Men and women alike stopped to ogle her, but she was unaware of their attention. Her focus was turned inward, most likely to whatever it had been she’d just taken care of in the admissions office. Angel knew what it was. The archess had just been accepted, with scholarship, to the dance program at Berkeley.
Angel had done a little research on the archess, as she always did with these precious, irreplaceable women. Like Eleanore Granger, this archess was clueless about what she was and the important role she would play in the very near future. To add to her ignorance, this particular archess had yet to develop any of her abilities. Angel was unsure as to why that was, but she wasn’t surprised. Each girl was alike in some ways and decidedly different in others.
Whether she was aware of her preciousness or not, the very fact that she seemed to cast some kind of spell over everyone she passed was enough to set her apart from the rest of humanity. She was an unwitting beacon, and the world was becoming increasingly dangerous by the second. Which was why Angel was there.
The golden-haired archess broke into a long-legged sprint toward the nearest bus stop and barely managed to catch the cabled vehicle before it pulled out and continued on its route. Angel prepared to move into the crowd and follow—until a presence filled the air around her and a footfall sounded from behind her in the alleyway.
“Well, well,” came an unfamiliar voice.
She didn’t recognize the speaker, but she knew the sensation. The power that emanated from the stranger was filled with the smell of incense and nighttime and what Angel had come to think of as the scent of dreams. It was also decidedly sexual. Her skin flushed pleasantly, her nipples hardened, and her body grew a little heavier.
It was the calling card presence of a Nightmare.
Angel slowly turned to face the incubus, every muscle in her body preparing for a supernatural fight. Even as she did, she threw up her mental shields, at once thinking of the archess and her protection.
“What have we here?” the newcomer asked, smiling an unabashedly wicked smile. He was tall, but not nearly as tall as his king. His brown hair was shaggy and he wore jeans and a tight blue t-shirt that matched his eyes and fit his upper body like a glove. To a mortal woman, he would have been tempting to say the least. But Angel had had better offers. And she wasn’t at all mortal.
“Leave, Nightmare. I won’t tell you again,” she warned, not wanting to waste time with bogus pleasantries. He was there to seduce her and screw her brains out. She wasn’t interested and she highly doubted that his king would appreciate his attention where she was concerned. If anything, telling him to blow might just save his life.
The incubus paused in the alleyway, his expression at once a mixture of confusion and surprise. “You aren’t human,” he stated simply. Only a nonhuman would call him a Nightmare. In fact, only a nonhuman would recognize him on sight for what he truly was. “What are you?” he asked next, all pretext of charm gone.
“It couldn’t be less of your business,” Angel told him plainly. Since her encounter with the Nightmare King, she’d gone to the trouble of changing her eyes, skin, and hair a number of times, as if the more she changed them, the more layers of disguise she could drape over her true form. At the moment, she had shoulder-length straight brown hair, brown eyes, and pale skin that she kept hidden beneath long sleeves and jeans. She’d put in extra effort to make the brown of her eyes flat and the color of her hair mousy. But it was pretense, she knew. A Nightmare would be able to see right through it in a heartbeat.
“Really?” he asked incredulously. He took a slow, threatening step toward her. “A beautiful woman who obviously possesses some amount of power is found sulking in an alleyway, wrapped in enough clothing to mummify three Egyptian kings, and you don’t think I’m going to want to know why?”
“Oh, I think you want to know,” Angel said as she sent mental feelers out for her magic and prepped for destruction. “I said it wasn’t any of your business.” With that, she let loose a bolt of her power, purposefully sending it blasting into the brick wall behind the incubus.
The Nightmare ducked and shielded his face as shards of red rock went flying in all directions and hit the ground to skitter along the cement. Smoke rose from the new hole in the wall.
Luckily, it wasn’t overly loud; more like a large rock hitting another rock surface. Otherwise, the students milling about outside of the alley might have taken an interest. As it was, Angel realized by the shocked but highly intrigued look on the incubus’s face that her warning hadn’t quite had the effect she had been hoping for.
He straightened, lowered his arm, and eyed her with frank curiosity. “She has claws,” he muttered softly, more to himself than to anyone else.
Angel immediately used another of her powers, and fire gathered in the upturned palm of her hand. The ball of flame swirled and pulsed, ready to be hurled at the incubus should he still not take the hint and leave.
“Indeed she does,” came a third, deep voice from further down the alley. “And you have no idea how long and sharp they can be.”
Angel glanced in that direction and the incubus turned to look as well, but as of yet, there was no one there. Still, Angel would recognize the voice anywhere. And from the way the incubus across from her took a wary step back, she could see he recognized the voice as well.
There was a small flash of light that reminded Angel of the way the gods used to appear and disappear on the old television show, Xena, Warrior Princess. And then the scent of sandalwood and leather drifted toward her.
When the light was gone, Hesperos stood where there had been nothing before. He barely waited to be fully materialized before he was striding toward them and the other Nightmare was dropping to his knees in the alley, head bowed in respect. Angel watched as Hesperos approached him, shooting only a single, meaningful glance Angel’s way before turning his full attention to his subject.
“You have business elsewhere tonight, Leonidas.”
Leonidas looked up, daring to meet his king’s eyes. Hesperos held the gaze, his arms at his sides, his expression unreadable. “We’ll finish this later.”
With that, Leonidas nodded once, bent low again, and then vanished in the same kind of flash and puff of smoke that Hesperos had arrived in. When he was gone and the alley was empty but for the two of them, the Nightmare King turned to Angel and looked her up and down, his steel green eyes glinting like gun metal in the weak rays of twilight from the alley’s exit.
And then he smiled and shook his head, placing his hands on his narrow hips. “You’re full of surprises, precious one.”
Chapter Seven
Angel let the fire in her palm go out and slowly lowered her hand. It took a good amount of energy to maintain magic like that and Hesperos was weakening her already. From the moment he’d appeared, she’d been flayed by his overwhelming presence. Her skin felt warm, her heart was beating faster than was strictly comfortable, and her throat had gone dry. She couldn’t help but remember what he felt like as he kissed her . . . and did other things to her. Two thousand years hadn’t managed to dim that memory.
She cleared her throat as best she could and shook her head. “Following me now, Hesperos?” Her voice cracked a little.
The king spread his hands at his sides. “Always,” he said softly.
At once, Angel wondered how much he had seen, how much he had heard. How long had he been floating about as nothing but a specter, keeping tabs on her? If he’d been reading over her shoulder as she had studied up on the archess . . . that would be bad.
“So, let me see if I can get this straight,” he said now, rubbing his chin thoughtfully and allowing his powerful gaze to drop to the rubble in the alley. “You’re obviously immortal—or very long lived at the least,” he said, almost conversationally. He spoke as if he were simply sorting out the facts. As he did, he paced toward her, once more circling around her in the sharklike fashion he managed so well.
It fit him. He was most definitely a pr
edator, and Angel had never felt more like prey in her life. She swallowed hard and simply listened.
“You can change your hair, eyes, and skin color, but not your features,” he added, glancing up to blatantly appreciate her figure. Angel’s mouth went a little drier, but he continued. “You can create and manipulate fire. And you wield some sort of force blast.”
Here, he stopped, faced her fully, and crossed his arms over his chest. “But that’s not the best part,” he said, his voice having dropped a little. He cocked his head to one side, his green-gray eyes once more piercing her to the core. “Word through the supernatural grapevine is that you’ve been cleaning house, Angel,” he said.
Angel’s heart skipped up into her throat and her head suddenly felt tight, like someone was squeezing it in a vice. Blood rushed through her ears.
“A wraith in Pittsburgh, an Icaran in upstate New York, another Icaran in Brisbane, Australia—and just now. . . .” He looked down at the ground between them and filled it with his boot as he took a step toward her. “You gave him a warning, I’ll admit. But you would have done away with my subject without a second notice. Am I right?”
“Like you said,” Angel told him, taking a step back, “I did warn him.”
Hesperos smiled a small, almost sad smile and shook his head just a little, taking another step forward. “What are you protecting, Angel? If I recall correctly, you didn’t have a problem with our kind two thousand years ago.” He took another step as Angel backed herself into the wall. “What’s changed?”
Nothing, she thought hastily. She projected the thought at him with tremendous force, knowing that if he wanted to, he could once again enter her mind and steal her unspoken words from where they lay. Nothing, she thought again, wanting only to protect the secret she kept. Nothing, nothing, nothing. . . .
“I wonder,” Hesperos said as he reached up and pushed the hood of her zip-up sweatshirt off her head. “I wonder who you’re hiding from. It’s not me,” he said, raising a brow. “After all, I’ve already found you.” His voice was so reasonable, his logic so methodical, a shiver rushed across her skin. She felt as if they were on the verge of something truly damaging—something irreparable. “So who is it, precious one?”
Angel shook her head, tore her gaze from his, and shoved past him with all of her strength. She took long steps down the alley, moving with tremendous speed toward the exit. All she wanted in that moment was to put some space between them. She knew damn well that the Nightmare King could not be defeated by force blasts, hurled balls of fire, or any of the other things she could do with the powers she possessed. In his true form, he was incorporeal. He was the very essence of lust, of need, and sexual hunger. He was invisible, intangible, and devastatingly powerful. A single brush of his spirit across a woman’s flesh could make her orgasm like she’d never dreamed. And that was nothing compared to what he could do if truly threatened.
All Angel had going for her in this power struggle between them was her strength of will, the mental walls she was so good at erecting around herself—and Hesperos’s unfailing honor.
Honor or not, Angel didn’t get far before she was stopped by something that cut across her path, a massive shadow that blocked the daylight from her eyes. “I’ll figure it out eventually, little one,” came his deep, sultry voice as she walked straight into his rock-hard chest and stumbled back a step. He steadied her with quick efficiency and then ran a hand through her straight brown hair. “You try so hard to hide who you are, but your spirit shines through like lightning on a dark night.”
“Lightning burns, Hesperos,” she told him, jerking out of his grasp. It took too much effort this time to put distance between them. He was getting to her with his sandalwood and leather scent, his perfect rock-hard sculpted body, even his fucking tattoos. The sound of his boots on the ground echoed with just the right amount of dangerous anticipation. His touch was like the richest, creamiest, most delicious chocolate. It set off a fireworklike series of synapses in her brain’s pleasure center. She wanted more.
“Oh, I know, Angel,” he said. “I remember.”
There was no warning. Hesperos was two feet away one second, and in the next, he was gone and his essence was rushing over her full blast. Angel’s legs gave out from beneath her as an orgasm ripped ruthlessly through her body, flooding her with a relentless, throbbing bliss that robbed her of all coherent thought. She cried out in ecstasy and fear as the orgasm intensified to the point of perfect, delicious, impossible pain.
And then his spirit lifted and Angel fell forward, gasping under the force of her waning pleasure. The alley was silent but for the sounds of her ragged breathing. Angel was once more alone.
When she returned to her apartment this time, she felt well-and-truly drained. Not only had she transported four times and changed her appearance repeatedly that day, she’d used telekinesis to save a cat from being been hit by a car, stopped a brush fire in West Texas, healed a five-year-old of leukemia, conjured a force blast and a ball of fire, and had been weakened by the Nightmare King’s insidious, incredible magic. Her two-bedroom, seventh-floor apartment had never looked so welcoming.
Angel stepped into the small foyer past the threshold of her apartment’s door and stopped to listen. Her world was being turned on its ear these days; you couldn’t be too careful. But she heard nothing, sensed nothing, and smelled nothing out of the ordinary.
So, she shut and bolted the door behind her and then headed straight into the kitchen. The fridge emitted a blast of frigid air as she swung the door open. Three beers left. Without hesitating, she reached in and pulled one out, twisting the cap off with a touch of telekinesis. It was easier than trying to twist it off by hand or fumbling through the kitchen drawers to locate the bottle opener.
She didn’t normally drink, but that first sip of uber cold brew on a tired throat was like a magic all its own.
Angel took her beer into the livingroom with her and glanced at the TV and its neighboring remote. Sam wasn’t on the TV nearly as much these days as he had been twenty years ago. He was established now, more famous than God. And just as elusive.
Interviews were sparse and were almost never video taped. His words alone were recorded most of the time and interviewers were grateful for those. Angel was well aware of his reasons for this. The man was an incredibly charismatic, magnetic figure who hadn’t aged in the last several decades. He hadn’t aged in the last several millennia. People were sure to notice. Of course, plastic surgery was a good fallback excuse and Sam certainly had money for the best, but why take chances?
Angel plopped down onto her overstuffed sofa and thought about everything that she had seen in the last week. She’d laid eyes on three of the four archesses.
Twenty years ago, when she’d found Eleanore Granger healing a playmate in the school yard, Angel had had to come to grips with the reality of her situation. For twenty centuries, she had fought for the force of good, saving humanity from things it could not even comprehend and had no idea existed. Granted, for most of that time, the supernatural creatures of Earth had all but disappeared, leaving the surface of the planet to the more creative and cruel imaginations of human murderers and miscreants. There had been war, disease, famine, and prosecution. Angel was no hero. She was able to save a life here or there, even the odds every now and then, and set a few wrongs to right. But on the whole, humanity had borne its crosses on its own.
However, despite how little she was able to accomplish on a grand scale, Angel realized that without the powers she’d been given, without her presence on the planet, a good deal more suffering would have gone down. There were plagues humanity was unaware had ever been a threat—because Angel had nipped them in the bud. Very important people had remained alive through diseases or accidents in order to make necessary changes in the course of history—because Angel had kept them alive.
The world would probably never know how much of a hand one single woman had had in the steering of its fate. It wasn??
?t a perfect world. Some days, Angel felt an aching despair at how it seemed to roller coaster itself through ups that were too proud and triumphant and downs that were absolutely devastating. The tragedies that arose struck Angel through an empathy that most people could never comprehend. She felt their pain as if it were her own.
It was a curse from which there was no cure. But it was probably also her most precious gift. Without the compassion that arose from this pain, she would not have been so driven to make the differences she made.
However, Angel had known from the very beginning that she was on a time limit. There were only so many years afforded to her before things were destined to change. Two thousand. Give or take a decade or two. That was how long she would have before the events that had been promised would come to fruition and everything would change.
When Angel had seen Eleanore Granger heal the other child on the playground, she’d realized that those events had already been put into motion. Eleanore was the first archess. When all four archesses were mated with their archangels . . . the Culmination would begin. Samael would realize the truth. And Angel would no longer be free to remain here on Earth to do the good she’d been doing for two millennia.
Chapter Eight
Angel awoke nearly twenty-two hours later, at six in the late afternoon. Her schedule was different from that of most people’s anyway; that happened when you normally fought bad guys all night long. And this time, she’d particularly needed to catch up on rest.
She lay in bed staring up at the ceiling, thinking about one of the three things that had been occupying her thoughts nonstop of late. If she wasn’t thinking about Sam, she was thinking about Hesperos. And if she wasn’t thinking about Hesperos, she was thinking about the archesses.
She’d seen three of them with her own eyes. There was only one left to locate. It would have been in Angel’s best interest to make sure that these women were never rematched to the archangels they’d each been created for. If something happened to one of them—or all of them—and they never learned to love the four favored archangels, then Angel would be free to remain on Earth. It was what she wanted.