Messenger's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels (2 page)

The soft part of Stuart had died in that water. What was left was rigid and right and strong to an absolute fault. But he was a good man, deep down, and a dependable friend. Stuart was the only human alive who knew Gabriel’s secret. He was the only one in Scotland who was aware that Gabriel Black was not in fact the son of Duncan Black, as everyone else believed, but was actually Duncan Black
himself
,
because every member of that particular Black family was actually the same man. Stuart was the only soul privy to the knowledge that there was really no such thing as Duncan Black or even Gabriel Black—there was only
Gabriel
, the eminent Messenger Archangel and one of the four most celebrated archangels in existence.

Over the centuries, Gabriel had spent a lot of time in Scotland. Some of those times were less pleasant than others. Europe had gone through an Inquisition, a plague, and countless wars, and the tapestry of Scotland’s history was woven from thorny thread. Nonetheless, when she was a fair land, she was a beautiful land, and Gabriel fell in love with his bonnie Caledonia.

However, he could never stay for too long, as he didn’t age, and people would begin to wonder why a fifty- or sixty-year-old man still looked to be in his thirties. Gabriel always left before this could happen. And then, twenty or thirty years later, he would return and pass himself off as the son of the man whose name he had claimed the last time he was in Scotland.

Gabriel’s explanations were always generally the same. His “father” had eloped with a woman from another village or town or city—and Gabriel was the result. Again and again he did this, because not much could keep him away from Scotland. Not for long, anyway.

Gabriel had especially wanted to return this time around. Life had become surreal at the mansion he shared with his three brothers, and in the States, of late. Uriel, one of his brothers, had recently found his archess, and in her a taste of the true happiness so long desired by the archangels. For two thousand years, the former Angel of Vengeance had searched for the female archangel made solely for him by the Old Man. And a few months ago, he had finally come across her. Uriel was the first of his brothers to find his archess. The archesses were treasured, not only by their mates, the archangels—but by the Adarians, a separate and frighteningly powerful race of archangels. The Adarians wanted the archesses for their unique ability to heal. When Uriel located Eleanore, so did the Adarian leader. A series of battles ensued, both physical and mental, and the archangels won, more or less. Now Uriel and Eleanore were happily married in the US.

Gabriel was elated for his brother. Knowing that the feat was possible and that the treasured women they had all sought out for twenty centuries were in fact
real
filled Gabriel with a sense of promise after having nearly given up hope that he would ever find his own archess.

But at the same time, it was hard to see Uriel and Eleanore together and not wonder . . . would he have to wait a week for his own archess to come out of the woodwork? Or would it be another two thousand years? He wondered whether his brothers Michael, the Warrior Archangel, and Azrael, the Angel of Death, felt the same way.

The thought was too heavy to bear. So, he’d come back to Scotland, and he’d been welcomed by his homeland with open arms. Some arms more open than others.

Across the pub, the fire had been stoked and a metal grid tray had been placed across it as a makeshift grill. Gabriel stifled an inner groan when two large hazelnuts were extracted from the kitchen in the back and brought into the fray of Scotsmen out front.

“Christ,” he muttered. It was a long-standing tradition in the Western Isles of Scotland, though it was supposed to happen only during Samhain, otherwise known as Halloween. However, the people of the Isle of Harris had changed their custom for this particular occasion, on account of one Duncan Black, a treacherously handsome silver-eyed, black-haired man whose existence had called for quite a few hazelnuts in his time.

Tradition stated that two hazelnuts were to be thrown onto the fire, one for each member of a couple. When the nuts heated up, they would pop and “jump.” If they jumped together, the couple was deemed destined for a happy life together, and usually married shortly afterward. If, however, the nuts jumped apart, the couple had better break up. And soon.

Much to Gabriel’s regret now, the late Duncan Black had been popular with the lasses, to say the least. Gabriel knew for a fact that none of Duncan’s “nuts” had ever jumped together. Hell, if they’d even tried, he would have used telekinesis to keep them apart. He was a man with a man’s needs, but none of the women he’d been with were meant to become his bride.

He knew this better than nearly any other man alive. And he’d never been more certain of the truth than he was now that Uriel had found his archess. There was hope where there frankly hadn’t been for far too many years.

And so it was with very real chagrin that Gabriel realized he was right back in “Duncan” Black’s shoes after a mere few months of residing once more in his hometown. It seemed the Black family line was doomed to drive women crazy and men insane with jealousy no matter what.

Gabe felt a little less at fault this time, however. He had had no idea that Edeen was Angus’s sister and he’d heard well enough about Angus Dougal’s reputation. Edeen had come on to Gabriel the first night he’d been back in Harris, when he was signing up for part-time work on Stuart’s boat. She’d told him she had “family” here, but was unattached. Gabriel, of course, was interested. After all, Edeen was a beauty with that shoulder-length flaxen hair and those green eyes. He’d done what any red-blooded man would do! He was innocent enough in that, wasn’t he?

Edeen Dougal was laughing. Gabriel could hear the light sound from across the room. She was seated with her friends at a round table near the window. When Gabe looked up and met her gaze, she offered him a teasing smile and a wink. It was a reassuring gesture to him, because it meant she thought this was funny. She wasn’t taking it seriously.

Gabriel nodded.

At least there was that. Now the only one who would be truly disappointed would be her brother, Angus. Gabriel lifted his head and turned slightly until he had Angus in his sights.

Angus gazed back. It was a cold, hard, green-eyed gaze in a face that many women found nearly as handsome as Gabriel’s. Gabe suspected that probably had something to do with the man’s ire. Of course, the rest of the ire came from the fact that Gabriel had bedded Angus’s sister. This was a very religious and superstitious community. People didn’t generally go sleeping around—especially with the sister of one of the most dangerous men in town.

Angus was tall and solid and as hard in his musculature as Stuart Burns was in the bones. And he had a chip on his shoulder; that much was easy for Gabriel to decipher. If the hazelnuts didn’t meet, he was going to try to prove something with Gabe.

And that wouldn’t end well. Because there wasn’t a human on earth who could best Gabriel in a fight—and at the same time, the last thing Gabe wanted to do was make real trouble by harming a clansman four months into his stay in Harris. Especially when that clansman also happened to be a cop.

“Get me out o’ this,” he whispered to Stuart, his own accent barely discernible when compared with the accent of the man beside him.

When Stuart laughed, it sounded like autumn leaves scratching across the ground in a gust of wind. “Yae got yerself into this, Black. Ye’ll get yerself out.”

Gabriel shot him a look and took a deep breath. He was about to stand up and make some sort of case for not using the hazelnuts as his father and grandfather—and great-grandfather—had done, when Edeen, herself, stood up and waved for everyone’s silence.

“Listen up!” She got on her chair and then, with the help of a few men around her, stood on the table next to her. “Ye’ve all had yer fun!” she said, putting her hands on her hips and eyeing the men dead-on. “Now enough’s enough! This is tae be a Samhain tradition, not a March tradition, and I fer one don’t take kindly to yae suggestin’ I marry a man based on what a fecking nut decides tae do!”

There was laughter throughout the pub then, some of it nervous, as women didn’t generally swear a lot on the Outer Hebrides. But Edeen Dougal was a force unto herself and they knew enough to accept it when she did.

Angus Dougal pushed through the crowd and came to stand before her. On the table, Edeen stood a half foot above her brother’s mass of brown hair. She glared down at him, daring him to say something. He dared. “Edeen, get yerself down from there an’ don’t interfere—”

“Och, shut up, Angus. Ye’re no’ me da’.” She made a dismissive gesture toward her older brother and rolled her eyes. “Awa’ with ye an’ bile yer heid.” She jumped down from the table and sauntered toward the front door, tossing a lock of her blond hair over her shoulder as she did so. “I’ll no’ take part in this; I’ll have nothin’ of it.” She turned and addressed the patrons of the pub, in general. “Ye’re all a wee bit childish, don’t ye think?”

Her friends joined her at the front door a moment later, one pulling her jacket on over her sweater, the other adjusting the strap of her purse. Both looked highly amused and a touch embarrassed. But they were obviously used to Edeen’s shenanigans.

With one more farewell nod to the pub owner and bartender, who nodded back with a knowing smile, Edeen Dougal and her companions left the pub.

Gabriel could have wept with relief.

“Ye’re saved, Black.” Stuart grinned, shaking his head admonishingly. “And by a girl, no less.”

“Aye.” Gabriel raised his glass, a lopsided smile on his handsome face. “God bless the womenfolk.”

CHAPTER TWO

“W
hat do you think the other archesses will look like?” Eleanore was seated on Uriel’s lap, her finger idly twirling a lock of her long blue-black hair as she stared into the fireplace in the massive living room of the archangels’ mansion.

“I don’t know. But you look exactly how I’d always imagined you,” Uriel said. “So probably they’ll look like whatever my brothers have in mind.”

Eleanore turned to face her mate. Uriel was as handsome as ever with his jade green eyes and mass of dark brown wavy hair, but she frowned at him nonetheless, unable to hide her irritation with what he’d just said. Why should what a woman looked like be dependent upon what a man wanted?

As if he could sense her irritation, Uriel smiled one of his devastating smiles and chuckled softly. “Of course, it’s also possible that it’s the other way around,” he said. “What you look like could very well determine what we want and expect.”

She liked the sound of that a little better and offered Uriel a smile that said as much. She took in his thick hair and the impossibly handsome lines of his chiseled face and then peered into the green of his gorgeous eyes. She’d never said so, but he was her idea of perfection, too. He had been since the first time she’d seen him in a movie poster for
Comeuppance
, in which he played the main character, a vampire named Jonathan Brakes. Like Gabriel, all the brothers maintained a human identity, some more visible than others. Uriel went by the name of Christopher Daniels, an A-list Hollywood actor.

Slowly, she cupped the side of his stubble-shadowed face and ran her thumb over his strong cheekbone. He narrowed his gaze questioningly. “You know, one thing I’ll always miss about that vampire curse Sam put on me is the ability to read your mind,” he said softly. “Penny for your thoughts?”

Eleanore laughed and shook her head. “No deal. I know you can make gold out of anything in this room. Pennies won’t cut it, young man.”

He laughed, too. “I’m anything but young, Ellie.”

It was true. She reasoned that, by all rights, he was more ancient than time itself. He had been on Earth for two thousand years, as had his brothers, but he’d existed as an archangel in another realm before that.

“Well?” he hedged. “You gonna share?” His green eyes twinkled. “Or do I have to torture it out of you?” His hand slipped under the hem of her shirt and his fingers brushed teasingly—threateningly—against the lace of her underwire bra.

Ellie’s heartbeat kicked up a notch, her temperature rose a few degrees, and her lips parted as she watched her husband’s pupils expand in hunger. As if he could sense her response, his smile turned dark, spreading to a dangerous grin.

She decided to prolong the torture. “I was just thinking that with the Adarians out there and Sam watching over everything, it’ll be war for the others,” she admitted truthfully. She
had
been worried about the other archesses. She, herself, hadn’t had an easy life. She’d run from the Adarians since she was a little girl and their leader had spied her healing another child. The other archesses were one of the main reasons she had decided to stay on Earth with Uriel after their souls had united and they’d literally earned their wings four months ago. They’d had a choice then—they could have left Earth and returned to Uriel’s realm, or they could remain behind. They’d chosen the latter.

Uriel’s smile stayed put; he clearly knew she was turned on and teasing him. “The other archesses?” He played along.

Eleanore nodded. There were supposed to be three more women out there, somewhere in the world: three more like her. Each one would be gifted with supernatural abilities and each one was fated to become the soul mate of one of the four favored archangels. But it hadn’t been easy for her and Uriel. The Adarians, twelve very powerful archangels who were cast to Earth by the Old Man, were dead set on obtaining an archess of their own in the hopes of somehow absorbing the archess’s ability to heal. And Samael . . .

With that thought, some of Ellie’s mounting desire slipped away. “What do you think Sam’s plan is?” she asked softly. Samael was an enigma. He was an archangel who had once been the Old Man’s favorite but who was displaced by Michael. He was also the thirteenth Adarian, but unlike the other twelve, he had not been discarded by the Old Man and sent to Earth all those years ago. For some reason the Old Man had kept him in their realm. He’d left only when the four favored left, in order to track down the archesses himself. Or at least that was the assumption.

The truth was, nobody knew what Samael’s motivation or plans were.

He was certainly more powerful than the four favored, a fact he made more painfully clear as time passed. And he made life hell for them at every given opportunity. Four months ago, Sam had tricked Uriel into signing a contract that indirectly caused him to become the very same vampire he played in Hollywood. The curse had nearly torn him and Ellie apart at a time when they had just found each other and should have been focusing on growing closer.

Why had Samael done this?
they had wondered. He claimed that he wanted an archess of his own—for his own reasons. But in the end, true to his enigmatic ways, Samael had turned the other cheek and shown a different side of himself by helping Ellie and the brothers defeat the Adarians in a harrowing battle in Texas. He was mysterious and dangerous in equal measures. Well, perhaps not quite equal measures.

He was very, very dangerous.

“Who knows?” Uriel said in answer to Ellie’s question. He sighed heavily, obviously disappointed in the turn of conversation. Then he slid his well-muscled arms around Ellie’s waist and pulled her back with him as he sank farther into the cushions of the couch. “But I’m starting to believe he exists for no other reason than to tempt me to kill him.”

Ellie cocked her head to one side and narrowed her gaze on her lover. “Oh?” She noted the tightness in his jaw and the unconscious possessiveness in his flexed muscles. He was irritated that she was bringing Sam into the conversation just then. Samael was a distraction Uriel didn’t want Ellie to have at that moment. “Jealous?” she asked.

A hint of Uriel’s smile was back. His hand slid beneath the wire of her bra. “Always.”

* * *

General Kevin Trenton was a tall, well-muscled man with blue-black shoulder-length hair and ice-blue eyes. He was also known as Abraxos, the leader of the Adarian race, the first archangels created by the Old Man and consequently discarded to Earth due to their frighteningly immense powers. Over the years, he’d changed his name many times and now most of his men simply referred to him as General.

At the moment, Kevin stood in front of the mirror above the sink in one of the many rooms in the Adarian headquarters in Texas. In the mirror’s reflection, he saw the tall, strong form of one of his men fill the space in his doorway. “Come in, Ely.”

Elyon was a black man and one of Kevin’s best fighters. As with all the Adarians, Elyon’s name had naturally been shortened over the last few millennia. His Adarian abilities had long ago proved themselves to be of the nastier, more potent variety. Among other things, with a single touch, Ely could wither a person’s body around its skeleton, sapping it of the water it needed to fill out its human cells. After a few seconds, Ely’s victim would fall at his feet, lifeless and crumpled as weathered parchment.

Ely nodded once and entered, but Kevin did not fail to notice the quick, nervous glance the Adarian shot toward the bound victim in the corner of the room.

The human male had been cuffed to a chair and apparently drugged. His eyes were unfocused and half-closed. He had put up a struggle when Kevin’s men brought him in, and his clothes were torn in places. Where the rips in the material of his pants rested against his skin, blood soaked it a fresh, wet red. His button-down dress shirt had been equally mistreated, but it was the sort that had once been worn beneath a suit coat and tie.

“Pay him no heed,” Kevin told the soldier. He turned and retrieved the razor blade he’d set on the counter alongside a basin of water and a clear drinking glass. He picked up the glass, then turned back to face the Adarian.

Ely’s amber-colored eyes were shot through with a sudden strain of apprehension at the sight of the blade, but his dark, handsome face managed to maintain a semblance of impassivity that Kevin was admittedly impressed with. Ely had always been an incredibly strong man, even among Adarians. That was why Kevin had chosen him for this test.

“Bare your wrist, Ely.”

Ely hesitated for a mere heartbeat before he raised his arm, rolled up his sleeve, and offered his right wrist to his general. Kevin lowered the razor blade to the inside of the man’s wrist and Ely’s body became a statue, unbreathing, unmoving.

The blade sliced swift and clean and the blood welled up at once. Kevin caught it with the glass as it escaped from the wound and ran down Ely’s wrist in a thick, crimson tributary. As the glass began to fill, Ely’s gaze wavered. He looked away from his wrist and focused on the wall. And then, eventually, he closed his eyes and swallowed hard.

“You look a tad pale, Ely,” Kevin joked, as it was actually difficult for Ely to look pale at all. Ashen at most, perhaps.

Ely said nothing. He was clearly not amused and knew better than to say anything unless he could say something nice.

When the glass was three-quarters full, Kevin set it down and retrieved the gauze bandaging from the counter. He wrapped this around Ely’s wrist and pressed hard on the wound until the red on the gauze stopped spreading.

“Get yourself some protein,” Kevin told him calmly. “And then return.”

Ely was very obviously confused and more than likely curious as to what the hell his general planned on doing with his blood. But he had been trained to follow orders and he’d done so for the last several thousand years. Now was no different; he nodded, said, “Yes sir,” and left the room, softly closing the General’s door behind him.

Kevin turned toward the bound, seated man and approached him. “If you have any final prayers, I suggest you utter them now. Not that anyone is listening.”

The man made no attempt to speak behind his gag. He only looked up at Kevin and let his heavy head drop back onto the top of the chair.

Kevin raised the glass of Adarian blood to his lips, closed his eyes, and began to drink. He swallowed tentatively at first. He was uncertain, after all. This was just a hunch, an experiment. And blood tasted terrible, whether it was angel blood or not.

But after the first few swallows, he felt able to drink more readily. He finished off the glass and left it, stained burgundy, on the counter above the man’s head. Then he leaned over the bound man and pressed his hand to the human’s chest.

He searched for the new ability within himself the way he always called forth his own abilities, and attempted to open that familiar channel inside that would allow the power to arc through his body and out into the world—out into the man before him.

He knew what he wanted to do.

Nothing happened right away, but the passage of inordinate amounts of time had taught Kevin nothing if not patience. He waited, ever determined, and left his hand where it was. The man’s eyes opened and focused on Kevin, his expression both lackluster and confused and yet filled with hatred. Kevin ignored him.

And then the man’s eyes filled with something else. It was pain, easily recognizable. He tried to scream behind his gag, but the sound was muffled and weak. Kevin smiled, instinctively pressing his hand harder against the man’s chest. The man bucked beneath the touch, shrieking into the gag and trying to get away despite the drug running through his system.

But he wasn’t going anywhere. And Kevin could see that his experiment was working when the man’s skin turned slightly green. Then gray. It was drying, cracking and flaking around the hairline. The cracking spread, crisscrossing his flesh, until the man stopped screaming and sat still as his body was leeched of every last drop of moisture within it.

When the foul deed was completed, Kevin extracted his hand with a strange crackling and sucking sound and stepped back. The corpse tied to his chair was nothing more than a mummy’s remains and Kevin had the sudden sensation that if he was to touch it again, it would crumble to dust.

He looked down at his hand and pondered what had just happened.

For centuries, Kevin had been searching for some means with which to give himself and his men the power to heal. The Adarians had been on Earth for thousands of years, and in that time, they had seen battle with many foes, almost all of them of a supernatural nature. The Old Man had used Earth as a trash heap for the creatures he created for eons. Most were in hiding now, having learned that fighting one another was only seeing them to extinction. For the most part, they stayed in the shadows, often passing themselves off as human, and left one another alone. But for many, many years, this wasn’t the case, and Kevin and his men had collectively sustained more injuries than they could count. The ability to heal was the one ability they lacked, and it was invaluable. The Adarians were hard to kill in that human, mortal wounds did not destroy them. However, the wounds healed painfully slowly, nearly at a human rate.

Over the course of thousands of years, many wounds are sustained by a single individual. It amounts to vast amounts of pain.

One day, not two decades ago, Kevin happened upon a little girl who displayed the ability to heal with no more than a touch. For twenty years, he followed her. She grew into an extraordinarily beautiful young woman with lustrous black hair and striking blue eyes. Her name was Eleanore. And she was an archess.

Kevin had had it all planned out. He would introduce himself, earn her trust, and she would join him and his men, willingly offering up her healing power to them for their use. One of his abilities was the power to change forms. He did so, appearing to Eleanore as a teenage version of himself when she was a mere fifteen years old. He could tell that she was falling for him, but before he could get close enough, she and her family caught the scent of danger on the wind and disappeared. The Grangers disappeared again and again over the years, always moving from one place to the next in order to protect Eleanore and her amazing abilities. It was the greatest frustration of Kevin’s painfully long existence, because as time passed, he found himself desiring Eleanore not only for her abilities—but for herself.