Beside them, a blade from the damaged turbine fell and its impact shook the ground and sent dirt flying into the air. Uriel paid it no heed. Nothing could have deterred him from what he was going to do next.
Heal this, Uriel spat at Kevin through a forced mental connection. Then he reared back, intent on ripping out the man’s throat as he had the other soldier. But before his arm descended to its mark, it was grabbed by a pair of strong hands and jerked roughly back, forcing Uriel to lose his grip and topple.
It was another face he did not recognize that loomed into view on his left, and it was a power he had not yet encountered that slammed into him like an invisible brick wall, picking him up and sending him with crushing force into the stem of the same turbine that had lost its blade. Reinforced steel and concrete groaned under the impact, bending in on the crumpled indentation where Uriel’s body had impacted it. Up above, the two remaining windmill blades tilted on their axis and began to scrape against their stem, now knocked out of their proper alignment. It sent sparks of heat shooting into the night and wrenched a shriek of scraping metal that sounded like a train wreck.
The turbine’s going to fall, thought Uriel, as the soldier who had attacked him hit him with his wall of solid force once again. This time, the invisible field slammed Uriel farther into the turbine trunk, crushing him with immense, merciless force. Behind him, the turbine cried out its death throes and buckled. Uriel felt it give, curling over him like a massive, wilting metal flower.
He knew that he was trapped. He tried to evaporate into green mist, but failed. He tried to use telekinesis to make the giant windmill straight, and again he failed. It was as if the very force field that held him in place also trapped his powers within his body. Like a binding bracelet, but bigger. And invisible. And controlled by the enemy.
He could go nowhere as the metal giant above him bent in on itself and began its ominous, otherworldly descent to the ground below.
When Eleanore looked up from the ground beside the white van to find two Uriels fighting in hand-to-hand combat, a new kind of terror gripped her. She wanted to help the real Uriel, but was powerless to do so.
And then the turbine above them that had been hit with lightning stopped spinning altogether and began to groan in an entirely new and evil way.
She had looked up once more, her wide-eyed attention caught on the blade as it bucked, dipped a little, and began ripping from its casement where it was bolted onto the stem of the windmill, two hundred and fifty feet up. The sound had been horrible. It was what she would have imagined a plane crash to sound like, the death throes of four engines and three hundred people.
She had spun in place and begun running just as the blade tore free of its bolts and soldering and began its strange, slow descent to the earth below. She’d known it was going to crush everything beneath it. She needed to get out of the way, but it was like she was treading water, moving in slow, sluggish motion through a dense atmosphere.
Behind her, the turbine blade hit and shook the ground. There was more terrible noise, the rending of more metal and the sound of something being crushed, and then lightning struck in several places all around her and Eleanore dove to the ground and covered her head.
Now her ears were ringing, her chest hurt, and there was no sense in the world any longer. Somewhere in her mad dash from here to there and back again, she had dropped her backpack filled with gold weapons. She literally had no idea what to do or where to go.
And then Eleanore felt arms slide around her, gripping her with an oddly gentle security, despite their strength. She uncovered her head and rolled over as she was lifted once more off of the ground.
Samael’s storm-gray eyes were not their normal charcoal as they peered through her. They were platinum and glowing starkly in the handsome planes of his angelic face. Behind him, the darkness moved. Eleanore’s gaze traveled to the shadows beyond Samael. It took but a few short seconds for her vision to adjust, and when it did, she found herself staring at a scene straight out of a Dantesque version of the apocalypse.
Rows of black-armored riders sat astride pitch-black stallions that pawed at the earth, causing sparks to fly where their hooves scraped the ground. There were dozens of them. A horse snorted and fire shot from its nostrils. Another whinnied, and fire erupted from behind its muzzled lips.
Long swords sheathed in black leather hung from the waists and backs of the horses’ riders. From the gaps in their black-metaled masks, their red glowing eyes peered across the darkness and pinned Eleanore to the spot.
They’re not human, she thought numbly. Monsters. Demons. Dark Riders ...
“It’s over, Ellie,” Samael told her. She turned her attention back to him and knew that he commanded the strange, dark army behind him. They waited for him to issue orders. “Uriel and the others have as good as lost,” he went on, his glowing gaze unforgiving. “Come with me. I’ll take you out of here.”
Eleanore shook her head.
The horses behind Samael pawed impatiently at the ground. The air felt heavy and the sounds of thunder and gunfire and groaning metal were drowned out by a rushing in her ears.
“Yes,” Samael quietly insisted.
Again, she shook her head. Her heart felt like lead in her chest. Her stomach felt empty and bottomless and she was fairly sure that her soul had slipped through the spreading hole inside of her that led, undoubtedly, to Hell.
“N-no,” she muttered, unable to think of anything else to say. She could not imagine Uriel dying. She could not imagine his brothers losing. She simply could not picture it—or, perhaps, she simply did not want to.
But Samael’s expression told her everything she needed to know. It was both triumphant and repentant, pitiful and victorious. There was a firm resolve to the set of his lips, and it was matched by the unrelenting grip he had on her arms.
“But those riders . . .” Eleanore whispered, “you can use them—make them help!”
Samael shook his head. He did so, once, and a very real panic blossomed within her. In that moment, she saw the remainder of her life spread out before her. She walked the halls of Samael’s infinite mansion alone but for the brief moments that she whored herself out to the Fallen One and his selfish desires. His queen. His concubine.
She saw a grave marker in the mists, dateless and barren, but for a single, ancient name. And she knew that she would never speak that name in earnest or in lust or in exasperation again.
Because he was going to die.
Unless . . .
“No.” Eleanore spoke the word again, this time with conviction. “No!”
She jerked herself out of Samael’s grip and lightning split the sky above them, so close that her hair stood on end and the air around her crackled menacingly. Ellie gasped and ducked, and on impulse, she jammed her hands into the pockets of her hoodie. Her fingers brushed cold, smooth gold.
Without thinking, she lunged forward, thrusting her body against Samael’s. He wasn’t expecting the strange move; his instinctive response was to wrap his arms tightly around her. Eleanore jerked the bracelet out of her pocket, turned in his embrace, and then slammed the bracelet down onto his left wrist. The gold band shimmered, flashed, and resolidified, now locked securely into place.
Samael pulled back and gazed down at the bracelet. Eleanore watched him, breathless, waiting to see what he would do. She expected him to strike her, and she tensed for the attack.
But Samael surprised her. Instead, he turned his arm over to see the gold glint beneath the flashes of lightning overhead. And then he smiled. It was a rueful and somewhat secret smile.
Eleanore had no idea what it meant—and she didn’t care. She wasted no further time. “Save them, Samael, or I will never remove that bracelet and you’ll be stuck without your powers forever,” she hissed at him. It wasn’t an empty threat. If Uriel died, she wouldn’t care what happened to Samael. She wouldn’t care what happened to anyone.
Samael glanced back up at her and the plat
inum fire in his gaze died down. “You continue to make an impression on me, Eleanore,” he told her. Amazingly, she heard his voice once again over the cacophony of the battle. “However, I wonder what you expect me to do in Uriel’s favor if I can’t use my powers?”
“You have an army of—I don’t know—Dark Riders behind you!” she yelled angrily. “Tell them to attack!”
Samael stared at her long and hard. He seemed to ponder something and Eleanore felt time being pulled from her grasp. Her temper flared. “Now, damn it!” she yelled again.
At that, Samael’s smile broadened, stretching into a white grin. He lowered his arm, and with slow and casual grace, he turned to face the riders behind him.
I’m going to die, Uriel thought.
It was not the first time that week he had thought such a thing. But this time it was with the added unpleasantness of a bitter and tangy fear on his tongue. He knew that this particular death was sure to hurt. It was certain to be slow. He would be crushed to death—could a vampire even die in such a manner? Or would he lie there, dying and awakening and dying and awakening, over and over again in an eternal round of agony?
The force field was unrelenting; the archangel who pinned him stared him down through a haze of loathing. Uriel had no hope of dislodging it, and the turbine was bending low over him, shoving him slowly, relentlessly into the concrete platform on which he stood. He closed his eyes against his grim fate, desperately wanting Eleanore and her closeness and her healing touch more than he had ever desired anything in his life.
For the third time in the last several seconds, Uriel attempted to disintegrate into mist, but without success. The archangel soldier’s power held Uriel’s form together, forcing him to remain in his solid, pain-filled state.
Uriel gritted his teeth as his muscles screamed.
And then, suddenly, the turbine halted in its downward progress, groaning to a begrudging stop even as Uriel’s legs began to buckle.
Uriel opened his eyes and gazed out into the night across from him to find a scene very changed from the one he had looked upon only seconds earlier. The archangel soldier who locked him into place against the turbine was under attack himself. Impossible though it was, Uriel watched as a black-armored rider on an equally pitch-black mount swung a sword that blazed with blue-black fire. The soldier ducked, rolled, and came to his feet, sparing a glance at Uriel and attempting to keep the force field up long enough for it to do its job and kill him.
But even as he did so, Uriel could feel the barrier slipping. And, at the same time, the turbine was no longer falling.
Uriel scanned the area and his eyes widened. Eleanore rested on her knees several yards away, her head bent, her eyes closed. She was obviously concentrating very hard. And her entire body was glowing with a strange and beautiful white light.
She couldn’t take much more. She felt like the Enterprise after a horrible fight with the Romulans, every ounce of her energy and fuel and strength used up and shot out at some clever, dangerous enemy. And yet she pushed on. As she had on the street when those cars had crashed several days ago, she pulled strength from her own body now. It was sapped from her muscles, from her bone marrow, from her blood.
With each passing heartbeat, she felt a little sicker and a little closer to death. But the alternative was too horrible to allow. She could not live while Uriel was crushed beneath all of that metal—crushed. Like being swallowed by an ocean or steamrollered on concrete or flattened by a freight train.
No.
As soon as Samael had left her company to command his bizarre and wholly evil-looking troops in a rally against the Adarians, Eleanore had noticed the sound of a turbine falling. She’d homed in on the sound, running to follow it back to the turbine beside the white van that had already lost its blade.
The massive windmill was bending in on itself, crushing an immobile form beneath it.
Uriel.
Eleanore hadn’t given it thought. She’d simply rushed toward him and began using her powers once more in an attempt to stop the turbine from falling any farther onto Uriel’s trapped form.
And now, here she was. Dying. She was sure of it. The moment had long passed when she had taken and used the last of her stores of energy and converted it to telekinesis. There was nothing left inside of her from which to pull.
She felt light as air where she knelt there on the ground. She felt numb and weightless and empty, like a helium balloon. A part of her wondered whether she would begin to float away on the wind.
But the rest of her was still focused on that turbine—and the man trapped beneath it.
Her love. Her life. The other half of her soul.
It was as she stooped there on the wet ground that she realized there was no other man in the world who could make her feel as he did. And no other man in the world cared for her as he did. He had recognized her on sight. He rescued her from the crowd on the streets. He took her flying over the Pacific Ocean.
He would die for her. She knew that.
And in the end, Eleanore simply couldn’t live knowing that she might have to go on without him. If he would die for her, then she would die for him as well.
So be it.
With no understanding of where the strength came from, Eleanore halted the turbine in its downward arc. She felt a new commotion stirring around her, but the light and numb body she now inhabited barely cared. She cared only that she was saving Uriel. Nothing else mattered.
Wings, Uriel thought in wonder. My God, they’re wings. . . .
Behind Eleanore’s glowing body, dual bluish whitish shapes had begun to take shimmering form. They were faint and transparent, reminiscent of the glowing afterimage from a camera’s flash. Or ghosts.
But as Uriel braced his legs beneath him and tried once more to evaporate into the mist that could finally escape, he watched Eleanore’s blue shadows change. They solidified and darkened, taking on a midnight cast that reflected the flashes of lightning above in the same manner as her raven hair until, at last, the archess bore midnight-black, gossamer wings, folded neatly at her back. They were so large, Uriel could imagine them stretching to at least eight feet in either direction when extended.
The archangel soldier who had trapped him was suddenly struck broadside by his attacker’s sword and the turbine pulled angrily upward, allowing Uriel to break free. The mighty metal flower screamed its anger at not being allowed to die and he knew it was Ellie saving him. Eleanore Granger, the archess who now glowed strangely in the lightning-scarred night and bore the very real, very physical wings of a mythical archangel.
Ellie.
Once Uriel was away from the cement platform of the windmill, he ran toward his soul mate, knowing only that he had to hold her—that he had to feel her in his arms, real and unimagined and precious.
He made it to her in the space of a millisecond and knelt, bending before her on reverent knees. But when he reached out to pull her to him, his arms coasted through her form as if she were not there.
He blinked, refusing to accept what had just happened, and tried again. And again, he moved through her.
“Ellie,” he choked, trying to curl his finger beneath her chin. There was nothing there for him to touch. She was visible, but intangible, and when she lifted her head to look into his eyes, he found himself drowning in pools of inhumanly glowing indigo blue.
You’re safe, she thought into his head.
He fought back the madness that clawed at his brain and the agony that crept up on his heart.
Yes, he told her firmly. You saved me.
I tried. She smiled. But it was an exhausted smile, wan and faint and was gone nearly as quickly as it had come.
Uriel knew despair then, and he realized that he’d never known it before.
Don’t leave me, he told her. He begged her. I love you, Ellie. Please don’t leave me.
Eleanore was as pale as the moon. Her lips parted and Uriel waited on what he swore would be one of his last breaths, t
o hear her words.
At once, two voices reached him—one in his mind, the other out loud. Together, they softly said, “I love you, too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Uriel’s mind rebelled; his heart cleaved itself in two. No.
“No, Ellie—”
When he reached out to attempt for the third time to pull her into his arms with the painfully numbing desperation he felt, it was to find that not only was she formless and ethereal—so was he.
His fingers trailed through her essence, leaving streams of their own molecular signature as they did so. He was dissolving, it seemed, breaking into fragments of what he was and dissipating into the glowing soup of shimmering substance that was once Ellie Granger.
He glanced up to capture her blue glowing gaze. Her look of relief was gone and had been replaced with one of confusion.
“What’s happening?” she asked, glancing down at his quickly evaporating body. He could sense her distress. She had just saved him, and now he was disappearing before her eyes.
It was unsettling to him as well but not as much as, perhaps, it should have been. Because something inside his head seemed to . . . remember. It clicked into place.
As their world melted around them and the rest of the universe began to seem more and more unreal, Uriel realized that he wasn’t afraid of this change. It was supposed to happen.
He’d been waiting for it for two thousand years.
“Uriel?” It was that echoing whisper again. Hollow and resonant.
“Close your eyes, Eleanore,” he told her softly.
She frowned at him. But he smiled a reassuring smile and nodded. “Trust me,” he said. “Close your eyes.”
She did so. Her ethereal lids barely muted the blue-white glow of her otherworldly eyes.
Then he closed his as well and waited. And waited . . .
“Now open them, Ellie.”
In the muted gray-white darkness that enveloped her, Eleanore realized that the world around them had gone silent. It was the kind of silence that pervaded on a snowy morning, muffled and absolute. She knew she was no longer on a battlefield in Texas amid fallen giants and petrified angels. There was no storm. No nothing.