She lifted herself up off her hands to come to her knees, and sat back on her heels. She looked up.
Gregori stood a few feet away, dressed immaculately in his white suit, hands slid casually into the pockets of his suit pants. His hair was perfect. His shoes were shiny. And he radiated a darkness so thick, it was like an eclipse on a summer’s day.
“That was some show you put on, Miss Dante. Probably your best performance yet. It’s a shame no one from Swallowtail was here to film it.”
Rhiannon didn’t say anything. She was saving her strength.
“However, I have to admit, I’m gravely disappointed in you.”
As if she cared.
He sighed. “You just had to love him, didn’t you.” It wasn’t a question. He was shaking his head in reprimand, and he was no longer even looking at her, but at the carnage of the room, walls, and overturned furniture. Then he looked up at the solitary red dragon on the roof.
“You have no idea what you’ve done, Miss Dante,” he told her. “Fortunately, the situation may be salvageable even now.”
Rhiannon stared up at him in frank confusion. But he paid her no heed whatsoever. Instead, his deep black gaze narrowed on the dragon. The enormous beast’s burning eyes flared up brighter, and he curled his wings in behind him agitatedly. “I’m disappointed in you as well, Calidum. You are the first to disobey my orders in thousands of years.”
Suddenly, he spun, turning away from the dragon to move with tremendous, unexpected speed, reaching down to grasp Mimi around the throat.
Mimi made a shocked, choking sound as he lifted her and turned again. With the same exacting speed, he kicked over the nearby kitchen table, righting it in one swift, impossible move.
“Mimi!” Rhiannon cried out, moving much more slowly than he was. She managed to get to her feet as Gregori slammed Mimi’s partly transformed body down onto the surface of the kitchen table. In his other hand, a dagger appeared, coming into existence out of thin air. It shone clean and sharp, reflecting some unknown light.
“A dragon for a dragon, Calidum, what say you? Your freedom for her death.”
The red dragon on the roof at once roared in outrage, and the sound was unlike any the dragons had made thus far. It was a terrifying noise so loud, it shook plaster from the cracks in the walls.
Rhiannon felt the room suddenly heat up with fire. She didn’t know exactly where the fire was or what was burning; it might have even been her that was burning, and she would not have been able to tell. Her attention was focused so pointedly on Mimi and the dagger in Gregori’s hand, nothing else mattered.
She hurled her body forward. There was not enough power within her to telekinetically knock the blade from his hand. She could no more pick him up and hurl him across the room than she could have won a marathon in that moment. And she was fresh out of electricity; that particular battery was just plain dead.
All she could do was move. So that was what she did.
Gregori’s hand came down, blade flashing. Rhiannon covered Mimi’s small body with her own a split-second before it hit.
She felt the metal enter her back and pierce her lung, nicking her heart just after. It was an incredible kind of pain, not in its intensity, but in the wrongness of it. He yanked the blade back out, brutally inflicting even more damage.
And this time, she knew: I’m dying.
“Yes,” said Brad Pitt.
Yes.
Above her, Gregori stepped back. She could see him because her head was turned in his direction. “That should do.”
Michael roared in agonized rage.
“We’re finished here.” Gregori was gone in the next instant, and Rhiannon knew the Adarians and remaining gargoyles had vanished along with him.
She closed her eyes. The fire from the red dragon ebbed away, and it began to rain, coming freely into the apartment due to its missing roof. She could feel the water splashing upon her cheek and smell its wonderful, clean scent.
“Rhee! Rhiannon! No, no, Rhee!”
Rhiannon slid from the table, uncovering Mimi as she fell. But the girl followed her down, clutching at her like a lifeline.
She hit the floor, heavy and limp, and someone turned her over onto her back. She stared up at the figures above her and tried to concentrate.
Heal yourself, Rhiannon, her mind commanded. She knew she couldn’t heal every wound she had sustained, but she could do enough, maybe just enough to keep her alive. She only needed to concentrate. But it was so hard. Her mind was spinning away. Her thoughts felt light, like down feathers. And there was a breeze, scattering them in a pretty, fluffy dance.
Mimi knelt on her left side. She was touching Rhiannon’s cheek with one hand, and her other fist was curled into Rhiannon’s shirt, gripping it as if she would never let go. She had reverted to human form, her smattering of freckles stark against the pale color of her cheeks. She was crying.
Max, the archangels’ Guardian was there, kneeling beside Mimi, his face a mask of fear and concern. He’d lost his glasses somewhere in the fight. Gabriel stood behind him, wearing the same terrible expression.
On Rhiannon’s other side, near her hip, knelt Sophie, the only archess remaining in the apartment. Rhiannon’s flittering mind surmised that if Uriel was gone, he’d probably returned to the mansion with Eleanore and Juliette. Maybe they would be all right.
She hoped. She truly did.
Sisters, her thoughts whispered. She’d always wanted sisters.
And then there was Michael.
He knelt directly beside Sophie, opposite of Mimi, at Rhiannon’s right side. He’d taken her hand and held it firmly between both of his. It should have brought her comfort. But she could feel what was wrong with his grip. Years of healing other people had taught her. She recognized the symptoms right away.
Michael was dying.
She’d been right about the wraith. There was poison in his blood. His lips were turning blue. But like the warrior that he was, he knelt beside her straight as an arrow, broad shouldered and brave, and the worry in his expression was for her alone.
“You need to mend the knife wound, Rhiannon. You have to heal,” he told her softly, earnestly. “Can you concentrate enough to do that? One last time?”
Concentrate enough to heal? Yeah, she thought. I can do that.
One last time.
With some effort, Rhiannon nodded. Images flashed before her mind’s eye, images of the last two thousand years and of everyone Michael had saved, and of everything he had done for the people of Earth. And she imagined everything he would do in the years to come.
Then, with the last of her will, and with strength she pulled from the very core of her spirit, Rhiannon lashed out. She knew she had to be fast. She was dealing with the Warrior Archangel. She would only get one shot. It had to count.
She pressed her hand to his chest and focused with every ounce of effort she could summon. In the space of a single moment in time, in the split instant between heartbeats, she pictured the man she’d fallen in love with as he had once been: whole and unharmed and perfect.
Light pooled in her palm, spread beneath it to envelop Michael’s body, and then flashed as bright as the sun before dying out once again.
Rhiannon smiled, and as the blue faded from Michael’s parted, surprised lips to be replaced with a healthy pink, she closed her eyes and welcomed the dark.
Chapter Thirty-Three
But the dark didn’t come. Not for long, anyway.
“Rhiannon!”
At first, the world faded out like a television from the fifties being shut off. Color and light went away, shrinking to a tiny dot at the center that greatly resembled a very distant light at the end of a really long tunnel.
Maybe that’s where it comes from, she thought. The whole tunnel thing.
“God damn it, Rhiannon! NO!”
But then the dark was more gray than black. And the light was fading into its surroundings.
“Rhee, angel, please
… no, God, no… why did you do this?” She was being shaken. She could sense it as if she were watching someone else being shaken, maybe in a movie. Then someone was holding her, wrapping arms around her like steel bands – steel bands that could be tender and gentle, despite their immense strength.
She remembered those arms and the way she felt in them, holding on to the memory because she wanted it to be the last thing she thought of as she left this life. But the dark gray kept getting lighter, and that tunnel light was all but gone within seconds.
Soon, the gray was a dark brown, then a light brown, then almost white.
Rhiannon realized that the pain in her chest was gone. So was the pain from the broken bones she’d sustained. The cuts. The bruises.
It was all fading, right along with that darkness.
“Rhiannon… what –”
His voice cut off, and she felt his arms slip from around her, sliding slowly away.
Because she was floating upward. The floor was no longer pressed against her back. There was no hardness, nothing cold.
The rain had stopped. The wind had died.
Rhiannon opened her eyes.
The glow from her body emanated outward in beams of star-like illumination. She lit up the destroyed living room of Michael’s apartment as she rose two feet, three, four and five feet from the ground. She continued to float upward, afforded the most amazing view of the world below.
Michael stood directly beneath her, his tall, strong form stunned, his jaw slack, his blue eyes glowing and wide with shock. Beside him, Gabriel and Azrael also gawked up at her, as did Max and Sophie.
There was another man there now as well, and Rhiannon knew he was the red dragon. There was no leather jacket encrusted with rubies, the way Rhiannon had grown accustomed to seeing dragons when in human form. But he did wear a complicated silver choker with rubies embedded in it, and his brown eyes were amber-ringed. Calidum had been his name. He gazed up at her now from a man’s perspective. Directly beside him and under his protective right arm was little Mimi, her cheeks tear-stained, her eyes the size of golf balls in her pretty face.
Rhiannon processed this as she stopped rising and merely floated above them for a few eternally long seconds. And then her body changed. It felt as if it emptied itself of darkness, of the weight of so many souls and suffering. It literally felt as if these things that had been unknowingly holding her down her entire life were pulled up and out of her, lifted from her shoulders, and tossed into oblivion.
She closed her eyes. It was a spiritual orgasm of sorts, beyond description and breathtakingly amazing. Her back tingled, and she heard a ruffling sound. She knew what it was without having to look; the gasps from below confirmed it.
“Rhee… you….” Mimi’s whisper of exclamation drifted off in awe, but Rhiannon could have finished her sentence for her.
I know, she thought. I have wings.
She felt them growing out behind her like a part of her that had been chopped off ages ago, limbs that she’d been missing her entire life and had finally found again. They were a part of her and had been all along.
When she opened her eyes again seconds later, she was smiling. It was a smile of pure joy, and it was matched in her archangel – who now floated with her less than a foot away, held aloft by his own magnificent set of wings. They stretched out behind him, massive feathered constructs of glorious perfection, the way she had always imagined an angel’s wings would appear. They were so white, they held a blue tint the way raven’s feathers were so black, they did the same.
But Michael wasn’t paying attention to his wings. Rhiannon got the impression he couldn’t have cared less about them. He shook his head in wonder as he gazed down at her, his expression one of abject admiration. His voice was deep and gravelly with emotion when he said, “You, Rhiannon Dante, truly are stunning.”
“You’ve already said that,” she teased softly as he gently took her hands and his gaze slid from hers to the wings at her back.
Rhiannon looked too. Her smile broadened.
Wow, she thought. Holy wow! They were white as well, but not as blue-white as Michael’s. Rather, they were slightly off-white and gold-tinted, and their very edges faded in a spectacular ombre from white to yellow to orange and then, finally red. They were dazzling. And they were hers.
“She really is the Phoenix,” she heard Mimi whisper. And she had to agree, her wings pretty much fit the bill.
She gave them a test flap, beating them strong and sure against the cool night air as if she’d always possessed them and had been using them for centuries. Like riding a bike; an angel never forgot how to fly.
A laugh escaped her throat, a sound of pure joy as her wings took her further up into the night sky. She beat them again, continuing to rise, and Michael followed suit, climbing into the Cosmos right along with her.
The night should have been cold up here. It had just stormed, and though they had settled, the clouds were still deep. Mist clung to Rhiannon’s hair and eyelashes, dampening them with droplets like diamonds. She laughed again when she realized the moisture was sticking to her wings as well. It was the oddest thing to realize they were there and a part of her. They had been all along.
“Rhiannon.”
He said it softly, intimately, claiming her attention at once. She hovered where she’d risen, beating her wings just enough to hold her in place while she gazed into his sapphire blue eyes.
“You sacrificed your life for mine.” He shook his head. “I knew you would do it. Even as I prayed you wouldn’t, I knew you would.”
Rhiannon said nothing. What was there to say? She would do it again, given the choice. He was so much more powerful than she was, capable of doing so much more good. The world was already so screwed up. If it lost him, that would be one tip of the scales in the wrong direction too many.
And she couldn’t bear the thought of him dying. There was that, too.
“I know you think you would do it again,” he said, his gaze narrowing slightly, and his lips curling up at their corners. It was the cop in him, knowing what she was thinking. She couldn’t help but smile guiltily.
“But you won’t.”
Rhiannon raised a brow. “Oh?”
“Never,” he told her firmly. His voice held a note of something so compelling, she wondered if he was using some sort of vampire power on her just then.
But he didn’t have any fangs… and now that Rhiannon really looked, she realized he appeared truly different. His hair was lighter, as it had been in her dream. His skin was darker. And the waves of forbidden, Nightmare powers that had emanated from him before, well, she couldn’t feel them anymore. His nearness made her warm, and his eyes made her stomach tighten. But that was just Michael. He didn’t need any help.
“Never,” Michael repeated hard, issuing the command like an ultimatum, “ever do that again.” He pulled her closer with his hold on her hands, and placed those hands palm-down upon his chest. The touch made her fingers tingle. Her heart rate quickened.
He waited a beat.
“Ever,” he said one last time, narrowing his gaze just before he removed one of his hands from hers to slip it behind her neck and pull her against him. She had time for a quick gasp of breath before he was claiming her lips in a deep, fierce kiss. It was a kiss filled with raw emotion: the release of fear, the exultation of hope come to fruition, the celebration of love, and the beginning of something wonderfully unknown.
His lips were warm and dry, and trapped in that kiss, Rhiannon felt a kind of salvation. This is Michael, she thought. The archangel, her mind mused deliriously. The one and only. And he’s mine.
My Michael.
Rhiannon grinned against his lips. She pulled her hands from his chest and wrapped her arms around him, deepening the kiss. He was no longer a vampire. He was no longer an incubus. Those curses had been lifted, and yet he was the sexiest, most powerful man she had ever encountered.
Had he been freed because of her? Because
of this?
Because of us, she thought, knowing it was true. They had overcome dark magic and an army of evil monsters, and even the most powerful obstacle life can encounter – that of the end of life itself. Simply by trusting one another.
By loving one another.
Michael pulled slowly away, breaking the kiss, but placing his forehead gently against hers. “I do love you, Rhiannon Dante. I always have,” he told her, promised her. “I always will.”
Rhiannon closed her eyes, letting the warmth of him embrace her like a blanket.
“Well,” she said softly, “at least that’s one thing we can agree on.”
The two warrior angels would always embrace struggle. It was in their natures. But in this, there would be no fight.
“I love you too, detective.”
Epilogue
Angel stood in the shadows of an alley a block from the scene of the archangels’ battle. She watched in silent understanding as Rhiannon Dante earned her wings and rose above the tumult of Earth alongside her mate, the archangel Michael. The last of the Four Favored had found his archess.
The battle had created a chaos of nearly epic proportions in the streets and buildings surrounding Michael’s. But Angel had seen this kind of thing before. In Texas, in Scotland, in San Francisco.
She knew the archangels’ Guardian would take charge of the cleanup. Vampires commanded by their king, Azrael, would erase minds and video recordings. The archangels themselves would use their abilities to right vehicles and road signs and traffic lights and mend buildings or roads where they’d been cracked or struck by lightning. Any injured mortals would be tended to by the archesses or by Michael, whose curse had been lifted, and who would once more possess the ability to heal.
Angel knew all of this with an easy certainty. It was simple fact.
But it was with a thick mixture of unease and bracing anticipation that she knew what it all meant.
The archangels had finished what they’d come to Earth to do. There was no reason any longer for them to remain here, in this realm. But remain, they would. Here, they would stay – until the final archess was located.