“Code red!” he yelled into the receiver of his radio and broke into a run toward the van. However, the van squealed forward, its tires leaving black smoke in their wake before he could get to it.
Kevin shot back to his own vehicle and issued the command to follow. In a few seconds, the van had made it off of the median and back into traffic and Kevin’s black SUV was speeding up behind it.
Uriel knew that he could use one of the van’s doors to open a portal into the mansion now if he wanted to. The strange metal cuffs were off and he could feel the swell of his power, plus the powers of the men he had drained, rising inside of him. However, opening a portal in the middle of the night and in the middle of an interstate was dangerous enough; humans could get hurt. Doing so with a team of Adarians on your tail was even worse. For all he knew, they would follow him right through the portal and into the mansion.
As both a vampire and an archangel, he could fly out of there, but he was betting at least some of the Adarians could fly as well. And they outnumbered him almost ten to one.
So Uriel did the only thing he could think of. He knocked out the driver, got behind the wheel, and started driving.
He knew the general and his men would follow him. With any luck, he could pull the evil convoy away from the interstate and to some place more private. What he would do then, he had no clue, but he was working on it.
On either side of the highway, gigantic metal windmills split the sky, turning more quickly than normal beneath the building storm. The Dallas area was full of wind turbines, the tops of which periodically lit up in synchronized red lighting to keep low-flying planes away from them. He shot them a glance and then turned back to the road.
And then it hit him.
He looked back at the turbines. Some were spinning faster than others. In fact, they seemed to speeding up alongside him—as if he were drawing nearer to the heart of whatever storm was building in this area.
With a newly determined grip on his steering wheel, Uriel took the van in that direction. A mile and a half down the road was a turnoff. He veered right, glancing in the rearview mirror. On cue, the black SUV behind him veered right as well, as did another SUV behind that one.
Uriel glared at the reflection. He was impressed that they hadn’t shot at him yet. He guessed they didn’t want to chance killing him. Kevin Trenton wanted his prisoner alive; Uriel was the man’s only bargaining chip and he really wanted to get his hands on Eleanore. The thought forced Uriel’s fangs to erupt in his mouth, but this time he was hungry for one man’s blood in particular.
No matter, Uriel thought grimly. It will all be over soon, one way or another.
He knew where he was going now. He knew what waited at the end of this trail of ever-more-quickly spinning windmills. The storm that grew and darkened ahead of him was no normal storm. It was born of the same woman whose magical rain had healed his wounds. And it was that woman that he drove steadily toward now.
Uriel hated the fact that he was leading the Adarians straight toward her. But he knew she wouldn’t be alone. At the very least, she would be with Samael. With any luck, Uriel’s brothers would be there as well.
And considering that there were nine Adarians and a handful of armed humans behind him who would do anything to take him down, he liked those odds much better than the ones he was up against right now.
“You’re a stormy woman, Granger,” Gabriel muttered beneath his breath as he looked up overhead and into the nucleus of the whirling, building tempest around them. “Can you no’ control that?” he asked, looking back down to meet her eyes.
She shook her head. “Sorry.”
All around them, giants of metal groaned their anger at being awakened so roughly. For as far as the eye could see in every direction, tall white bladed structures dotted the landscape, their tallest reaches flashing a slow warning red every few seconds. From a distance, they were rather beautiful—slowly spinning monuments to the ironic fact that Texas was number one in the country for renewable resource advances.
Up close, however, each turbine was ominous in its overwhelming size. The bases of the structures were more than fifty feet in diameter and, from what Eleanore had learned while living in Texas, the turbines stood more than two hundred and fifty feet high.
They had always frightened Eleanore. Their blades alone were longer than semitrucks and had to be transported individually over the interstates, draped in protective tarps until they reached their destinations and could be assembled. They spun so slowly downward, so portentously, that they could be viewed as nothing but threatening from someone as small as a human standing beneath them.
Now they sliced through the air as the dark sky turned yellow-gray with anvil clouds and lightning was caught by the lightning rods positioned throughout the fields.
“How much longer do we have?” Michael asked Max, shouting a little to be heard over the mounting wind.
“Ten minutes, give or take!” Max replied. “Now gather around!” He motioned for the others to pull in close and they did so. There was still no sign of Samael or any of the multitude of minions who worked for him. Eleanore wondered whether they would really show up as he’d said they would.
“Okay, here’s what we know,” Max began. “The Adarians can become invisible, some can fly, and according to Lilith, they have a host of abilities they can use long-range.” He paused for a moment, glanced at his watch, and then continued. “For that reason, they’re as dangerous at a distance as they are up close, if not more so. We need to get inside their personal space and take them down hard,” Max said.
It was surreal for Eleanore to watch the man give such instruction. She was used to seeing him in glasses and a three-piece suit. Now, however, he was dressed in fatigue pants and a tight T-shirt and she could see he was actually quite built. He vaguely reminded her of Stargate’s Daniel Jackson, taken out of the library and placed on the battlefield. He didn’t sound like a celebrity agent now either; he sounded like a drill sergeant, but without all the ridiculous swearing.
Max turned to her then and pinned her with a hard look. “Ellie, I need you to stay hidden. The moment they get their hands on you, our fight is over.”
Alarm shot through her. “But what about Uriel?” she asked.
“Leave him to us,” Michael replied firmly.
Lightning struck a rod somewhere very close and they all ducked a little, out of reflex, and shuddered under the booming thunder.
Max straightened and put a hand on Eleanore’s shoulder. “Try to control your fears, Eleanore,” he said. “You’re not without recourse. In that bag, you will find grenades, an automatic pistol, gold dust blow guns, and three separate pouches of gold dust itself.” He nodded. “That’s why it’s so heavy.”
Eleanore nodded her understanding, though her stomach was officially tied in knots now. She was terrified that if Kevin didn’t see her right away, he would just kill Uriel.
Remember my promise, little one.
Eleanore glanced up at Azrael, catching his gold gaze. He had promised that they would bring Uriel back alive. They stared at each other for a moment and then she nodded. Somehow, she believed him.
“We’ve come up with one final safeguard for you, Ellie, though we hope you won’t need it,” Max said then.
“What is it?”
“Armor. More or less.”
Max pulled a small vial of what looked like shimmering lotion from his pack. “Put this on your arms and neck. It’s embedded with gold dust and should act as a repellant of sorts should any of them get near enough to touch you.”
Eleanore took the vial and shrugged off her hoodie. She popped the top off of the small container and wasted no time in pouring the solution into her hands and then spreading it over her exposed flesh.
“Lookin’ good, lass,” Gabriel said. He winked at her. She blushed and looked back down at her skin to see that it shimmered a little with a glow that reminded her of some sort of exotic tan. It was actually rather a
ttractive. She sort of wished she had a few bottles of it in her apartment. Once she was done, she handed the vial back to Max and pulled her hoodie back on. The rain was beginning to fall now and it was cold.
Max turned to Michael and was about to say something when the sound of screeching tires reached their ears over the distant crack of thunder and the ever-more-steadily falling rain.
They turned to see headlights in the distance, three pairs.
“Crap,” Michael muttered. Time had officially run out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The archangels had been around for a long time, and Eleanore was certain that when the bullets had begun flying several seconds ago, they had all known, instinctively, what to do. But Ellie was new to the trauma of being shot at, and other than her brush with terror at the gala, she had no experience on battlefields.
When a machine gun that she could only assume was like the shard guns that Lilith had told them about began kicking strange stonelike holes into the dirt in front of them, she’d screamed. It was only natural. There hadn’t been time for her to hide before the attack was upon them. Everyone was moving and the world was a flashing chaos of gunpowder sparks and lightning and shouts and thunder.
Someone put a firm hand over her head and shoved her to the ground, rolling his body on top of hers.
He barked some kind of statement to someone else, though the sound of it was lost to her ears when lightning slammed into a turbine nearby, cracking her eardrums with a roar of thunder that was closely followed by the strange and ominous groaning of grinding metal. She tried to roll over and look up, but someone heavy was on top of her. And then that person lifted her by the wrist in a firm, viselike grip.
She was whirled around and quite unexpectedly, she was airborne. She tried to scream, but the sound lodged itself in her throat. She was only in the air a few short seconds before she once more hit the ground and rolled.
Again a body was on top of her, and the sound of bullets thunking against metal forced her eyes shut tight. The body atop her moved a second time and she was pulled up along with it. Then Ellie was shoved toward a white, windowless van. She stumbled and was caught. She was steadied and righted again, rushed almost violently along until, finally, she was falling to the prickly, gravelly ground behind the stalled vehicle. Peripherally, she noticed that it had four flat tires.
“Ellie!” Someone hissed the word by her ear, lifting her again until she was sitting. He grasped her head in his hands so that she looked into his eyes.
They were green.
“Ellie, are you all right?”
Eleanore stared up at him, not sure she should believe what she was seeing. “Uriel?”
“It’s me, Ellie.” He smiled, flashing those fangs of his, and brushed his thumb across her cheekbone. “I’m getting you out of here right now.”
He removed his hand from her face and stood, taking her by her upper arm. Reflex kicked in and she grabbed his hand. “We can’t leave!” She must have been insane to think what she was thinking, but there it was. She couldn’t leave in the middle of the battle; she had to stay to heal those who were wounded. Max and Uriel’s brothers were out there. She had to help.
But in a move so utterly unexpected it made Eleanore gasp, Uriel yanked his hand out of her grip and pain flashed in his green eyes.
Ellie looked down at his hand to find it burned dark red and blistered with fingerprint bands around its edges.
. . . gold is caustic to them....
“Oh my God . . .” she whispered, remembering the gold-flecked lotion she had put on.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” Uriel hissed, drawing her attention back to his face. He reached out like lightning and grabbed her upper arm where she was covered by her hoodie. “God isn’t here.” His gaze hardened, going from green to blue in the space of a single heartbeat.
Eleanore recognized those eyes. Even after ten years, she knew Kevin Trenton’s handsome gaze as if she had peered into it only yesterday. It wasn’t Uriel holding her at all. Lilith had said the Adarians could shape-shift. This was Kevin.
Rain was starting to fall now, and it made Uriel’s grip on his enemy slippery. Through the contact he had on the archangel’s throat, he felt surges of great power, yet untapped.
Uriel had fed three times that night and Eleanore’s rain had healed him. Yet he wasn’t certain he could survive the general’s attack, much less get himself and Eleanore to safety.
He had hoped to have more time to plan an escape. But as soon as he had begun driving that van across the empty valley of space between him and his brothers, the gunfire started up. It wasn’t long before he figured out that the first archangels were trying to prevent his progress to the other side. Within the space of seconds, he lost all four tires and, ultimately, control of the vehicle.
He’d slammed on the breaks and thrown open the door to drop to the ground beneath as bullets fanned across the makeshift battlefield. A shard gun blast hit him in the leg, began solidifying his calf muscle and knee, and then the Adarian’s blood he’d taken had kicked in and reversed the process.
He managed to get his feet beneath him once more and start running toward his brothers when he was knocked to the ground and bowled over by one of the general’s men. The archangel who tackled him was one of the men who had tortured him in his holding cell. He recognized him immediately, not only by the man’s features, but by the fact that the enemy archangel instantly began forcing horrid mental images into Uriel’s mind.
Uriel struck out with vampiric speed and literally ripped out the man’s throat. The man’s esophagus popped open with a whooshing sound and blood sprayed out with exuberant, tremendous pressure, nearly coating Uriel. He managed to duck and roll, avoiding the gory mess, and when he looked over his shoulder, it was to find the archangel toppling forward onto his face in the blood-muddied dirt. The Adarian did not move and no longer breathed. He simply laid there and bled to death.
They can be killed by other archangels, Uriel realized as he listened to the man’s heart falter and stop.
Another shard bullet found Uriel’s shoulder and he grimaced with the spreading rock-hard pain. But it, too, subsided and receded once more, leaving his flesh normal in the end. He shot to his feet and started toward his brothers a second time, using vampire reflexes to half disperse into green dust and dodge beneath bullets that flew in both directions.
Up ahead, Uriel could make out the fire-emblazoned outline of two tall, broad-shouldered men. He heard his name shouted on the wind. In another few seconds and two shard-blast impacts later, he’d made it across the space between them and was being shoved to the ground behind a turbine foundation beside Gabriel.
“Where is Eleanore?” Gabriel shouted, the expression on his face a stark mixture of confusion, fear, fury, and pain.
Uriel’s heart shot into his throat and stayed there. He wasted no time in delving into his brother’s mind, and Gabriel willingly let him in. It was within a few heartbeats that Uriel learned his brothers thought they had already greeted him, albeit quickly and amidst unfriendly fire, and had seen him take Eleanore out of the fight. Apparently, Uriel—or some being they thought was Uriel—had grabbed her, shouted a brief good-bye to the others, and taken to the skies. Gabriel was utterly mystified that Uriel was now back, and without Eleanore.
Kevin Trenton, Uriel thought coldly. The archangel had the ability to change form.
Once more, he was up and moving. This time, he shot up into the sky and evaporated into green mist, effectively avoiding any and all gunfire. It was more difficult to maneuver like this, especially in the storm that Eleanore had wreaked around them. The wind buffeted his particles, separating them until it took almost too much concentration to keep himself together. And it was harder to see. It was a sight of the mind and not of the eyes—everything was an afterimage, a negative of sorts, and it was like viewing impressions instead of three-dimensional beings.
Still, he was determined.
He found h
er below, beside the white van, standing with Trenton, who was disguised as Uriel himself. He homed in on her as if she were a lifeline and he was drowning.
He landed on the opposite side of the van and came around the corner to find her and Trenton face-to-face. The general was holding her fast, spearing her with an evil blue gaze.
“God isn’t here,” he said.
“No,” Uriel hissed, drawing their attention. “But I am.”
Kevin bared his teeth in anger, tossed Ellie unceremoniously aside, and braced himself as Uriel charged straight toward him. Lightning once more slammed into something nearby and actual sparks of electric fire fanned out into the night sky above them as he and Kevin met in combat.
Uriel could hear the horrid sound of bending, creaking metal and knew that the last bolt of lightning had done serious damage to a nearby turbine. But it was a passing realization and took a backseat to the battle at hand. He and Kevin now fought in a way that he had never fought another being. This was more than vengeance, which, in and of itself, was deserved. This was more than jealousy, self-preservation, and love. This was hatred, at its finest, at its core, and it fueled his body beyond all sense of pain, sound, or vision.
Trenton’s face morphed before Uriel’s eyes, taking on his own familiar, handsome, and detested features.
“You can’t win, Uriel,” Kevin growled at him through straight, white, gritted teeth. “You’re outnumbered.” He grimaced and grunted as Uriel slammed them both into the cement platform of a turbine. “Two of your brothers have already fallen. The third will follow in short order.” It must have been difficult for him to speak through the limited air supply Uriel’s tight grip around his neck afforded him. But he managed, perhaps fueled by the same kind of hatred that fed his attacker.
Uriel knew what Trenton was doing. Whether he was telling the truth or not, his words were a distraction, a warning meant to slow Uriel down, to give him pause, and make him unsure.