I married her. I’ll train her and look after her, but I’m not fucking her and I’m not taking her blood and bringing about her death. We aren’t death-takers anymore—Raziel broke that command. Besides, her blood would probably kill me.”

“She’s your mate,” Martha said. “It would make you stronger.”

“She’s a temporary inconvenience, for you all as well as me,” he shot back. There was a shocked silence at his callous words. In truth, his deliberate cruelty shocked even him, but he wasn’t about to show it. “There isn’t time for this,” he went on, trying to sound reasonable. “If the Armies of Heaven are going to attack in one month, we need to spend every spare moment training.”

“I don’t know why you’re arguing,” Raziel said. “There was a time when you shagged anything female.”

“They didn’t die afterward,” he snapped.

His words were cold. As cold as the ice he could feel forming inside him. He didn’t even know her. He was a warrior, used to death. She’d lived almost twenty-five pampered years, which was better than many people got.

Azazel rose, taking his wife’s hand. “If there’s no changing your mind, I guess we’re done here.”

“We’re done,” Raziel said. He glanced at Martha. “Unless there’s anything else?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Not now.”

Michael wanted to throttle her, but it wasn’t her fault, and in fact he’d always liked Martha. Thomas, her husband, had been one of his best warriors, and she’d taken his death with dignified grief.

None of this was anyone’s fault, and he needed to take a step back and look at it rationally, as one more battle to be fought in the war against Uriel and the Armies of Heaven. Battles were his life—one more was nothing.

He wasn’t going to do it. But there was a quiet little voice inside, a wicked, insidious one:
You know this is what you want. You have the perfect excuse, and this way there won’t be any long-term repercussions. You can have her, and then she’ll go away. And you know you want her. You’ve wanted her since you first set eyes on her. Wanted her, when you’ve been impervious to every other woman you’ve seen for eons.

And her blood. He could smell it dancing through her veins, and for the first time he understood the obsession that drove the bonded couples. He’d refused to bond, refused to take blood from anyone but the Source. He could deny Uriel that triumph.

The girl—no, she was a woman, despite the untried aura about her. She called to him.

He would not listen to that voice. He knew women, and she was afraid of him and desperate not
to show it. If he took her, then her death was assured. If he left her alone, there was room for hope.

But the fate of the world hung on this. Could he afford to ignore his duty?

It wouldn’t come to that. He’d figure out some way. In the meantime, he was going to do what he did best—push his body to a state of exhaustion in training, and not think about anything else.

W
HEN
I
AWOKE, THE SUN WAS
sending wide shafts of light across the floor of my bedroom, and I sat up, panicked, disoriented. It took me only a moment to remember where I was. I’d traded one prison for another, and looking out the glass doors to the glinting ocean beyond, I didn’t regret my choice.

I pushed out of the comfortable bed, amazed that I’d apparently slept through the night, and quickly made it in military fashion as Pedersen had always insisted. Pedersen. He was dead, by my hands, and I should feel something, anything. All my life he’d been my tormentor and enemy, yet I felt no satisfaction at his death. No sorrow either. I just felt . . . odd. It was as if he were an enemy soldier and I was in the midst of a war. I’d had no
choice. I wasn’t going to waste time lamenting that necessity.