Azrael had not taken Sophie’s family from her. But she was trapped in the idea of having lost what she might have had, and nothing burned so much as the acid of resentment.
“Sophie,” he whispered as he moved forward again, coming to stand just behind her. “Sweet Sophie.” He closed his eyes, which now burned bright and hot in his skull, and he swallowed hard. “I didn’t kill your parents,” he said. “And if I had been there to take them when they died, I would have moved heaven and earth to change things.”
He shuddered and looked up, as if expecting lightning to strike as he realized the full weight of what he was about to say. And then he didn’t care, and he said it with the fierce resolve of a man who is both telling the truth and making a promise. “I would have laid down my wings to save you from that grief. Sophie. . . . I would have stepped down and turned away from everything I’d ever known if it meant that you could know the warmth of your mother’s smile and your father’s laugh for even a minute more.”
In front of him, Sophie went completely still. The surf climbed the sand a hundred feet away and seagulls rounded a band of rocks up ahead, searching for a washed-up meal. The sky was more or less quiet . . . but Azrael could hear Sophie’s blood rushing through her veins, pushed hard by a heart that raced maniacally. It pounded with deafening ardor, testament to her complete surprise.
Slowly, stiffly, she dropped her arms and turned to face him. He stared down at her through gold eyes filled with so much emotion that they burned painfully in his skull. He heard her breath catch and wondered if he was frightening her.
“Az . . . ,” she began, her voice shaking, “are you telling me—” She broke off, blinked, and started again. “Are you telling me you would have stood up to the Old Man in order to . . .” Again she trailed off. It was as if she was just as afraid of saying it as he had been of thinking it.
But there was no hesitation now as he replied, “To protect you, Sophie, I would do anything.”
* * *
Sophie couldn’t speak. She could barely think. Azrael stood before her a monument of a man, tall and dark and incredibly dangerous. His inhumanly beautiful eyes glowed with a hellish gold fire, bright and hot. They pulled her in with their blazing emotion, scorching her from the inside out.
She couldn’t move while trapped in that sway; she could only stand there and let the wind whip through her hair as her mind tried to come to grips with what Azrael had just told her. It literally took the breath from her lungs.
But Azrael spared her any further speech by looking away for a moment and composing himself. Then, with paramount grace, the tall, dark archangel brushed past her to move several feet down the beach. Sophie, wrapped in her stunned and heavy silence, could only turn and watch him.
Az stopped beside a smooth black stone that rose from the wet sand like the back of an Orca whale. Then he bent gracefully and Sophie saw him pick something up. He straightened, coming back to his full impressive height, and gazed down at what he held in his hands. But his back was still blocking her view, and curiosity pulled her across the sand toward him.
When she was three feet away, he turned and held out his hand. In his palm was the perfect white disc of a large sand dollar.
“It’s been years since I thought about it, but the Old Man made these for us,” he said. “Sand dollars.”
Sophie blinked, her brow furrowing, her voice entirely gone. He’d completely changed the subject, as if he couldn’t bear to think any longer about her loss and the part she felt he’d played in it.
In the silence, he went on. “He made them for me and my brothers.” He smiled, just a little, and the moonlight sliced across his piercing eyes. “In other parts of the world, they’re known as sea cookies or snapper biscuits. Some people believe they’re the coin of merfolk. In reality, they’re the skeletons of echinoids, nothing more.” He paused, running his thumb idly over the surface of the endoskeleton. “But the Old Man had always been most proud of our wings.” He chuckled, and it was a melancholy sound, sweet and lilting and filled with unspoken sadness. “So, in secret, he reproduced them.” He looked up as Sophie inched closer. “Here.”
Sophie watched as the perfect sand dollar split slowly in half, a hairline crack forming across the middle of the object from one side to the other. When it was finished, Azrael pulled the separate pieces apart and tipped one of them over his open palm. Five tiny objects poured out.
Sophie leaned in to see better. “They’re angels,” she whispered, finding her voice at last. Tiny white objects that honestly looked like miniature angel sculptures rested in his open hand.
Azrael chuckled again. This time it was a little less sad. “There are five in every sand dollar,” he said. Sophie looked up at him, her gold eyes meeting his. “Four represent Michael, Uriel, Gabriel, and myself. The Old Man wouldn’t tell us what the fifth was for.” His voice had dropped to a whisper at this point. Very gently, he took the tiny white delicate angels between his fingers and dropped the sand dollar casings. Then, with a gentle touch that sent a rush of warmth up Sophie’s arm and across her chest, Azrael took her right wrist in his fingers and turned her own hand over.
The mark that Gregori’s black dandelion had given her was still there, but it was greatly faded, as if the ink had washed away with time.
If Azrael saw it now, he made no mention of it. Instead, he very carefully set one of the tiny angels in the middle of her palm. It lay atop the black dandelion, stark in its whitewashed beauty. “But I’ve figured it out,” he said softly, drawing her gaze to him. His eyes were searching, deep and mesmerizing. “The fifth is that which the four of us search for. It’s that piece of us that was made with us, surrounds us in spirit, and leaves us incomplete until we find it again.” He paused, allowed his next words to be said in the waiting silence, and then spoke them aloud for good measure. “For me, that’s you, Sophie.”
Sophie stood numb and still for a long while. Then she looked down at the tiny angel in her hand. It seemed so small—yet so significant. Finally, she looked back up at Azrael. Her chest ached. It was a real, physical kind of pain that gnawed at her and yet filled her with something for once substantial. There was a brief moment, a pulse in time—eternally long—that was gone in an instant.
And then Azrael was kissing her.
No. That wasn’t right. She was kissing him.
She wasn’t sure what had given her the push, but she stared up at him standing there, wrapped in regret and wishes as thick as her own, and knew that she was gazing at not only the most outwardly beautiful man in the world, but the most inwardly beautiful as well.
She suddenly realized that while she had been trapped in her own destiny—so had he. They were angels in a sand dollar, adrift in a sea and split apart to be lost and separated for two thousand years.
And now here they were, standing on the shore once more. And Sophie knew—she knew—she’d loved this man from the very beginning. She’d loved him from the moment she’d heard his voice crooning over the radio. She’d ached inside, wanting to pull back the mask he wore onstage so that she could look into the face that she had already fallen for.
She loved him. Despite the fact that he’d been the Angel of Death, despite the fact that he was tied to her through some divine destiny, and despite the fact that he was a vampire. Despite everything—or maybe because of it.
I love you, she thought.
And then she was moving forward and standing on her tiptoes to shove her hand through his long, thick black hair and pull his lips to her own. It took no time at all—none passed—before Azrael was sliding his strong arm around her waist and using it to pull her body against his.
She melted into the tall, hard frame of him, at once enveloped in his warm darkness and his incredible surge of power. She gave herself up to it—to him—and let him take control for the second time that night. She had no choice.
His lips claimed hers in a way that chased the uncertainty from Sophie’s mind like the sun
on the fog. His grip on her was tight with desperation; his kiss was just as desperate. She caught the scent of leather and felt his hair brush her cheek as his tongue expertly, insistently, opened her up beneath him.
And just like that, once again, she was delirious. The night danced around her. She felt his hand in her hair, tilting her back as he drew her every breath into himself, devouring her heart and soul. She heard a moan and knew it was her own but could not remember making the sound.
There was sudden sharp pain in Sophie’s palm and she jerked slightly in Azrael’s embrace. At once, he broke the kiss and gazed down at her, concern clear in his handsome features.
Sophie frowned and looked down at her hand, which was curled tightly into a fist. With a rapidly pounding heart, she uncurled her hand and stared at her palm. The mark Gregori had given her was now gone. But so was the tiny white angel Azrael had given her. In their place, etched perfectly into the skin of her hand, was a shimmering pair of golden wings.
Chapter Thirty-two
In a large white marble chamber, complete with round marble columns and firelight flickering off the polished marble surfaces, a man sat cross-legged in the center of a circle of white candles. His thick black hair curled over the collar of his crisp white button-down shirt. His incredibly strong body was at ease, relaxed. And his beautiful but frighteningly different eyes were closed.
The flash of an image passed before those closed eyes—and they flew open. Pupils the color of ice surrounded dark stars born of a darker magic that was capable of spreading like wildfire and growing like a weed. The man gazed through those eyes into a scene of a vampire on a beach—and a woman who had escaped her bonds.
So be it, the man thought. It is time.
* * *
I love you.
He heard it loud and clear. The single, short thought cut through the thick fog that was the rest of the world as if those three words were the only three words any being had ever uttered in the history of time.
In that moment, everything bad that had ever happened in his existence was nothing. It was gone, blown away like dust in a hurricane. All was forgiven, all was right, and all he wanted to do was kiss the woman who had made it possible.
I love you.
She jumped up on her tiptoes and ran her hand through his hair and for the briefest of moments, he was so stunned, he simply stood there and let her pull his lips to her own. And then he was taking over, every fiber of his archangel being roaring to life once again.
She flinched and he felt a thrum of quick, sharp pain move through her as if it was his own. He pulled out of the kiss, regretting it at once, and looked down at her. She was staring at her palm where Gregori’s mark had been replaced by a shimmering golden tattoo.
Of a pair of wings.
It was the sudden shifting of the air on the beach that prevented him from grabbing her hand for a closer look. A disturbance around them drew his attention and switched on his defenses. He straightened and turned, holding his breath as his now glowing gaze skirted the shadows of the shore.
There was a popping and then a sucking sound, and everything changed. Azrael was moving so fast that his body blurred, his vampire-archangel reflexes spinning him around and drawing Sophie behind him in the blink of an eye. He took in the scene and processed it in no more than a millisecond.
Phantoms swarmed the beach, a handful of wraiths among them. Their presence warped and froze the air, sending out negative energy so thick it was stifling.
Azrael’s fangs erupted, his eyes shifting to red. His breath formed icicles in the phantom-chilled night. The presence of these monsters was inexplicably wrong. They were obviously there for Sophie. If they’d wanted Azrael, they’d had thousands of years to attack.
The milky-white bodies of the phantoms turned toward the couple, their grisly visages twisting into black, razor-toothed smiles. They stood seven feet tall, and their skin slithered and swirled as if it were coated with a thin layer of fog. In some respects, they looked like photo negatives of mortals, though they stood taller.
Their shoulder-length blue-white hair was so fine, it looked like feathers in the breeze. Their eyes were no more than pools of bottomless black. Their broad chests were bare, and around their tight abdomens were tattooed strings of arcane symbols inscribed in glowing blue-white ink.
Phantoms were the bane of the supernatural community. They could disappear at will, transport through a space of any size in the blink of an eye, and when they touched a victim, the victim was sapped of strength and chilled from the inside out, resulting in a painful, frozen death.
One phantom alone was a challenge none of the archangels would have taken lightly. Many phantoms was an apocalyptic nightmare. Fortunately, phantoms were known to be solitary creatures and had never before worked in any kind of group. What Azrael saw before him now, he’d previously thought impossible.
The wraiths among the phantoms moved more slowly. They were less powerful than the notorious assassins, but their figures stood out more. Their power was simple and horrible: they possessed the ability to literally open old wounds simply by touching their victims. Any injury ever sustained in a being’s lifetime could reappear, tearing holes in flesh and cracking bones within seconds.
Long ago, when the Old Man had first created the wraiths, he’d realized his mistake, and he’d taken the hands off every wraith and then cast the monsters to Earth. However, once on Earth, the wraiths had quickly found substitutes for their missing hands, turning their stumps into working appendages once more by robbing what they needed from the dead.
Now they existed as black-cloaked figures with faces like wax, bleeding red slits for mouths, eyes of stone—and skeletal hands. One touch from those skeletal hands and every wound Azrael had ever suffered would begin to resurface.
Az did a quick count: at least a dozen phantoms, and half that number of wraiths. And then a flicker of movement caught his eye and he glanced to his left toward an outcropping of wet black stone.
Icarans. He sensed at least three, although their black skin camouflaged their presence in the dark night. Icarans were also known as leeches because they fed on magic. They were attracted to it; it was their sustenance, and they tended to gorge on it, often to the point of a grisly, explosive death. They were no doubt drawn to the beach by the massive amount of supernatural power gathering on it at that moment.
Sophie’s fingers curled around Azrael’s right wrist as she peeked out from behind him at the small army of monsters closing in on them.
“Holy hell,” she whispered, her voice shaking with both cold and terror. “What in G-God’s name are th-those?”
Azrael didn’t reply. He was too busy trying to figure out how to deal with their situation. The phantoms could transport at will; their presence here was easily explained. They’d mostly likely brought the wraiths with them; it was the only logical explanation for the wraiths’ synchronized appearance, despite the fact that it seemed to go against phantom nature. The Icarans had probably been somewhere nearby and had simply followed the magic.
There was little time. Azrael didn’t know why the monsters had gathered, but he knew he had to get help very quickly. It took seconds for him to send out a mental call. Unfortunately, there were no archways or anything even remotely door-like on the beach that could serve as a portal. His brothers and Max would not be able to use the mansion to get to him in time. Only Azrael’s vampires could come to his aid fast enough. But first he and Sophie needed to survive the seconds it would take for help to arrive.
He could take Sophie and escape through the shadows to someplace safer—but the phantoms would only follow him. It was one of the many, many things that made them so dangerous. They could track anything, anywhere. Only vampires and black dragons could traverse the dark web of passageways in the shadow realm, but phantoms could sniff out who had been through them, when, and where they were headed next. They would know where Az was going before he got there. Then all they had to do was t
ransport to that location. If Az disappeared through them with Sophie, he would come out the other side only to find himself walking into an ambush of terrible proportions.
His only other option was to take to the skies with her. Both phantoms and wraiths could fly, and they would be hot on his tail. But vampires, at least, were faster.
Az had decided to do this and was turning to face Sophie when she was suddenly ripped from his side. He spun, blurring with the motion, but too late.
Sophie was caught fast, a strong arm around her shoulders both pinning her to her captor and covering her mouth so that she couldn’t scream. A second hand fisted in her hair to expose her neck to the now frigid air. A pair of glowing blue eyes glared at Azrael over Sophie’s head, and a set of sharp white fangs threatened her throat.
Azrael froze. “Abraxos,” he whispered.
Abraxos grinned at him through those misbegotten teeth as Sophie struggled ineffectually in his strong grasp. The Adarian vampire winked at Azrael and stepped back into the shadows behind him, taking Sophie with him.
Az was rushing forward to follow him into the darkness when something cold and horrible struck him from behind. An arc of freezing pain shot through his chest, clutching at his heart. He stopped in his tracks, fighting not to fall to his knees. Unsteadily, he attempted to inhale, but his lungs felt frozen. He looked down to see icicles forming across the black clothing over his chest, and he knew that the flesh and bone beneath it were freezing just as rapidly.
From the center of his chest protruded a taloned, slithering white hand shrouded in magical mist. As he watched, the phantom slowly twisted its arm in Azrael’s chest, and then yanked it back out again, sending Az to his knees after all.
The pain was excruciating, but Azrael’s worry for Sophie was stronger. It shoved his legs back underneath him and brought him once more to his feet. But the moment he again attempted to blur into forward motion, he was met with another, different kind of pain that brought him to a fast halt for a second time.