So two thousand years ago the four favored archangels, Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, and Azrael had been gathered to speak with the Old Man. He’d told them that as a reward for their continued loyalty, he had created for each of them the most precious gift of all: a female mate.
These he called archesses. Uriel closed his eyes as his memories turned dark. He and his three brothers had never had a chance to claim their archesses. Before they could accept them, disaster struck and the women were lost—scattered on the winds of Earth.
The archangels decided to go after them.
They’d thought it would be easy. They were archangels, after all. Nothing had ever been difficult for them. But decades passed and centuries crawled by and the four brothers found no trace of their archesses. Instead, they found themselves trapped in bodies that were more human than archangel. They experienced human emotions and felt human agony. After a while, they found that just the struggle to survive the human condition was a constant distraction from their search for their archesses.
Michael was the first to make his stand in the human world. He was the warrior among them and had joined every army, had fought in every war, and had volunteered for every dangerous job humanity required: spy, fighter pilot, rebel. He had moved from village to village, town to town, and city to city, leaving friends behind as time passed and it became clear he wasn’t aging. Life was hard, but as the years went on he had assimilated, along with his brothers. Michael was now a police officer in New York City.
Gabriel, the former Messenger Archangel, had lived in Scotland off and on since his arrival on earth. He possessed an affinity for the land and its people, but he, too, needed to be exceedingly careful with the passage of time. Every twenty years or so, he regrettably departed the land of the Thistle and was away for some time. He was on one of those breaks now and working as a firefighter in New York City, not too far away from Michael.
Azrael, the former Angel of Death, didn’t keep to any particular place on Earth. His existence was even more difficult than that of the other three brothers. At first, they hadn’t understood what had happened to Azrael when they all came to Earth and were transformed. His form had been altered in a cruel and painful manner. But now the archangels knew what to call his transformation. They knew what he was. He’d been the first, in fact—the first vampire.
As such, he visited a different city every night. He stayed in the shadows; he fed and he moved on. He never killed when he fed. He drank from abusive drunks and addicts, evening out the score for the humans they would have harmed, and he was never hurt by the taint in their blood.
For centuries, Azrael had kept to this pattern of constant movement. However, in the last few years, he’d changed his behavior somewhat. Now when he wasn’t sleeping or drinking from some unsuspecting mortal, Azrael was onstage, dressed in black leather and a black half mask. That was the costume he used when he performed his music, hiding part of his face from the prying eyes of his millions upon millions of screaming fans.
Azrael was the Masked One, lead singer of Valley of Shadow, an immensely popular rock band that had taken the world by storm ten years ago. He had always had an amazing voice. It was mesmerizing, literally, and it had propelled him to the top of the charts in no time flat.
Occasionally, Az was approached by someone who recognized him for what he was. A rare individual would sometimes come forth, knowing that Azrael was a vampire and desperately wanting that vampirism for themselves. Seldom did Azrael oblige. However, once in a while, he felt the choice to turn a mortal was the right decision. He would feed from that individual a certain number of times—and the change would take place. Over the course of thousands of years, even a seldom-granted request will add up. Whether he approved or not, vampires now roamed the Earth, claiming Azrael as their father.
Uriel, for his part, had never really felt that there was a niche in the mortal realm he could comfortably fill. He’d once been the Angel of Vengeance. He had once punished the plethora of evildoers that the Old Man had created and unleashed upon the world. Along with the conception of humans had been the making of various animals and creatures. Some of these creatures had come to be known in the mortal realm as demons, devils, ghouls, and goblins.
When he’d resided in the archangel realm, it had been Uriel’s task to seek out these creatures and the humans who joined them. But now that he was on Earth . . . it wasn’t as easy to tell the monster from the human. And punishing them was no longer his task anyway.
He still knew right from wrong. He still hated evil and felt the need to protect innocence. But finding a way to do so on the mortal plane was not easy. It hadn’t taken Uriel long to tire of his role as human assassin for the troublemakers in human history, as sharpshooter in war after war, as a sniper, as a double agent, as a killer. In the end, he’d realized that he was tired of being Uriel. He wanted to be someone else for a while. And so he’d answered a casting call pinned to the wall of a coffee shop in California. After all, acting was all about pretending to be someone you weren’t.
And now here he was, in a limousine on his way to a signing because he’d suddenly become as popular as the Masked One. The movie, Comeuppance, had been so overwhelmingly successful, they’d turned it into a book and now the cast members were signing copies of it all over the country.
Outside the car window, the blur of buildings passing by slowed down and the car pulled to the right, gently rounding a corner into a drive. Overhead, a built-in speaker came to life.
“We’re here, Mr. Gillihan.”
Max sat up a little straighter and nodded at Uriel. “All right, here’s the deal. The bookstore said there would be a pull of two to five hundred people today—”
“Here?” Uriel was certain his expression matched his emotions. He was an actor, after all, and expression was everything. “In this Podunk little town?”
“There are teenyboppers everywhere, Uriel,” Max explained calmly. “When it comes to you and your fake set of fangs, they’ll come out of the woodwork if they have to eat their way out.”
“Nice visual.”
“I know, isn’t it?” Gillihan laughed again.
The limousine slowed to a stop and thunder rolled over the top of the car. Uriel frowned. A storm was coming? He hadn’t sensed it, and usually he could. He must have been incredibly distracted not to notice.
“I told Nathan to pull to the back of the store to give us a little time to prepare before we head in,” Gillihan continued, suddenly all business again.
“Did you hear that?” Uriel asked, interrupting him.
Max frowned and then blinked. “What? The thunder?”
“Yeah,” Uriel replied, peering out the window at the gathering darkness as he pulled on his leather jacket. “Did you notice it coming before?”
Max seemed to consider this for a moment. He glanced out the window and his brow furrowed a little more. “Actually, no. But this is the Southwest. These things come up out of nowhere and all of a sudden.” He shrugged as he pulled a few new pens and a file folder filled with photographs out of his briefcase. “I grew up down here.”
Uriel rolled his eyes. Max Gillihan hadn’t “grown up” anywhere. He’d simply existed for two thousand years. But, for some strange reason, he always waxed nostalgic when they visited a new location, and insisted that he’d been raised there.
“In a place not too far from here, actually. Called Lovington. It was a crap-smudge on the map thirty years ago, and it’s even less than that now,” Gillihan continued, shaking his head as he effortlessly doled out the lie. “But I remember the storms. Blew the roof off our house one summer.” He handed the pens to Uriel and turned in his seat to signal to the driver.
“Wait.” Uriel held up his hand. Gillihan paused, his brow arched.
Uriel felt uneasy. Something was off. This was supposed to be just another signing. . . . And yet something told him that it wouldn’t be. “I’m not ready yet.”
Max’s gaze narrowed and h
e sat back in the leather of the opposite seat. “You’d best get ready, my friend. Because it’s going to be a long night.”
Uriel blew out a sigh and ran a hand through his thick brown hair. “That’s what I’m not ready for.”
Eleanore Granger glanced up when she heard the thunder. She’d known the storm was coming. She smiled to herself. She always knew.
She glanced back down at the gathering crowd beyond the front doors of the store and couldn’t help the out-and-out grin that lit up her face. “They couldn’t have picked a worse day, could they?” Within minutes, the rain would be falling. Everyone outside would get soaked.
It was probably wrong that the thought gave her a thrill of satisfaction. But she was tired and she was frustrated and she was sort of sick to death of seeing Comeuppance posters in every store window from here to Timbuktu, interviews with all the cast members on the news, and new fashion designs in department stores that mysteriously resembled what the characters wore throughout the film.
And all because the main characters were attractive.
A jet plane carrying 236 passengers had gone down over the Pacific last week and the news slot that covered the horrific story was composed of a single live hour, and a revisit that night and the next morning. Meanwhile, the handsome visage of Christopher Daniels, the actor who played Jonathan Brakes in Comeuppance, seemed to be plastered nonstop on the fifty-inch plasma TV screen above the fireplace in the café of the bookstore. Whether in movie trailers, on interview shows or in news clips, he seemed to have been there for two weeks straight.
He was up there again, in fact. It was late Saturday afternoon and Denna’s Day was airing their interview with the star. Yes, he was gorgeous. Ellie had to admit as much, though she did so only to herself. The actor was quite tall and trim and broad-shouldered and his thick, dark hair was slightly wavy where it hit the collar of his shirts and jackets. His nose was Roman, his chin strong but not too strong, and whether clean-shaven or darkened by a shadow of stubble, his face forced a double take.
It’s his eyes, Ellie thought distractedly.
Those eyes. Christopher Daniels had eyes of the lightest green she had ever seen. She had thought they were contact lenses when she’d first seen them on the big screen. But interview after interview, it was clear that the eye color was his own. Ellie had dreamed about those eyes a few times. Not that she would willingly share this information.
He was most certainly a stunning man. His voice was smooth and he moved with a nearly unnatural grace. Ellie had to force herself not to gaze at his pictures when she passed them everywhere—on store windows, the sides of buses, in Walmart.
Were the women of the world truly that desperate for a pretty face? Including herself? Since when did a handsome man trump a tragedy in the news? It was crazy.
Ellie refused to play into that craziness. At least when she was awake.
The walkie-talkie on the customer service desk a few aisles away came to static life and someone in the stockroom asked her if she was there. Eleanore finished shelving the books she had with her and strode to the desk to pick up the walkie-talkie. “I’m here, Shaun. What’s going on?”
“The bigwigs are here. But they pulled up to the back door instead of the front door. You want me to tell Dianne or Mark? What should I do?”
“Um . . .” Eleanore thought for a moment. Why would they have pulled up to the back? Were they hiding for some reason? Did they need to talk to a manager? “Give them a minute, I guess. Maybe they just need some time to get ready. If they’re still back there in five, we’ll tell Dianne.”
“Oh my God!”
Eleanore jumped and turned to face a group of three girls who were standing at the entrance to the science fiction aisle behind her. One of the girls was pointing at Eleanore.
“I heard you! Christopher Daniels is here, isn’t he?”
“What? No, I—”
“I heard that guy on the other end, Shaun! He said that they were pulled up by the back door!” The girl’s voice dropped to a very loud, conspiratorial whisper and she turned frantically to her two companions. “Oh my God, guys, we can head to the back of the store and see him before anyone else does!”
“Wait!” But before Eleanore could even contemplate stopping the trio, the girls were off like Abercrombie-armored rockets, weaving through the store to the front door while trying not to draw too much attention to themselves.
“Crap.” Eleanore pressed the talk button on the walkie-talkie and put her hand on her hip. “Shaun, do me a favor?”
“Sure, babe.”
“We’ve got a threesome of Brakes Flakes racing toward Christopher Daniels’s limo. Can you head them off for me, please?”
Shaun managed to click the talk button on his handset in time for Eleanore to catch his laugh. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks.” She put the radio back on the desk and ran a rough hand through her hair. “Shit.” She squeezed her eyes shut tight. Then she picked up the phone at the desk and addressed her boss. “Dianne, I’m afraid I need to head back to help Daniels. There’s a group of fans racing through the store.”
It was clear from her heavy sigh that Dianne wasn’t pleased. “No kidding. The kids in front just noticed, and there are more heading back there now. I’ll get someone to cover for you temporarily. Hurry and help Shaun,” she replied and hung up.
Eleanore whirled around and left the customer service desk to head toward the exit beyond the bathrooms, but just as she was passing the women’s restroom, the distinct sound of someone retching stopped her in her tracks.
Oh no, she thought. Someone’s sick.
The sound came again, this time followed by the low whine and sniffling sounds obviously made by a child. Eleanore’s heart broke. Not only was the person sick—she was just a kid.
“Crap,” she whispered. Double crap.
She glanced once toward the locked back door and then down at the key that hung on a lanyard around her neck. She had a choice to make. She could go and save Christopher Daniels from his fans and, in turn, save the bookstore from any resulting reprimands, and hence, save herself from losing her job.
Or she could go and save the child instead.
As Eleanore pushed on the swinging door to the women’s restroom, she realized that there had really been no choice to make, after all.
Uriel stared out the window at the falling rain. He sighed. One of his given powers was that he could forecast the weather; he could accurately determine what the sky was going to do a good while before it actually did it. However, today the storm had come without warning.
Which left Uriel a bit befuddled. Perhaps he was more distracted than he’d realized. He had to admit that he’d been busy. Filming for the second movie had been nonstop and trying. Promotional interviews for the first movie took up the majority of whatever time was left. Add to that signing autographs and answering fan mail and finding dates for red carpet events . . .
“Shit,” he suddenly swore under his breath.
“And here I was hoping that you were just about to tell me that you were finally ready to go in and lie down in the bed you’ve made for yourself.” Gillihan sighed. “What is it now?” He still sat back against the opposite seat, his legs crossed, his hands resting casually on his perfectly creased trousers. He arched one brow and waited for Uriel to answer.
“I have to find a date for Thursday night.” He had a “gala” in Dallas to attend that night.
“Ask one of the multitude of women who come to your signings.”
“I’d rather not.” Uriel shook his head. “It feels wrong—like I’m pitting my fans against one another or something.”
“Oh, listen to yourself.” Gillihan rolled his eyes.
Uriel cocked his head to one side, his green eyes sparking with warning.
Gillihan sighed again. “You and your brothers are more trouble than you’re worth. You wanted this, remember? You swore you had to have it.” Max leaned forward, pla
cing his elbows on his knees. “I bet you don’t even remember why you were sent down here in the first place.” He shook his head and gazed at Uriel over the top of his glasses.
Uriel frowned. “To Texas?”
Max shook his head. “Earth, genius. A few piddly thousand years go by and you all get so mired in what it means to be human that you take your very existence for granted.” He paused and considered something. “Except, perhaps, for Michael. He rides the other end of the spectrum and takes himself too seriously.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Uriel told him firmly. And it was true. He hadn’t forgotten why he and his brothers had been given humanlike forms and allowed to reside on Earth two thousand years ago. It was just that they had been looking so long without finding any sign of even one archess that they’d gotten to the point where they just didn’t think about it most days.
That was all.
“The least you can do is quit your whining and get on with your increasingly meaningless existence without giving me any more trouble,” Gillihan told him flatly.
Gillihan’s words were abrasive, and they were meant to be. But Uriel knew that, deep down, it wasn’t the guardian’s fault. He’d been down here for as long as Uriel and his brothers had and it was simply too long for anyone to go without accomplishing something and gaining a sense of fulfillment, no matter how immortal he may be.
“I’m sorry, Max,” Uriel said softly.
Gillihan blinked. He sat up straight, and then blinked again. “You are?”
“You’re right.” Uriel shrugged and slapped his hands on his jeans in a gesture of defeat. “What have I got to complain about? Chicks dig me. I should be happier than a pig in shit.” He smiled that smile that had women swooning in the aisles. “That is what they say down here, right?”
Max laughed. “It’s what they used to say, mostly. But close enough.” He shook his head and turned in his seat to reach his arm through the opening between their cabin and the driver’s seat. Just as he was signaling for Nathan to head back around to the storefront, a shrieking sound drew his attention to the windows.