The other dragon was blue. It was smaller, small enough to fit in the confining space of the living room, but it had a massive spiked tail. The beast was whipping the tail back and forth with incredible speed. Michael repeatedly dodged it, rolling across the floor to avoid being impaled and crushed by its weight.
She was in awe of these monsters. It was the same kind of feeling she got at the zoo, when she would stare through protective glass at the tigers or panthers or lions that paced restlessly back and forth just short feet away. She thought they were beautiful. And she knew they were deadly. At those times, on her side of the glass, it was 80% awe and 20% fear.
Now there was no protection. And those numbers were switched around.
The dragons weren’t the only monsters in Michael’s home. There were other creatures there as well, not nearly as beautiful as the dragons.
Two such creatures were popping in and out of existence in the living room as if they could magically transport from one place to the next. They kept trying to touch Michael, but he just kept dodging. Mimi had never seen a man move so fast.
The monsters had milky-white bodies and disturbing smiles filled with black, razor-sharp teeth. They were so tall, they were even taller than Michael, and their skin actually slithered over their muscles like liquid fog. They had long blue-white hair so fine, it moved in the wind like baby bird feathers. And their eyes were just pools of bottomless black. Mimi could barely stand to look at those eyes, so she looked at their bodies instead. Glowing tattoos of what appeared to be arcane writing were inscribed across their chests and upper arms.
Another, different sort of monster was slowly crawling over the glass of the broken windows of Michael’s destroyed living room. These were truly terrible. Mimi felt like she was staring at every bad dream she had ever had, re-living every scary or painful situation she’d ever experienced when she looked at them. They wore black cloaks and were not as tall as the white creatures, but what she could see of them was far more horrible. Their faces looked like they were made of raw wax, with bleeding red slits for mouths, and their eyes looked like they were carved out of stone, dead and cold. Their hands were the only other parts of their bodies to show from beneath the cloak, skeletal fingers, no flesh, all bone.
Mimi could scarcely believe the variety of hideousness crawling through the small one-bedroom home just then. Smaller monsters, curled over and hunched like Golem from Lord of the Rings, inched little by little toward Michael as if to pick off anything that might be left once the dragons and other monsters were done with him. These smaller creatures had coal-black skin that slithered just like their taller white counter-parts, and their mouths were just as terrible, filled again with razor-sharp teeth, this time glowing yellow rather than black and inky. They smelled bad, too. Like death… sort of. Like the death of something better than carbon-based life.
Like the death of magic, Mimi thought.
A familiar voice made a sound of pain behind her, and Mimi spun to see Rhiannon slammed up against the opposite wall. A mirror had been hanging behind her. It shattered under the impact, and shards of metallic glass cascaded to the carpeted floor as Rhiannon momentarily slumped in her attacker’s grasp.
“Rhee!”
It was a gargoyle that had her in its clutches, his stone fingers around Rhiannon’s neck, his stone fangs bared in hatred. Mimi knew that’s what it was. She also knew a gargoyle was what she’d glimpsed coming out of the studio wall the day before when Angel had taken her home.
The man was made of rock; it looked like marble or something similar from where Mimi stood. Huge wings sprouted from his back to scrape against the painted walls of the hall, leaving large gashes. There were more like him, piled into what must have been Michael’s bedroom behind the first gargoyle, all of them focused on Rhiannon. They wanted to kill her. Of this, Mimi was also certain.
Another bellow of pain erupted from behind Mimi, and again she spun, this time to see Michael tumble to the ground, bleeding from numerous wounds. From his hand tumbled a cell phone, which bounced once across the carpet and came to a stop at the bar separating the living room from the kitchen.
She could see from the smart phone’s screen that he’d been in the process of making a call, but not to 9-1-1. She didn’t recognize the number, but the ID read: Max.
Get the phone.
The voice in her head was not her own; someone was in her thoughts. Mimi looked back up to see that Michael was immediately battling another foe, given no time to recuperate from his last blow. They were coming in at him from all sides, and as Mimi watched, every now and then, his form flashed or wavered, and draped over it, like the after-image from a bright flash, was a glowing figure with wings and a massive sword.
For a split second, Mimi felt she recognized that figure, possibly from a myth or an ancient tale. But there was no time to dwell. She acted on the internal command to go for the phone; she had no choice.
Her body moved on auto-pilot, leaving the doorway to the bathroom to sprint toward Michael’s lost phone, somehow avoiding the two monsters who made swipes at her as she went. She leapt with agility she hadn’t known she possessed over one of them and then did a flip off the adjoining kitchen counter top to escape the other.
Her moves were unfamiliar to her; she’d never done anything like this before except in dreams. But they also felt automatic, and her young, agile body was more than capable of making them.
Once she reached the bar, Mimi dropped down to a crouch and grabbed Michael’s phone from where it had fallen. She looked up again, her eyes met his, and she put the phone to her ear.
He continued to watch her even as he battled, and now Mimi could see that he did, in fact, have a sword. Where it had come from, she didn’t know, and she didn’t care. It was a righteous weapon, if ever there was one, long and fierce and sharp, and at the moment, it was covered in monster blood.
“Max, we need help,” she said swiftly. The words were not her own. They were being fed into her brain and down to her mouth by the same commanding voice that had told her to get to the phone. “Come right away,” she continued, “and bring everyone you can. We’re under attack. Dragons, leeches, phantoms, wraiths, and gargoyles – and we’re losing. We’re dying.” She swallowed hard, her eyes still trapped in Michael’s powerful, blue-glowing gaze.
He’s not human either, she thought. Not even a little bit.
“We’re in Michael’s apartment in Manhattan,” she continued. “Use the mansion and come right away.”
Chapter Thirty
He force-fed Mimi the words that he hadn’t had a chance to say himself. It was harder than he’d thought it would be. Mimi was not the child he’d first assumed she was. It was true, the vampire in him had scented something different about her when he’d first found her skipping school in the Swallowtail Foundation studio, but she was young, and he’d learned that children always smelled odd to a vampire. It was an off-limits kind of scent, a foreign kind of thing, the way bug spray masked the presence of a human. Plus, the dog had been with her, making it more difficult. Any telling signs had been completely masked.
But now he knew.
There was so much more to her physical makeup than even she, herself, was aware of. Unfortunately, subjugating the mind of a “monster,” especially one as potentially powerful as Mimi, was much more difficult than controlling the thoughts of a human.
Red dragon poison had found its way into Michael’s blood stream and was burning him up from the inside out, further compromising his concentration. He’d been swiped by a wraith, and old wounds were re-opening one by one: a broken rib here, a deep gash there, further poisons that had at one time ridden freely through his veins.
He could feel the Icaran leeches moving in around him like vultures, licking their lips and slowly sapping away what magic he accidentally allowed to slip from his conscious grip. He must have looked like the feast of a lifetime to them with his Nightmare-vampire-archangel make-up. They would have liked not
hing more than to eat him alive.
Pain and fear were becoming Michael’s waking world, especially since he’d lost sight of Rhiannon. They were what kept him going now, like the only fuel that kept a fire burning on a cold, wet night. He called upon every skill he had ever developed, every power the monsters within him afforded him, and he whittled away at the beasts around him. Yet, he made no headway. One would fall and another would take its place. They rolled in like ants over a hill, an impossible army to fight off or escape.
The gargoyles had barricaded Rhiannon somewhere down the hall, at the opposite end of his apartment. He couldn’t get to her. It was as if his enemies expected him to try that route, because whenever he did, their attacks increased ten-fold.
A part of him tried to focus, to reassure himself that Rhiannon was a big girl, a warrior in her own right. She was his mate; she could take care of herself. Hell, she was fucking amazing.
But these professions, though probably true, were in vain. He simply could not ignore her demise, and it was killing him. It had been mere seconds, maybe no more than a minute or two, since the attack had begun. But it felt like a lifetime.
He’d done his fair share of damage, it was true. The blue dragon was dying now; he’d managed that much, at least. And he was fairly sure he’d taken a few dozen phantoms and half that many wraiths out of the picture. But there were more coming in to fill their gaps. There were so many more.
The Culmination.
He couldn’t help the thought that wafted through his pain-addled mind. What if this was it? What if they had all been right? Was it worth what he and Rhiannon had shared?
And then, quite out of the blue, he almost laughed.
Because the answer was both yes and no.
If Michael were the only one to die in said Culmination, then it would absolutely have been worth it to him to have found his archess. Rhiannon Dante was his soul mate. She was literally his reason for being.
What made it all not worth it was that she was stuck in the middle of all of this too. And Mimi, as well. And quite possibly the rest of the known world.
Michael gritted his teeth as another wave of red dragon fire burned away more of his veins and seared his muscle and bone. His sword flashed through the air, lightning struck somewhere far too close, and thunder rocked the apartment complex.
His one saving grace was that the monsters seemed to be completely uninterested in Mimi. One or two curious leeches had made swipes for her, but otherwise remained at a distance.
The very special child and the phone in her hand were their last hope.
He’d managed to dial Max’s number just before the dying blue dragon’s tail had knocked the wind out of him, thrown him down, and sent the phone flying from his grip. It was the animal’s final act of vengeance. He’d just heard Max pick up before the phone was gone and Michael was once more battling another powerful foe.
Fortune seemed to smile upon them then, if even for a single blessed instant. As Michael held Mimi fiercely in his vampire sway, he could hear Max speaking on the other end of the line. The Guardian understood what was happening.
Now it was up to him, Michael’s brothers, and their archesses to turn the tables.
Hope had begun to bloom inside Michael, small and promising, but also devastating and dangerous. Because hope, in its sheep skin disguise, was always the harbinger of misfortune.
It was no different this time. As Michael finished off the phantom before him, the white-skinned creature fell to reveal an entirely different kind of opponent that had been standing behind him.
It was an enemy Michael had honestly believed he would never see again. Their gazes locked, and unanswered questions filled the heated space between them.
They met in a fury of untold proportions, and lightning lit up the sky like the Fourth of July.
*****
Rhiannon braced herself where she’d fallen against the wall, despite the fact that it forced shards of mirrored glass through her skin and into her back. She needed the support when she kicked out with both feet and slammed her boots against her attacker’s chest. The impact was successful, and the gargoyle went sailing back down the hall into the living room beyond.
He was quickly replaced, however. The stone beasts had come en-masse to destroy her. Never mind what lay beyond their hulking forms. Rhiannon saw the shadows of dragon’s wings, recognized the stench of leeches, and felt the cold of phantoms.
She couldn’t see Michael, but she could hear him, and the roars of the beasts he defeated. She could also see the carnage he was leaving in his battling wake. A part of her felt connected to him in that moment, almost as if what he did, she felt. She imagined him again as he’d been in her dream, standing before their enemies with that sword in his hand. The dead bodies of phantoms and wraiths piling up at the end of the hall were a good indication she probably wasn’t far off.
Her body moved and fought on impulse, falling back on thirty-plus years of practice. This was a good thing, because her mind wasn’t on her own fight. It was on Michael and Mimi, but mostly on Mimi, whom she’d told to stay in the bathroom, and who had out-and-out disobeyed her. The last she’d seen of the red-haired child, Mimi had been running back down the hall toward the more dangerous foes Rhiannon specifically wanted to protect her from.
And she couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
Using her fire skills in this enclosed space would be suicidal, so those were useless. It was pointless to attempt to heal anything just now; those sorts of abilities were best used after a fight. Telekinesis could only do so much when your opponents were made of stone or the size of dragons and there was nothing big in the house to throw around. And then there was the weather.
Well, that was answering her call well enough, whether she meant it to or not. The sky above them was darkening ominously, and lightning crisscrossed it, slicing it up like a jigsaw puzzle. But lightning would do more damage to her, Michael, and Mimi than it would to gargoyles, and she couldn’t get a clear enough look at any other monsters to take a shot at them. Plus, a blast of natural lightning so close would make them all go deaf. This wasn’t like a studio session. This was the real deal.
Rhiannon twisted out of the painful grip of another gargoyle male, and pointy stone fingers dug furrows into her shoulder like icicles, ripping deep to draw immediate blood. She felt it seep into the torn material of her shirt even as she spun, punched, ducked, and kicked once more, putting her entire weight into the strike. There was no other way to fight off a gargoyle. They were just too heavy, even in human form.
Something hit the back of her head, and she heard the impact rather than felt it. Stars erupted like fireworks in her vision, and she knew the attack had done real damage. She stumbled forward, bracing herself on the hallway wall as a thick banded arm slid around her waist. She grasped hold of the gargoyle’s wrist, twisted it painfully to loosen it, and spun out of his grip. Then she shot out with the heel of her other palm to the monster’s throat, collapsing his currently-human windpipe. At once, he fell back, but still, her head was spinning, and nausea was beginning to push bile up her esophagus.
I have a concussion. She knew that in this particular instance, she needed to heal herself long before the fight would be over. If she didn’t, it would be over a lot sooner than she wanted, and the outcome would suck.
Rhiannon hit the opposite wall, allowed herself to sink against it to separate her from the men in front of her, and tried to concentrate on repairing the damage to her skull. That was when she heard Mimi’s blood-curdling scream coming from the living room.
Time clicked up a few notches, falling into fast-forward. Rhiannon was moving, she was lashing out with telekinesis-thrown hanging paintings and dressers and side tables. She sent flying a stove, a microwave, and a refrigerator that she pulled out from the wall sight-unseen. She was running for all she was worth. Wind was howling, and someone or something was roaring, and lightning was striking. A flash of illumination brightened the
room just as she skidded into it, highlighting the scene before her with intense clarity.
It was Mimi screaming, but not for the reason Rhiannon had assumed. No one was attacking her. Rather, Mimi stood alone near the bar that separated the living room from the kitchen.
Blood stained so much of the carpet, it was more red than tan, and in some places it was multi-hued, painted black or blue or even green. The walls were scorched and claw-raked, and most of the furniture in the living room had been either over-turned or tossed completely out of the apartment altogether.
There was a man in a blue-studded leather jacket sprawled and prone near the front door, which hung limply from its hinges. Blue liquid stained the floor beneath him. There were countless creepy-crawly creatures slithering behind the destroyed furniture or suckling at the fallen bodies of evil comrades. These were leeches, devouring the left-over magic of the monsters who’d been killed. More waited along the sidelines to see what would happen with Michael.
Michael, himself, was in hand-to-hand combat with another man. If he’d ever possessed the sword Rhiannon had imagined him using, he’d lost it somewhere during the battle. Rhiannon recognized the man he was fighting. She’d seen glimpses of his raven-black hair and blue eyes as she’d absorbed his story through Michael’s mind meld trick the day before. It was Abraxos, the Adarian.
But he was supposed to be dead.
From the looks of him, he was anything but dead, and for once, Michael and his opponent were nearly on even footing. They struggled as only the supernatural could struggle, slamming one another through walls and the plaster beneath, striking each other so hard, their bodies went flying.
Up above it all, like a sentinel of fire, waited a red dragon. He perched atop the destroyed roof above them, his massive leathery red wings so large, they draped over the gaping hole in the ceiling like an enormous umbrella. Heat emanated from his body, and when he breathed, his scales lifted slightly, showing brief glimpses of what looked like nothing but sheer and pure fire underneath. He was a creature composed of flame, and he was utterly terrifying to behold.