Juliette turned to stare out the tall sliding glass doors at the rising tide. She couldn’t really claim to believe any longer that Gabriel had planned that attack. As little as she knew about him, it still felt wrong. Gabriel really had saved her.
He really was an angel.
Barring the fact that she’d always assumed angels to be cherubic figures with tiny, flittering dove wings and bows and arrows, the scenario made sense. In a sick sort of way. It explained so much. It explained her powers. It explained why she had been so fascinated with Gabriel’s profile in that tavern bar before he had even turned around and she’d seen his face. It explained the impossible sexual hunger he awakened within her with no more than a glance. And his kisses?
“Christ,” she mumbled, closing her eyes once more. “It explains everything.”
Juliette pushed off the couch and headed back to her room to get dressed. Halfway there, she stopped and shook her head, smiling a wry smile. She’d forgotten to do a load of laundry and all her clothes were dirty. She would also probably have to put some money into the generator in order to work up enough power to get the washing machine going. Electricity was like that in Scotland, and especially in highly remote places such as Luskentyre on the Western Isles.
Juliette opened the door to her room and again stopped dead. Her suitcase was lying open and inside were all her clothes—and more—freshly folded, except her dresses, which were lying out across the bed.
Without missing a beat, Juliette knew it was Sam again. Whatever he was, he was powerful. And very considerate.
She moved to the bed and gazed down at the clothes lying across it. They were gorgeous but also looked warm and comfortable. They were exactly the kinds of clothes she would purchase for herself if she had enough money to shop the Burberry, Gucci, Hilfiger, or Kors lines. Samuel had known exactly what her tastes were.
Juliette ran her hand along the leather and fleece aviator’s jacket from Burberry and experienced a shiver of pure, hard delight. Was it even right to accept such a thing from someone? Then again, she’d already accepted so much from him. . . . What did it matter to add to it now? It was probably horrible reasoning, but she was a bit emotionally drained at the moment. She was also cold. The clothing looked warm. And she’d always admired Burberry.
Without giving it further thought, Juliette dressed in a new pair of jeans, a warm long-sleeved shirt, a pair of boots, and the Burberry jacket. Then she headed back to the kitchen to put the teakettle on.
She jumped a good two inches when there was a knock on the door in front of her. Her eyes flew to the sliding door and stared through the glass at the woman standing outside. She was dressed in a floor-length parka, which looked warm, but perhaps a bit much for Scotland at that time of year. She also looked familiar. The woman raised her hand and gave a little wave.
“Lily?” Juliette asked, realizing that it was the woman from the hotel. She worked for Samuel Lambent. Another shiver wracked through Juliette’s petite frame, but this one wasn’t so pleasant. She looked down at herself and the new clothes she wore and then she looked back up at Lily. The woman smiled sheepishly and shrugged, mouthing the word “Sorry.”
Juliette made her way to the door, unlocking it to slide it open. “Lily?” she asked, bracing herself against the wind and chill that instantly struck her exposed face. The rest of her was cozy warm.
“I’m sorry, Miss Anderson,” Lily said urgently. “But I really felt that we needed to talk. My name isn’t Lily,” she said. “It’s Lilith. And I need to speak with you about Samuel Lambent.”
* * *
“I’m gonna kill him,” Gabriel growled.
“Good luck with that,” said Uriel.
“Wow, this week is a déjà vu train wreck,” said Michael, running a hand through his thick blond curls. “We’ve been here before, people. I can’t believe you’re surprised by this anymore. Sam is a bastard. He’s also very smart. We really should learn to expect this kind of thing, don’t you think?”
“Michael’s right,” said Max. “He may have helped us on the battlefield outside of Texas a few months ago, but I’d chalk that up to his way of confusing the hell out of us and call it good.”
“You could have warned me.” Gabriel turned on Azrael, who was leaning against the fireplace in his stone chamber of a room, his arms crossed casually over his broad chest. He’d returned from feeding twenty minutes ago. The vampire just stared at Gabriel, his expression unreadable. But his gold eyes began to glow.
“Don’t go there, Gabe,” warned Michael. “Whether Az could have told you about the contract or not, you never gave him the chance. Lay off.”
“And you say I’m the hotheaded one,” muttered Uriel as he lifted himself up onto the stone altar upon which Azrael normally slept. He looked down at the stone slab and then around the room. “This brings back memories.”
“Boys, we need to focus.” Ellie crossed her arms over her chest and turned in place, eyeing each of the archangels with impatience. “Speaking from experience, Samael isn’t going to hurt Juliette, and we know that it was Sam’s doing that she disappeared. So, she’s probably safe.”
“You’re working under the assumption that he still wants an archess for himself,” Max told her.
“No, I’m working under the assumption that Sam isn’t that kind of person. He’s not violent toward women. It’s not his style.” Ellie shrugged and looked at the ground. “I don’t know how else to tell you. I just know that Sam doesn’t want to hurt us. He may be sneaky and conniving and underhanded, but he was always a gentleman with me. He has something else in mind.”
“Like what?” Michael asked.
“I have no idea.” Ellie shook her head helplessly. “But the thing we should be focusing on right now is where Jules may have gone. I wouldn’t automatically assume that Sam would yank her back to him.”
“Why not?” Uriel asked.
“Because,” Max butted in, “she’ll be on the defensive, and Sam’s not stupid. He doesn’t want her to think ill of him. He’ll send her somewhere else to calm down for a while.”
“Right,” Ellie agreed. “As long as you’ve received the message loud and clear that you’re not allowed to bad-mouth Sam in front of the new archess, nothing else will really matter to him.”
“He’s very touchy about his little secrets, isn’t he?” Uriel muttered, clearly reliving his own experience of attempting to disclose Samael’s true identity to his archess.
Gabriel watched them all for a moment, his mind spinning at a thousand RPMs. He figured they were probably right and Juliette had come to no harm. Sam was a lot of dangerous things, but an outwardly aggressive individual he had never been.
So Juliette was safe. And hopefully he and his brothers had managed to fill her head with enough of the truth about what she was and about what they were that it would simmer for a while, and she might even come around to believing them. He hated that he hadn’t had more time with her, but he’d been a fool not to expect this. Like Michael had said—they needed to be on their toes with Samael. They were learning.
Gabriel wanted to ask Azrael to perform a scry and find out just where in the bloody hell Juliette actually was at that moment, but he figured that he probably wasn’t on the vampire archangel’s good side just then. Admittedly, Gabe wasn’t behaving like himself. He was picking a fight with the entire world. This whole affair was getting to him. Two thousand years and he’d always managed to remain relatively cool in a crisis. He’d had no idea that someone as small and unassuming as his little archess would wind up tossing every last ounce of his sanity out the window.
“I’ll do it,” Az said suddenly, straightening from where he’d been leaning against the hearth. “And then I must rest.”
Gabriel didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. He was more grateful than words most likely would have expressed anyway.
Max looked questioningly from Az to Gabriel, as did Michael and Uriel. But Eleanore didn’t seem surpr
ised. She’d probably been thinking the same thing Gabriel had. She was a smart girl. Uriel was a lucky archangel.
The others figured out relatively quickly what he was going to do when Azrael gracefully sat down on the rug-covered stone floor in front of the fireplace and began to gaze into the rising flames. He didn’t need something like that to stare into when performing a scry, but it seemed to help, because he preferred it.
“She’s in Luskentyre,” he said a few seconds later. “In the cottage she rented.”
He stood then, in one fluid, unnatural movement, and extinguished the fire with a wave of his hand. At the same time, the torches in their sconces along the wall burst to fiery life. “Now leave. It’s past my bedtime.” He smiled, flashing fangs.
Gabriel watched Max and the others leave. He slowly followed behind them. But before stepping out into the stone corridor that would lead him to the rest of the mansion up above, he turned and looked back at Azrael.
The vampire was watching him steadily.
“Thank you,” Gabriel said.
“You’re welcome,” Azrael replied. “And I should probably also tell you this,” he added. Gabriel waited, tensing up as he expected the worst. “Sam’s been very busy on the enticement front.”
“Wha’s that supposed to mean?” Gabriel asked, gaze narrowed.
“She doesn’t hate him,” Az replied simply. “She’s also not alone at the moment. Lilith is with her.”
Gabriel frowned. Lilith was with Juliette? Why?
Obviously reading his mind, Az shrugged and leapt, very vampirelike, on top of the stone slab upon which he would be sleeping. “Lilith may work with Samael, but her loyalty to him runs through a strange and secret vein,” he said as he lay down and closed his eyes. “Who knows why she does what she does? But my guess is that she doesn’t wish the archess to be alone while the Adarians are yet at large.”
Gabriel felt very torn. He liked Lilith. All the archangels did, and everyone knew that Max had fallen head over heels for her at least a thousand bloody years ago. Gabe was grateful that Juliette wouldn’t be alone right now.
But where did that leave him? Where did he go from here? What was he supposed to do now?
“There’s always the old-fashioned way,” Az said. His eyes were still closed, but a smile was curling the corners of his handsome mouth. “You could make amends. You could woo her,” he said before his smile broke into a full-fledged grin, fangs pronounced and gleaming in the torchlight.
“As if that’ll work after wha’ I’ve already pu’ her through,” Gabriel said.
“Women are amazing creatures, Gabriel,” Azrael said as his smile slipped from his face and his features relaxed. He was sliding into sleep. “Give them the credit they’re due. Juliette may surprise you.”
* * *
Juliette had never liked Tuesdays. They were worse than Mondays as far as she was concerned. On Monday it sucked because you had the entire week ahead of you, and you were relentlessly bombarded with all the crap that everyone was able to think up over the weekend. But Tuesdays were brutal because you were already tired from Monday, and you still had four long-ass days ahead of you, and it was a safe bet that you didn’t get half of the stuff you had to do on Monday finished anyway.
But this Tuesday was different. It wasn’t harried or frantic—it was surreal. And if it and the Monday preceding it were any indication of what the rest of the week would be like, she was going to have to take up drinking. Or sniffing glue.
“Okay,” Juliette said, placing her hands palms down on her lap and taking a deep breath. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight.”
Lily, or “Lilith,” as she’d told Juliette her real name was, had been in the rental cottage for the last four hours, telling Jules the truth about Samuel Lambent—also known as Samael—and his very tricky contracts. She had also filled Juliette in on the other archangels and the Adarians. And so far, everything but the news about Samael had been a repeat of what the archangels had already told her.
“The Old Man made me for Gabriel—and then tossed me down to Earth to protect me. And this was two thousand years ago?” Lilith nodded. She raised her teacup to her lips and took a sip. Juliette frowned. “Where have I been for the last two thousand years, then?”
Lilith put her cup in the saucer in her hand and tilted her head to one side. She studied Juliette closely, and not for the first time, Jules was struck by the way Lilith looked so young, though her black eyes looked ancient. “I think that’s a very good question, Juliette.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well.” Lilith shrugged slightly and turned to look out the window at the turquoise water at the shore. “Where do you feel like you’ve been?” she asked without looking at Juliette.
“Nowhere,” Jules answered without thinking. It was a weird question. There couldn’t be a correct answer for it.
But Lilith turned away from the windows and pinned her with that dark gaze once more. “Are you sure about that?”
Juliette blinked several times. And then she looked away, picked up her own teacup, and hurriedly brought it to her lips. The truth was, no—she didn’t feel as if she’d been nowhere. For years she had been haunted by dreams filled with images of crumbling castles overlaid with the transparent impressions of what the buildings had looked like thousands of years ago. She’d dreamed of cemeteries both old and new, streets made of cobblestones and yet paved in asphalt.
She’d always wondered why she had these dreams. She wondered why, when she picked up a book with a photograph or painting of the past, it felt familiar to her. It was the reason she had focused on history and ethnography in school, and it was why she spent so much of her free time in libraries or online, browsing books and maps and pictures of what had been long ago.
She didn’t feel as if she had never been anywhere. She felt as if she’d been everywhere. Or, at least, everywhen.
“What about Eleanore Granger?” she asked, wanting to take the attention off herself. “Why wasn’t she found before now? If what you all tell me is true, then archesses are coming out of the woodwork after two thousand years. Why?”
“That’s a good question, too,” Lilith said, smiling a strange, secret smile. “But I’m afraid I don’t have an answer I can share with you.”
Juliette mulled that over, wondering whether it meant that Lily didn’t have an answer at all—or just wasn’t going to share the one she did have. Finally, she changed the subject entirely and asked, “If Samuel Lambent is actually Samael, is this deal he made with me even real? Do I still need to collect this information for his show?”
“Oh, it’s real,” Lilith said, setting both her cup and saucer on the coffee table in front of them. “He is a media mogul, after all. He may not be human, but he’s lived amongst them for thousands of years. One thing he’s always been good at is multitasking.” At this, Lilith chuckled softly. “He might be turning the world upside down with one hand, but at the same time, he’ll be making money with the other.”
“So this miniseries he wants is on the level? It wasn’t just a ruse to get me to meet with him?”
Lilith considered her words carefully. “He will definitely follow through with the miniseries, and most likely, it will get great ratings. Everything he creates does. But he’s not opposed to killing two birds with one stone, and yes, he did initially use the proposal to bring you to him.” She stopped and considered something else, and then shrugged. “Not that he couldn’t simply meet you whenever he wanted to without any kind of scheme.”
Juliette put her teacup down on the table. “But the business about the warlock . . . that’s all a lie, isn’t it?”
Lilith shook her head. “Every untruth has at least the tiniest amount of truth to it,” she said. “For all intents and purposes, archesses do possess a special kind of magic. And there is another being of immense power out there who wishes to take that magic from you.”
“But it isn’t Gabriel, is it?” It wasn’t real
ly a question. Juliette already knew the answer. Lawrence McNabb had said the warlock had black hair—and eyes of a different color. He hadn’t come out and said those eyes were silver. According to Gabriel and his brothers, Abraxos, the leader of the Adarians, had black hair and blue eyes. It was the Adarian General who wanted Juliette’s power. He was the warlock—not Gabriel.
Lilith shook her head, her eyes twinkling. “No. I think it’s safe to say that Gabriel wants something entirely different from you, Juliette.”
A rush of warmth thrummed through Juliette at those words. It was akin to a best friend telling you in high school that your crush is crushing right back. But this was stronger. She ducked her head, rubbed her hands on her jeans, and changed the subject again. “Lilith . . .” She trailed off as she thought about how best to put forth her next question. “Gabriel and the others . . . they dislike Sam greatly. Is Samael a bad man? Is he that dangerous? He’s never been anything but kind to me. And if he was talking about the Adarians when he made up that warlock story—then he was in fact warning me, wasn’t he?”
Lilith straightened in her seat and gazed steadily at Juliette. The look in her dark, dark eyes was suddenly so intense, Juliette felt uncomfortable there beneath it.
“Good and evil are subjective, Juliette,” Lilith said, her tone much more serious than it had been a moment ago. “But as to whether or not Samael is dangerous . . . let’s just say I wouldn’t take him lightly.” She paused a moment, then added, “Ever.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Lilith stayed with Juliette until a few hours later, when there was a second knock on the door. Angus Dougal stood on the doorstep, his hands on his hips, his green eyes turned out to sea.