“Can you feel them, Azrael? Those whose ancestors you brought to this place know that you walk among them. They are restless.” Samuel chuckled again, clasping his hands easily behind his back as he slowly paced to a place somewhere between Azrael and Eleanore. He glanced at her and there was genuine amusement in his crackling silver gaze.
“Enough,” Azrael said. He spoke without anger and without any real force, but his voice carried across the darkness with incredible beauty. He also sounded weary. Genuinely weary. “Speak the truth, Samael. For once in your ungodly existence.”
At this, Samuel Lambent threw back his head and laughed heartily. The sound was as deep and rumbling and beautiful as the voice of Azrael.
Eleanore was simply bewildered. She would have given almost anything at that moment to be transported somewhere safe and bright and free of men altogether.
Sam stopped laughing and turned his piercing gaze on her. It took her breath away to be suddenly under such a weight.
“
Anything
, Eleanore?”
Eleanore blinked.
He read my mind....
“Say nothing to him, Ellie!” Azrael commanded from where he stood. His gold eyes were now blazing bright as fire. They reminded Eleanore of Uriel’s brilliant frozen gaze as he’d looked upon her in the garage only hours ago. “Do not speak, and guard your thoughts well,” Azrael told her. Something in his golden eyes held a very real warning.
She looked from Azrael to Samuel, and in her mind she replayed her meeting with the wealthy media mogul. She thought of the motorcycle crash and his injury that had been uncommonly difficult to mend. And now here he was. In a cemetery on a dark night, when he shouldn’t have been able to find her at all.
Eleanore suddenly found herself doubting Samuel Lambent.
Samael,
she thought. Azrael had called him Samael. Was he the same Samael Uriel told her about in the mansion? The one who had caused her and the other archesses to be lost to the archangels all of those years ago?
Sam cocked his head to one side and studied her very carefully. He turned to face her fully, spearing her with eyes that were abruptly and unexpectedly unnerving.
“Who, then, shall you be taking counsel from on this night, Eleanore?” he asked her slowly, softly. There was danger in that gaze, but there was something else as well. Pain? He smiled a small, self-deprecatory smile. “Death or the ‘Devil’?”
That’s it,
thought Eleanore. Her creep-out-o-meter had just pretty much exploded.
The tombstones were heavy enough to do damage to a human if slammed into one telekinetically—but she was no longer so sure Samuel was human. And she honestly didn’t feel that she’d yet regained the strength it took to call lightning forth from the skies. Not that it would stop either of the men with her.
As worthless as she knew it would be, the only recourse left to her, despite everything, was to run. She spun around and grasped hold of the metal bars of the gate behind her, bringing her legs up with the intent of vaulting over it.
But it was Samuel Lambent’s tall, suit-clad form gazing steadily at her from the other side that stopped her short. She hadn’t seen him move, of course. And it should have been impossible for him to be standing behind her at one moment—and then be standing thirty feet away, outside of the cemetery the next.
“Running will do you no good,” he said as he came toward the gate from the other side. He said it matter-of-factly and looked down at the ground as he walked. He was a gorgeous man in an expensive suit merely contemplating a fact, nothing more.
Eleanore instinctively let go of the rusted bars and stepped back from the metal barrier that now seemed so utterly flimsy.
Sam paused where he was and casually unbuttoned his suit coat. He shoved his hands into his pant pockets. “Running will only weaken you, Ellie,” he said with a shrug. Another few lazy steps forward and he sighed heavily, nearly closing the distance between himself and the gate. When he finally reached it, he looked up, caught her eyes with his, and peered all the way into her soul.
In no more than a whisper, he said, “I promise you that you will need all of your strength once I get you alone.”
The air around Eleanore shifted with an unnatural wind. It whipped at her hair and blew debris into her eyes just as she was shoved roughly backward and went flying across the cemetery to land on her back on a patch of grass and mud several yards away.
Eleanore lay stunned for a moment, listening to the shriek of bending, wrenching metal and the violent crunch and splinter of wood. And then she rolled over and pushed herself up onto her elbow, using her other hand to shove her long black hair out of her face. But arms came around her then, strong bands of steel that hauled her backward across the ground and against an equally hard body.
Self-preservation kicked in and Eleanore went into overdrive, fighting furiously in her captor’s grip. But the fight did no good and it didn’t last long before her captor was twisting her arm behind her, and she was contemplating the lightning once more.
“Zap me and you’ll get yourself, too. Be a good girl and hold still.”
She recognized that voice. It was Jason something or other, Samuel Lambent’s personal assistant.
Despite the fight-or-flight reflex pouring adrenaline into Eleanore’s blood, she was beginning to feel well and truly spent. Exhaustion was creeping in around the edges when metal cuffs were snapped onto her wrists and Jason’s arms came around her once more.
She couldn’t move. There was nowhere for her to go. Jason held her tight as she peered across the cemetery to where two men were fighting, their tall forms locked in mortal combat. Each had a hand around the other’s throat. The air was charged with lightning, and it wasn’t Eleanore’s doing. There was also a deeper darkness to the night around them. It was more cloying, colder and blacker. It seemed to linger in patches and moved as the two struggling figures moved. It followed them, welcoming its honored guests, laying out its shadows for them to tread upon and draping them in its finest sable cloaks, as was befitting their stations.
Across the graveyard, Azrael threw Samuel against a crumbling crypt laced with dead ivy; the impact cracked the mortar under Sam’s rock-hard body. But as Samuel slowly straightened from the crumbling indentation behind him, a moaning rose from the ground of the graveyard. It was a whistling, screeching kind of moan that caused Eleanore to duck her head and wish her hands were free to cover her ears.
The wailing, moaning din grew in volume and Azrael looked around him at the gravestones and matted, muddy earth.
Eleanore looked up to see Jason smile a broad, white grin.
Samuel spoke, moving away from the wall behind him and straightening his clothes as he did. “Like I said, Azrael, they know you’re here. They know who you are.” He looked down at the ground and the faint mist that was now rising from each grave. He smiled. “And they’re not happy to see you.”
The sound crescendoed and the mists coalesced and darkened and floated toward the tall, dark form of the one who had seen their father’s fathers to their graves. It was like a dam of spirits had broken and the flood was rushing toward the former Angel of Death.
Samuel turned to Jason then and raised his hand. Before Eleanore knew it, Jason raised his other hand toward his master and the world melted around them.
“Why do you do this to yourself, Sam?” She sounded like weariness itself, her tone so soft, her voice so mournfully tender, that for just a moment, Samael regretted having brought her to that stage. But the regret was fleeting and flighty and left on the same fickle wings on which it had flown in.
“It’s in my nature, Lily.” He shrugged, gave her a sidelong glance, and then turned back to finish preparing the drink he had been making for Eleanore Granger—who waited with Jason in the sitting room next door. “It’s who I am.”
“No, it isn’t.”
At that, he smiled. He spared her the mirthless chuckle, however, and simply shook his head. “You’ll never give up, will you?”
“Nor will you,” she retorted. She stood from where she’d been sitting on the couch across from the bar at which he stood. “Such self-destructive behavior.” She made her way to the bar beside him, and without looking at him, she began to pour herself a drink. “Thousands of years, and I am the only one to have glimpsed the side of you I’ve seen,” she said softly. She glanced up at him over her shoulder, and he met her dark gaze. “You torture yourself,” she told him.
“Someone has to do it.” His smile was self-deprecating and entirely charming. Then he grew serious and his gaze narrowed. “How are you feeling?’
For a moment, Lilith appeared nervous under the weight of the question. Then she put down her freshly poured drink without taking a sip. She straightened her shirt and looked down at the marble counter of the bar. “Better. I heal quickly.”
“Yes, I know,” Sam said, cocking his head to one side and studying her more closely. “I never would have sent you otherwise.”
She said nothing, and avoided meeting his gaze.
“Gillihan insisted on seeing you one last time before he left with the contract,” he told her, watching her closely to see her response.
She blushed, if only slightly, and looked up at him in surprise. It was answer enough for him. His smile became one of dawning roguishness. “You’re in love with the Guardian.”
“Enough,” she insisted softly. “What is it exactly that Max will learn once he studies the contract, Sam?” she asked, changing the subject. She paused and sighed, turning the stem of the wineglass in her fingers. “What have you done?”
Now Samael smirked, turning away from the bar with two drinks in his hands. “Stipulations, my dear. Details.” He shrugged as he made his way to the door at the other side of the room. “Contracts are serious business. Uriel knew that going into it.”
“You gave him little choice.”
Samael stopped and shot her a dark look over his broad shoulder. His tone was very low when he replied, “There is always a choice, Lily.”
The sun was coming up on Wednesday morning. He could sense it; there remained less than an hour of night. Azrael had grown accustomed to its coming and going and what it meant. But there was a vampire among them now who had never before experienced a dawn through a vampire’s eyes. Az could effortlessly read Uriel’s thoughts and emotions; it had been easy when Uriel was only an archangel. It was even easier now.
Uriel had always regarded the day as any human would. It was simply the sun—it existed and it did its thing and that was that. But now, as the new vampire noticed its creeping rays slithering toward the horizon like tentacles of an angry god, he was fully aware of it in a way that no normal mortal could possibly comprehend. It was, in all of its gigantic, gaseous glory,
certain death
. And he felt as if it were coming for him.
“I haven’t much time,” Uriel said. His eyes were on the window and the thick curtains that hung over it. They were black and velvet and behind them were the protective wooden slats of venetian blinds. Beyond the blinds and the window they covered was a courtyard underground. This was Azrael’s wing of the mansion, as far from the reach of daylight’s glowing orb as possible. And it wasn’t enough for Uriel. He was still so new.
“I know,” Max said, glancing up. “I’m working as fast as I can.” The guardian watched his charge with a wary, careful gaze. Uriel had been warned by his brothers and by Max, as well, not to attempt to go after Eleanore on his own. He was not used to being a vampire and couldn’t be trusted not to lose control and hurt her.
Azrael could feel the wrath that surrounded the former Angel of Vengeance like an invisible, pulsing shroud. What they suggested may have made loads of sense, but it was clearly driving Uriel mad.
Max returned his attention to the task before him. In front of him rested a thick slab composed of some combination of marble and limestone. It resembled an altar, minus the candle wax drippings. On top of it rested, un-scrolled, the contract that Uriel and Samael had both signed.
On the other side of the altar, Gabriel and Michael watched Max closely, their handsome visages shadow-crossed, their jaws tight, their voices silenced.
Across the room, hidden in the shadows and leaning against a carved stone wall, Azrael waited. He was still weak. Samael’s spell had taken him by surprise and drained much of the strength out of him. The Fallen One had called up the spirits of the dead that had not yet moved on—and they’d gone after Azrael. Their bitter essences had speared through him and about him, angrily devouring the life force from him they so desperately yearned for. Az didn’t have a lot of life force in him to begin with. He was a vampire. The spell had left him weak beyond measure. And it had allowed Samael to escape with the archess.
But Az had since fed—twice—and now the darkness licked his wounds. He watched in silence and knew what they were all thinking. He carefully gauged Uriel’s every heartbeat, his every tightened fist, and every impatient flexing of muscle within his tall, toned body.
He was paler now, Azrael noted. Uriel now resembled his infamous portrayal of Jonathan Brakes much more closely than he did the alias Christopher Daniels. Az had to smile at that.