Warrior's Angel (The Lost Angels Book 4) (8 page)

Chapter
Seven

“If you don’t mind my
confirming sir, we will bide our time now, am I correct?” John Smith took off his glasses, cleaned them with the cleaning cloth he kept in his front pocket, and then slid them back on his nose before looking up at his…
employer
.

The man he spoke to, a
very tall, very handsome, very imposing figure in a white suit, continued to gaze into the flames of a fireplace a few feet away from his massive, leather, wing-backed chair. Popping and crackling filled the long pause of silence.

“Yes, Mr. Smith. We wait,
” said Gregori.

Mr. Smith, who for all intents and purposes appeared to be the most ordinary, plain individual on the planet, smiled a wholly un-ordinary smile. It was filled with a malice that lit up the
brown in his eyes like candlelight behind citrine.

“There is no
specific reason for us to interfere at this juncture,” continued his employer, whose deep, unnaturally beautiful voice filled the gracious space of the massive living room with ease. “It would appear fate is on our side just now. The final of the Four Favored has been cursed.” Gregori paused here, and Smith could feel the ancient man thinking. “He’s been made a monster. With any luck, his archess will not accept him. The Culmination will not come to pass. And we will have the time we need to locate the Old Man.”

John Smith nodded to himself, just once.
But he remained where he was. “It does bear keeping in mind, however,” he said softly, “that the Angel of Death was a monster once as well. But vampires are not entirely monstrous to the thinking of some.”

“Mmm,” agreed Gregori. His expression remained the same
, and his distant gaze unchanged. “Yes, the thought occurred to me. Azrael’s archess accepted him despite this apparent obstacle.”

John Smith smiled. “The young Miss Bryce was not at all averse to the archangel’s darker tendencies.”

“No, she wasn’t. She reminded me much of Amara.”

There was another pause here, in which Smith was certain his employer was reminiscing. Somewhere outside, on the plane of
endless white, clouds began to gather. They often did when Gregori reminisced.

The man in white sighed heavily. “We will monitor the situation. If it appears the
curse is not enough of a deterrent, we will take matters into our own hands. But until and unless it comes to such a point, we will allow nature to take its course.”

“Wise decision, sir.” John Smith nodded once, then
left his employer’s side and stepped out into the hall. The ice beneath his feet cracked just a bit as he moved through the hallway and past several other doors that led to separate areas in the palace.

It was a palace constructed of ice, built into a glacier some millions of years old. Magic, of course, kept the fire from the hearths separate from the ice, and allowed for the mechanical workings of technology throughout the intricate structure. This was where Gregori had made his home long, long ago.

Mr. Smith stopped in front of a massive portrait that hung on the wall at the end of the long hall. It depicted a woman with long, thick caramel brown hair, soft brown eyes, luxurious lashes, rosy cheeks, and a winsome smile. She wore a white robe, loosely clasped and exceedingly simple. In her folded hands rested a small bunch of wild picked dandelions. Her favorite.

Her name had been Amara.

When she died, Gregori moved here, to this desolate and uninhabitable place at the top of the world. He’d wanted to be somewhere as frozen on the outside as he had become on the inside. As cold and unyielding. As dead.

Mr. Smith moved away from the painting and into the study, with its bookshelves of ice and its floor to ceiling windows that peeked out over an underground –
under ice
– lake of clear, pure blue. Nothing swam in the lake. It was as beautiful and dead as was everything in Gregori’s world.

On the banks of the lake, however, there was life. It was the only sign of such for miles in every direction. Dandelions grew thick and plush there, as grass or moss would have
grown in forest or jungle. But in stark contrast to the white ice and light bright, impossible blue of the lake, these dandelions were not yellow. They were black.

*****

Rhiannon stopped when she reached the next alley, rounded the corner like a slingshot, and hit the adjacent wall with a numb
thud
. Her body slid to the ground between a dumpster and a pile of empty cardboard boxes to rest against the cold, hard bricks. Her heart beat bruisingly against the inside of her ribs, pounding out an erratic, maniacal rhythm of fear. Her breaths were coming hard and fast, but she struggled with the need to control them, forcing them to quiet. Her life could depend upon it.

The effort
to still her breathing caused her pulse to quicken even further, and began a terrible pressure behind her eyes. She covered her face with her hands, hoping to drown out any sounds she might be making. And there, under the cover of shadow and night, hidden from the street and headlights of passing cars, she shook uncontrollably and wondered how the hell it had come to this.

They’d only returned to New York when she’d been given this assignment. Which
had gone horribly wrong.

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut against the pain riding up her left leg
, where four even gashes had been carved into her thigh. She needed to heal the wound. She could feel some sort of poison from it seeping into her bloodstream and moving already through her system. But she’d used up so much of her power, so much of her strength just trying to hide her presence and then get away with her life. And she had no idea how much more of it she would need before the night was out.

Her mind spun as she tried to figure out exactly where everything fell apart.
She’d never messed up this bad before. Her memories of the night were as botched as the job had become, all twisted and chaotic, and she didn’t have time to unwind them before she heard her pursuers coming for her.

Their wings made a terrible f
lapping sound against the wind, and she could see them in her mind’s eye. They were massive and colored like stone – because that’s what they were.

Years ago, Rhiannon had awoken on Saturday mornings to a short-lived cartoon called “Gargoyles.” She’
d enjoyed the artwork and story lines and absolutely loved the voice actors since so many of them were so closely tied to
Star Trek: The Next Generation
. But at the time, she’d had yet to come across phantoms and Icarans, vampires and Nightmares, or dragons and wraiths. She’d had yet to realize that she wasn’t alone, or that magic touched anyone in the world other than her.

Now she k
new better. But the idea of gargoyles had come and gone along with the cartoon and hadn’t really resurfaced for Rhiannon but for the occasional fleeting thought she would have upon looking up at the Chrysler building or a really old library. It had never occurred to her that along with vampires and dragons, gargoyles might be real too.

You learn something new every day,
she thought now, her internal voice dripping with bitter sarcasm.

I’m going to die tonight
, she thought next. It was one of those feather-light fleeting thoughts that managed to carve its red-hot way through your brain despite its wayward flight. It was a weird twist of fate that she had set out to vandalize and destroy contraband owned by bad guys she had long ago lumped into the category of E.B. – evil bastards – who provided weapons to soldiers in Sudan and the Congo who killed women and children and now she was about to be destroyed by something that had nothing to do with any of them.

The warehouse owned by the
E.B. had unfortunately been located directly across the street from a building occupied by what she could only liken to a
horde
of gargoyles. Apparently they didn’t like the fact that she’d seen them, and now they were out to keep her quiet about their existence. That was her sum up, anyway. There was little time for much more deliberation on the matter.

The ensuing madness had seen Rhiannon going through the warehouse, destroying as much as possible, while fighting off men whose bodies felt like rock under her kicks and punches, who didn’t seem phased in the slightest by anything her telekinesis threw at them
other than the largest objects, who were immune to the lightning she called down upon them or the fire she set on them, and who weren’t even affected by the bullets she had finally fired off from the gun she kept – just in case.

It had been a harried, uncontrolled, terribly loud battle that
managed to rid her of her mask, which they’d torn from her face, and forced her to flee the burning building for all she was worth. Suddenly she was running for her life under cover of night, sincerely hoping that none of the onlookers she’d seen gathering across the street had seen her clearly or filmed her on their smart phones.

She was the only one any of them would have
seen. The gargoyles had taken to the skies.

And now
they were here.

Rhiannon
crouched a little lower in the alley where she hid and looked up toward the space of night that stretched between the two buildings on either side. A few faint stars peeked through the blanket of pollution and darkness, and a distant plane blinked across the carpet of black. But there was no other light, no other movement.

The flapping stopped – and Rhiannon held her breath.

“She’s nearby.”

“I sense nothing.”

Rhiannon’s eyes widened when the voices carried enough to be heard. They were on top of the buildings, somewhere fifteen to twenty stories up, and searching for her. She had never been so grateful for the black clothing she wore as she was now.

“I managed to mark her before she escaped. I can feel her… somewhere….” Voice number one was younger; she could tell that much.

“
You’d better be right. She’s seen us. We can’t let her go.” Voice number two was older.

T
hink, damn it!
Rhiannon gritted her teeth as an arc of some kind of acid-burning poison moved through her left hip and up into her abdomen. It felt like cold fire, like dry ice, riding along the nerve endings of her lower body.

He marked me,
she repeated.
Marked me, marked me….
She looked down at the claw marks, and realization struck her. He was tracking her by the wound. She needed to heal herself. If it was the last thing she did, so be it. It was her only chance. She was well hidden where she was. If she didn’t move, didn’t make a sound, and he could no longer detect her nearby, he would move on. They both would.

She would live.

“This way,” voice number one instructed.

Footsteps, distant and fleeting, drifted toward her on the night wind.

“She’ll make a fine addition to the horde,” said voice number two. “It’s been too long since we brought in new blood.”

It’s now or never
. Rhiannon peeled off her left glove, placed her hand near the open, bleeding wound on her thigh, and then laid the glove back over it to hide the light that would come from her magic.

She closed her eyes. B
ehind the darkness of her shut lids, she imagined her leg whole again. She imagined her skin unmarred, and her blood clean and free from poisons or unwanted magic. She imagined that she was no longer sweating with the pain moving through her system, that her heart was slowing, that her lungs were no longer aching.

T
here, in the blessed forgiveness that was sometimes fate, her body mended itself. She felt her skin stitch, felt the easing of the pressure in her head, felt her lungs open slowly and softly, and felt her heart settle down into a gentle, even rhythm. It was bliss. She’d read once, in an eBook by one of her favorite authors, that there was no greater pleasure than the cessation of pain.

It was so true.

Rhiannon chanced an exhale, soft and wonderful, and opened her eyes to once more look up. The footsteps had ceased. She could see nothing beyond the outlines of the building edges, and there was no sound from above.

She waited.

Again, she found herself holding her breath. What if it hadn’t worked? What if they’d seen her anyway?

“What is it?” It was voice number two.

“I don’t know. I can’t sense her anymore.”

“Maybe you didn’t mark her as well as you thought you had.”

There was a sigh of frustration, a pause, and then voice number two said, “This isn’t good. If she spreads the word about us….”

“They’ll think she’s crazy,” said voice number one. “Trust me.
No one will believe her. And if she surfaces to talk, then we’ll find her, and she probably knows it, so I doubt she’s going to chance being found.”

There was another pause, Rhiannon continued to hold her breath, and then voice number two said
, “You’re probably right. Humans don’t believe in anything that defies logic unless it’s got do to with religion.” Another pause as the footsteps started up again and began to take the pair a little further away. “Shame, though. She was something special.”