“What do you think?” Michael asked, pride clear in his features.
“I think you’re a heck of a collector. I know someone who would probably pay top dollar for this one.” She gestured to the Harley.
“Oh?” Michael asked, somewhat amused. “It’s not for sale. But out of curiosity, who?”
“Samuel Lambent,” Ellie replied without thinking.
The garage fell into silence around her and she looked up to see each of the men staring at her, somewhat stricken expressions on their handsome faces.
“What?” she asked, wide-eyed.
Gabriel looked up at his brother. “We need to tell ’er about Sam.”
Eleanore turned from him to Uriel, who glanced at her and then glanced away, as if he couldn’t meet her gaze.
“She’s already met him, Uriel, and you know she’s gotten the wrong impression of him,” said Michael.
“Who?” Eleanore asked, unable to stop herself. “I’ve got the wrong impression about who?”
“Samuel Lambent,” Gabriel answered, before Uriel could.
“Enough, Gabe. I’ll handle this.”
“All right, then, but best make it soon; the weesack’s obviously made ’imself out to be a bloody hero.”
Eleanore turned to face Uriel once more and found her hands on her hips. “What the hell is going on, Christopher?” She corrected herself with a quick shake of her head. “I mean Uriel.” It was going to take some getting used to, no matter how attracted to him she was.
“You two leave.” Uriel leveled his brothers with a hard, meaningful look. Michael shrugged and left right away. Gabriel returned the dark gaze with one of his own, nodded once to both of them, and then followed Michael out, closing the door behind him.
Finally, Uriel turned back to Eleanore and sighed. “I’m sorry, Ellie. They’re right. We need to talk about Samuel Lambent.”
CHAPTER NINE
“W
hat about him?”
“He’s not what he pretends to be,” Uriel said. “Did you get my things from the car?” she asked, quickly changing the subject and turning away from him to stand on her tiptoes and gaze down the long line of vehicles. Presumably she was searching for her own MINI Cooper. But clearly she was uncomfortable with the subject of Lambent and didn’t want to discuss him. He wondered why.
Uriel stared down at Eleanore’s head and frowned. “Ellie, you need to listen to me right now. What I’m trying to tell you is very important.”
He moved forward to take her arm and turn her back around, but as he stepped toward her, the sun’s thin rays at the slats in the windows of the garage shifted and a stream of it hit his eyes. He squinted against it, instantly irritated, and pulled back.
Then he frowned again. That was weird.
“Ellie, please turn around and talk to me.”
“I can’t see my car from here—it must be behind that SUV down there.” She started off along the row of cars once more, and he was forced to follow her. Instinctively, he turned his face away from the light at the windows, not even realizing he was doing so.
She was moving quickly and he could feel his irritation rising. “Eleanore, Samuel Lambent is not just a media mogul, and I know you think he’s a nice guy. . . .” He flinched when the sun hit his eyes once more, but gritted his teeth against the pain. “But you couldn’t be more off,” he finished through a clenched jaw.
Eleanore ducked in between two of the vehicles to her left and Uriel hurriedly went after her. “Ellie, his name isn’t actually Samuel. It’s Sama—”
Sharp pain shot through his right eye and into his skull, immediately lancing everything from his brain to his stomach with agony. He instantly stopped, and once again acting on instinct, turned away from the windows, clutching at his gut as he ducked behind the large SUV beside him. He crouched low and closed his eyes. The pain eased, and as it did, he noticed that his breathing was ragged. Heavy.
What’s happening to me . . . ?
This wasn’t normal. He rarely felt pain, and when he did, it was either fleeting or an injury, in which case, Michael would heal him and that would be that. This was different. Something was definitely wrong.
“Here it is!” Eleanore called from several cars down.
Uriel ignored her and concentrated on his body. The inside of his left wrist was throbbing. Beneath the buzzing of the lights overhead, which were suddenly louder than before, he also discerned the faint sound of something splashing.
Drip . . . drip . . . drip . . .
He tried to steady his breathing and listen more closely. Then he looked down to see small, bright crimson splashes on the polished concrete of the garage floor. Each flower of dark red was a tad larger than the previous one. As he looked on, another flower joined the bunch. And then another.
They were coming from his fingertips. Slowly, he turned his hand over. Streams of bright red had streaked across his palm and down his fingers. He followed their trail to the now-stained cuff of his long-sleeved thermal shirt and then roughly shoved it farther up on his arm.
His wrist was bleeding. The wound was small but deep; it was the piercing he’d given himself with Samael’s blade-tipped pen. He’d thought it healed—apparently not.
“Eleanore!” He raised his head and rested it against the grill of the vehicle behind him. He closed his eyes and waited for her reply.
“Yeah?” She was farther away now.
“Please . . .”
Come here,
he thought, wanting her near. Needing her near. “You need to know the truth! ” he told her, even as the pain was back in his head and it wrenched the breath temporarily from his lungs. He swallowed hard several times, choked down bile, and continued. “Samuel Lambent is one of u—”
That was as far as he got before the real torture kicked in. There was a ripping sound from inside his skull and blood erupted in his mouth. He cried out, unable to stop himself, and slammed his head against the SUV’s radiator cover. His gums bled and throbbed in an anguish unlike any his long existence had ever known. With a bewildered, horrified fascination, Uriel felt his canines elongating from behind his tongue.
Oh God,
he thought
. Azrael! Help me!
He was now petrified with the absolute knowledge that a transformation had come over him. His fear for himself was bad enough; his fear for Eleanore was greater. She was in this garage with him—somewhere—and the hunger that was now dawning within him and yawning awake scared the hell out of him. He could smell his blood where it continued to gather in his palm and spill over onto the garage floor.
And he could smell hers as well.
There was only one man he could think of who might be able to help. Only Azrael possessed the ability to hear him. But it was daylight and the Masked One would be confined by the sun to his quarters under the mansion.
Despair sliced through Uriel. He gasped for breath beneath the onslaught and cried out again, using all of his mental capacity. There was nothing else for it.
AZRAEL!
“Uriel?” Eleanore’s voice came tentatively around the cars several vehicles down. “You okay?”
She can sense something is wrong.
He knew it was part of who she was—her ability to heal. He knew that now; as he knew with dreadful certainty that if he didn’t get away from her as soon as inhumanly possible, he was going to hurt her.
When he’d sworn to her that he would never allow anyone to harm her, he hadn’t considered that one of the people he might have to protect her from was himself.
Az. Please help me.
And then he heard Azrael’s voice in his head.
I’m sending the others, Uriel. Try to remain calm.
His brother’s tone was tranquil and controlled, but forceful in the way it carried through Uriel’s mind and echoed in the chambers of his consciousness. It instantly filled him with hope. They were on their way.
At the same time, he heard Eleanore’s footsteps drawing nearer. “Uriel? Where are you? Are you okay?” She was more worried now and moving quickly from vehicle to vehicle. He could smell her drawing nearer . . . She smelled like . . . like . . .
Oh fuck.
She smelled like sex and dinner and satisfaction and heaven and he was in agony, his insides in knots, his body on fire and frozen at once, his fangs now fully developed and his gums throbbing. His vision had turned slightly red and everything in the room was entirely too bright. His head felt as if it would explode.
Explode ...
Unless he sank his fangs into Eleanore’s throat and drank her in. Her blood would stop his pain. It would end this torture. He knew what he was becoming now. He’d played the part on screen enough to recognize the symptoms. He had no idea how it was happening or why, but he was becoming a vampire.
And he needed Ellie. . . .
“Ellie, I’m here,” he whispered, croaked, and called to her.
In turn, her footsteps changed direction, breaking into a run as they neared him. He looked up as she came around the corner.
“Eleanore, get back!”
The door to the garage was slammed open on its hinges to bang noisily against the adjacent wall. Eleanore stopped in her tracks and stared at Gabriel, Michael, and Max Gillihan. They were rushing toward her.
As if in slow motion, she looked down at Uriel. Eyes red as fire gazed back at her, freezing her in her tracks. His handsome face had gone pale, his hair was longer and darker, his lips were parted to reveal the cruelest set of fangs she had ever seen. They were white as the moon, long, sharp, and faintly bathed in his own blood. His body was shaking, trembling with unholy need; she could feel his pain and knew what was going on in his body as she always knew when looking upon the suffering. His hard muscles were even more pronounced than normal, and a deep, throaty growl was emanating from the recesses of his throat.
Eleanore couldn’t scream. She couldn’t even gasp. All she could do was stand there and stare through wide eyes as the monster who had only moments before been an archangel rose from his crouched position and leapt toward her.
Everything happened very quickly then; time seemed to pick up speed and momentum so that each event blurred by in rapid succession: Uriel’s transformed features rushed toward her face; someone was shoving her roughly, his hand slamming into her chest with such force that it knocked the wind from her lungs; she went sailing backward to violently smack into one of the garage walls, banging her head against the concrete and her hip against a large metal tool chest as she dropped to the ground, stunned.
There was a roar—and then a growl . . . some screaming, things breaking. Shattering? Eleanore blinked lazily; the world was out of focus and sound was distant, like an echo.
She was scared. She was also very sleepy. But worst of all was the nausea. It came fast and furious, like it did with a migraine, and Eleanore tried not to retch. It took her a half second more before she was closing her eyes again and summoning all of her strength to heal herself. She knew it was her head. She knew it as if she could see the injury from a doctor’s vantage point. She saw the concussion and the blood pooling beneath her skull and she concentrated on that—and on the nausea it created.
Just as the nausea ebbed and Eleanore was again resting back against the wall to exhale with new weariness, she felt breath on her cheek. The garage had gone eerily quiet.
She opened her eyes. Uriel knelt before her, his hands pressed to the wall on either side of her, trapping her there. The irises of his eyes were burning red; she could actually see the movement of flames within them. He bared his fangs and a deep, low, predatory rumble surrounded them both like thunder.
Eleanore swallowed hard, her heart rate kicking up a few hundred notches.
What the hell is happening to him?
Once more, her life had been plunged into mad chaos. “Uriel,” she said softly, trying desperately to find the strength to reason with him. Self-preservation was kicking in. She could feel a little of her power still there, but she’d used a lot healing her concussion. Still, if she needed to, she could move a few objects—maybe aim for his head. “Please don’t hurt me,” she whispered. “You promised.”
She gazed up into those eyes and felt lost. The world around them melted away into a monochromatic background.
He’s a vampire
. It was irrational and impossible, but there it was. He had become the Jonathan Brakes of America’s imagination. He’d become the vampire, the darkness, the hunger.
It suits him,
Eleanore thought. It was one of those crazy, senseless thoughts that raced unhindered through a person’s mind when they teetered on the precipice of madness-inducing fear.
He’s beautiful. He’s going to kill me, but he’s gorgeous.
The corners of Uriel’s mouth turned up then, offering the slightest, cruelest smile.
“I can read your mind now,” he told her, his voice deeper and more seductive than it had been before.
Can you hear me, my love?