Her head was turned away, and for an eternity Michael still couldn’t see her face.
And then he was kneeling beside her, taking her chin gently in his hand, and absorbing everything at once.
Oh God.
Something had him in its clutches. It was invisible, inaudible, and left no viable trace, but it was as real and as physical as the monsters he’d just battled. It squeezed his chest, crushing his heart in its merciless grip, and sent a torturous frisson of emotion careening through his soul.
She was breathtaking.
Her eyes were closed but he knew what they looked like. He knew as if he’d always known. He knew every curve of her delicate features as if he’d drawn them himself. He knew what her voice would sound like should she ever speak his name. And what her touch would do to him.
She looked like an angel.
Because she was one.
“Rhiannon!” A woman’s voice cut through Michael’s consciousness, and he realized that all had once more grown still around them. The fighting had ceased; the storm had quieted, and the clouds had parted. Moonlight again bathed the park. Against all reason, he managed to wrench his gaze away from the woman before him to look up.
Two people were headed his way. One, he recognized, the other he did not.
Hesperos, the Nightmare King, had his arm around a young woman with brown hair and brown eyes. She was injured, and he supported most of her weight. She was struggling to make it to Michael and the woman beside him.
Hesperos met Michael’s gaze, his expression grim. On the ground around them were the bodies of various dragons, phantoms, wraiths, and a couple of Icarans. A veritable platoon of paranormal bad guys had attacked. Michael had no idea how Hesperos and his female friend had managed to arrive in that exact place at that exact time, but if they hadn’t, Michael would almost certainly be dead.
He returned his gaze to the felled angel beside him.
“Rhiannon,” the other woman said again. They were twenty feet away and closing. “She needs to be healed.”
Michael’s mind recoiled at the word “heal.” It stabbed through him like an ice lance, sharp and cold, and chilled him to the core.
“I can’t,” he whispered. He couldn’t heal her. Samael had stolen that ability from him and given it to Azrael. Michael needed a door to transport across vast distances. But he was in the middle of a massive park, nowhere near any doors of any kind. He couldn’t reach his brothers or their wives in time. Even with his speed, it would take him too long to reach so much as a parked car, get through the mansion, and get back. He couldn’t make it to anyone who could heal his archess.
What were the chances of that? Why had this happened here? Why now, and like this? It was as if he were being punished. As if . . .
“I can’t,” he repeated. And then he said her name. Because he had to say it at least once while she still existed, while he could touch her living form and hold it tight. “Rhiannon.” It was a beautiful name. Perfect, really. Just like her.
Before his eyes, Rhiannon’s full, pink lips faded to blue.
“The dragon bit her!” the other woman cried. “She has air in her veins!”
Michael had already figured out as much. He’d recognized the bite mark on Rhiannon’s shoulder. It was deep and furious, and the cobalt tint to the skin around it signaled the presence of poison. She had, perhaps, a minute or two to live. And if he’d still been in possession of his ability to heal her, it would have taken at least that long.
Michael looked up at the brown-haired woman again in time to see her suddenly freeze in place. Beside her, Hesperos stopped as well, and looked down at her. “Angel?”
Her brown eyes had gone wide. “Oh no,” she said, shaking her head. Her gaze slid from Michael to Rhiannon. “Oh no,” she repeated. “I can’t stay. I can’t heal her!” She looked desperate—stricken, even.
Numbly, Michael realized that she must have been a friend of Rhiannon’s.
A friend to his archess.
“Michael, you have to do it,” Angel told him firmly. Her teeth were clenched in what must have been pain and desperation. She looked torn. Truly torn.
Michael was too far gone to give much thought to the fact that she knew his name. He heard himself say the words “I can’t,” once again, but they were far off. His body felt as if it wasn’t there. His chest hurt too much; the agony was filling his world.
“I have to go,” Angel repeated, almost sobbed. And then, using an ability that Michael knew only a few select supernatural creatures to possess, the young woman transported away. One second she was there; the next, the air was closing up where she’d once stood, and Hesperos was alone.
A moment later, Hesperos lifted his chin, his eyes filled with oceans of sadness, and then he disappeared as well.
Michael looked down at his archess. Her chest rose slowly . . . so slowly. . . . And then went still.
“No,” he said, choking on the word. And then, as if to make up for its lack of volume, for its lack of righteous rage, Michael gripped the front of her warm shirt in his fists, threw back his head, and cried out into the night, “Nooooooo!”
“Really, Michael,” came a cool, familiar voice from the shadows in front of him.
Michael’s voice hitched, his body going immobile in trembling disbelief.
“Such drama.”
The Warrior Archangel watched as Samael stepped out of the darkness, tall and calm and dressed as ever in the most exquisitely tailored suit money or magic could buy. His hands were in his pockets, his composure completely at ease. From behind him stepped Jason, his “assistant.”
Samael gave him a look that was neither friendly nor unfriendly, and then both he and Jason turned their attention to Rhiannon’s prone form.
“You need to heal her soon, Michael, or you’ll lose the archess you’ve been searching centuries for.”
“You son of a bitch,” Michael whispered. “I will die trying to kill you.”
Sam seemed not to hear him, or perhaps he just didn’t care. “If you hurry, I believe there is a twenty-four-hour X-rated video shop at the end of that walk there. It has a door. I think it’s the closest one.” His stormy gaze slid from Rhiannon’s face to Michael’s and held there. “At your speed it should only take you a few minutes.”
Beats of silence passed between them. A more pregnant silence had never existed. Michael had never felt more suicidal and the night had never been so dark.
“Or I could heal her for you,” Sam said.
The shadows perked their ears. The moon turned to listen. The world waited.
Michael straightened, his cheeks wet, his heart bleeding out into his chest. Please, he thought wretchedly. “Please,” he said, his voice quaking.
Samael’s smile was slow and utterly devoid of kindness. He took a step forward, coming to Rhiannon’s side, and then gracefully lowered himself to one knee. There were fathomless secrets behind the storm clouds of those eyes. Michael experienced the terrible urge to rip them out of his head and pop them between his teeth like caviar.
But his life was slipping through his fingers—through the fervent, white-knuckled grip he had on his archess’s shirt. “Please,” he repeated. There was no pride here. Not for him. Not anymore.
Samael held his gaze for a moment longer, and then he cocked his handsome head to one side. The steel of his eyes glinted in the moonlight. “There’s a price, Michael,” he said. “But you knew that, didn’t you?” His smile seemed almost sad now. “Nothing in life is free.”
Michael could only nod. Just once.
Samael placed his hand to the archess’s chest and the breath stilled in Michael’s lungs. Sam’s gaze cut to him again.
“Now then, Warrior Archangel,” Sam said. “What is she worth to you?”
Michael found himself surrounded by the storm that brewed in the Fallen One’s gaze. A wind filled with nightmares brushed past his hair, blew through his clothes and whispered of hurricanes, tidal waves and terror
. The gray was filled with ghosts and promises, and they were all around him. He had no choice.
“Everything.”
Anything I have, all that I am.
“Take what you will, Sam,” Michael continued, his every word a solemn vow. “Whatever you want, it’s yours. I don’t care anymore.” He’d never cared. Not really. Not like this. “Just come down from your mountain and save her.”
Samael’s cold smile froze on his handsome face, and time slowed down.
“It’s already done,” Sam said just before he lifted his hand from Rhiannon’s now-moving chest and slammed his palm into Michael’s instead. “And so are you.”
Michael felt the jolt of Samael’s touch as if the Fallen One’s hand were composed of lightning and not flesh. It rushed through him, white hot and painful, burning him from the inside out.
“Everything you love, everything you worship, all that you hold dear, oh Favored One,” Samael hissed, “you lose here and now. All that you loathe and fear and unfairly judge shall become your burden.” Samael leaned forward, and Michael could see his face draw near through the frozen haze of his unimaginable pain. “Karma is a bitch, Michael. And now she’s your bitch.” Low, wicked laughter followed Michael down through the rabbit hole of damnation. “Good luck with your archess.”
The agony in Michael’s body flashed to a boiling point and expanded outward, encompassing the world in a white light of impossible, crackling pressure. He cried out, his voice lost in the roar of his bellowing mind and the magic that Samael had skillfully, brutally unleashed.
And then it receded again, shrinking down like a dying sun, coalescing into a single point of pain that resided somewhere near his heart. He felt it beat, felt the twinge of discomfort that came with that beat, and opened his eyes.
Samael was gone. Jason was gone. Everyone was gone, including Rhiannon.
He had no idea how much time had passed since Sam had touched him and done to him whatever evil he’d done. He had no idea where everyone had gone, but no doubt Sam had a hand in that as well.
Michael swallowed hard. His mouth felt strange. His throat was tight or swollen, and he was fairly sure he tasted metal. He was alone in a dark Central Park, surrounded by uncanny stillness and the sound of his own beating heart. It was louder than it should have been. He felt cold. It was late, he knew, but the cold was an unnatural and deep down kind of cold that iced over his bones and sent goose bumps rising in waves across his skin. He felt as if he had a fever.
But he was Michael the Warrior Archangel, and he didn’t get fevers.
Laughter, soft and mocking, followed him through the darkness as he stood and made his way out of the park.
Chapter One
Rhiannon came awake through a white film of fog. It was thick, and when she pushed on it to move it out of the way, it pushed back, slightly heavy and terribly soft. She blinked, moaning when she tried to move; her body ached in ways she didn’t think possible. There was a soreness that went well past her muscles, into the core of her, into her blood – her very cells.
Fighting the pain, she raised her legs, bending her knees, and again she pushed at the fog. This time, it hardened at her touch and slid past her fingertips to spill off the bed onto the floor.
Rhiannon blinked, trying to focus. The fog was a blanket. And she was in a bed.
She was in her bed.
Little by little, the room came into view, from the slash of sunlight at the curtains to the rosewood dresser against the opposite wall, to the closet, whose doors had been left open.
Rhiannon touched her face, and wasn’t surprised to find heat radiating from her skin to her fingertips. She must have some kind of fever.
“I need to call upstairs,” she whispered, and then winced when the effort sent pain lancing through her skull. “Son of a bitch,” she automatically replied, gritting her teeth against the pain, and once more she was punished for speaking as the sharp spike grew sharper and sliced through more of her brain.
Rhiannon bit back anything further she might have said and was rolling over in the bed when the speaker on her bedside table came alive with static. Her eyes cut to the machine.
“I’m guessing you had a bit of a rough night, Number One.”
Rhiannon would have rolled her eyes, but that would have added to her pain. Plus, she’d somehow managed to go to sleep with her contacts in, and they felt dry and scratchy. If she rolled her eyes, one of them would surely get stuck.
“You could say that,” she spoke back, irritated that she had to speak at all.
There was a chuckle from the speaker. “I’ll send some coffee up and you can tell me all about it in a few hours. Come see me then; I have another job for you.”
The speaker went dead again, and Rhiannon rolled back onto her back to stare at the ceiling through slits between her eyelids. She frowned, trying to remember the last several hours of her life, but the images were indistinct and cloudy.
It happened sometimes. The kinds of creatures she fought on a daily basis were often capable of messing with a person’s mind. This was not the first time she’d woken up with a foggy recollection of where she’d been and what she’d done the night before. It was par for the course in her particular line of work.
But it was still frustrating. A good one-third of her life seemed to consist of dream-like memories, indistinct and not quite there.
“Coffee would be good,” she muttered softly.
A few minutes later, she’d managed to get out of bed and take a relatively fast shower. She was more banged up than usual, and that deep, down soreness for the most part stuck around, even through the shower. She really wished she could remember what had happened the night before.
She had just put her hair up in a towel when there was a gentle knock at the door. Rhiannon glanced one last time in the bathroom mirror to make sure her oversized shirt hid most of her new bruises and then traipsed barefoot across the thick padded carpet to the front door of her 13th floor apartment.
There was a peep hole in the door, but she rarely used it. At this point, she could recognize the knocks of the people on the other side. This knock was Emanuel’s – and he had her coffee. A soy cappuccino with heavy sprinkles of cocoa. That, she could smell.
Rhiannon opened the door to find a man in a fine tailored suit on the other side. He was tall and slim with dark skin, a white grin, and thick, shining black hair. His left eye was dark, dark brown, and his right eye, he’d lost years ago. A patch now covered it, placed so expertly, it managed to look as if he were born with a patch rather than a second eye.
“Thank you Emanuel,” Rhiannon said as the young man handed her a small tray with a large, fat steaming mug of coffee at its center. The cappuccino’s foam had been artistically swirled into the shape of a calla lily. The drink always came with a different flower shape in the mug; the cook loved to pay special attention to presentation, and she was a gardener with an affinity for blossoms. Yesterday, it had been a hyacinth.
“It’s my pleasure, Miss Dante,” he said as he bowed slightly. “Can I have breakfast started for you?”
Rhiannon’s stomach turned a bit at the thought of food. It was like that sometimes when she was in a lot of pain. “No, thank you. I’ll pick up a bagel while I’m out.”
Emanuel nodded, bowed again, and turned on his heel to make his way back down the hall to the elevator.
There were twenty floors in this apartment complex, and more or less one four-bedroom apartment to each floor. To Rhiannon’s knowledge, Bess, the cook, lived on the first floor with her niece, Mimi, and their dog, Strike. The second floor was Emanuel’s home. The third was the atrium. The fourth floor belonged to Mr. Verdigri’s personal driver, Alex. The fifth through tenth floors were populated by a host of networking employees Rhiannon couldn’t keep straight because they were constantly changing.
Emanuel, Bess, Mimi, Alex, and Rhiannon’s employer were the only real constants in the building. Rhiannon’s employer lived on the nin
eteenth floor, and no one lived on the twentieth. The floors in-between the thirteenth and the nineteenth were empty, just as the floors between the tenth and thirteenth were. Rhiannon had been told this was done for the sake of privacy, and her employer could certainly afford it.
Mr. Verdigri was an enigmatic, eccentric, and exceptionally rich man who had hired her years ago due to her unique talents. How he had ever learned of her unique talents in the first place, she had no idea. And he had never divulged. He was a secretive man, and Rhiannon knew damn well that Verdigri was not his real name.
The penthouse suite remained empty and ready for any benefactors that might come along. Her employer knew how to wine and dine potential money like it was nobody’s business. Perhaps it was one of the reasons he had so very much of it today.
Rhiannon took her coffee back into her apartment and closed the door. She paused between the living room and the hallway and lifted the mug to take a drink. A small sample packet of Tylenol 3 was revealed resting on top of the napkin beside the mug. Rhiannon smiled, shook her head, and took a sip of the coffee. As usual, it was perfect. She savored the first few swallows and then continued back into her room to set the mug on the bedside table and the tray on the bed.
She took the packet of pain killers from the tray, tore it open, popped both pills in her mouth, and swallowed them down with another long swig of quickly cooling coffee.
When she’d finished, she leaned over and pressed the button on the speaker. As soon as she knew her boss had connected on the other side, she said, “How did you know I’d need that this morning, Mr. Verdigri?”