Death's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels (22 page)

Chapter Twenty-three

There are vampires.

Sophie had always believed there was more to life than what met the eye. She’d always had an open mind. Ghost stories intrigued her; haunted houses sparked her imagination. She’d seen every vampire movie and read every vampire book she could get her little orphan hands on while growing up. Not because she knew they were pretend and she had fun staring at the actors. But because they made her wonder. That was just the kind of girl she was.

But now, sitting on the cold stone floor of a cell God-knew-where and facing the very real fact that there were not only archangels but vampires as well, she realized that she was feeling . . . rather strange. As if she were composed of stuff as insubstantial and make-believe as the books and movies she’d loved so much. She was living in a fantasy world. She remembered teachers accusing her of that from time to time. If they could only see her now. . . .

A loud clanging sound drew her head up and had her hastily wiping her eyes. She hadn’t realized she’d been crying until now. She spun around to face the bars on the other end of the cell and wasn’t surprised to find herself face-to-face with someone she didn’t recognize. Nothing surprised her now, she guessed.

He was a man of average height and build, had slightly thinning brown hair, and his unremarkable blue eyes looked out from behind wire-rimmed glasses. He was dressed impeccably in a three-piece suit the same color as his hair.

The man waited until the bars finished sliding to the side, and Sophie noticed that the bars moved in time with those of other cells across the hall. She could see them all now; someone had turned on the lights, and there was also a softer edge to everything, as if the sun were rising. Row upon row of tiny concrete rooms stretched down the corridor. As the doors slid into their open place, the sound rang loud and clear through the hollow emptiness.

“Miss Bryce.” The man greeted her, his voice gentle. He stood in the open doorway, his hands clasped before him in a friendly manner.

Sophie frowned and blinked, coming to her feet.

“I do hope you rested comfortably,” he went on, gesturing to the bed behind her with one well-manicured hand. “I’m afraid this bed was the best I could come up with on such short notice.”

“Who are you?” Sophie asked, speaking before she realized she was going to do so. Her voice shook horribly. She was more of a mess than she’d realized.

“I’m John Smith,” he said. “But please call me John. I’m here to escort you to my employer. He’s been waiting patiently for you to sleep off the remainder of the influence the Adarian put you under. He would have awakened you, but he felt you most likely needed the rest.”

This took a moment for her to digest. Employer? Adarians? The employer wasn’t an Adarian? “Where are we?” she asked next, her subconscious clearly wanting to tick off the questions in order of importance.

“An old prison,” Smith replied with a glance at their surroundings. He made a slightly displeased face, but the look was quickly gone and his expression was once more emotionless. “It was not our choice, believe me. But time was of the essence, and this was where fate brought us.”

Sophie had never felt more confused or wrung out. She wondered if she looked as crooked and stringy and crinkled as she felt inside.

“Please,” Mr. Smith said as he stepped to the side and gestured for her to exit the cell. “Come with me.”

What else was she to do? It felt strange to step through that space and out into the hall; as her body crossed to the other side, it almost felt as if something pulled on it for the briefest moment—trying to draw it back inside, hold on to it. Keep it forever.

But it must have been her imagination. Unless ghosts existed too. Just like angels . . . And vampires.

“I imagine you are very confused right now,” said Smith as he led her down the long gray corridor. On either side the cell doors lay open, revealing empty rooms beyond. “And more than a little frightened.”

Sophie barely heard him; she was half listening and half stuck in her own numb, overcrowded world. She knew where she was now. She’d come here when she was very little. She had visited with her mother.

Back then, she’d been surrounded by other tourists, and the halls had echoed with the sounds of children and women whispering and men snapping photographs. Now the hallways were hollow. The only people here were her and John Smith—whoever he was—and the ghosts of the men who had been imprisoned here so long ago.

Smith walked Sophie to the end of the corridor, a hall she seemed to recall was named after Broadway. As they crossed the threshold of the doors that led to another room, Sophie looked up to see a red handprint, faded but memorable, marking the peeling paint. No doubt it had been left there by Native Americans in the sixties when they’d occupied the infamous penitentiary. And it was still there now.

“I’m in Alcatraz,” she said softly, more to hear herself say the words than for any other reason.

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” said Smith. “But though he felt it would be too cold there for you to rest comfortably, my employer prefers the open air, so we will be meeting him in the yard.”

“Who are you?” Sophie asked.

Smith glanced at her over his shoulder and offered her a warm, understanding smile. “I’m assuming you actually mean to ask, ‘what’ am I. And I can understand why.” His smile broadened, touching the blue in his eyes and lightening it. “You’ve been hit with a lot lately. Angels are one thing. Vampires are another, no?”

“Are you a vampire?” she asked.

He chuckled. “No,” he said, as if the very idea were too nuts to consider. “I am not.”

They pushed through a final set of doors and then stepped out into the frigid temperatures of an Alcatraz Island dawn. At once, Sophie was hugging herself. She still wore the warm clothes and army jacket she’d put on before she’d left her apartment what seemed like ages ago, but out here, in the middle of the bay, the temperatures were always much cooler—and the winds much stronger—than they were on the mainland.

She closed her eyes for a moment against a blast of cold, and felt something heavy being laid across her shoulders. She opened her eyes to see that Smith had moved behind her and was draping the coat of his suit over her. “Sophie Bryce,” he said, and she glanced over her shoulder to see that his eyes were on something ahead of her. “May I introduce my employer.”

He paused as Sophie peered through the stray strands of her hair to see a tall figure in white standing at the end of the long yard, his back to her.

“Gregori,” Smith finished.

He was very tall, though that didn’t surprise Sophie any longer. In fact, if anyone stood out in her world of late, it was Smith because he was less than six feet tall. Gregori had a strong, slim build and broad shoulders that gave Sophie a strange flutter in her stomach. His hair was shoulder length, jet-black, and thick. At the moment, he seemed to be gazing out across the bay; she couldn’t see his face. But for some reason . . . she imagined he was quite handsome. Beautiful, in fact.

He wore a white suit, tailored to fit his strong, athletic figure. His hands were hidden in the pockets of his suit pants, his posture that of a man completely at ease—or lost in the depths of his own private thoughts. For the briefest of moments, Sophie was struck with an image of Al Capone gazing out across the waters that had held him captive.

The atmosphere of the timeless, infamous prison was getting to her.

Smith left the coat over her shoulders and moved around her to approach his employer. A short flight of stairs led up to the platform on which the man in white stood. Smith took these stairs with the slow and measured care of a man approaching one much more powerful than he.

The wind whipped across the small length of yard between them and Sophie couldn’t hear what Smith said to his boss. However, Gregori’s head tilted so slightly as he caught his employee’s words, and Sophie glimpsed the strong line of his jaw. It caused her heart to skip in her chest. And then the man pulled his hands from his pockets and turned to face her.

Oh no
, Sophie thought as her heart again skipped and began racing.
I was right.

Even from this distance, his nearly cruel beauty struck her with almost tangible force. She could see that his eyes were the color of thin blue ice. They seemed to almost glow in the somewhat swarthy frame of his sculpted face. She felt locked in their pull; something about his gaze was both mesmerizing and unsettling. There was something wrong with it . . . but she couldn’t tell what it was. She wanted to stare forever, for as long as it took to figure it out. He was a puzzle that entrapped her, and she’d seen him for only three seconds.

I can’t move
, she thought. She felt stuck there, immobile, glued to the spot as she gazed up into his light, light,
light
blue eyes. They were nearly white. And at their centers . . .

A gentle wave of cologne wafted toward her, clean and masculine. “You look positively frozen, Sophie,” he said, his voice like deep black silk. She heard the words as if they’d been spoken intimately into her ear. She blinked and straightened. Somehow, Gregori had come across the yard and was now standing in front of her. She didn’t even remember seeing him move.

Frozen
, she thought. Yes, she was frozen.
Petrified
.

And then she realized what it was about his eyes that both intrigued and troubled her so. His pupils were not round; the black, bottomless pools were the shape of stars . . . many-pointed stars, deep and dark and deadly. When he smiled then, it was with teeth as white and predatory as Azrael’s, his canines ever so slightly longer than they should have been.

“What are you?” Sophie found herself asking. She felt a tremor moving through her, quivering the marrow in her bones. Standing before Gregori on this isolated rock in the middle of a cold, deep sea was rocking her to her core. She was terrified and her body knew it.

“I am a messenger,” he told her. “A warrior, a guardian,” he went on as he slowly began to pace around her. She found herself turning in place to maintain eye contact. She would have done anything in that moment to continue staring into the stars in his eyes. “I am a judge, a rectifier.” His smile slipped just a little, and a dark shape moved beneath the frozen ice of his eyes. “I am death.”

He said it so softly, so intimately, Sophie was utterly and completely thrown. If she’d known what to say, she wouldn’t have been able to say it. Not here, not now, not trapped and breathless in the pull of Gregori’s presence.

“Sophie,” he said as he turned to face her fully and gently took her arms in his hands. His touch was strange. Even through the layers of her clothing and the protective warmth of Smith’s jacket, Gregori’s hands . . .
hurt
. The sensation of his gentle grip felt as though she were touching a fork to the coils of an electric stove. There was a slight buzz going through her body now and it wasn’t pleasant.

It was nothing like being touched by Azrael. But Gregori’s touch was nonetheless more powerful.
That
she knew with every fiber of her being.

Whoever and whatever Gregori was, he was awe-inspiring. And incredibly dangerous.

I am death.

“I’m here to help you, Sophie Bryce,” he told her. “You now know that you’re an archess. You know because the powers-that-be
deemed
that you would find out now.
Now
,” he said with slightly more emphasis, “that you have grown and your painful childhood is over.
Now
,” he said again, “that your helplessness has come to fruition and set you upon your path.”

Sophie couldn’t help but think of the gun in her hand, the heavy weight of her foster father’s body over hers, the pain of the grave beneath her as its sharp-edged stones angled bruises into her back. She heard his labored breathing, his swear words that sliced across her mind, felt his fingers gripping the top of her jeans. Then she heard the bang that split the fog and cast her into a decade of forgetting and denial.

She’d been a child. Completely helpless. If she’d had the powers of an archess then, when she’d needed them most . . .

“But you didn’t have them, did you, Sophie?” Gregori asked. He raised his hand to curl his forefinger beneath her chin, tilting it up. Again, his touch was unnerving, setting off currents of electricity across her skin.

She stared up at him, feeling bewildered. He looked concerned and the emotion was completely at odds with the mesmerizing stars in his eyes. “You have never had what you needed, not until now—because some other being out there is pulling your strings. Someone
else
is planning your fate. That someone has deemed that the time is finally right for you to come into your abilities.” He smiled tenderly and cupped her face with his hands. Sophie felt as though she were watching the cobra sway gently from side to side. “So that you can become an archess and give your life to the man you were made for,” he finished.

Gregori brushed his thumb across her cheekbone in a loving gesture. Sophie’s teeth clenched, her jaw tightening. She felt the stirrings of something wholly uncomfortable swirling within her.

“Everything has been decided for you, young Sophie. Your entire life has been dictated. You have never had any choice, any control—any freedom.”

He released her suddenly, and Sophie blinked as he took a step back from her. The cold rushed in at once, cutting straight through the jacket Smith had given her. In her peripheral vision, she could see Smith watching the exchange in careful silence.

“Until now,” Gregori went on. “Now you have the means with which to do
anything
if you’re given the freedom to do it. For instance, you can do something about
this
. If you try.”

With that, he took a step to the side and turned. As he did, he revealed a young woman tied to a pole behind him. She hadn’t been there before. The space had been empty until now.

The girl must have been no older than eighteen; a slight smattering of acne marred her forehead, but otherwise her skin was young and smooth. Her long black hair had been fishtail-braided at one point, but bits of it had come out, and mascara smeared her cheeks. She was gagged, and ropes cut into the sweatshirt and jeans over her body where they bound her tightly to the metal column behind her. The old column stood alone in the yard and supported nothing now but the young female captive.