Dragons could take human form, and when they died, it was this human form that they passed away in. This was why no mortal had ever discovered dragon bodies or petrified dragon bones. The man in the blue-gemmed leather jacket lying unconscious on the floor had been a blue dragon. Michael had clearly killed him.
Even in human form, they were fierce opponents, bearing fangs and claws that carried the poison of their make-up. For blue dragons, it was oxygen that would replace the blood in a man’s veins. Yellow dragon poison paralyzed its victims. Green dragons filled their victims’ veins with acid that ate away at their bodies from the inside. With red dragons, it was fire. Their victims would simply burn up, going from feverish to combustion within minutes.
But when there was room, dragons preferred their natural state. It was less inhibiting and much more terrifying. Fear was a factor they enjoyed using against their opponents, and size was almost always a leverage of its own.
This red dragon had clearly issued fireballs here and there at his target, who was obviously Michael. The scorch marks along the walls and the burned areas of the rug were evidence to that end. But at the moment, the red dragon wasn’t watching Michael. He also didn’t bother looking up at Rhiannon as she halted in her tracks on her way into the living room. Instead, he was watching Mimi.
Mimi – who was screaming at the tops of her lungs and looking down at her own arms and hands. Before their eyes, Mimi’s body transformed. Her skin darkened from white to pink, and then to a deep blood red. Her fingers elongated, and her fingernails grew, inching their way into actual claws. She whimpered, breathing hard, and Rhiannon saw puffs of smoke emit from between the child’s lips.
Mimi looked up from her hands, and somehow found Rhiannon.
Their eyes met, and Rhiannon stared back, trapped in the red and orange flickering gaze of a very young, very inexperienced, and very scared red dragon.
Chapter Thirty-One
Max pocketed his phone as he turned. He caught Eleanore’s gaze. “That call we were waiting for from Michael?” He looked up at Uriel next, who was standing behind Eleanore at the couch. “He just made it. We’ve got to go.”
It must have been something in his voice, or maybe Michael’s brothers simply knew. Hell Max was pretty sure there had been something in the air of late because Uriel, Gabe, and Az were all there together in the mansion, and they had been for days. Normally, they would all be off doing their own things, traveling across countries or oceans, going on tours, filming on location or taking fishing trips out on the North Sea.
But this week, they’d found excuses to stay in, to stay home, and to stay close.
They’d known. Just like Max had. He’d felt it in his blood.
For the last two hours, they’d roamed aimlessly through the mansion’s rooms, pretending to do paperwork or use the mansion’s gymnasium, or read books whose pages never seemed to turn. Their minds had all been on Michael.
Even Az was there with them, having risen early that night. Most likely on the same uneasy notion.
Uriel said nothing. He just faced the nearest doorway, which led from the mansion’s library to the hallway, and began to call up a portal that would take them to Michael’s apartment in New York. No doubt, they’d heard the girl’s screeching words through the cell phone and didn’t need Max to tell them where to go.
Az was already stepping into the shadows in one corner of the library, most likely sending out a mental call to his vampires as he went. Max was glad of that. From the sound of things, the world had been coming to an end on the other side of that phone call, and they would need all the help they could possibly get.
Sophie, Eleanore, and Juliette gathered together behind Uriel and Gabriel, exchanging glances of shared fear and reassurance. They’d become sisters of a sort, closer than the closest of friends. It made sense; they’d been created together. They shared a sort of soul.
Max considered this as he grabbed his bag of supplies from the nearest fainting couch and hoisted it over his shoulders. The girls shared a soul with one other woman as well – Michael’s archess.
He wondered if they would find her, too, on the other side of that portal. If they did…. Max swallowed hard and went still for a moment.
The others noticed, and before Uriel stepped into the swirling gateway that would take them to New York, he turned a questioning gaze on Max. “What is it?”
Max was quick to reply. “Nothing.” What he was thinking, he sincerely did not want to voice. Because he was thinking that if Michael’s archess was with the Warrior Archangel, then chances were they had already mated. And if they had, then all four of the Four Favored will have found their archesses.
Which meant that what the brothers and Max might actually be heading into was not just another fight between good and evil, but the Culmination, itself.
*****
Rhiannon landed on her knees beside Mimi’s transforming body. There was no revulsion involved, and strangely, there was also no surprise. All Rhiannon felt as she took the terrified child into her arms was a need to comfort her. A need to protect her. All she felt was love.
“We’re all special, Mimi,” Rhiannon whispered to her fiercely. “None of us is what we seem. We’re all something more.” They were words issued quickly, and through clenched teeth. Rhiannon’s was spiraling downward. Her body wanted to be healed. There were broken bones, there were lesions, and her brain was bleeding into her skull; she could feel it all now. Stars were swimming in her vision. Her stomach was clenching horribly.
But her arms held Mimi with absolute and fierce determination, tender but protective, warm and tight and right.
Sometimes there were things in life that were literally more important than life, itself. This was one of those things, and this was one of those moments. This, right here. This was the moment Mimi would remember for her entire existence. It was the moment that would paint the colors of the rest of her life.
Rhiannon would die before she allowed the child to face that life in fear or confusion. She would rather die than allow Mimi to face it alone.
She could hear the gargoyles making their way down the hall; they’d chosen to remain in full gargoyle form, most likely for the intimidation factor. Their stone wings carved furrows in the walls on either side of them, the space too small to allow them to pass unhindered.
Rhiannon turned slightly to peer at them over her shoulder. Something inside of her sizzled and sparked, like a live electric wire dropped into a rain puddle. Her eyes flashed; she saw it from her side like the sudden aura of a migraine. And then the first gargoyle in the line of men heading toward her suddenly lifted from the floor and went sailing overhead.
He wasn’t flapping his wings, and he had no control over where he was going. It was Rhiannon making him fly. She was throwing him with her telekinesis.
She’d never lifted a living being before.
She gave herself no time to question it, and she didn’t look to see where the first gargoyle was going to land, choosing instead to focus on the next gargoyle. He, too, lifted from the ground, this time crying out in surprise and waving his arms and legs in a helpless, rather comical struggle.
Rhiannon felt Mimi stop crying and pull slightly back from her as if to watch what was happening over her shoulder.
Rhiannon didn’t stop, however. There was power swarming loose within her now; the concussion had knocked something free. She knew that. It felt like killer bees escaping from a broken hive. She also knew it was deadly. She had no idea how long she could remain conscious. But she also didn’t care. There was a fury building inside her now, new and strong, steady and determined – like a warrior.
Something near the door flashed outward, and Rhiannon glanced in its direction. A portal was opening, a swirling gateway the likes of which the Swallowtail Foundation might have created for a movie with computer graphics. Only, this one was real. She watched long enough to see several men step out of the portal, followed by three women. Rhiannon knew
them all at once.
From the other side of the apartment, in a shadowy corner of the living room, several more figures emerged. They were tall and handsome and as instantly recognizable as the people from the portal.
The rest of the Four Favored and their archesses had come to join the battle, accompanied by several vampires and Max, their Guardian. At once, they were struggling with the monsters in the room. The gargoyles were forced to turn their attention to them rather than Rhiannon, freeing her up momentarily.
But someone out there must have been desperate. Someone must have been more determined than anyone had ever been in the course of human existence, because no matter how many wraiths, leeches, gargoyles, and phantoms the archangels killed, more appeared to take their places.
The bad guys were dwindling, but with excruciating slowness. It was barely noticeable. The phantoms arrived more slowly. The wraiths were just a touch more hesitant. The leeches waited a little longer before vulturing in for their meals.
But it came at great cost. Wraiths were re-opening deadly wounds in the brothers, and she imagined things like red dragon poison and broken bones piercing vital organs. Rhiannon saw one of the archesses go down after a gargoyle strike directly to the skull. Her mate knelt beside her, protecting her, taking mortal wound after mortal wound to cover her body with his.
Rhiannon watched all of this and felt an odd sensation, like that blessed numbing that came when you were finally buzzed or the pain killers at last kicked in. She felt detached, yet outraged.
She felt a second wind. It was a wind she couldn’t stop, too; it was building into a gale.
The sky was electrocuting the earth with renewed fervor, zapping it here and there with errant, non-stop lightning. Somewhere out in the street, cars were crashing, lights had stopped working, and sirens blared.
Rhiannon released Mimi to come slowly to her feet. She felt that wind around her, wrapping like a cloak, turning her hair into a halo of long, red tendrils. She felt a heat in her eyes, burning them from the inside, and Michael’s apartment slid into stark, brightly-hued contrasts. She felt her fingertips heat up, as if magic were collecting there, buzzing and zapping and ready to be used.
The pain of her injuries receded one by one, taking a back seat to the power surging through her. She felt invincible.
It’s a lie, she thought haphazardly. I’m imagining this; it’s the concussion.
But she knew that wasn’t true. And she wouldn’t have cared if it was.
The leeches in the room turned toward her, their eyes widening in restored interest. More began pouring over the ragged glass lips of the windows, drawn to her like moths to a flame.
“Rhee… you look like Jean Gray!” Mimi exclaimed in a stunned whisper. “As the Phoenix!”
The phantoms that had been flanking Michael and Abraxos began to turn toward Rhiannon’s side of the room. More popped into existence, transporting into the fight from some unknown location. As they did, they, too, focused on Rhiannon and her glowing form. They were followed in turn by the wraiths, whose slick black skin fidgeted and twitched, expressing their shifting attention.
Rhiannon smiled at them all as if to say, Bring it.
And then electricity exploded from her fingertips, shooting in long sparking streams of blue-white light to slam into the crouching forms of the nearest leeches. They screeched in surprised agony as the electricity x-rayed their forms, turning them transparent. But the lightning didn’t stop there. It leapt from them to the next two monsters, and from those to two more. Within seconds, every slithering creature in the room was sliced-through with Rhiannon’s electric power.
She felt it pulling itself out of her as if she were a battery being drained. But there was so much more where that came from.
She cried out in fury, the scream coming from the core of her, where she had shoved and stored away every pain-filled witnessing of rape or torture or bigotry, of abuse and apathy. It was a cry of outrage for the shallow, pathetic state of the world, of its intolerant bullying, cowardly men, its so-called leaders, and its utter, despicable evil.
She screamed in rage. And the lightning-encased beasts in the apartment rose into the air on a telekinetic wind, spinning around as if stuck to toy tops. They continued to sizzle and crackle, slowly and painfully cooking to death. There were dozens of them. The lightning exited the apartment, striking monsters that had not yet even entered the fray. It slipped into invisible portal-ways, zapping unsuspecting phantoms before they could even arrive on the scene. It stretched beyond the boundaries of space and time and speared monsters where they hid or skulked or hungered.
It was an exacting sword, that lightning, that power. It sliced swiftly and in a kind of justice that could only have been called divine.
And then Rhiannon felt the last of her power slip away, sapped suddenly, unexpectedly. It was a butterfly battery, the one in her soul. It was beautiful and it was powerful, capable of changing fate with a single flapping of its wings. But it was short-lived.
Rhiannon cried out again, this time in desperate weakness and pain. She fell to her knees. The electricity disconnected from her body – and the floating, spinning monsters hovering above the apartment complex exploded.
One after another, their bodies popped, rupturing and discharging like massive Black Cat fireworks. Nothing was left after the blasts. The lightning ate it all up, dried it all out, and disintegrated every last molecule of evidence that the beasts had ever existed at all.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The silence that followed was surreal. Rhiannon felt trapped in a dream, where sound was hollow and muffled. There were noises, but they were far-off. Rhiannon could feel the carpet under her fingertips, but it was too soft, and she knew that her fingertips had gone partially numb.
Am I dying?
She’d seen a movie once with Brad Pitt as Death. Anthony Hopkins had been having heart attack symptoms, and each time he did, he asked himself, “Am I dying?” and Brad Pitt’s invisible character would whisper, “Yes….” And Rhiannon had always thought that was horribly cruel. What kind of an asshole went around rubbing it in that you were dying? What kind of jerk-wad got his kicks out of teasing you because you were kicking the bucket?
At least no one answered Rhiannon just then. Or, if they did, she couldn’t quite hear them.
What she did hear was her heartbeat. It was steady, but quiet. She concentrated on it. Little by little, it grew in volume. So did the rest of the world. Seconds passed, and she could hear voices.
She raised her head.
Mimi had crawled up next to her, and the girl’s arm was around Rhiannon’s shoulders. She was saying something to her, but Rhiannon couldn’t interpret it just then.
Up above them all, for some reason untouched by Rhiannon’s lightning, and yet unmoving from where it rested and watched, remained the mighty red dragon. Its yellow-orange eyes flickered like the fires inside it, trapping Rhiannon in its heated gaze. She had no idea what the massive beast was thinking or why it had stopped attacking. She could only be thankful for it.
Somehow, Rhiannon looked away to take in the rest of the room. Two of the archesses were unconscious on the floor. Eleanore and Juliette. The third, the blonde Sophie, was kneeling over Eleanore, no doubt trying to heal her.
“She’s dying!” She heard Sophie cry. “They both are! I can’t save them both!”
Not far away, Michael and Abraxos continued to battle. Michael was losing. He hadn’t only been battling the Adarian all this time. Leeches had been pulling his magic from him little by little. He’d been burned by the red dragon. Frost on the sleeves of his tee-shirt told her a phantom or two had taken their turns inflicting damage. A wraith had no doubt gotten to him as well, re-opening old wounds…. And Rhiannon knew there were countless wounds to choose from. He was a warrior, after all.
There was only so much he could take. Even him.
The realization was a punch in the gut to Rhiannon. She could sense the shifting of
power inside herself. She could no longer control the weather. There was a disconnect there; she’d used that ability all up. The same went for the telekinesis. And the fire.
But she could still heal. Maybe not as much as Michael needed in order to be at one hundred percent again, but enough to keep him alive.
She just needed to get to him.
A few feet from Michael was Azrael; the vampire was a mess. Fire had scorched one side of his body, ruining his clothing and scarring the skin underneath. His face had been spared, which was truly a blessing. The archangels were so beautiful.
However, his right arm and leg were useless. He balanced on his other leg, and his left hand was wrapped around the throat of a very large black man that Rhiannon recognized as another Adarian. Who was also supposed to be dead.
There were two more Adarians in the room as well, one with blond hair and another with black hair. The first was struggling with Gabriel, the other with Uriel. She couldn’t recall the Adarians’ names, but it didn’t matter. They’d all been turned into vampires, and they were all under some strong, external influence. She could even feel that influence; it poured out and over them like an inky blanket, forcing them to fight. It had to be strong because Rhiannon could tell they didn’t want to do what they were doing. It was in their eyes. Someone was controlling them, determined to destroy the brothers and Michael, and most especially her.
Gregori.
“Gregori,” she whispered.
She didn’t know why she said his name aloud. Maybe to give her power over it. Over him. But whatever the reason, he heard her.
“Rhiannon,” he replied coolly. His voice cut through her courage and made her go very, very still.
Mimi removed her arm from Rhiannon’s shoulders and whirled around to face him, taken aback by his sudden appearance directly behind them. Rhiannon wasn’t surprised at all, however. Or perhaps she simply lacked the energy to be anything but calm. She was very nearly drained, and was frankly grateful she was still able to move.