Avenger''s Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels

  It was one of those mornings.

  As Eleanore let her MINI Cooper idle in the long line, she rolled up her windows and pressed a few buttons on the CD player. The music poured over and around her and she momentarily closed her eyes.

  She’d almost managed to relax when she heard the scream of tires burning on rubber. It was a sudden, terrifying sound that ripped through Eleanore, silencing the music, the hum of her motor, and her own dizzying thoughts. For the second time that week, she felt herself moving in slow motion, weighed down by the dreadful knowledge that bad things were about to happen.

  And they did.

  The burning scream continued for devastatingly long seconds and was joined by another, second screeching cacophony. Eleanore turned in the thick, molasses air to watch through her window as a pickup truck veered to the left, bumped the curb going way too fast, and then flipped, rolling over a white sedan and then slamming into an SUV in the right lane.

  Across the intersection, more cars skidded to unsteady stops, their bumpers crunching, the telephone pole coming down to smash a parked car beneath it.

  It all probably happened in the course of seconds. But in Eleanore’s eyes, it looked like lifetimes. Several of them. Births and childhoods and marriages and careers and retirements—there in one instant and gone in the next. It was the kind of accident that people looked on with muted horror because they knew that people had been hurt, and most likely killed.

  It was with a strange resignation and a detached awareness that Eleanore realized she’d left her car. She was running across the parking lot and toward the intersection. She couldn’t feel the ground beneath her feet or hear anything past the rush of blood in her ears. Her body moved of its own accord, as if she were trapped in a dream and watching herself from above.

  The closest vehicle was the white sedan. Its roof was caved in and the old man behind the wheel was trapped between the metal above him and the seat below him. But Eleanore knew that he was all right. It was an instinctive and natural thing with her. She had always been able to read people for injury and illness. The man was terrified and he’d wet himself. But other than a few scratches from the glass, he was unharmed.

  Her sense of unease grew, however, when she vaulted over the hood of the sedan, ignoring the scrapes it caused to her own flesh, and ran to the second vehicle that had been caught in the fray.

  The SUV.

  “Oh God. No, no, no, no . . .” She was speaking and barely realized it, hearing her voice from far off—high pitched, desperate, a cry and a sob and a whisper of pleading.

  There was a child in the backseat. Very young . . . But the car seat she was in was crushed beneath her, and the door had been shoved into the side of her small, delicate body.

  She was unconscious and drenched in blood, as was her father in the front seat. The driver’s side of the entire vehicle had been viciously crumpled inward. She sensed broken ribs and internal bleeding. She sensed concussions and a ruptured organ and a heartbeat that was steadily slowing. Slowing . . .

  With a cry of determined alarm, Eleanore reached her arm through the shattered back window, placing her palm against the toddler’s bloodied head. In flashes of pain and disorder, she recognized the injuries within the girl’s body, noting that it was indeed the child’s heart that was giving out. There wasn’t much time.

  Something was happening up ahead. He could sense it before it went down—a thrumming kind of hum in the air that vibrated his spine and set his teeth on edge. He found himself leaning forward in his seat until Max looked over at him from the opposite seat and frowned.

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “Yes,” Uriel replied. His green gaze was trained in the far distance, at some point blocks away, where there seemed to be some kind of traffic jam. A crowd was gathering around an SUV.

  Awareness shot through him like a bolt of electricity. “Max, it’s Eleanore!”

  Eleanore was unaware that she was being watched. All around her, people gathered, some calling 911, others pointing, still others using their cell phones to take photographs that would later become grisly accounts of life and death on the streets of Texas.

  A few were tending to the relatively uninjured woman in the pickup truck that had initially caused the wreck. The police would later find that she’d been tex-ting when the light had changed; she hadn’t looked up in time to see the cars in front of her slow and stop.

  Still other bystanders were trying to calm down the panicking elderly man in the white sedan. But no one came near Eleanore. Instead, they looked on with wide eyes and spoke to one another in hushed tones.

  . . . Her hand is glowing.... No, I swear. I’m not shitting you . . .

  . . . Holy fuck—is she? She is! She’s healing that little girl!

  . . . I swear to Christ, I’m not seeing this; you wouldn’t believe me. . . .

  . . . Take a picture!

  Eleanore heard none of it, was aware of none of it, and only saw the body beneath her touch and felt the soul that clung to it in desperation. She focused on her little heart first. She willed it to keep beating, promising it that she would give it the blood it needed to keep up the fight. Then she mended the gash in the girl’s liver. Next was the punctured lung; she had to move the ribs back in place and mend them in order to make it work.

  As she concentrated, Eleanore grew weak. The wounds were fatal, as they had been for Samuel Lambent. There was so much damage, so very much to make right.

  Several seconds and twenty eternities later, she pulled her hand away and slumped against the side of the car. Wearily, she noted the people around her. They were blurred though, half there and half not, less substantial to her than the dying man in the front seat.

  The girl’s father.

  I won’t let you die. . . .

  With renewed determination, Eleanore pushed off of the crumpled metal and turned toward the front of the car once more.

  Dad was hanging in there. But he was losing a lot of blood. If she didn’t heal him soon, he would lose too much. Sirens wailed in the distance. But it was such a far, far distance.... Eleanore reached in and placed her right hand over the man’s crushed chest. Ribs were broken. A lung was punctured here, too. Several vertebrae were knocked out of place.

  It took her forever to heal him. She felt as if she were shoving a five-hundred-pound boulder up a muddy forty-five-degree-angle slope. Finally, she felt the last rib click into place and the man’s life stabilize beneath her touch.

  Her legs gave out from under her then, and the world tipped on its axis. She could hear the people gathered around and understood what they were saying, despite the fact that the sentences were melded together. She could see their faces—dangerous strangers, looming above her and all around her. She knew it was over now.

  All of her running. All of her hiding. It would end this morning, on this street. They would come and take her away and drug her up to keep her from fighting, and she would live out the remainder of her life strapped to a hard bed with bleached sheets and the scent of antiseptic in the air.

  “Please . . .” She meant to say, “Please don’t take me away,” but her vocal cords gave life to only the one word. It was all they could manage before they, too, gave out.

  Had she killed herself? She wondered this, as she closed her eyes against the flood of reality. She’d never saved two lives like this. She’d never healed so many horrible, horrible wounds.

  I went too far, she thought, as she felt strong arms lift her from the pebbly ground and clutch her to a hard chest.

  Warmth enveloped her. There was the smell of leather, and there was someone breathing softly against her ear.

  “You’re safe, Ellie. Rest. I have you. You’re safe. . . .” Fingers gripped her tight; bands of steel held her firm. She knew she was being moved, and quickly. But she was so exhausted and so far gone that she could no longer keep oblivion at bay.

  It won, in the end, that dark nothingness to which the helpless go. Wha
tever would happen would happen. She could only pray—and sleep.

  With a surge of mind-blowing possessiveness and protectiveness, Uriel shoved his way through the crowd to his soul mate, who was now lying on her back in the road, her beautiful blue eyes closed against the madness around her.

  She had healed the little girl and her father. He knew it as if he had watched it himself. She had been in the right place at the right time and had witnessed the accident. And the archess in her had leapt to the fore in order to protect those who were not as powerful as she was. She drained herself, placing herself in the public eye and in extreme danger in order to save two innocents from certain death. And the people around her repaid her kindness by ogling her, snapping photographs, and filming her on their cell phones.

  A few of them snapped photos of him now as well. Christopher Daniels!

  Uriel bent over his archess and scooped her up into his arms. She was so light—it was as if her power had literally drained her of substance. He whispered to her, trying to console her slight form, and as he did, he felt hot tears stinging his eyes. In a show of righteous anger that he had no ability to control, Uriel turned to face the onlookers once more.

  His emerald eyes were glowing bright with the wrath coursing through him. His teeth bared, he straightened to his full height and bellowed into the crowd, “Get back!” His order was unnaturally loud, carrying over the din of confusion and amazement that the intersection had become.

  In the next instant, and out of a clear blue sky, lightning struck a parked vehicle in the black lot on one corner of the intersection. Thunder pierced the sky, drawing shrieks of surprise from half of the people in the streets. Others ducked, shielding their heads protectively as another bolt hit the top of a building, eliciting a second peal of thunder that rocked the earth beneath their feet and bellowed in human eardrums.

  The crowd began scrambling back away from Uriel, whose eyes were lit with an eerie and unnatural fire. On the sidewalk across from him, a limousine pulled up and skidded to a loud halt. But the sound of its tires squealing against the pavement was drowned out when another bolt of lightning struck down and the people scattered in fear.

  Uriel rushed toward the car with Eleanore in his arms and the door was opened for him before he reached it. He ducked into the back and Max stepped out onto the sidewalk.

  Uriel laid Eleanore out on one of the seats and turned his burning gaze on his guardian. “Deal with them,” he growled.

  Max Gillihan swallowed and nodded. He had never seen Uriel like this. And the errant lightning was a new thing; Uriel could not normally control the weather. It was all disconcerting, but Max had little time to think on it. Human minds needed to be cleansed of their recent memories. Cell phones and cameras needed to be wiped. Conversations had to be traced and dealt with.

  That was part of his job.

  So Max slammed the car door shut and nodded to the limo driver, who pulled away without further ado, leaving the guardian to his arduous task.

  The sun coming up over the lake in Chicago never failed to take Samael’s breath away.

  It was something he never would have known, nor would have been able to appreciate, from where he used to reside, in a place where the sun never set to begin with.

  But without night, there could be no day. And it took a human existence to understand such a thing. Samael knew that this was why the Old Man would never fully be capable of empathizing with the people who lived and breathed on his planet. He was too far removed from them; his hands were too clean, dusted off with finality long, long ago.

  Now, from the sixty-sixth floor of the Willis building, which most people still called the Sears Tower out of habit and a grudging respect, Samael could believe that he had made the right choice. Right here, right now, with those pink-purple-orange reflections gleaming off of the water and the blood-sweat-and-tears creations of man—it was easy.

  Samael took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He closed his eyes as the first beam of light hit his window, warming it from the outside. He placed his palms against the glass and absorbed the heat, needing it as much as did the human world down below.

  “My lord?”

  Slowly, and with quiet, slightly irritated deliberation, Samael lowered his hands and turned around. He and his “staff” were alone on their floor today. Otherwise, Jason would not have addressed him in such a manner.

  “What is it?”

  “You’ll want to see this, sir.” The handsome young man held a folder in his hand. It looked a lot like the manila folder that had held Eleanore Granger’s personal information. Jason strode forward and held it out for his master.

  Samael took it and opened it to the first page. He was met with the photograph of a young woman gazing at him with hazel eyes that nearly glowed in a tanned, smiling face.

  “This photograph was taken in Brisbane, Australia, two days ago,” Jason told him as Samael absorbed the woman’s beauty, his fingertips tracing over the rich brown curls that cascaded to her shoulders and behind her back. “One of Darion’s men snapped it, my lord—after watching the woman heal an injured surfer.”

  Samael’s head snapped up, his charcoal-gray eyes darkening. “Did anyone else see this?”

  “No, sir.” Jason shook his head once. “Darion was not in his human form and the surfer was unconscious. She pulled him out of the water, tended to him, and ran from the scene. Darion and one of his men followed her throughout the remainder of the day until they took this photograph that night, as she was dining with friends.”

  Samael thought this over. His dark eyes were glittering with untold machinations. He looked back down at the pages in his hand, reading her name. “Juliette Anderson,” he whispered.

  The second archess. Like Eleanore, she, too, was strikingly beautiful. They were nearly as different as night and day in hair color and complexion. But there was a likeness to them as well. It was incredibly subtle, whatever it was; he couldn’t quite give name to it.

  “I wonder,” he said then, running his hand over her photograph once more, “who she belongs to.”

  It was with a slow and highly unsettled uncertainty that Eleanore came rising back into consciousness. Her eyelids were heavy, but there was light behind them. Not a blue light or a muted light, as one would find in a hospital room or under fluorescents. This was sunlight.

  That’s a good sign, she thought meekly.

  She concentrated on listening then. She expected to hear buzzing sounds, like the flickering of halogen bulbs. She expected the jingling of keys on chains or the melodic, muted tones of people pressing the buttons on code keypads. But there was none of this. Instead, there was the gentle crackling and popping of a fire in a hearth. And there was warmth.

  And the feeling that she was being watched.

  Eleanore turned her head and opened her eyes. Her vision was blurry, but through it, she saw the fuzzy outline of a face and body beside the bed. It leaned forward and a lock of her hair was gently brushed from her forehead.

  “Take it easy,” he said. “You’re safe here, Ellie. I won’t let anyone hurt you.” The figure moved back again and she heard the creaking of a wooden chair beneath him. She recognized his voice this time when he added, “Rest as long as you need to.” He sighed and she saw him run a hand through dark brown hair. “God knows you’ve earned it.”

  Though she couldn’t see it clearly, she knew that his brown hair was thick and a little too long to be conventional. And she also knew that his eyes were green; the kind of ultra light green that was next to impossible to get without contacts.

  And if she hadn’t felt as if she had been run over by a Mack truck, she would have sat up in that bed right then and there and decked him.

  “You asshole . . .” she whispered, her voice a hoarse scratching of what it had been earlier that morning. She swallowed, blinked, and forced herself to go on. “You had no right . . . selfish . . . spoiled . . . überbrat . . .” She breathed the last part, the effort utterly an
d completely wearing her out.

  Christopher Daniels was still beside the bed. She blinked a few times as his figure came increasingly into focus. She wondered what he was thinking.

  His beautiful form sharpened and cleared just as he threw back his head and laughed heartily, deep and full, the sound like a salve on Eleanore’s body and soul. It soothed away her fear and somehow smoothed over the rougher parts of her indignant fury.

  She frowned, watching him, bewildered by the fact that she was so fascinated with the sound of his voice and the warmth that his nearness afforded her.

  Finally, he straightened, lowering his head, his smile lighting up his face the way it did on the silver screen. But this smile was just for her. And his green eyes sparkled with emotion that was not faked; he wasn’t acting now.

  “You’re absolutely right, Ellie. I should not have done what I did.” He seemed to ponder something for a moment, silent and contemplative. Then he asked softly, “Will you consider forgiving me?”

  Eleanore licked her lips and whispered, “Too tired to forgive you.”

  “I think I can do something about that,” he said then, and stood. She watched as he moved away from the bed and two other men stepped forward. She blinked and frowned.

  They were extremely handsome, both of them. One had black hair and gray-silver eyes and looked as though he spent a lot of time outdoors; he was tan and scruffy and had a five-o’clock shadow. The dark tone of his skin caused his eyes to stand out with such severe intensity, they seemed to almost glow in the handsome frame of his face.

  The other man had wavy blond hair and very, very blue eyes. They looked like light, clear sapphires as they gazed down at her.