Messenger's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels (10 page)

So, she remained quiet. After a long while, Dougal nodded. “Verra well,” he said, coming to his booted feet.

He’s so tall,
thought Juliette. But then, most men were tall compared with her. She also took note of the way his muscles flexed enticingly beneath the material of his thermal shirt.

Jesus,
she thought.
What’s wrong with me? I’ve got skin on the brain.

This, too, did not go unnoticed by the inspector, whose green eyes flashed with something equally enticing as he looked down at her. “It’s clear tae me tha’ yae’ve go’ somethin’ under wraps aboot this case. I suppose I’ve nae choice but tae keep yae under house arrest until we have more information tae go on.”

He waited, his gaze locked on hers, as this statement settled in. When her jaw dropped open and she stood, it was clear he’d gotten the reaction he was hoping for. Juliette couldn’t believe this. Could the police do this? Keep witnesses locked up? Especially when no real crime had been committed? Vaguely, she recalled something about people being guilty until proven innocent in the UK and her stomach began to feel strange.

“For what crime?” she asked.

“Disturbin’ the peace an’ destruction of public property,” he told her calmly. “If Black is no’ responsible for the damage, as you say he’s no’, then I can onlae assume yae were in on it with him.” His gaze traveled across her face to her neck and collarbone and back up again. His voice lowered a bit. “Which means, yae’re responsible yaerself, Miss Anderson.” He smiled a
gotcha
smile and added, “Of course, yae can always pay for the damages an’ be on yaer way.”

CHAPTER TEN

G
eneral Kevin Trenton ran his tongue along the edges of his teeth for the thousandth time that afternoon and frowned.

“You look troubled.”

He turned to find Ely standing in the doorway, leaning against the wall. The Adarian was studying him closely. Kevin wondered how much the big man had noticed.

“I have to orchestrate the killing of four very beautiful women,” Kevin told him, his tongue feeling strange against the new sharpness in his mouth. “I
should
look troubled.”

Ely said nothing, but he continued to stare at his leader a moment before his gaze slid to the shut blinds at the window behind Kevin. “Is the sun bothering you again, sir?”

To this, Kevin said nothing. He didn’t have to answer. He was the General. And it didn’t matter anyway; whatever he said, Ely would know the truth. He was a smart man and he’d been chosen to receive the blood of an archess for a reason.

Instead, Kevin changed the subject. “Xathaniel has not been found. If there is anything Daniel is good at, it’s hiding. I suppose an inherent invisibility will create that in a man.” He turned away from the window that he had just indeed shut his blinds against and walked to his desk. “I want him found.”

“Sir, we’ve—,” Ely began softly. But Kevin held up his hand and the Adarian fell silent at once.

“Change tactics, Ely. Think like he would. We can’t afford to allow him to leak information about our organization. Think on it for a moment.” He cocked his head to one side and pinned Ely with a hard stare. “Going to the press or the American government would be one thing. But that’s not what he would do. He would go to the archangels.” He paused, allowing the information to sink in. “My job is hard enough, Ely. Understand?”

Ely straightened and cleared his throat. “Perfectly, sir.” With that, the Adarian left his general’s office and Kevin was once more alone. Kevin looked up at the empty doorway and took a deep breath. The last few days had been incredibly difficult.

Completely destroying an Adarian was not easy. Not by any means. The men who served under Kevin had served him for many millennia. Human beings would have no idea what kind of a bond this amount of time formed. And that bond was broken earlier that week as Kevin had chosen his victim.

The Adarian’s name was Hamon. His power was slightly more impressive than Daniel’s invisibility, but still expendable. Hamon was able to control the will of nonhuman animals. It was a power that might come in handy at a zoo or an establishment guarded by Dobermans, but, other than that, bore little significance.

Kevin approached Hamon when he was alone and immobilized him with a shard gun. As the soldier lay petrified on the cold slab of metal Kevin had laid him out upon, the General had proceeded to drain his strong body of every last drop of Adarian blood. He then decapitated and burned the body in the building’s incinerator. The blood he then drank. As he drank, he concentrated on absorbing the power he wanted. As it had been when he’d taken Ely’s blood, it was nauseating at first and Kevin had been forced to swallow his own bile in order to keep the thick red substance down.

But he’d managed. And after the second glass, the blood’s consistency seemed to change as it went down. It felt thinner, cooler, less like metal. By the fourth glass, it was almost cold and nearly refreshing.

When he’d finished, he licked his lips, and as he’d suspected, all he had to do was consciously reach out for the power he’d absorbed, and it was there for his using.

Covering up the homicide wasn’t easy. It had required careful planning. First, Kevin paraded around in front of his men in the guise of the Adarian he had killed. He told them he was going out for drinks. Then, a few hours later, Kevin, now dressed as himself, alerted his men to the fact that Hamon was missing and would not return Kevin’s summons by cell.

Puriel, or Paul, as he went by now, was an Adarian capable of “sensing” the existence of other Adarian minds. It was only one of the man’s abilities, and the far less valuable one at that, but it was the one that Kevin then called upon. He asked Paul to send out his mental feelers in order to “make sure” everything was all right with Hamon. When Paul could not feel the other man—the Adarians assumed the worst. Hamon was dead.

It was easy for them to make the next logical leap and take it for granted that one of the archangels had come across Hamon and done him in. The Adarian soldiers now wanted archangel blood more than ever.

Everything was going splendidly and according to Kevin’s plans.

However, in the aftermath of the ordeal, Kevin had been hit with the reality of what he’d done. He’d killed a man loyal to him. A man he had often called a friend.

He’d then had to call his three chosen men to a meeting and declare his edict. It had been incredibly painful to look into their faces and know he had destroyed one of their own.

It had been necessary. The Adarians and the archangels were the only two beings he knew of who possessed powers above and beyond the mortal realm of understanding. It would have been perfect if one of the four favorites had been residing in the Adarian prison instead.
Uriel would have been so much fun to drain,
Kevin thought darkly. If Uriel were dead, he would never be able to touch—to kiss—Eleanore Granger again.

And as to Eleanore, absorbing the power he wanted from the archesses would be much more pleasant. If Eleanore’s loveliness was any indication, each archess would be a beauty to behold. Taking their blood would be easy and pleasurable. In Ellie’s case . . . well, if he decided to keep her around for a bit and enjoy other aspects of her being, it was his prerogative.

Kevin’s lips curled into a smile at this thought. And then he turned toward the window and the fading light outlined by the slats that covered it.

There was still Xathaniel to deal with. He was out there somewhere, apparently far from the compound, as if he’d known exactly what had been about to go down inside its walls.

Kevin’s gaze narrowed as he considered this.
Could
he have known? The skill he brought to the Adarian table had always been his invisibility. But the Adarians were incredibly powerful beings and Kevin had always felt a very strong aura around Daniel. It didn’t quite seem to match his singular power, truth be told. It had always felt uneven—skewed.

The realization hit Kevin in that moment, and he felt as Dorian Gray must have felt when he’d looked upon his own image that final and fateful time.
He was holding out on me,
he thought grimly.
All this time, he was hiding his true gift.
Daniel had another power. And that power had saved him from his slaughter.

Kevin lowered his head to his chest and felt his hands curl into fists at his sides. If he’d wanted Daniel found before, it was nothing compared with how badly he wanted him now. None of the Adarians had the ability to scry on happenings elsewhere in the world. In fact, the existence of such an ability had been no more than unsubstantiated, legendary hearsay until his men had discovered that one of the archangels did indeed possess that incredible talent. Lord Azrael, as he had been called eons ago, the former Angel of Death, purportedly had the ability to find anyone he wanted anywhere on the planet as long as he knew enough about them to do the search.

The ability to scry a person’s whereabouts in such a manner would have served the General very well at that moment. Unfortunately, scrying wasn’t an Adarian gift.

Morael, or “Mitchell,” as they called him, possessed the power of telepathy, among other abilities. Mitchell was able to read any mortal’s mind, and every Adarian’s mind except for Kevin’s. The General assumed this had something to do with the fact that Kevin was the first archangel to have been created. His mind was decidedly different from all the others to come after his.

Mitchell’s telepathy and Luke’s dream-invasive abilities were as close as any of them could come to something like scrying. If they could be combined . . . Kevin frowned and pondered the possibilities. What might happen should the two powers be joined together—and focused? He had learned more about Adarian powers in the last week than he’d learned for the last several thousand years. What he had only dreamed could be possible was becoming a reality for him. So, there could be no harm in trying this one extra little experiment. After all, no one’s death was necessary for this one.

Kevin took the radio off his desk and used it to call two of his men to his office. He looked up again when he heard Mitchell and Laoth on the other side of his door.

Before the men could knock, Kevin bade them to enter.

Mitchell was what a human woman would most likely refer to as tall, dark, and exceedingly handsome. He had a quintessential Italian feel to him, from his black hair to his black, star-speckled eyes and his penchant for sleek, fast cars. Laoth, or Luke, was a finely sculpted man with blond curls who had once modeled for Michelangelo, so very many years ago.

Kevin gave the two men their instructions. Like the loyal Adarian soldiers they had always been, they took their orders, nodded their consent, and left his office once more.

Kevin watched them go. And then he turned and studied the single window in his room with a mixture of curiosity and strange, cold trepidation. The sun would set any minute, but where it rested on the horizon just then, it shone bright and orange and the rays forced a bright glow to the edges of the window’s blinds.

He felt threatened by it.

It was a disturbing realization. Elyon had been right. The sun was indeed bothering him of late. And that wasn’t all.

As his tongue gingerly prodded the slightly longer, noticeably sharper shape of his incisors, Kevin realized there was a pulse to his thoughts now. It beat like a drum, both feeding him and starving him at once. As he had since he’d discovered her healing power, he longed for little Ellie. From the moment he’d beheld the woman that she had blossomed into at the ripe age of fifteen, that longing had taken a more personal bent.

She’d looked at him through the slats of her window blinds with those blue, blue eyes—and now he wanted her to do so again. He longed to feel her body beneath him on his bed. That was as it had been for years.

But now, underneath the hunger he felt for her flesh, for her submission, and for her power, lay something entirely new. Beyond his yearning for her body was the foreboding and very real hunger he felt for the taste of her blood.

* * *

Juliette was dreaming again. This time, she was walking down a hall both rich with rugs and tapestries and hollow with wind and crumbling walls. Again, one image overlaid itself upon another, a transparent echo of what it once was that draped the cold, stone reality of what it had become.

Voices carried through the yawning doorways, snippets of conversation in a lilting accent she could almost place. Formless, incorporeal figures moved above her, as if there had once been a ceiling and a floor where now there were only the muted grays of fog and sea mist in the open castle ruin.

She caught the scent of baking bread and cooking meat. It wafted by and was gone, replaced at once with the salt and brine scent of the North Sea. Wind whispered through her hair and caressed her neck as she rounded a set of winding stairs, and stepped through an archway into a massive chamber.

A fire crackled in the grate, blazing bright and high, but its image was transparent over the hollow hearth and black stone that had once offered warmth to the lord of the castle. This was his bedroom.

Juliette paused in the arched entry, her gaze skirting over the ghostly impressions of the master’s furnishings. A writing desk, a wardrobe, a chest—a bed. Its four posters rose like spires to the cloudy sky, the faintest misting of draperies cascading from their tips to blow in the lingering breeze. The furs looked warm and soft, the wool thick and finely woven, and the blankets mussed as if the bed’s owner couldn’t be bothered.

She moved toward it, caught in a pull she could not understand, and heard music. It was muffled, barely audible, and yet it tore at her heartstrings. She closed her eyes as footfalls joined the tune, echoing in the chamber’s outer halls, drawing nearer.

He was behind her then, and she knew he was there. His presence was the only real and solid thing in this haunted dreamscape. His touch was warm as he laid his hands upon her shoulders and drew her against his chest. She pressed into him, needing his strength, and moaned when his hand slid from her shoulder to her neck to encircle it gently, tenderly.

Anticipation thrummed through her, a drug in her bloodstream, awakening a desire she’d only ever known once before. He took her chin in his hand and turned her head, slowly, softly. She held her breath as he bent over her and whispered words across her lips. The language was old; she had understood it once, but had forgotten.

His teeth nibbled her lower lip, clasping it as he drew her nearer, tighter, and then he was claiming her with his kiss, and she couldn’t have breathed if she’d wanted to.

The blankets were over her head. They were smothering her. Juliette gasped for air, rolled over, and fought with the covers until they slid in a heavy, twisted heap, off the bed. Then she sat there on the mattress, breathing heavily, as her hair acted like a curtain around her face, long and tangled beyond help.

She huffed at it and slapped it away, clearing her vision.
Where the hell am I?
she wondered, feeling disoriented and unsure. The room was dark and quiet and wind howled at a windowpane. She closed her eyes and swallowed, feeling a touch sick. She racked her brain, trying hard to recall. . . . Australia? No. She’d flown home. Pittsburgh? No. She had a night-light in her room there.

Scotland.

She opened her eyes and blinked. This was her bedroom in the cottage she was renting in Harris. A few more seconds and she recalled everything. The pub in Lewis, the dark-haired, silver-eyed Gabriel Black, and the deadly stranger who had attacked her in the hotel room.

Inspector Angus Dougal had issued a house arrest for her only minutes before he’d received a phone call from one of his men at the station house. The officer on the other end of the line suggested that new evidence had been found in the room where Juliette was attacked, and Gabriel Black had been released. Dougal’s entire demeanor had gone stony, but he’d played the good cop well enough, and he even drove Juliette down to her cottage in Luskentyre and saw her inside. He also apologized for all her suffering that night and left her his cell number in case of any further emergencies.