Uro had always been there for him.
If you take her now, you will kill her. And then you will kill yourself, Uro told him, his words spilling into Azrael’s mind with desperate clarity. You will lose your queen—and we will lose you both.
Azrael’s body shook under the assault of his fierce hunger. It needled through his nerve endings, forming stars on the outskirts of his supernatural vision. His grip on Uro’s throat tightened.
Leave her blood, Uro told him, clearly refusing to give up. “Take mine instead.”
Az stilled. He replayed what Uro had just offered through his head. And as he did, he thought of Michael. Two thousand years ago, Michael had given his blood freely so that Azrael would suffer less. Now Uro offered to do the same.
Azrael considered it for a split second more, and then he moved his hand up so that it tilted his friend’s head to the side, and he sank his fangs into Uro’s neck.
Uro tensed; the bite hurt. A vampire’s blood was not meant to be drained in this manner. But he remained steadfastly silent, and as his pain increased, Azrael’s subsided.
He pulled and swallowed, and after a few seconds clarity began to return to his world.
Soon, he withdrew his fangs and took a step back. Uro swallowed hard, remained on his feet, and turned his face to look at his sovereign. The fire in his eyes had retreated to two smaller pinpoints of red light. He looked a tad pale.
But otherwise, alive.
“Thank you,” said Az. He meant it from the bottom of his heart. He turned to glance at Sophie where she still lay sleeping and unsuspecting on his bed.
He’d almost done something terrible.
He turned back to watch as Uro stepped away from the wall and his eyes returned to normal. The wound on his neck had already healed. Uro glanced at Sophie and then back at his king. “What happened?” he asked.
It was an excellent question. Azrael was still in some discomfort; he felt like a human would feel after not eating for a few days. But he was sane, and now that he was sane, he was able to reflect upon Sophie’s memory and the way it had drained him so thoroughly.
“I don’t know,” he replied softly. He looked at her sleeping figure. He didn’t know—not yet. It was one thing to have to fight his way through his archess’s mind; she was complicated and intricate and her thoughts went as deep as her beauty. It would have been difficult for him to pull something out of any archess’s mind; with Sophie, it was astronomically so. Still, that alone would not have had such a severe effect upon his constitution.
What had done him in was the cemetery. Even in the supposed safety of her memory, the graveyard’s spirits posed a threat to him. And something had awakened them.
Azrael thought of the phantom’s presence in Sophie’s past. He thought of what she had been forced to do—and how the phantom had covered it up. He wondered what Sophie had done once she’d regained consciousness on that misty, fateful day.
Whatever it was, he was willing to bet the phantom had orchestrated many of the things that had happened to her, and influenced her choices. A path had been built for her, and whoever had hired the phantom—for the creatures were always the employees of those more powerful and more secretive than they—had led her down that path with terrible accuracy and skill.
There were forces at work here that Azrael did not understand. His first instinct was to blame Samael. The spell in the cemetery of Sophie’s memory and the spell that Samael had cast on him in the graveyard months ago were so similar that it was a natural assumption. But it felt wrong.
Granted, it wasn’t as if any of the four brothers ever really had any idea what the hell Samael’s game was, but the phantoms and the accident on the bridge—those weren’t like Sam. In the two thousand years that he’d been making life miserable for Azrael and his brothers, Sam had never been known to cause humans undue suffering. He’d never killed anyone. He’d never actually even come close.
Either the Fallen One had gone through a major personality shift or this was the work of someone else.
The Adarians?
Azrael moved to the bed and stood over it. He took a deep breath and raised his hand, palm down, to slowly trace Sophie’s outline in the air. As he did, her clothing took on a different cast; its threads shimmered and changed, becoming woven through with gold. It never hurt to play it safe, and this was a trick he knew Gabriel and Uriel had both used on their archesses. According to Juliette, gold no longer had a caustic effect on Abraxos, no doubt due to his new vampiracy. However, he was only one Adarian.
When Az was finished, he ran his hand through his hair and realized his fingers were shaking. He turned back to Uro, who was still watching him in silence. There was a companionable warmth to the man, even now, after all he’d been put through that night, that was priceless to Azrael. Uro’s dark gaze was as ancient and vast as the night sky. He was the only one of Azrael’s created vampires old enough to travel through the shadows and find this cave.
“How many did you have to go through before you found me?” Az asked. His voice was deep and beautiful, but it lacked the strength it normally had. He needed to feed again, and soon.
Uro offered up a small smile and shrugged. “A few.”
Az returned the smile. “We have a few hours before sunrise,” he said. “We could both use more sustenance.” He and Uro could move with incredible speed. They could find a soul to feed from and be at the bridge in very short order. Sophie would be safe in the cave. No one who wasn’t able to walk the darkness of the shadows would be able to find her here, a hundred feet belowground, in a space with no windows and no doors and only magically created oxygen. “And I need to check in with my brothers.”
“They’re still at the bridge,” Uro told him.
“I’m sure they are.”
* * *
Michael ran his hand through his hair and fisted it there, frustration riding him hard and mean as he stood on the Golden Gate Bridge. He’d already been under an undue amount of stress. Between the Adarians and Samael—wherever he was—and this rapist making his way across New York, Michael’s cortisol levels had been on the heavy side of late.
But there was an edge to this night that cut through him like jagged glass, fracturing reality in such a way that he almost couldn’t tell the difference between what had happened and what he was afraid would happen next.
Randall McFarlan had met Michael and his brothers, the archesses, and Max on the bridge after they’d used the mansion to transport themselves to San Francisco. While Michael had to admit that he felt less than comfortable around a lot of Azrael’s “creations,” he liked McFarlan well enough. As usual, he was accompanied by the thin, younger-looking Terrence Colby and the Hispanic Casper MonteVega. According to McFarlan, Azrael had been out on his boat with a woman when an eighteen-wheeler had broken through the cables and guard rails on the Golden Gate Bridge above them and then sailed through the air to crash into Az’s boat. The Calliope, which Michael did feel comfortable around—he’d been on the boat a few times himself—was completely destroyed. The truck had sunk like a rock to the bottom of the bay, and the driver would have been dead if not for the quick thinking of Azrael’s vampires—and Michael’s healing powers.
Everything had happened so fast.
Michael was in New York, just getting off work when Max called him on his cell phone. He’d just receive a telepathic message from Azrael informing him that their help was needed at the Golden Gate Bridge.
After he hung up with Michael, Max called the others. Within minutes Uriel, Eleanore, Gabriel and Juliette, and Michael had all managed to convene in the foyer of the mansion. They stepped through its swirling portal of a door and into the San Francisco night together.
They were met at once by one of Azrael’s band mates, Uro. Seconds later, several other vampires showed up and together they led the archangels to the accident scene.
It was a horrible mess.
Michael had seen a lot of devastation in the course
of his existence. If that wasn’t about destruction, nothing was. However, he’d gone after evildoers and “mistakes” that the Old Man had created and tossed to Earth to forget about. He’d fought demons, things so ancient and wrong that their names were eventually forgotten because people had refused to utter them for so long.
Human destruction was different. Whether it was caused by man or it involved man, it was always . . . worse, somehow.
Michael and his brothers never turned their backs on human suffering. Not when they could help it. There was too much pain in the world, all of it happening at once in too many different places, for them to deal with all of it—or even most of it. But they did what they could, when they could.
As a peace officer for various countries and states, Michael had actually witnessed more loss and heartbreak than he’d taken in during all of his years as the sword arm of the Old Man. Humans were a tragic lot, trapped in the enormously cruel dichotomy of having minds that allowed them to feel beyond the boundaries of necessity and brains that pushed them to create situations in which these emotions were put into play. They were naturally unnatural.
And the thirteen-car pileup on the Golden Gate Bridge that night was testament to that. Though it was clear that the crash had not been initially set in motion by a human, its ultimate capacity for tragedy was entirely human.
A kind of quiet hysteria had taken over the bridge. The stalled vehicles on either side of the massive accident shone their headlights on the scene, outlining the horrors of it in all their gory detail.
Mothers were sobbing, fathers were shouting, and bystanders were wandering aimlessly, too much in shock to know what to do other than call 911. No amount of extra telephoning was going to help at this point; the rescue crews could only move so fast, and Michael was more grateful than words could say that two of the archesses had been found so far. He needed the help.
The vampires helped as well. There were more of them than Michael had been expecting. It made him wonder just how many of the creatures there were on Earth. At the moment, though he might not be entirely at ease with their presence, he was happy to have their assistance. Their mind-bending powers calmed family members and the injured enough that Michael and the archesses could do their jobs.
There were twenty-seven people with injuries, but only nine of those cases were serious. The truck driver that one of the vampires had pulled out of the bay was the first Michael healed. His barely living body had been laid flat on the tarmac of the bridge between two shielding, empty vehicles. Michael saved his life and a vampire promptly put him to sleep.
The pileup was so bad, the traffic so jammed, none of the ambulances dispatched to the location had yet been able to make it through. Helicopters whirred above them, their blades slicing through the sky like the wings of massive dragonflies.
Michael knew they were filming the bridge and he knew that the helicopters and their “live” hookups would be the first order of business for Max and his unique abilities.
As Max stood near the red-painted railing that divided the road from the pedestrian walkway and blanked out the minds and cameras of any who could bear witness to the event, Michael, Eleanore, and Juliette got to work healing the remaining wounded.
It was a draining endeavor. By the time ten minutes had passed, he’d sealed a ruptured spleen, mended two sets of pierced lungs, and re-formed more than a dozen broken bones. Eleanore had calmed a seizure, rebuilt an entire nervous system, and healed a concussed woman’s underlying case of breast cancer. Juliette had perhaps the hardest job of the three of them; her “patients” had been children for the most part. For some reason, she just seemed to be on the side of the road where there were more of them. And while their little bodies were more flexible and often received less injury because of this, they were also easier to throw through the windshield of a bus.
Michael was rising on unsteady legs and joining Gabriel and Juliette when he felt the familiar presence of Azrael on the bridge. He turned and scanned the wreckage around him until he saw Az and Uro come around the side of a flipped taxicab. He approached them, as did McFarlan and his companions.
“I think we’re wrapping up,” he told his brother. “Max looks wiped out and probably can’t hold off the press much longer.”
Az nodded and looked up at the helicopters overhead. His golden eyes began to glow yellow and then narrowed dangerously. The air around them started to stir and a wind picked up.
Michael shielded his eyes and watched as the choppers tipped to the side a little and then began flying off into the distance, leaving the area of the bridge.
“Nice,” Michael admitted. Sometimes it paid to have a brother who had the very wind at his fingertips.
“Damn,” said McFarlan. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”
Chapter Nineteen
Az waited until he was certain that the helicopters were both out of the way and safe and then he looked back down at Michael. His brother’s exhaustion was patently obvious. The blue of Michael’s eyes was lighter than normal, as if the color had been depleted from their irises. His body swayed ever so slightly and his fingers shook where his hands rested at his sides. The Warrior Archangel’s tall, strong form was bent under the burden of weariness.
The stench of disaster was all around them. Human blood and bodily fluids lent a tang to the air, and gasoline, antifreeze, and exhaust made it murky. Not far away, Eleanore, Juliette, Gabriel, and Uriel stood together, the women looking as tired as Michael.
“We need to talk,” Azrael said seriously. It was time his brothers knew about Sophie and about the phantom that had caused this horrendous mess. Someone out there had it in for one or both of them, and he stood a much better chance of figuring out who it was if his brothers and Max were helping him.
“I agree,” said Michael, something dark flashing in his blue eyes.
Az’s gaze narrowed thoughtfully. He brushed Michael’s mind and caught the floating thoughts there. Michael didn’t believe this was an “accident” any more than Az did. The coincidences were too strong—and Michael had been a cop for too long.
Azrael nodded, just once, and turned to Uro. “Sophie is alone. Please join her and keep an eye on her until I return.” He was fairly certain that no harm could come to the archess as long as she was sequestered in that hole underground, but there was more here than met the eye and something dank and creepy was riding his skin. He felt what a human would probably feel just before getting goose bumps. And there was always the possibility that she would wake up before he could return to her; she would be alone in the cave and under the full, mind-numbing influence of her retrieved memories. It wouldn’t be good. However, she knew Uro and had spent time around him, at the hockey game and on the boat. And since Azrael and Uro had fed on the way to the bridge, Az knew that Uro would be able to help her if she woke up and was overwhelmed.
Uro nodded, and in the next instant, he was gone in a fury of wind and shadow.
“Sophie Bryce?” Michael asked, his expression giving nothing away. But Az didn’t have to read his mind to know what he was thinking.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll explain once everything is stable.”
Michael nodded. “Can you do anything to get the medics here faster? I can’t replace blood, and some of the kids have lost a lot.”
Az turned to Randall, who nodded his immediate assent. The two together would work faster and more efficiently than Azrael alone. At once, they took to the skies. It didn’t take them long to find the ambulances, fire trucks, and police cruisers that had either been dispatched to the scene or were on the same route when the call went through. They were trapped in traffic, however, the cars in front of them completely boxed in. Their sirens wailed, their horns honked, but they could only stay where they were, in their useless cacophonies.
Azrael quickly studied the scene and then concentrated. On either side of the stalled vehicles waited a good two to three feet of empty space. Az utilized that space now,
lifting the cars and trucks telekinetically and setting them to the side. Randall used the power of the wind to the same effect. The passengers inside the vehicles reacted as one would expect them to. They froze behind their steering wheels, certain that they were trapped in an earthquake or some kind of tornado, their senses of logic forcing them to wonder whether it had been a natural disaster that had caused the wreckage ahead.
Once the vehicles has been moved sufficiently to the side, the EMTs inside the ambulances stared in wonder at the empty space in front of them. But their initial awe lasted only seconds before their sense of duty kicked in. Gas pedals were floored and medic bags were grabbed as the ambulances shot forward through the gaps toward the wounded.
Azrael watched them go, his careful eye sliding anything that might slow them down out of the way. No doubt, the EMTs would think they were living a miracle and that nothing short of the hand of God had aided them on the bridge that night. If Max wasn’t able to clear their memories and erase the anomalies from their minds, they would retell the story of what happened, probably embellishing it to some degree.
It was a good thing and a bad thing to have faith in such miracles. On the one hand, it allowed humans to feel as if there were a higher purpose to life and that they were not alone—even when they felt more alone than ever. However, it also made people lazy. When they believed someone or something bigger than themselves would come to save them, would rescue them, would make things “better,” they were less inclined to do the work to make these things come to fruition themselves.
Azrael frowned slightly at the thought. Hopefully Max would be able to wipe their minds.
A few minutes later, three of the ambulances had made it to the scene and Azrael had sent the order for the others to get his brothers and their archesses and the guardian off of the bridge and to safety.
He met them on Pier 39, where people were gathering to watch the accident on the distant bridge despite the late hour.
“It’s going to get messy here before long,” McFarlan told them, his intelligent blue gaze scanning the building crowd.