Azrael knew exactly where he was going.
It was a fault of human reasoning that people automatically assumed those who were older would prefer older things. While this was often the case, there were exceptions. Age sometimes had little bearing on the novelty of a mind. And a novel mind thoroughly enjoyed new experiences and unexpected sights, sounds, or feelings.
Fisherman’s Wharf had been around for hundreds of years in one form or another. Fishermen had sailed out and thrown their nets from the wharves for as long as there had been settlers on the West Coast. Immigrants from China and Italy had each at one time called it home. San Francisco was the gateway to those seeking fortunes during the gold rush, and Angel Island in the bay was the Ellis Island of the West, having seen countless of the hungry, tired, and hopeful.
Pier 39 had not always been what it was today. It had been moved, destroyed, built up again, burned down, and restored. In 1978 one man decided to do what had previously been thought impossible: create a breakwater pier where families could go to shop, dine, and relax. He fought for the legislation and funding to make it possible—and against all odds, Pier 39 was completed in just one year.
Azrael was not a young man and he most certainly wasn’t a tourist, but because Pier 39 had bucked the system and proven naysayers wrong, it was Azrael’s favorite place in San Francisco. It was also quite lovely at night. It was quiet in a hollow, echo-like way. It was there that he headed now.
The Pier became overcrowded on the weekends, but at ten o’clock on Sunday evening, six hours earlier than it had been in Scotland, the weekend revelers were beginning to put the finishing touches on their short escapes from reality. Street performers were packing up, musicians were putting away their instruments and counting their change, and the beggars were gathering on the sidewalks to share or exchange the day’s winnings.
As the stragglers drifted away, restaurants shut off their lights and wharf maintenance crews broke out the brooms and dust pails. Garbage and recycling bins clanked as they were emptied. Azrael’s boots echoed loudly on the wooden planks of the pier as he landed in a shadowed recess behind a shop that had string puppets dangling in its window.
Pier 39 was empty. There was no reason for people to remain once the shops had closed down. The calls of the sea lions just off the south side of the pier were harsh in an otherwise eerie silence.
Azrael strode slowly out of the shadows and approached the empty stage upon which performers plied their trade during the day. Beyond that was a massive, beautiful carousel. Az could imagine that during operating hours it whirred in a blur of color and sound as children lined up to ride dragons and sea creatures for three dollars a pop. Now the complex structure was covered in a plastic tarp, unmoving and silent.
Az took it all in with the same quiet sense of awe that he always felt when gazing upon the echoes of the world. Nighttime held afterimages of people coming and going, buying and selling, smiling and waving good-bye. And by the time Az’s boots followed the footsteps left hours before, only memories remained. They smelled like cotton candy and sea salt and waffle cones. And they felt like the caress of ghosts—there . . . but gone.
Azrael moved gracefully down the pier toward the sailboats anchored off the north side. He made his way past a handful of seagulls fighting over the remains of a corn dog and stopped at the wooden barrier, allowing the wind to whip through his hair. Then he closed his eyes and sent out a mental call.
At the moment, Valley of Shadow was on tour across the United States. With the help of the archangels’ mansion, Az and his band mates always showed up in time for each of their appearances. In fact, they were scheduled to play in San Francisco in two weeks. Azrael knew that Sophie planned to be in California by that time. He also knew that she would most likely jump at the chance to see the show. That is, if she wasn’t allowed to psych herself out when he invited her. Azrael could easily make certain of that.
In the meantime, he had two weeks to charm his way past her defenses and win her trust. That was the difficult part, and it wasn’t something he could use his powers for. No matter how strong supernatural creatures were, one thing they could never master was the ability to make someone love them. There were drugs that made women pass out, there were spells that made them sexually aroused, and vampiric powers could force submission with no more than a passing will. But true love was evasive and unattainable by any means other than one: it had to be earned.
And the truth was, Azrael wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. From the moment he’d laid eyes on Sophie as she’d helped Juliette down that aisle, Az had known that he was gazing upon a piece of his soul. The sunny piece; the opposite of his dark, dark moon.
But she didn’t love him. She lusted after him and dreamed of him and fantasized about him—or, at least about the Masked One—but she didn’t love him. Why would she? She had absolutely no reason to. She didn’t know him. Not yet, anyway.
Sophie was planning to leave Scotland the following day. He’d caught that thought skating through her mind. There was no point to her remaining there; her best friend would be honeymooning, and knowing Gabriel, there would be no interrupting that. Sophie didn’t want to feel like a third wheel, so she’d booked the trip home for sunrise.
And that was where things got complicated for Az. His brothers would most likely insist that she allow them to simply open a portal in the mansion for her and send her home the easy way, but that would fix only part of the problem. She might get home faster, but she would still be traveling by day.
Az might be the former Angel of Death and the king of all vampires, but his weaknesses were as strong as they came. He wouldn’t be able to watch over her once the sun came up. She might’ve been oblivious to it, but she needed watching. Sophie was an archess, and the Adarians were still at large. Their leader, Abraxos, was more dangerous—and more determined—than ever.
There was also Samael and his enigmatic plan to contend with. Neither Az nor his brothers or their guardian Max could determine what the hell was motivating the Fallen One to behave as he did. He’d gone after Eleanore Granger in the devious, underhanded manner for which he was infamous. And then he had gone out of his way to help Juliette Anderson escape the Adarians and wind up safely with Gabriel. Some days, Samael was blatantly opposed to the Four Favored. Other days, he appeared to aid them. He was a riddle. But whatever he was up to, Sophie wasn’t safe on her own.
Az waited only a few moments after summoning his subjects before he felt the air around him stir in a way both enticing and unnatural. He opened his eyes and stepped back. Three male figures dressed in varying degrees of black and gray landed gracefully on the pier’s wooden planks in front of him. All three of them bowed their heads with extreme deference, and it was only after several long moments of respectful silence that any of them spoke.
“Az.” One of the men greeted him in a deep, somewhat gravelly voice. He spoke the name tenderly, as a friend would, and his blue eyes glinted with something akin to love. He was quite tall, though not as tall as the Four Favored and certainly not as tall as Azrael. His reddish brown hair was thin on top, his blue eyes were intelligent, and his mustache gave him a friendly appearance. He looked a bit like a seasoned cop.
This was Randall McFarlan. His fangs were not as pronounced as those of the other two men; he was older than they were by centuries and had learned how to retract his teeth a good deal so that they were less noticeable. He looked to be somewhere in his late forties or early fifties and had the easygoing air of a man who had been very handsome in his youth but had probably not noticed it because he’d been concerned with other things. He seemed wise and gentle, and in this case, what he seemed to be was exactly what he was.
“Randall, I need your help and the help of your servants,” said Az. “You have humans who work for you. I need them to work for me now.”
Randall’s brow furrowed with concern. “Of course,” he said. “What’s goin’ on?” His words drawled, easy and slow, but
the worry that laced them was evident.
Beside him, a younger-looking, thinner man cocked his head to one side and asked, “It’s something big, isn’t it?” He had short-cropped brown hair, blue eyes nearly the same color as Randall’s, and a disposition that was the antithesis of the older man’s. His face was open and youthful, and his tall, slim body seemed to radiate a hyperactive energy. “I knew it. I’ve had a feeling all week,” he went on matter-of-factly, nodding at his own words and clasping his hands behind his back as if he were pleased with his premonition. “It’s go time, isn’t it?”
Randall turned toward the younger vampire and frowned. “Terry, what the hell are you talkin’ about, ‘go time’?” he asked, shaking his head. “What is ‘go time’? ‘Go time’ for what?”
Terry blinked, looked from Randall to Az, and then shrugged. “I don’t know, I mean—just go time. You know. Something big is about to go down. Right? I can feel it in my bones.”
Randall rolled his eyes and took a deep breath. “Your bones, Terry?” he asked incredulously, managing to appear infinitely patient by the fact that he had yet to raise his voice. “Seriously?”
“Well . . . I am pretty old, you know. Don’t old people start feeling things in their bones?”
“Old humans do, Terry,” said the third man. He hadn’t spoken until now, but at the sound of his very soft voice, both Randall and Terry glanced at him. “Old vampires—not so much.” He shook his head a little, shrugged as if to make nothing of what he’d said, and focused on smoothing an invisible wrinkle from his sport coat. He was a middle-aged Hispanic gentleman, impeccably dressed in a crisp white button-down, brown slacks, a brown sport coat, and shiny brown dress shoes. His name was Casper MonteVega, but his companions had called him Monte for decades.
Azrael had created each of the three vampires before him for different and carefully considered reasons. Randall McFarlan had been in Ireland during the Elizabethan wars and was fatally wounded in 1584 when Az happened upon him. He was not the first vampire Azrael had ever created, and he hadn’t been the last, but he was one of Azrael’s most trusted. He worked under the radar on cases with Michael on occasion and had grown closer to the four brothers than many of the others that Azrael had created. At the moment, he happened to live in San Francisco. And right now, he was just coming off of his second ten-year stint as a night-shift police officer in Marin County. He had to space out the services he chose, in both time and location, to lessen the chance of being recognized, but one way or another he always found a way to serve on the force.
Terrence Colby, or Terry, had been born in Tennessee in 1850 and joined the Texas Rangers in 1875. There, he worked under Randall, who took a strong liking to him and thought of him as the son he’d never had. However, a mere three months into his service, Terry was fatally shot by the outlaw John Wesley Hardin. That was when Randall had called on Azrael for help.
As a vampire himself, Randy inherently possessed the ability to create a new vampire on his own, but he had never done so, and he wasn’t certain how to do it now. Azrael answered the call and helped Randall turn Terry before the young man’s heart beat its final time.
Randy and Terry had remained in each other’s company ever since, and their behavior toward each other was today as it always had been. Terry’s youthful energy kept Randall young. Randy’s wisdom kept Terry out of trouble.
Casper MonteVega, the third vampire to answer Azrael’s call, was the youngest among them, though his behavior would never reveal it. Monte had been a very successful author living in New York when he’d climbed out on the icy ledge of his thirty-second-story apartment on the morning of February 22, 1959.
Monte had suffered from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder since he was a child. He was an incredibly sensitive individual who noticed things that others did not. However, he was unable to block out the stimuli all around him and, though it helped him to write best-selling novels and earn a lot of money, it also made him miserable. He’d reached a breaking point.
In a move that Monte would never forget for as long as he lived, Azrael proceeded to land on the ledge beside him, scaring him so badly that he nearly slipped off anyway. Of course, Az would have caught him if he had.
Azrael knew the man didn’t want to die, but could no longer bear the pain of life. He told Casper there was another way. Vampires did not suffer from psychological disorders. It was, perhaps, the silver lining in the thunderhead of their strange existence. A few softly spoken words between two troubled figures on the ledge of an apartment building in the midst of a New York winter—and moments later Casper MonteVega became a vampire.
He met Randall McFarlan and Terrence Colby a few years later in San Francisco, and the three of them had become fast friends.
Now Randall turned away from Terry and faced Az with a serious expression. “Terry’s right in a way, though, isn’t he? I’ve felt something strange in the air lately.”
Azrael nodded. The Adarians were shaking things up, changing the rules. But there was something else. It was odd to Az that the archesses seemed to be coming to light all at once. Why now? After two thousand years? And wasn’t it a little too much of a coincidence that two of them not only knew each other but were best friends?
What did it mean?
“I have an edict to deliver,” Azrael announced, looking them each in the eye and allowing them to feel the urgent, stark command behind his words. The reaction was strong and instantaneous. The air around them thickened, the three men straightened, and Terry stopped fidgeting. Azrael had no idea what was happening on a global scale, but Randall was right. There was a new sensation in the air. Whatever it was, Sophie Bryce was sure to wind up at the middle of it all—just as the previous archesses had. So he was going to send out a message—to every vampire on the planet, and every human servant they depended upon.
“Sophie Bryce is to be protected as if she were your queen,” he told them softly. Because she soon will be, he thought. Against all odds and no matter what it took—she would be.
The three vampires before him nodded once, their serious expressions indicating that they understood.
“And, Randall,” Az added, almost as an afterthought, “Michael needs your help with a case.”
* * *
Abraxos, also known as General Kevin Trenton among his fellow Adarians, was a patient man by nature. You couldn’t live as long as he had and not develop some kind of resistance to the frustrating idiosyncrasies of time. However, time seemed to have sped up around him of late, and he had the sensation that if he didn’t hurry up and start running along with it, he was going to miss the train.
Kevin had lived on Earth with his Adarian brethren for thousands of years. The Adarians had been created by the Old Man long, long ago—and subsequently disposed of here, on this trash heap of a planet, along with a plethora of other beings, both supernatural and non. In those thousands of years, he had suffered a lot. His men had suffered a lot. The one ability their powerful bodies lacked was the one that could make their existences less painful. None of the Adarians possessed the power to heal.
For this reason, Kevin had been searching for such a power for millennia. He’d found it in young Eleanore Granger—and for fifteen years, he’d hunted the girl, who became a woman and was eventually revealed as an archess.
Several months ago, Kevin had located the archess and tried to apprehend her so that he and his men could determine some way to absorb her ability to heal. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Ellie was a beautiful woman. She always had been lovely, even as a teenager. Kevin could think of no sweeter victory than to finally have her in his possession.
However, he lost her in a battle with the Four Favored and she was consequently claimed by her mate, the former Angel of Vengeance, Uriel.
In that battle, Kevin had lost several of his men. He’d lost more in the fights that followed when a second archess, Juliette Anderson, made her appearance. Of the twelve original Adarians, only seven remained.
And Kevin was no closer to achieving his goal than he had been before their deaths.
Now there was another archess—the third. They were cropping up like weeds all of a sudden, after thousands of years. Something was happening, and he was running out of time. Despite his age and the calm that comes with the millennia, he was running out of patience.
Kevin now stood still on the rocky outcropping of Alcatraz Island, a solitary figure who gazed out over the dark, deep bay at the San Francisco skyline a mile away. It was quiet out here at night, cold and lonely and perfect. The bustle of the city was far enough away that its sounds could be heard only on the occasional breeze. He’d been in the Bay Area because of the third archess. He knew now that this was where she lived, and so this was where he lurked, planning and plotting and biding his time.
But in this infamous, lonely place, Kevin felt a kindred spirit. It was a rock, famed for housing the wicked and the wrong . . . an island from which no goodness escaped.
At his right, an information booth with a map of Alcatraz swayed gently in the strong wind coming off the ocean. It drew Kevin’s attention and offered his reflection on the surface of its smooth, polished plastic.
Kevin smiled at the reflection, flashing sharp white fangs in an uncommonly handsome face with sapphire blue eyes and hair the color of a raven’s wings. He chuckled softly. Another vampire myth shot to hell.
There was one favorable circumstance that had come out of his continual confrontations with the archangels and their archesses over the last few months.
During his initial battle with Uriel and his brothers after Kevin’s attempt to abduct Eleanore Granger, Uriel had been inexplicably trapped in the form of a vampire. Kevin still wasn’t certain what had caused this, and no intel on the sudden change—not to mention the switch back to his normal self—was forthcoming. However, while he was briefly in this form, Uriel had attacked two of Kevin’s men and taken some of their blood.