It passed and Juliette lay there, her eyes closed, waiting.
There was a footfall beside her. Juliette opened her eyes to see Samael kneeling at her side. She blinked up at him, at once lost in his stormy gaze. He’s so beautiful.
He smiled at her, using gentle fingers to brush her hair out of her face. “How do you feel?”
“Fine,” she replied softly, feeling as if the world had melted into surrealism. She blinked and frowned and Sam laughed. He offered her his hand, helping her to sit up. Juliette looked down at her clothes, expecting to see them drenched in red, but they were untouched by anything other than a bit of rain.
No blood. No holes in the fabric—or in her flesh. Juliette ran her hand over her stomach, searching for the wound. It wasn’t there. She exhaled a little shakily and looked back up at Sam. She didn’t flinch or try to pull away when his warm hand cupped her cheek. “Did he hurt you?” he asked.
Juliette looked around at the mention of the Adarian—but she and Sam appeared to be alone beside the two cars on the deserted road. There was no sign of Daniel. She looked back at Sam and thought of Daniel and all he had done. The Adarian had set fire to an orphanage and trapped children inside, but he had never outwardly harmed her. He had given her sugar water and restored a little of her strength—quite the opposite of harming her. Apparently he hadn’t even shot her, as she’d thought he had.
She shook her head. “No,” she said.
“Then I will allow him to live,” he said softly, his eyes flashing with some untold, very serious emotion. He once more offered her his hand and began to rise, taking her with him. She came easily to her feet, not feeling any of the weakness she had felt before. Samael had restored her strength. She didn’t know how. She couldn’t comprehend the last ten minutes of her life at all—but there it was.
Sam towered over her, tall and strong and draped in power. She caught a faint whiff of cologne and it reinforced the effect of his nearness, making her feel strange. He was somehow forcing other thoughts from her mind, hiding her worry from her, drowning her fears.
She gazed up at him, unsure of what it was he wanted. “Why are you here?” she found herself asking. She was just so confused.
“That’s a very good question, Juliette,” Samael whispered, once more cupping her cheek. “And a very big one. But if you mean why am I here on this road with you right now—let’s just say that I’ve had my eye on a certain Adarian’s abilities for a while now.”
Juliette frowned. Daniel? He’d been after Daniel all this time? Was all of this solely so that he could get his hands on Daniel? Was that what he meant? She was clueless as to why he would go to so much trouble to secure an Adarian who could turn invisible. Samael seemed so much more powerful than that. And that was the crux of her perplexity right there. Samael, in general, confused the hell out of her.
“Why are you . . . here?” she asked, gesturing to the whole world around them.
“Ah.” He smiled a beautiful smile. “As to that, little one, I don’t have an answer to share with you.”
His reply echoed Lily’s earlier reply and once more, Juliette wondered whether he didn’t have an answer—or simply wasn’t willing to share the one he had.
“I will tell you this, however,” he continued. “The world is a dangerous place. Especially for an archess.” He leaned over, placed a tender kiss to her forehead, and then moved his lips to her ear. She closed her eyes, at once feeling dizzy. “Keep your wits about you, Juliette. Heed the lessons history has to teach.”
With that, he pulled away, just a little, and Juliette opened her eyes once more.
“Juliette!” A man’s cry caused her to jerk in Samael’s gentle grip and she whirled around, turning her back to him in order to see Gabriel, Michael, and Uriel racing down a nearby hill. They moved with unnatural speed, covering the distance in seconds and leaving Juliette a little breathless. Any woman staring out across the moors to find three supernaturally handsome men running full tilt straight for her is going to have the wind knocked out of her.
Gabriel reached her first, and she found herself pulled tightly into his arms before she could react. His grip was strong and his body radiated heat. “Juliette, wha’ in the bloody Christ are you doin’ out here?” he asked as he took her to arm’s length again and looked her over with flashing silver eyes.
Juliette’s mouth opened. She blinked. She glanced over her shoulder at Sam—but Sam wasn’t there. She was alone with the two cars—and three archangel brothers. She turned back to Gabriel and wondered where in the world to start.
Michael and Uriel scanned the area with glowing eyes. “When did you two get here?” she asked.
“Just now,” Michael replied without looking at her. His sapphire eyes were burning a bright, beautiful blue as he searched their surroundings. “Your boyfriend left one hell of a mess in the mansion, so we came straight away and more or less followed the road.” That explained how they’d found her; they probably knew that Daniel would take a car, and since they could move fast, it wasn’t long before they’d caught up. But the mess in the mansion?
She looked at Gabriel. He shook his head. “Long story, luv,” he said, waving the issue away. “You put out the fire.”
She nodded, blushing a little. “Yeah, I guess I sort of did.”
“An’ you saved Tristan.”
Again, she nodded, averting her gaze. His praise was making her uncomfortable. Gabriel cupped her cheek, much like Sam had done, but when Gabriel did it, it went deeper. He pulled her gaze back to his, trapping it in the silver of his soul. She felt as if she were being embraced by the land, the very earth itself. “Och, lass, bu’ how?” he asked, clearly almost breathless with wonder.
“I . . . I don’t know,” she replied, feeling distinctly embarrassed. “Was Beth okay?” she asked, changing the subject. Tristan had been so worried about his sister. They both had. The fire had been so strong.
“Aye, luv, she’s fine,” he said, brushing his thumb across her cheek the way he liked to do. “Thanks to you.” He leaned in then, taking her lips in a tender kiss. His heat suffused her, causing her to shudder as all traces of chill were chased away. When he finally pulled away, she was dizzy. “They said you’d been taken,” he told her, whispering his words across her lips. “By the man who shot the vicar.”
“I was,” she told him, recalling the way Daniel had pulled his trigger on the old man. “Oh God,” she said. “Did he—was he—”
“He did no’ make it, little one.”
A numb kind of sadness threatened inside of Juliette and she shook her head. “I was taken by the Adarian Daniel. He brought me here and was going to change cars, but then Sam came and—”
“Sam?” Uriel and Michael both stopped what they were doing and turned to face her, their attention at once focused on her.
“Samael was here?” Gabriel asked, his gaze narrowing, his grip on her arms tightening.
Juliette nodded. “Yes, but—”
Before she could explain further, the group was overtaken by a blast of wind so strong, it knocked Juliette and Gabriel into the car beside them. Gabriel was reacting instantly, yanking her around behind him and shielding her between himself and the source of the powerful air burst—the handful of Adarians now coming over the rise.
Uriel swore softly under his breath as he and Michael came to stand beside Gabriel, one on either side. Juliette recognized three of the Adarians. The black man, the dark-haired man, and the blond with blue eyes were the three who had attacked them at Callanish.
But there were three others there as well. All of them looked as tall and strong as their companions and Juliette’s stomach was beginning to turn. She tasted sour in her mouth.
“Where is he?” whispered Uriel.
“Where’s who?” Juliette asked.
“Abraxos,” Michael replied, his blue eyes trained on the men staring down at them. “He’s not with them.”
“He’s here somewhere,” said Gabriel.
“I can bloody well feel ’im.”
Juliette gazed up at the outline of tall, strong bodies and was reminded of that scene from The Lost Boys as David and his “boys” gazed down at Michael from the top of a hill. They had just finished “feeding,” on innocent prey. Was that what was about to happen now?
“I have to take your blood,” Daniel had told her.
“Juliette, get in the car,” Gabriel commanded. Juliette frowned, but when she felt the solidity of the vehicle behind her begin to waver and warp, she understood. Gabriel was opening a portal through the car door.
Just then Gabriel swore under his breath, and the world was turned upside down.
The earth began to quake, the temperature dropped fifty degrees, and Michael was struck by a stray bolt of lightning. The cacophony ripped through the atmosphere, destroying all other sound. The ground bucked beneath Juliette, shooting her forward and onto her knees as the portal behind her swirled closed once more, blocking her only exit. She looked up, shoving the hair out of her face to see that Gabriel was wrapped in a force field like plastic wrap that picked him up off the ground and tossed him into the air. She screamed, rushing forward, but was cut off as Uriel jerked her to a halt and swung her around to face him.
“Get in the car!” he bellowed. Even without the portal, he was right. It was the safest place for her right now because as soon as any of them could manage it, they could open a portal through the doors and she could slip on through.
But before she could obey him, the world was cast into utter and complete darkness. Juliette cried out as Uriel’s body was simultaneously ripped away from hers and she wondered if she’d gone blind. She put her hands to her eyes, rubbed them, and then reached out around her, trying desperately not to panic. All she could feel was the car, and her fingers were quickly beginning to freeze in the unnaturally dropped temperature. On instinct, she slid down low against the car and shoved her hands into her pockets for whatever warmth they could afford. She was crying; she could feel the tears freezing into ice streams on her cheeks.
And then her fingers brushed something smooth and hard. The bracelet, she realized, as she recalled Gabriel giving it to her days ago. She had changed several times—but the bracelet had always somehow come back to her, taking up residence in her jacket pocket once more.
There were sounds everywhere, the earth was shaking, and the super-subfreezing temperature was causing her lungs to burn with each intake of breath. Her teeth hurt when she opened her mouth, and her nostrils were freezing shut. There was an explosion nearby and a grunt of pain and then there was a crackling sound, as if a column of ice was crashing to the ground.
“Heed the lessons history has to teach.” Samael’s words echoed in her mind, somehow managing to be heard in the entropy of her thoughts even over the amazing dissonance of the crumbling, crackling world around her. What lessons? she thought frantically. What lessons have I ever dealt with in any of my many lifetimes that would prepare me for battle with Adarians?
Juliette’s heart was going rapid-fire behind her lungs; terror clutched at her with fingers as cold as the air around her. She ducked her head into the car door, instinctively shielding her face, when lightning struck again somewhere nearby. She could see nothing. Her existence had gone black.
I’m gonna die, she thought hysterically. I’m gonna die and I never got my PhD. I never even did the research. The only thing I even read at all was that stupid half of a page that Law somehow slid into my cottage room closet—
The magical, absolute darkness she had been draped in lifted then, casting her into sudden moving color that matched the sounds she’d been hearing. She unshielded her face in time to see the blond, blue-eyed Adarian who had attacked her at Callanish go sailing into the side of a peat-bog-carved hill. His back collided with the brown grass and freezing mud, sending a cascade of the muck high into the air. It had been Uriel who had tossed him into the moor—Uriel, who now sported massive black-feathered wings that allowed him to hover several dozen feet in the air above them.
Juliette’s jaw dropped and she gasped, pulling frozen air deep into her lungs and searing them with cold from the inside out. She coughed violently and hugged herself, her eyes hurriedly skating over the scene, taking everything in.
Gabriel and the large black Adarian were fighting hand to hand once more. Both men were bleeding in various places and Juliette’s heart ached at the sight. The blond and Uriel were going at each other, the blond apparently possessing some ability that allowed him to move bodies around in space. Uriel landed, his giant black wings folding behind him and then disappearing altogether before he and the blond rushed each other at full speed. They collided, each with his hands clasped tightly around the other’s neck.
Juliette ripped her gaze off them to find Michael battling not one but two Adarians. His clothes were singed in places, mementos from the lightning, but he’d obviously healed himself, and as he finished dealing with one Adarian, knocking him to the ground with a blow or a shove, another attacked, taking on his immense strength and skill. Juliette was incredibly impressed with the former Warrior Archangel. He obviously still had most of that warrior within him.
But the cold was getting to her now; the temperature was continuing to drop. She was losing the feeling in her fingers and toes. She looked away from Michael and his opponents to find the dark-haired Adarian from Callanish standing twenty yards away, staring at her once again. The expression on his face as he watched her was both intense and unreadable. He looked troubled. His black eyes sparkled like obsidian ice in this new field of hard winter. He was the one controlling the temperature. He was making it hard for her to think, to move, and probably making it difficult for the archangels to fight.
Lightning bolt him, she told herself. But even her mind seemed to be stuttering now, slow and sluggish in the freeze. She looked up at the pitch black above her and tried to focus on the clouds she couldn’t see. The ground bucked beneath her, throwing her back into the car behind her. She hit hard, the wind knocked from her lungs, and stars swam in her vision.
Why doesn’t he just kill me? she wondered then, as she slid against the car and curled her legs up to her chest. The dark-haired Adarian was powerful enough to stop her from fighting back. He controlled the air they breathed and the ground they walked on. What was he waiting for?
She blinked away the pain from her impact and looked up at him again. Still, he watched her, his expression one of utter fascination. She felt like he was inside of her, listening to her thoughts and feeding her fear. She glared at him, hoping that for that brief, painful moment he actually could read her mind. Bite me, she thought at him.
“He will, little one, when it’s his turn.”
Juliette spun on the ground, her head snapping up to meet a pair of ice-blue eyes. A black-haired man hovered nearly upside down above her, unmoving in the freezing air. He was uncommonly handsome, reminding her instantly of one of the four favored. He smiled, flashing two elongated, wickedly sharp fangs.
Juliette screamed. A bloodcurdling howl of horror escaped her throat as she felt the earth drop down beneath her. Ten feet. Twenty. All at once, she was breaking through the bonds of gravity as the man with blue eyes and fangs ripped her away from the world and took her into the heavens.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“Juliette!” Gabriel saw Juliette being ripped from the ground and torn through the sky, but there was nothing he could do about it. His opponent took advantage of his brief lapse in concentration, taking him by the throat and tossing him to the ground so that the wind was knocked violently from his lungs. Gabriel rolled across the frost-covered ground, shoved himself back up, forced his lungs to expand, and called for his brother.
“Uriel!” he bellowed, but he needn’t have bothered. Uriel had seen Abraxos take Juliette. His black and emerald wings exploded from his back, stretching to their full, impressive length in a heartbeat.
The former Angel of Vengeance leapt into the night sky, shooting
across the darkness like a raven rocket. He didn’t get far. As suddenly as he’d taken to the air, he was ripped from it, yanked to a halt by another insidious force field that wrapped around his airborne body and flung him to the ground like a rag doll. Uriel had enough foresight to brace for the impact and roll as he struck down, but the hardened air wrapped around him once more, picking him up and slamming him back down into the ground with vicious force.
Gabriel knew it was his own opponent responsible; he could see the man’s amber eyes glowing like double suns, burning with power as he flung the force field at Uriel. Gabriel shoved himself up from the ground, rushed the black man, and called his own power to the fore at the same time.
As they collided, the force field evaporated and Gabriel braced his hand against the Adarian’s clothing, weaving gold into it with unearthly speed. The Adarian bellowed in agony as the gold began to sear his flesh.
Thirty yards away, Uriel once more pulled himself up off the ground and leapt into the sky. Gabriel watched him go with a mind-numbing sense of ambivalence. He wondered whether it was too late.
Azrael! As Gabriel wrestled with his smoking opponent, he once more called for his vampiric brother. Azrael hadn’t come through the portal with Uriel and Michael, and neither had Max. They hadn’t made it home yet; only Uriel and Michael had seen the wreckage of the mansion’s main room and immediately put two and two together to come after Gabriel.
But Gabriel needed Az. If anyone could track down an Adarian turned vampire, it was an archangel turned vampire. Azrael was the very first vampire in existence; his powers measured greater than those of his brothers’ combined, and he could perform scries at will. Az! I need you! Gabriel had no pride in that moment.
He picked his opponent up off the ground and flung him with all his archangel strength against a nearby boulder. The man went flying through the air, leaving a trail of smoke behind him like a failing jet engine. He struck the stone, cracking the rock beneath him with immense force.