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Authors: Heather Killough-Walden

Avenger's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels (51 page)

BOOK: Avenger's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels

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“You have an army of—I don’t know—Dark Riders behind you!” she yelled angrily. “Tell them to attack!”

Samael stared at her long and hard. He seemed to ponder something and Eleanore felt time being pulled from her grasp. Her temper flared.
“Now, damn it!”
she yelled again.

At that, Samael’s smile broadened, stretching into a white grin. He lowered his arm, and with slow and casual grace, he turned to face the riders behind him.

I’m going to die,
Uriel thought.

It was not the first time that week he had thought such a thing. But this time it was with the added unpleasantness of a bitter and tangy fear on his tongue. He knew that this particular death was sure to hurt. It was certain to be slow. He would be crushed to death—could a vampire even die in such a manner? Or would he lie there, dying and awakening and dying and awakening, over and over again in an eternal round of agony?

The force field was unrelenting; the archangel who pinned him stared him down through a haze of loathing. Uriel had no hope of dislodging it, and the turbine was bending low over him, shoving him slowly, relentlessly into the concrete platform on which he stood. He closed his eyes against his grim fate, desperately wanting Eleanore and her closeness and her healing touch more than he had ever desired anything in his life.

For the third time in the last several seconds, Uriel attempted to disintegrate into mist, but without success. The archangel soldier’s power held Uriel’s form together, forcing him to remain in his solid, pain-filled state.

Uriel gritted his teeth as his muscles screamed.

And then, suddenly, the turbine halted in its downward progress, groaning to a begrudging stop even as Uriel’s legs began to buckle.

Uriel opened his eyes and gazed out into the night across from him to find a scene very changed from the one he had looked upon only seconds earlier. The archangel soldier who locked him into place against the turbine was under attack himself. Impossible though it was, Uriel watched as a black-armored rider on an equally pitch-black mount swung a sword that blazed with blue-black fire. The soldier ducked, rolled, and came to his feet, sparing a glance at Uriel and attempting to keep the force field up long enough for it to do its job and kill him.

But even as he did so, Uriel could feel the barrier slipping. And, at the same time, the turbine was no longer falling.

Uriel scanned the area and his eyes widened. Eleanore rested on her knees several yards away, her head bent, her eyes closed. She was obviously concentrating very hard. And her entire body was glowing with a strange and beautiful white light.

She couldn’t take much more. She felt like the
Enterprise
after a horrible fight with the Romulans, every ounce of her energy and fuel and strength used up and shot out at some clever, dangerous enemy. And yet she pushed on. As she had on the street when those cars had crashed several days ago, she pulled strength from her own body now. It was sapped from her muscles, from her bone marrow, from her blood.

With each passing heartbeat, she felt a little sicker and a little closer to death. But the alternative was too horrible to allow. She could not live while Uriel was crushed beneath all of that metal—
crushed
. Like being swallowed by an ocean or steamrollered on concrete or flattened by a freight train.

No.

As soon as Samael had left her company to command his bizarre and wholly evil-looking troops in a rally against the Adarians, Eleanore had noticed the sound of a turbine falling. She’d homed in on the sound, running to follow it back to the turbine beside the white van that had already lost its blade.

The massive windmill was bending in on itself, crushing an immobile form beneath it.

Uriel.

Eleanore hadn’t given it thought. She’d simply rushed toward him and began using her powers once more in an attempt to stop the turbine from falling any farther onto Uriel’s trapped form.

And now, here she was.
Dying
. She was sure of it. The moment had long passed when she had taken and used the last of her stores of energy and converted it to telekinesis. There was nothing left inside of her from which to pull.

She felt light as air where she knelt there on the ground. She felt numb and weightless and empty, like a helium balloon. A part of her wondered whether she would begin to float away on the wind.

But the rest of her was still focused on that turbine—and the man trapped beneath it.

Her love. Her life. The other half of her soul.

It was as she stooped there on the wet ground that she realized there was no other man in the world who could make her feel as he did. And no other man in the world cared for her as he did. He had recognized her on sight. He rescued her from the crowd on the streets. He took her flying over the Pacific Ocean.

He would die for her. She knew that.

And in the end, Eleanore simply couldn’t live knowing that she might have to go on without him. If he would die for her, then she would die for him as well.

So be it.

With no understanding of where the strength came from, Eleanore halted the turbine in its downward arc. She felt a new commotion stirring around her, but the light and numb body she now inhabited barely cared. She cared only that she was saving Uriel. Nothing else mattered.

Wings,
Uriel thought in wonder.
My God, they’re wings. . . .

Behind Eleanore’s glowing body, dual bluish whitish shapes had begun to take shimmering form. They were faint and transparent, reminiscent of the glowing afterimage from a camera’s flash. Or ghosts.

But as Uriel braced his legs beneath him and tried once more to evaporate into the mist that could finally escape, he watched Eleanore’s blue shadows change. They solidified and darkened, taking on a midnight cast that reflected the flashes of lightning above in the same manner as her raven hair until, at last, the archess bore midnight-black, gossamer wings, folded neatly at her back. They were so large, Uriel could imagine them stretching to at least eight feet in either direction when extended.

The archangel soldier who had trapped him was suddenly struck broadside by his attacker’s sword and the turbine pulled angrily upward, allowing Uriel to break free. The mighty metal flower screamed its anger at not being allowed to die and he knew it was Ellie saving him. Eleanore Granger, the archess who now glowed strangely in the lightning-scarred night and bore the very real, very physical wings of a mythical archangel.

Ellie.

Once Uriel was away from the cement platform of the windmill, he ran toward his soul mate, knowing only that he had to hold her—that he had to feel her in his arms, real and unimagined and precious.

He made it to her in the space of a millisecond and knelt, bending before her on reverent knees. But when he reached out to pull her to him, his arms coasted through her form as if she were not there.

He blinked, refusing to accept what had just happened, and tried again. And again, he moved through her.

“Ellie,” he choked, trying to curl his finger beneath her chin. There was nothing there for him to touch. She was visible, but intangible, and when she lifted her head to look into his eyes, he found himself drowning in pools of inhumanly glowing indigo blue.

You’re safe,
she thought into his head.

He fought back the madness that clawed at his brain and the agony that crept up on his heart.

Yes,
he told her firmly.
You saved me.

I tried.
She smiled. But it was an exhausted smile, wan and faint and was gone nearly as quickly as it had come.

Uriel knew despair then, and he realized that he’d never known it before.

Don’t leave me,
he told her. He begged her.
I love you, Ellie. Please don’t leave me.

Eleanore was as pale as the moon. Her lips parted and Uriel waited on what he swore would be one of his last breaths, to hear her words.

At once, two voices reached him—one in his mind, the other out loud. Together, they softly said, “I love you, too.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

U
riel’s mind rebelled; his heart cleaved itself in two.
No
.

“No, Ellie—”

When he reached out to attempt for the third time to pull her into his arms with the painfully numbing desperation he felt, it was to find that not only was she formless and ethereal—so was he.

His fingers trailed through her essence, leaving streams of their own molecular signature as they did so. He was dissolving, it seemed, breaking into fragments of what he was and dissipating into the glowing soup of shimmering substance that was once Ellie Granger.

He glanced up to capture her blue glowing gaze. Her look of relief was gone and had been replaced with one of confusion.

“What’s happening?” she asked, glancing down at his quickly evaporating body. He could sense her distress. She had just saved him, and now he was disappearing before her eyes.

It was unsettling to him as well but not as much as, perhaps, it should have been. Because something inside his head seemed to . . .
remember
. It clicked into place.

As their world melted around them and the rest of the universe began to seem more and more unreal, Uriel realized that he wasn’t afraid of this change. It was
supposed
to happen.

He’d been waiting for it for two thousand years.

“Uriel?” It was that echoing whisper again. Hollow and resonant.

“Close your eyes, Eleanore,” he told her softly.

She frowned at him. But he smiled a reassuring smile and nodded. “Trust me,” he said. “Close your eyes.”

She did so. Her ethereal lids barely muted the blue-white glow of her otherworldly eyes.

Then he closed his as well and waited.
And waited . . .

“Now open them, Ellie.”

In the muted gray-white darkness that enveloped her, Eleanore realized that the world around them had gone silent. It was the kind of silence that pervaded on a snowy morning, muffled and absolute. She knew she was no longer on a battlefield in Texas amid fallen giants and petrified angels. There was no storm. No nothing.

If she hadn’t just heard Uriel’s voice, she would have thought herself well and truly alone. But he told her to open her eyes and she opened them to stare across at the man she loved.

He was solid once more and at his back was a pair of wings unlike any she’d ever imagined. They were black, but tinted green, the way a raven’s feathers were tinted blue. They were enormous. Beautiful. Stunning.

As was his smile.

“Uriel?” she said, more to test her voice and the sound it made than anything else.

He laughed softly. “Are you okay?” he asked, at last cupping her cheek with his hand. His now solid touch was warm. It filled her with instant peace and reassurance.

“I’m fine.” She smiled. “Nice wings.”

“Yours aren’t so bad either,” he said, his emerald eyes sparkling. They matched his wings, she noticed. Perfectly. “Where are we?”

“Nowhere,” he said. Then he glanced to either side of him, at the wall of foggy white that encompassed them. “Not yet anyway.” He looked back at her. “I think we’re being given a choice.”

“What kind of choice?”

“To leave Earth—or to stay.”

Eleanore considered that for a moment. “You mean, we can”—she hesitated, as if saying it out loud was somehow different from experiencing it—“we can
die
and go wherever it is people go when they die . . . or we can go back to the way we were before?”

Uriel nodded, brushing his thumb against her cheekbone. The gesture was so tender, she closed her eyes again just to enjoy it.

“What about our wings?” she asked, her eyes still shut. She wasn’t sure why she’d asked such a thing. There was no filter between her brain and her tongue just then, and she
liked
the wings. They felt natural.

He laughed again, a soft, easy sound. “I honestly have no idea. I kind of like them too.”

She opened her eyes when she felt his fingers brush along the tops of her blue-black feathers. If someone had asked her to explain what it felt like to have a person touch her wings, she wouldn’t be able to. It was like asking a mermaid to describe her legs.

But it felt good. She shivered.

“Yours match your eyes,” he added.

She peered up at him and watched his pupils expand, eating the green of his irises. There was that telltale hunger again, that desire that never seemed to be far from his gaze when it came to her.

She swallowed, sensing his need and feeling it build within her own body as well.

“I have a family,” she said. “I can’t leave my parents. And knowing what we know now, we can help your brothers and their archesses if we stay—”

BOOK: Avenger's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels

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