Uriel was the only man she had ever kissed.
And though she tried to stop herself, she actually told him as much. As she admitted this final, damning bit, she choked back a sob and willed her eyes to stay dry. He touched her arm and she shivered; the feeling was electric. She felt exposed in front of him now and couldn’t bring herself to meet his gaze.
But the thought of him kissing her was chasing away her bad memories. His nearness beside her was like standing next to a sexual furnace. She felt not only vulnerable, but suddenly expectant. Hopeful.
For the second time that day, Uriel cupped her chin and tilted her head, forcing her to look at him. She gasped when she saw that his eyes were glowing as they had when he’d lifted everything in the room with his telekinetic powers.
He looked like an angel now, supernatural and powerful. She could easily imagine wings at his back. Those glowing green eyes held her in place as surely as his arms could have.
“Ellie, I won’t allow anyone to harm you. Not now. Not ever.” He shook his head once. “Do you understand?”
Eleanore managed a nod. Barely.
Then Uriel released her chin and placed his hands on the wall behind her, trapping her against it; she stepped back into the hard surface and could go no farther. Her eyes flicked to his lips and back again. He was so close....
“I know you don’t understand it fully yet and I know it will take some time for you to accept, but you and I are . . .” He paused, as if searching for the right words. “You were made to be protected by me,” he finally told her. “There isn’t a force on Earth that can get through me when you’re standing on the other side.” He shook his head, lowering it to stare at her through those unnatural, determined eyes. “I promise to keep you safe,” he swore. “Always.”
Eleanore’s head swam. He smelled so good; he always smelled so good. Like the leather of his jacket and that perfect, masculine spiced soap or deodorant. He was filling her senses, leaving no room for thought.
Again, she swallowed hard. She was suddenly having some difficulty breathing. But something niggled at her consciousness. There was something left undone, unsettled, floating in vagueness and ambiguity.
She had always possessed a hard stubborn streak and it came into play now. Just as it seemed he might kiss her—and, God did she want him to—she rallied all of her strength and forced herself to straighten. With some effort, she squared her shoulders, reached up, and placed her palm against his chest.
He smiled a wry smile and glanced down at her hand.
God, he feels good....
She could feel the muscles beneath her touch, hard and coiled and strong—waiting, like magic untapped.
Christ, I can’t concentrate. . . .
She closed her eyes and said quickly, “I need to get something straight.” She spoke in a rush, as if she might not get the words out if she didn’t do it all at once. “You said that I was created, along with three others like me, and then we were tossed to the wind—and landed down here. Just like that?”
She opened her eyes again and let her hand drop. It was hard to do. Her fingers immediately missed the feel of him. But she clenched her teeth and forced herself to push onward. “And then you chose to come after us? Just like that? There’s nothing more to the story? I mean, why were we thrown out like garbage in the first place? Are we . . .” Here, she paused, shocked at how much the next words hurt her to say. “Are we
mistakes
?”
Uriel’s eyes widened. He instantly shoved off of the wall. “
God
, no.”
Eleanore gasped as he grabbed her arms and drew her to him, his entire form now radiating an intensity that hadn’t been there only seconds before. His glowing green eyes sparked orange fire as he shook his head. “No, Eleanore. Absolutely not. You are . . .” His gaze trailed over her eyes, her cheeks, her lips, her blue-black hair, and then returned to her eyes. The space between their lips was suddenly like that space between Adam’s fingers and God’s on the Sistine Chapel—charged, electric, so small and yet too big at the same time.
“You’re
perfection
,” he told her, his voice no more than a whisper. “In every sense of the word.”
“Then why did I get thrown out?” she whispered.
Uriel frowned, and she could see the wheels spinning behind those gorgeous eyes. There was something else there—something he wasn’t telling her.
“What is it?” Eleanore asked, needing to know.
“It’s complicated.” He shook his head, just a little.
His jaw set, and for a moment, Eleanore thought he was going to keep it from her.
But then he let out a breath though his nose, and closed his eyes. “But you were honest with me, so . . .”
His tone was one of such weariness and defeat, it was clear to Eleanore that he would rather have talked about anything else in that moment than what he was about to say.
He opened his eyes and stepped back, just a little, letting his arms fall from where they had trapped her against the wall. “My brothers and I were not the only archangels,” he began. “There were others. One, in particular, had been the Old Man’s favorite since his creation. Then Michael came along and—” He paused, as if unsure of how to phrase his words. “In a way, Michael took his place. There was a lot of mistrust. Some of the angels didn’t feel the Old Man had his head screwed on right anymore. Dissention caused rifts and separated us into factions.”
Uriel’s gaze traveled to Eleanore’s hair and he gently lifted a lock of it to slowly rub it between his fingers as he spoke. “One day, the Old Man pulled the four of us aside and told us he had a gift for us. He showed us four stars in the sky. They burned brighter than the others. He told us there was one for each of us. Our soul mates—our archesses.” Uriel released her hair and ran a hand through his own. “We’ve existed for so long and”—he smiled a small, strangely wry smile—“we’re all male. We were lonely beyond belief.”
Eleanore did as he said and imagined such a world. She couldn’t help but do so. And as it always did when faced with something sad, her empathic heart hurt for him.
“The Old Man had decided to reward us for the loyalty we’d always shown him by creating these female angels just for us.” He gently cupped her cheek and brushed his thumb along her cheekbone, warming her to her core. “So that we would no longer be lonely,” he added softly.
Uriel blinked, frowned, and looked at the floor now, as if lost in the darker parts of his memory.
“As we were standing there, the archangel who had fallen out of the Old Man’s favor came up behind us. His name was Samael. He was not alone. And he demanded that the Old Man create archesses for him and the other archangels. He was like that—always wanting anything anyone else possessed. It was his idea of fairness.” Uriel sighed. “When the Old Man refused, there was an uprising. Your safety was threatened. To protect you, he decided to hide you by sending you out of our realm and into this one.”
Uriel looked up at Eleanore.
“The four of us decided we wanted to come after you. It had never been done before. No angel had ever fallen to Earth before. We had no clue what would await us here.” He shrugged. “But the Old Man granted our wishes and we left. We thought it would be a lot easier than it was. Unfortunately, your souls were scattered and we had no idea where to look. Our communication with the Old Man was completely cut off; we haven’t been able to contact him in two thousand years. It’s like we entered an entirely different universe. For all we knew, the four of you could float in limbo for eons or you could be born and born again and we would miss you by chance.” He shrugged and shook his head. “It’s amazing to me how little we understood about the human realm before experiencing it for ourselves. Even the Old Man had no clue.” At that, he paused and frowned. In a softer voice, he said, “Sometimes I think he still doesn’t.”
Eleanore was silent as she digested this. She should have felt overwhelmed, but aside from her initial anger earlier, she felt strangely . . . calm. It would explain so much. Why she had always been different. Her ability to heal. It even made sense, suddenly, that she’d never really minded her lack of any kind of boyfriend. Men were always vaguely interesting to her, but when she had to pick up and move, they were the least of her concerns.
And now she knew why. They weren’t meant for her.
Uriel was.
That explained her fascination with him from afar. Why she dreamed of him and read his articles and even sat through his movie just so that she could peer into his green eyes.
“You . . . seem okay with this,” Uriel said. She looked up at him to find an almost painfully hopeful expression on his handsome face. “Are you?”
Eleanore smiled a small smile and shrugged. “You know, I think I actually am.” She believed him. She believed Max. She was an archess and Uriel was her soul mate. It was an amazingly peaceful realization. As if she’d had a scratch she couldn’t reach her whole life. And now it no longer itched.
“Who’s doing your job now that you’re no longer the Angel of Vengeance?” she asked softly. It was something that she’d been wondering since he’d first admitted as much.
“No one. Humans don’t need angels to do their work any longer. Not that they ever did. Humans have amazing imaginations and their capacity for punishing one another far outdoes anything I ever came up with. In the end, revenge finds its own way, as does everything else we once delivered to the world.”
Ellie said nothing. She couldn’t disagree with that.
Uriel took her by the upper arms, squeezing gently. “Are we okay?” he asked, his eyes no longer glowing.
She shrugged and offered him a confused but friendly smile. He smiled back, looking relieved.
Then he turned away from her and opened the door to the garage. A vast, echoing darkness yawned open beyond, and he stepped into it. Eleanore blinked while her eyes tried to adjust and she hesitantly followed him in, looking around as she did so. The garage door was solid but for severely tinted windows punctuated by thin slats of clear glass that allowed very small beams of sunlight into the vast garage. The windows were most likely tinted to protect the paint jobs of the vehicles inside. Something hummed electrically in the blackness and something else
tink
ed in mechanical rhythm. Machinery of some kind. She heard Uriel run his hand over the wall, and turned to find him searching for the light. He found it, flipped the switch, and the fluorescents popped to life above them. The garage came into sudden, flickering view. Eleanore stopped in her tracks and stared.
Uriel disappeared into the row of vehicles and she lost sight of him. “What
are
all of these?” she asked, her tone filled with wonder. The closest “car” to her was by far the most bizarre, and barely recognizable as something that moved—it was the wheels that made her believe it was some sort of transportation device. Otherwise, it looked like something from the middle ages. Its wheels were huge, its “carriage” was nothing but a gigantic flat wagon, and the entire contraption was connected to a massive conical tank with one giant tube sticking out of it.
Eleanore slowly moved toward it and placed her hand on the carriage. “What the hell is this thing?”
“It’s technically the first automobile ever invented,” Uriel told her, his voice carrying over from somewhere deeper within the garage. “It was designed in 1335 by a man named Guido da Vigevano. He was also a doctor and a good friend of Michael’s.”
A friend of Michael’s
. . .
It hit her then, in that moment. How truly old Uriel and his brothers were. It was one thing for someone to tell you that they were immortal. It was another to be standing a few inches away from proof to that end.
Eleanore moved away from the vehicle and stared down at her hand. She’d just touched the very first automobile ever made. How many people could say that? “Does it work?”
“Not without help,” Uriel replied, suddenly standing next to her once more.
Eleanore jumped and spun to face him. She hadn’t heard him come up beside her. He smiled. “And these other cars?” She gestured to the long row of vehicles that seemed to progress from oldest to newest in one solid line of history.
“All invented or owned by people we’ve known throughout the years. Michael loves anything with wheels, so most of them are his.”
“I see.” Eleanore looked from the 1335 vehicle to the next, which appeared to be a massive tricycle with steam pipes and vents all over it. After that came a recognizable steam engine, albeit a small one. Then something resembling what she would have identified as a Model T. After that, it was one long line of smoothed-out angles, better paint jobs, less wood, more leather, rubber, and chrome.
Eleanore left the ledge where she was standing and walked in front of the line of cars until she was standing before an early-model Harley-Davidson. “Michael likes motorcycles, too?”
“Like I said—anything with wheels.”
Eleanore had to smile at that.
Samuel Lambent would love this,
she thought.
Someone cleared his throat behind them and Eleanore and Uriel turned to see Michael and Gabriel standing in the doorway to the garage.