“Gabe, you look kinda scary right now,” Michael said.
“We have to get her out of there,” Uriel said.
“I’m having déjà vu,” said Michael. Gabe and the others watched him as he made his way to the window, pulled the curtain aside, and glanced up at the setting sun.
He was right. The entire scenario was too familiar. When Eleanore had been discovered by Uriel, she hadn’t trusted him either. And why would she have trusted him? She had powers to hide and had been running from the Adarians all her life. She’d been seduced by Samael’s lies and it hadn’t been easy for Uriel to win her faith. Just when he had more or less managed to win her over, Sam had stepped in again and turned Uriel into a vampire, complicating things to a painful degree and making their lives a living hell for a while.
Michael let the curtains drop and turned to face them once more. “Az will be up soon.”
“And you think he can get her out of Sam’s fortress?” Uriel asked.
“We certainly stand a better chance with him than without him,” Max said.
“Seriously, guys,” Uriel muttered. “You don’t honestly think Sam is just going to let her walk out on him and go anywhere she wants alone, do you?”
“I don’t have a clue as to what Sam is or is not going to do,” Max said testily. “None of us does. But Juliette is an archess and from Gabriel’s description of her, she is a smart, independent woman. She isn’t going to take well to being shadowed by him.”
“And wha’ makes you think he’s goin’ to give her the choice?” Gabriel asked.
Everyone fell silent. No one had an answer to that one.
They were all well aware that Samael was more powerful than they were. If it came down to it, he was probably capable of forcing Juliette’s surrender. He might hypnotize her, wipe her memory, or even go the old-fashioned route and lock her up in his dungeon.
Or in his bedroom.
Gabriel felt a pain in his right palm. He glanced down with faint surprise to see that he’d fisted his hand so tight, his fingernails had broken the skin over his lifeline. Thin crescent moons of blood were appearing across his palm.
“You’ll want to control that,” came a deep voice from across the room. Gabriel glanced up to meet a glowing gold gaze as Azrael stepped out of the shadows of the hall that led to his wing of the mansion. The sun had gone down—and the vampire had risen.
Is that not what you told her? came Az’s voice again, this time in Gabriel’s mind. Gabriel swallowed hard. Azrael could easily read other people’s memories, but Gabe didn’t need his brother’s help remembering what he had said to Juliette. “You’ll want to control that, luv. Let it rage an’ it’ll drain your strength. An’ then how will you fight me off, lass?”
Gabriel had cornered her with his knowledge of her power right off the bat. And then, to make things worse, he’d threatened her. He’d told her there was nowhere she could hide that he couldn’t find her. Gabriel closed his eyes and swore softly. He’d done irreparable harm. Juliette would never want to speak with him again.
Not necessarily true, said Az. And remember, Eleanore was furious with Uriel after his televised announcement about her. Gabriel could hear the smile in Azrael’s voice at that. She forgave him in the end.
“Are you two finished having your nice private conversation?” Max asked, his voice tight. Gabriel looked up to see that Uriel, Michael, and Max were all watching him and Azrael expectantly.
Gabriel glared back. Az simply smiled, flashing fangs.
“So, once Ellie’s back here, what’s the plan?” Uriel asked, ignoring Gabriel’s look.
“Actually, I might have an idea,” Michael said. Everyone turned to face him and he turned to Max. “How many floors does the Trinity Hotel have?”
“Roughly forty,” Max said.
“Okay.” Michael put his hands on his hips and looked at the floor, clearly ruminating on something. Then he looked back up and continued. “The mansion can open anywhere there’s a door,” he explained. “Granted, the Trinity is a lot smaller than the Sears Tower, but it’s a tall public building, just the same. Assuming Sam has treated it as he has the Tower, then he’ll probably only have control of the upper floors and possibly the ground-floor entrances.”
“Assumin’,” Gabriel muttered. That was a big assumption.
“It’s all I’ve got,” Michael shot back.
“Even so,” Uriel said, “his men’ll be stationed all over the building. If you’re thinking we’ll get by them unseen, you’re wrong.”
“That’s not what I’m thinking,” Michael told him. “I’m thinking that we should open a portal from the mansion directly into the Trinity Hotel. Preferably as close to the top suites as possible.”
Once again, everyone was silent. What Michael was suggesting was not only a really good idea—it was a plausible one.
“We wouldn’t have to wait for Juliette to leave the hotel,” Uriel said.
“Nope,” Michael continued. “All we would need is for her to get on the elevator.”
“You’re thinking of opening the mansion’s portal directly onto the elevator?” Max asked, his eyes a little wide behind his spectacles.
“Into the shaft, to be more precise.” Michael nodded. “Gabriel’s been in enough elevator shafts while working as a firefighter to know how they work. Once we’re in, we can shut the elevator down. From there, it’s just a matter of redirecting traffic—and isolating Juliette.”
“And I’ve been in enough five-star hotels to tell you that they all have more than one elevator,” Uriel interrupted. “In fact, wouldn’t the suites have their own dedicated elevator?”
“Not in this one,” Max supplied. “You get to the suites with a key card.”
“So, we shut down all of the elevators. One at a time.” Michael shrugged.
“We would have to work tremendously fast,” Max said. “Before Samael figured out what was going on and put a stop to it.”
“That we can do,” Azrael stated calmly. The others turned to look at him. Archangels were fast by nature—freakishly fast. But Azrael was a vampire on top of it all and could move with such speed that his form actually appeared to blur to everyone around him.
The brothers were quiet for several long seconds. And then Max swigged the remainder of his glass and replaced it on the liquor table with a thunk. “Well, then what are we waiting for?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Daniel knew what he was going to have to do. Once he’d managed to escape from the other Adarians, he’d had a lot of time to himself to think.
He’d gotten away from Mitchell and the others by racing along the tracks and into the forest where the tracks led. He continued running until he was a good half mile away from them, well out of Mitchell’s psychic reach. Then when the train came by, he simply used his Adarian speed to hop it. He’d ridden the line straight into Glasgow.
Those moments at the train station had changed everything. The fact that Ely, Luke, and Mitchell were there meant that they had somehow figured out he would be there—or that the archess would. Either way they had an ability they hadn’t had before. Maybe they could scry now. Or perhaps they could even divine. He had no idea how or when this had happened, but it altered the course of just about everything as far as he was concerned.
Subduing and kidnapping the archess in order to present her to the General wasn’t going to work now. Kevin wouldn’t care that Daniel could divine the future whereabouts of the archesses. Daniel was going to have to do better than that now. He needed to take matters into his own hands.
If the powers of an archess—or an Adarian, for that matter—could be absorbed through their blood, then there was no reason why Daniel couldn’t absorb Juliette’s powers as easily as the General could. If he drained her entirely, the powers he took from her might be permanent. He might be able to heal wounds on his own.
If there was one power in the world that General Kevin Trenton found indispensably valuable, it was th
e ability to heal. There was a good chance that if Daniel could absorb this power on a permanent basis, that, combined with his other abilities, could make him enough of a boon to the General that it would buy him his life back among the Adarians. Juliette was still Daniel’s ticket to safety, but the role she played would now be different.
And shorter.
* * *
Juliette leaned heavily on the brass bar in the elevator as it shot through the floors toward the top of the hotel. She’d had the wine after all. And boy was it strong.
But it was either down the wine or pass out from shock in front of two gorgeous strangers. When they’d started talking about the “Black Wizard,” her world had begun spinning. The warlock had possessed black hair and silver eyes? He’d gone after women he called “archesses”? He’d seduced them into his bed? It was too much. It was too close to be coincidence.
I would sleep with him in a heartbeat, she thought hazardously. Gabriel Black is sex with a Scottish brogue. He kisses like an angel. . . . Juliette momentarily closed her eyes and the memory of his kiss washed over her, eliciting from her a careless moan.
Fuck, I’m drunk, she thought. She’d had only the one glass of wine. But it had been so dark . . . so red . . . and it had burned all the way down, just as she’d thought it would. Three sips, and she’d felt some of her fear drift away like so much dust on the wind. And when the fear went, she started thinking about what Lambent and McNabb were saying.
And wondering whether the legend could be true—and whether Gabriel Black could be the wizard.
And she, the archess.
But it couldn’t be true, could it? It had to be coincidence, didn’t it? People didn’t live for two thousand years, and there were no such things as warlocks or wizards. And whatever the hell an archess was, it had nothing to do with her, one way or another. “Archess” must just be a word from some other language that meant something in particular—like virgin or woman or something.
Then again . . . Juliette could heal people. And control the weather. And use telekinesis. And people weren’t supposed to be able to do any of those things either. “God, what is happening to my life?” she asked herself, as she ran her hand over her face. She felt hot; the alcohol was burning through her veins like a fossil fuel. She almost never drank. This wasn’t like her.
Without warning, Juliette’s legs gave out and her body slid down along the wall in the elevator. She sat on the floor, bending her knees and pulling them to her chest. She knew that she would be the only one on the lift until she reached the top floor; once she slipped her key card into the slot, the elevator wouldn’t stop until it reached the suites. And she was too stunned to stand. Because it hit her then, in that instant. It really hit her—everything that was happening to her. She had become a superhero. A figure from fantasy.
And in the last week, she had met far too many handsome men. Men like this didn’t really walk the Earth, and definitely not unattached. And this legend . . . it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She was floating in a soup of nonsense now. Drowning in it. She was trapped in a fairy story with no way out. It was like being caught up in a dream from which you never woke. Was that what was happening? Was she in some sort of coma somewhere? Had she hit her head on coral while trying to pull that surfer out of the water and now she was lying in a hospital bed somewhere imagining all of this?
That thought scared her more than anything. It was something no person ever wanted to be—trapped between life and death, her parents and friends sitting in a hospital chair beside her, tired and giving up hope. She wanted to wake up.
But there was a part of Juliette, deep down, that knew it couldn’t be a dream. If it was, then she had had dreams within dreams. And she never felt pain in her dreams. This was different. It was all too real—even as it was all too unbelievable.
“Somebody save me,” she whispered, feeling close to tears.
Suddenly the elevator jerked around her, and it was fortunate that she was sitting or she would have fallen. It screeched loudly as it slowed and then jammed noisily to a halt. Juliette’s heart rate kicked up and her eyes widened. The LCD readout on the wall told her that she was somewhere between floors thirty-four and thirty-five.
She grabbed the brass bar above her and hauled herself to her feet. She was about to slam her hand down on the red emergency button when another screeching noise sounded from above her. She looked up to see the brass ceiling of the elevator warping.
And then it split—and peeled away.
Juliette’s mouth went dry. Her legs went numb again and she slumped against the bar, temporarily incapable of coherent thought. She watched in stunned silence as the roof of the elevator was completely ripped off, revealing a yawning chasm of darkness that stretched beyond.
For a single second, Juliette stared into that darkness, unseeing, unknowing. And then a tall outline of a man stepped into the elevator’s light and knelt on the edge of the roof. Juliette gazed up at the man. He was incredibly tall—he had several inches more than a foot on her. His hair was a little longer than shoulder length, layered, and jet-black, and his eyes glowed like twin golden suns. He looked at Juliette, seemed to study her as deeply as Samuel Lambent had, and then he smiled, sporting straight, bright white teeth—and fangs. He was a vision out of some combination of a nightmare and a gothic wet dream.
Beautiful. Deadly. Impossible.
Juliette wanted to scream. She really did. But the man quickly stood and then leapt down into the elevator, landing lightly on his booted feet with supernatural grace. Juliette backed into the bar behind her until she felt it bruising her bones.
She had been right about his height. He towered over her.
“Juliette,” the man spoke, saying her name as if it were a piece of candy he wanted to savor upon his tongue. “I won’t hurt you,” he promised softly. “You need to come with me, though,” he continued. “And I won’t ask you twice.”
All of my powers, Juliette thought wildly, and not a single one will help me now. There were no clouds to call lightning from, no objects to throw with her telekinesis, and it didn’t bloody well matter that she could heal. What she needed to do was harm. And then fly away.
“Wh-who are you?” she asked, her voice no more than a whisper. Her hands gripped the bar behind her painfully; her fingers had gone numb.
“My name is Azrael,” he said. “I am Gabriel’s brother.”
Gabriel Black, she thought, knowing that her face reflected the recognition and heightened fear his name produced in her. Samuel was right. Black is a wizard—and his brother is a fucking vampire! It was a senseless assessment, but it was one of those spur-of-the-moment assessments that happened when fear completely took control of a person’s brain.
Juliette had no idea what to do when the vampire who called himself Azrael took another step toward her. But her body did. She felt it searching for her powers before she realized what it was doing. It was this inward pull and then an outward yank and she was suddenly spinning in place and rewrapping her hands around the brass bar in the elevator.
A split second of hard concentration and the brass bar came away from the wall with a rush of telekinesis, and Juliette wasted no time in turning with it, intent on slamming its shiny metal against Azrael’s handsome skull.
But the vampire did not move or even duck as she swung the bar around. Instead, he simply raised his right hand and caught the weapon, halting its progress completely. Juliette gazed into his eyes, terror taking trepidation’s place inside of her.
The bar began to grow cold in Juliette’s hand—colder than it should have been. She glanced down at it to see ice crystals forming along the metal. And then steam rising. And then her hands were stinging and she was forced to let go.
She released it and stepped back, once more trapped against the elevator’s wall.
“I’m sorry, Juliette,” the vampire said calmly. “I don’t want to frighten you. But I told you I would not ask you again. I’m a
fraid there’s no time.”
With that, he dropped the brass bar and rushed forward, his form blurring before her as he closed the distance between them. Juliette tried to scream again, but as she inhaled sharply to take that breath, she was caught up in a pair of strong arms and spun around to be pulled back against a hard chest. At the same time, an alien sense of deep calm washed over her, melting the tension from her body even as it clouded her mind.
She felt instantly fuzzy and relaxed, and she lost the will to fight.
The vampire pushed off the floor of the elevator even as, beyond its stuck doors, Juliette began to hear the sound of men shouting. But in a moment, the shouts were all but inaudible, and Juliette and the vampire were airborne.
The flight was a short one, however. Azrael’s right arm held Juliette securely against him as they shot up the elevator shaft toward a set of doors farther up that were glowing. She had no more strength to wonder about the glowing doors—it was simply yet another supernatural novelty in a world that no longer made any logical sense.
Instead, she focused on them as they neared them and she let her mind go. She had no choice. She felt drugged, peaceful, and incapable of anger or escape.
The vampire stopped as they came to float before the doors, and he raised his free hand. The doors began to warp and then to spin. Out of the blurred mass of metal, a portal yawned open. Beyond the portal, Juliette could see what looked like a living room with leather sofas and chairs and a crackling fireplace.
And there were men there, waiting for them. She recognized two of them. One was Christopher Daniels, the famous movie actor.
The other was Gabriel Black.
Before Juliette could fully comprehend what was happening, the vampire was moving forward, through the portal, and time and space were warping around them. It was an extremely bizarre sensation, and she would not have been able to describe it had someone asked her. But her relaxed state took it in stride as they came out the other side and the portal door closed behind them.