So he took a deep breath.
But a mere second after he’d closed his eyes, all sound beyond his eyelids ceased.
No crackling fire, no screeches, no blasts, no warping magical spells, no crunching of leaves under boots, no nothing. He was plunged instantly into a world of peaceful quiet.
He popped his eyes open again, more alarmed by this than anything.
And found himself in another world.
Chapter Forty-Eight
It had probably been mere seconds since Mimi had put out her call to the dragons, but for everyone on that platform that had at one point been a very lovely tree house, it felt like forever.
Max stumbled back, his grip on the hilt of his sword slippery with sweat and blood. He took the weapon with him as he retreated, yanking it from the wraith’s midsection as he stumbled backward. It dislodged itself, covered in blue blood, and the wraith fell to the floor.
As the monster vanished from view, Max looked up.
At first, it was almost only a sound that kept his attention heaven-ward. It was a distant call not unlike an eagle’s cry. But the calls became more plentiful and deeper, resonating the way thunder did, and one by one, the archangels and their opponents slowed in their battle to look up.
The dragons arrived like a tide of color on the wind. They spanned across the horizon, distant raptors of red, green, blue, and even black. There were dozens of them. Possibly hundreds. They were distant dots, but he could make out their wings, and before long, he recognized tails, arms, legs, and toothy maws. Max could scarcely believe it.
One by one, the Phantoms, wraiths, and gargoyles slowed in their attacks and looked up as well. The sound was upon them, now, the colors near. When they realized what was coming, they stopped fighting altogether and seemed lost and unsure, like pets without their masters, or soldiers without orders.
Max looked back down to find the archangels glancing at one another, the archesses pulling slowly together, their wary, keen gazes watching their enemies as they moved in. Then he noticed Mimi when Rhiannon stepped away, revealing the red-headed child.
It happened as if the change was a portent to the arrival of her kin. One moment, she was standing there, eyes closed, feet firmly planted, hands outstretched and bathed in fire, the next, a coating of magic enveloped her, and inch by inch, her body switched from human – to dragon. Her legs and arms developed red shimmering scales, her hands curled into talons, her back arched, and in a bright red flash, she was entirely magnificent, every inch the young red fire-breathing monster.
Max gazed up at the beast with the spikes down her back, the tail that could take a man’s head off, and the teeth that could rip another monster in two. Mimi raised up on her back legs, threw back her dragon’s head, and roared to the heavens. Fire emitted from her throat like a blow torch, and the flying beasts closing in answered her call.
The sky was suddenly filled with a concerto of dragon cries. The tree house inhabitants scrambled. More flashes of bad guys came in one after another like a camera bulb that had gone crazy. The dragons had come, but as if Gregori had set up the battle to match and counter everything the archangels could throw at him, more monsters came in to fight them.
The next several minutes were a blur. Where one body ended and another began was impossible to decipher. There was movement all around Max. It took split-second decisions to determine whether the creatures standing in front of him were friend or foe. He lashed out again and again, trying to make his way to some sort of wall or stable structure so he could get his bearings. One after another, he slashed through his enemies. One after another, they dropped at his feet.
He felt the platform of the tree house shift under his boots, and for a breathless moment, he was sliding side-ways on something wet. Probably blood. He grasped at a piece of furniture and righted himself. The platform straightened out again, but he knew it wouldn’t last. No matter how strong the magic had been that had created that tree house long ago, it had taken all it could. They were all going down.
This is the end of the world, he thought.
In the back of his mind, he wondered where Samael was. He wondered about Angel. He wondered if they’d escaped or if they were dead. Was this the Culmination? Did it even matter anymore?
Suddenly, there was intense pain.
Max stopped, freezing in place. He looked down at the claw protruding from his midsection. It was covered in his blood. He had a sheer moment to register the attack – skeletal hand, a wraith. All of his injuries would come back now.
And then a second hand punched through him to join the other. This time, the pain was unbearable. A wave of nausea rolled over him. His body flushed impossibly hot, then cold. He made a sound that he could not hear and watched in horrible fascination as the second appendage exited his rib cage. This wasn’t a wraith. The hand was carved of sheer granite.
And it held Max’s heart.
It’s over.
They must have drawn their arms back out of his body, but Max barely felt that. He was staring at the sky now, the flashes of color that came and went. In his mind, he heard music. It was the last song he’d listened to – Moonlight Sonata. He’d played it to relax, to help him think.
It drifted, unattached through his thoughts. The colors in the sky grew lighter, back-dropping against a field of pure white. He was floating. The pain was gone. Absolute peace enveloped him as his nerve endings shut down and his brain stopped registering their signals.
“I’m sorry, Max,” a voice told him in that cloud of soft wonder. It was the most beautiful voice he had ever heard, one he had always admired. “That was a close one,” it told him lightly. The voice was smiling, and he could see the curling lips behind it. “But I’m here now.”
Beethoven continued to caress the piano in his mind, but now someone was drumming. There were no drums in this song. Max frowned and bumped into something in his floating miasma. He was knocked gently to the side. Then he bumped into something else. Again, he was moved, like a balloon rising up through a crowded room.
The drumming became louder, and the piano faded. The colors darkened once more, the white backdrop turning to blue and pink and orange. Little by little, he became aware of his body, where moments ago it had been gone. He could feel it now, heavy and real.
But still, there was no pain.
The beating drum centered itself within him, settling at last in that place just behind his ribs. He had a heart once more, it would seem, and it beat steadily.
“Open your eyes, Max.”
He did as he was told. He would do anything and everything she ever told him to do. How could he do otherwise?
She was smiling just as he’d imagined her to be. Eyes of black forever gazed down at him, and within their endless depths, he saw the galaxies of the multiverse. Her hair was down now, and the glasses were gone. But she was the same as she had ever been, and in that fateful moment just after dying, there was rarely anything more welcome than a loved and familiar face.
“I guess this time it was you doing the saving,” he said.
Lilith gently brushed a lock of hair from his forehead and shrugged. “Well, after all this time,” she said, and cupped his cheek. “I sort of owe you.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
The floor was slipping. Rhiannon’s boots bumped into a Phantom’s foot as the tree house platform tilted at a 30 degree angle, and everyone went sliding. She turned her body, ready to catch Mimi and prevent her from touching the icy beast, but Mimi was already responding to the danger herself. She batted her huge red wings, and Rhiannon was buffeted by air as the young red dragon took to the skies.
A much larger and more powerfully built red dragon swooped down out of the army of flying monsters that had arrived and circled Mimi as if to protectively welcome her to the flying hoard. The larger red dragon was no doubt Calidum, a powerful red who also happened to be Mimi’s personal trainer.
Rhiannon turned her attention away from the dragons, knowing
that Mimi would be safe with her own kind. She ducked under the Phantom’s swing, dropped to her stomach, and rolled back in the other direction as the floor again tilted, this time to right itself.
This thing isn’t going to last long, she thought. It was going to plummet right out from underneath them at any second, and they’d all be riding Disney’s Tower of Terror, except this time for real. They needed a Plan B.
I’ve got wings, she thought. So did all of the archesses and archangels. All they needed to do was break them out and use them the moment the tree house fell. Juliette, in fact, was already in the air. She and Gabriel passed the time in Scotland by jumping off cliffs overlooking the North Sea and soaring through the night over the cold, white waves. The sky was her second home, and she was comfortable up there, using her telekinesis to aid in the battle however she could.
The others only preferred to leave their wings shelved because for some reason, wings were the first things bad guys went for when trying to disable you. And having your wings sliced up really, really hurt.
Rhiannon had learned that the hard way when she’d been in a fight with a boat load of human traffickers shortly after she’d earned her own glorious pair of wings. She’d landed atop the boat in the middle of the night, interrupting nefarious negotiations. Then she’d smiled and transformed into her angel form, hoping the change would shock the boat’s inhabitants enough to make them put down their weapons. They all wore crosses, after all, big gaudy gold and silver things that dangled over hairy chests under open collars. Surely they wouldn’t hurt an angel?
But she’d been wrong. Maybe they weren’t as reverent as they pretended to be, or perhaps they immediately assumed she was a demon instead. Either way, they sprung into action at once and used their guns on her wings. It was exceedingly painful, and she’d quickly forced the appendages back into their magical hiding places before taking care of the bastards without them.
So she’d learned: It was best to fight on the ground, hand-to-hand and in person. But in the end, the wings were always there, and the archesses and their mates would have them when they needed them. In fact, the only one among them who didn’t have wings was….
Max.
Rhiannon frowned. She jumped to her feet and spun, taking in her surroundings with the speed and agility that she’d trained long and hard to develop. The tree house around her was packed so tight with struggling, fighting bodies, they could scarcely move without bumping into one another. She saw Michael going up against a blue dragon, which made Rhiannon nervous. It had been a blue dragon that had nearly killed him weeks ago, when she’d been forced to sacrifice the last of her life’s force to save him. But he seemed to have things well in hand, and Rhiannon knew she had to trust her mate’s abilities. They were all fighting demons right now.
She saw Gabriel struggling with a gargoyle. But when the Messenger Angel punched the gargoyle in the face and the rock-hard beast dropped to his knees, rather than cradle what must have been a broken hand, Gabriel grinned like the crazy angel he was, and kicked the stone monster in the throat. The gargoyle toppled backward and crashed to the floor.
Then, coming to no surprise whatsoever to Rhiannon, the Messenger Angel took two steps to the wall closest to him, and pulled a beer from the mantle over a fire place. He’d obviously placed it there before taking on the gargoyle.
He was just lucky the tree house floor had tilted in that direction when it had, or the beer would have been lost. Gabriel took a long swig, replaced the beer, and turned to fight someone else.
Rhiannon shook her head and continued to scan the room She saw Sophie next, who was clearly running healing interference, because she sped past Gabriel, reaching out to touch him gently on the back as she ran by. A quick flash later, Gabriel was flexing his no-longer injured hand and calling after her. “Thanks lass!”
Eleanore and Uriel fought back to back like the team of vengeance they were, and on the floor at their feet were a ring of dead or unconscious bodies. Just beyond that ring was another ring of creatures, this one alive and waiting. Leeches – restlessly anticipating the fall of either the archangel or the archess. Rhiannon knew it wouldn’t happen. They were powerful enough on their own. Together, they were absolutely awesome.
Speaking of awesome – Azrael, too, had been surrounded by a mountain of fallen foes. However, when Rhiannon located him again, it was to find him kicking the bodies off the tree house platform and into the forest below.
Making room, she thought to herself. Or maybe the Angel of Death simply wanted to kick something.
Okay, they were all accounted for. All except for Max. There was no sign of the Guardian.
Rhiannon began to make her way to the platform’s edge on her side so she could peek over and see whether Max was on the ground below. She punched and kicked her way through opponents as she went, but half-way there, the ground tilted once more. Oh crap, I knew it, she thought uselessly. The tree house moaned, and a terrible groaning rose up from the floor boards.
This time, it didn’t stop and slant back the other way – it just kept tilting. Rhiannon’s eyes grew wide as she felt the ground disappear beneath her feet. She cried out, grew her wings in a flash, and struck the air with them hard to hold herself aloft.
All around her, bodies began raining down. Rhiannon looked up as the tree house’s west wall rose high above them, and everyone on that end was tossed into nothingness. She saw Gabriel’s beer sail past.
And then something very heavy and very hard struck her shoulders, instantly breaking her left wing. She cried out as she tumbled downward, and the gargoyle that had landed on her dropped past her.
“Rhiannon!” she heard Michael yell. She knew he would probably be coming after her. But it was too late. The ground was spiraling upward at an impossible rate. This is going to hurt, she thought, closing her eyes tight just before she hit the ground.
But it didn’t hurt. Because she never hit the ground.
Instead, the terrible groaning of the dying tree house, the screeching death cries of their fallen enemies, the smashing and crashing of things and bodies slamming into the trees and ground below – it all stopped. All sound vanished.
Rhiannon opened her eyes. There was a warm white melting of the world around her. The burned forest ground that had been reaching up to meet her a millisecond before was no longer there. It had been replaced by dandelions.
She was standing on her own two feet, tall and strong, in a field of white dandelions. She looked up to find that she was not alone in that field, which stretched to the horizon and bent slightly with the curvature of the Earth. Michael was there, about ten feet away. He looked as confused as she felt, and when their eyes met, only questions passed between them. No answers.
Sophie was there too. And Azrael. Uriel and Eleanore. Gabriel and Juliette.
And they were not the only ones. The Adarians were there in that dandelion field. Around twenty yards away, the entire group of fallen warriors stood together, their arms at their sides, their expressions puzzled. Their clothing was clean, however, no longer covered in the dried remnants of their victims. Their skin coloring, too, was different. It was no longer gaunt or bloodless. Their eyes were blue or green or brown, not red.
Rhiannon turned slowly in place until she found the final two inhabitants of the endless field.
Samael and Angel stood together behind them, on a small hill overlooking the field.
Chapter Fifty
Michael recognized the Old Man as soon as he saw him. Michael was his favored, his right-hand, his faithful servant until the bitter end. As such, the Warrior Archangel would have recognized him all along, if the Old Man had been himself. If he’d been whole. But he hadn’t.
The Old Man had been torn in two long, long ago. Two thousand years ago, to be precise.
And now, reunited with both parts of himself, he stood atop the hill in the field of white flowers and gazed down at them all in silence.
Samael and Angel were the Old Ma
n. Two halves of one very mighty whole, combined in spirit and soul.
All this time, Michael had hated Samael so. How could he? Confusion ran thick through his archangel blood.
“You did so because I told you to,” Samael said, his voice changed. It was the same deep voice in tone and timbre, but different in depth. It echoed now, pure and eternal, like the night. “You believed what I determined you would believe. It was necessary.”
He stopped, and Angel stepped forward. “Long ago,” she said, her voice as powerful as his, like the day to the night, and two sides of the same coin. “I ruled over a world of angels. We were content there.”
“Or so it would seem,” said Samael. “I’m afraid I made some mistakes.” He smiled sheepishly, and it was an expression Michael had never before seen on his face. It was bizarrely endearing. Gazing up at that self-ashamed smile, Michael felt he could forgive the Old Man for anything. Anything at all.
“Every leader makes mistakes at one point or another,” Sam went on. “Unfortunately, the more powerful the leader, the grander the mistakes.”
“In an attempt to form the perfect realm around me, I created life and, when it did not suit my ideals of perfection, I tossed it away,” said Angel. “Here. To the planet you’ve called home for two thousand years.”
“I sent the imperfect here to fend for itself and never gave it another thought. Why should I? Does an artist consider the repercussions of a torn up canvas? Does a sculptor think twice about the clay he throws away?” asked Sam.
Angel shook her head. “In my eyes, it was waste and nothing more.”
“A few among you questioned my actions,” said Samael. His expression became serious now, and Michael felt his stomach turning to lead. Sam waited a good long time before he continued. At last, he said, “You were right to do so.”
“But at the time, I thought you were wrong,” said Angel. Now it was her turn to smile, and it was as self-deprecating and beautiful as Sam’s had been a moment earlier.