Warrior's Angel (The Lost Angels Book 4) (17 page)

“You know
, your last name is pretty
deep
Italian too,” said Mimi as she peeled off a mushroom and popped it into her mouth. “You on the take with the mafia,
Uncle Sal?
” she asked, grinning like an imp.

Rhiannon’s eyes got very big, but she cou
ldn’t say anything around a mouthful of spaghetti. Mimi was the most precocious child she had ever met.

But the detective took it in expert stride. He laughed and shook his head. “Now, now, Mimi. You know there’s no such thi
ng as a crooked cop in New York City. Now finish your pizza. I’m late for a meeting with an accountant and a cement mixer.”

Chapter
Nineteen

It was the laughter that woke him. It was a sound both unexpected and foreign for Gregori. It had been forever
since he’d heard someone laugh,
really
laugh. It was a child’s laughter, too, which made it worse.

An unsettled feeling hovered over him like a shroud as he rose from the massive chair he’d fallen asleep in and made his way to one of the magical windows of his ice palace. It was clear and provided a view to the white world beyond, but allowed no cold to pass through its invisible barrier. The interior of the palace, in fact was a very comfortable 69 degrees
Fahrenheit. He liked it a hair on the cool side to make up for the suits he dressed in; and the cool air cleared his head.

It helped now as he
braced his hands on either side of the window and leaned against the ice wall, ignoring the equally magical un-melting chill that seeped in through his palms and up his arms. He gazed out into the stark beyond and concentrated.

As he did, an image began to form above the ice.
It was like watching a massive movie screen hung impossibly over a wasted, barren landscape. In that moving picture, Gregori saw the final archangel of the Favored Four seated at a restaurant table with his fated archess and a little girl. They were laughing.

Gregori heard a crack, and his gaze drifted to the ice beneath his right hand. A stress fracture had opened up under his palm and was inching skyward, testament to the emotions spinning through him.

Gregori pushed away from the wall and took a step back. As he did, the image over the ice vanished. In the crack in the ice, green sprouts began to emerge. Before his eyes, those sprouts grew into small, young weeds. And then those weeds sprouted blooms.

Black dandelion blooms.

Gregori straightened his shoulders. He felt a presence at his side and glanced over to find Mr. Smith had approached him. “It appears, Mr. Smith, that we will have to take matters into our own hands after all.”

*****

Michael glanced into his rear-view mirror to find Mimi sinking lower and lower into the back seat of the unmarked squad car, a basic silver gray Crown Victoria, paid for partially by the city and partially by him. Up ahead and on the right, a group of boys loitered on a street corner, attempting skateboarding tricks amongst themselves.

“Friends of yours?” Michael asked Mimi.

Rhiannon glanced at him and then looked back through the bars and wire mesh that separated the back seat from the front area of the vehicle.

Mimi shrugged as if she couldn’t really care, which meant she cared a whole lot. “Not really.”

“Would you
like
to be friends?” Michael asked.

Mimi looked up at the mirror and met his gaze. “Why?”

Michael grinned. He flipped a few switches and the car’s lights and siren came on. “Grab hold of the bars and make a show of trying to get out,” he told Mimi.

M
imi’s eyes grew really wide, as did Rhiannon’s, but it didn’t take her long to catch on. In a heartbeat, she was grabbing the bars with both hands and thrashing around, her mouth wide-open in a silent scream.

Michael did his part to play it up too, mouthing fake warnings and pretending to radio something in.
For her part, Rhiannon simply looked forward in a semi-serious manner, no doubt attempting to look like another plain clothes cop.

It did the trick
. The boys on the corner froze when they heard the sirens, and when they saw who was in the back seat of his car, a few of them nudged each other. They exchanged surprised glances and words he couldn’t hear, and he knew they would have a hard time waiting to meet up with Mimi for their last day of school so they could ask her what had happened.

Michael drove the car past the boys
, made it a few blocks, turned down another street, and Michael switched everything back off again. Mimi was laughing riotously in the back seat. “That was
awesome
!” she exclaimed. “I can’t
wait
to hear the rumors that get spread over that!”

Michael looked over at Rhiannon, who had been biting her lip to keep from laughing, but now failed. She chuckled, shaking her head. “You’re really something.”

Michael felt his chest swell. Whatever it was filling up with was warm and felt like an orgasm in his heart. He found himself laughing as well when they finally pulled up in front of Rhiannon’s apartment complex. He was more familiar with it than he’d admitted thus far, having been inside to deposit the chest filled with gold in Rhiannon’s room. Of course, her room was the only portion he’d seen. He’d used his archangel ability to travel from a door in one location to a door in another location in order to evade the cameras and detection.

“Last stop,” he announced as he opened his door and got out. Mimi’s door had to be
opened from the outside, and on the passenger side. He walked around the car and popped it open just as Rhiannon was getting out beside him.

Things slid into slow motion in his very male mind, and h
e was watching her emerge with her long, lean legs and her mass of red hair and her gorgeous, well,
everything
, when he suddenly stumbled back as Mimi catapulted from the back seat and he was caught in a bear hug by an overly ecstatic nine-year-old.

“Thank you so much, Uncle Sal
!” Mimi exclaimed before she hoisted her bag over her shoulder and rushed to the entrance of the building. The doorman’s brow raised when he saw her out so late. But he asked no questions, instead opening the door for her so she could run straight on through.

Rhiannon
turned to Michael as he steadied himself and watched the kid disappear into an elevator beyond the glass doors. “What she said,
Uncle Sal
,” she told him, laughing softly. “Despite the gargoyles, it was actually a pretty cool night.”

Michael turned to fully face her, and
the rest of the world  took a few steps back.

“You still haven’
t told me who you really are,” she continued as she moved in closer, and his heart rate kicked up several notches. “And I have no idea what you’re after.”

Another step, and Michael saw his entire future moving steadily toward him.

“But whoever you are and whatever you want, Michael Salvatore, I have to think it can’t be all that bad.” She shook her head and stopped just a few inches away, leaving them toe to toe and a breath apart. “Not with you.”

There was no pretense, no drawn-
out gazing or awkward waiting. Michael had waited long enough.

His arm slid around her waist, his body bent, and his mouth trapped her own in a crushing, bone-deep kiss that made the world stop turning – just for a second.

When it started turning again, it spun wildly, and Michael’s inner archangel soared on newly grown wings as Rhiannon melted into him, opened herself up, and let him in. Her body was as hot as the fire in her hair when he pulled her against him, holding her to him in a steel grip. He caught the scent, once again, of her soap and shampoo and a hint of cherry bark and almond that must have been in a lotion she used.

She tasted like the wine
they had shared – wine laced with laughter. It had a flavor, laughter. Like Pop Rocks and champagne and something else, a note that rode a little deeper. Something like root beer. There was a hint of hope in it, a possible promise of redemption. And now, through the taste and feel of her, no longer tentative but strong against him like the fighter that she was, that promise was in him as well.

But along with
it rode a rumbling, waking storm, a hunger that moved upon the tides of his burgeoning happiness like a serpent in the seas. There was a dragon waking from the bottom and rising to the surface like a massive, dripping shadow.

He felt a prickling in his
gums, and his vision went red behind his eyelids. The tips of his fingers stung as his claws began to extend. A twinkling black, like sparkling, dark smoke, slunk away from him and curled hungrily around his archess.

H
is magic was taking over.

She moaned against him, warm, inviting, weakening. He
r long, silken locks brushed like butterfly wings against the back of his hands, tingling through his body and fueling the fire that was already spreading. He felt her move in, giving in against the pressing of his strength, and he knew he could have had her then and there, right there on the hood of his car. No one would have noticed them; his power surrounded them, hiding their magic from the world. To the watching, ignorant human universe, he was a man kissing a woman, nothing more.

When in truth, he was a Nightmare vampire on the brink of devour
ing the only salvation he could ever know.

Stop.

He had to release her. He had to let her go or he would destroy them both.

This was the curse Samael had given him. Now, here in this moment, it became abundantly clear. If he couldn’t control the monsters the Fallen One had turned him i
nto, he would lose everything.

Rhiannon would never love him.
How could a fighter like Rhiannon ever come to accept being a virtual prisoner? Warrior that she was, his mate could never know love as a blood-drained slave to the dark, seductive whims of a vampiric incubus.

Michael warred with the beasts, holding Rhiannon even tighter and kissing her harder, stealing her breath as he drank her in –
before he had to steel himself and pull away.

He broke the kiss, gently, slowly,
painstakingly
, and straightened. His hand steadied her as she stood before him, swaying slightly with her eyes still closed. It took him a moment to regain his voice. It was stuck somewhere just beneath the need that had all but taken him over.

His gums
stung again, his body burned, but his heart went from racing to simply pounding, timing out the ache inside him like a drum sending waves of regret through his system.

He couldn’t stay. There
was something he needed to tend to once and for all, and the sooner the better. But he also needed to escape this moment, before he did something that he could never undo.

Rhiannon
opened her eyes and nodded, as if she knew.

Michael leaned over her and whispered in her ear.
“Good night, Rhiannon.”

Then he let her go completely and stepped back.

C
onfusion clouded her beautiful irises. Her gaze was unfocused, her lips parted, her cheeks flushed feverishly. He knew his magic was still wrapped partially around her, suckling at her. He had denied it the feast of a lifetime. It sulked now. And waited.

H
e turned, walked around the car, got in, and started it up. When he was half-way down the block, he chanced a look in his rear-view mirror. Rhiannon was still standing where he had left her, tall, strong, beautiful beyond compare, and ultimately vulnerable.

His fangs at once erupted fully in his mouth.
His vision altered, shoving everything into stark contrasts of white, red, and black.

It was definitely feeding time.

Chapter Twenty

Despite his role as an NYPD detective, and the department’s very real need to figure out, for insurance purposes
, who and what had caused the building fire on the corner of third and thirty-third, Michael hadn’t himself been back to the location of the destruction since that night last week. Not until now.

The night was long,
and the moon was lowering itself in the sky behind the haze of pollution over Manhattan when Michael found himself alone in an alley, surrounded by shadow. He faced one of those shadows, a long and deep one that ran the length of the building that had been partially destroyed by Rhiannon. Using the powers of both vampire and incubus, Michael touched the shadowed brick. The brick warped beneath his touch, and his palm sank partly into the stone. He smiled. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

The shadow deepened further, until it was clear that it was no longer solid
rock, but
space
beneath his touch. Michael readied himself. As soon as he felt the brush of movement under his fingertips, he gripped tightly and held on, yanking the figure toward him with brutal, unnatural strength.

A strangled
sound accompanied the rather miasmic, not entirely formed figure that Michael pulled from the darkness. It wriggled in his grasp, and its incorporeal darkness wisped into hardened spaces here and there, clawing at Michael’s arm like shreds of sandpaper. But he held on, and his gaze narrowed.

“We need to talk,” he stated calmly, his ey
es glowing hot and red. “Cooperate and I will allow you to form before you suffocate.”

The writhing figure stopped struggling, drooping into what looked and felt like a shadow-sand version of an unconscious octopus.

Michael loosened his grip just a little, and the figure began to solidify. Within seconds, it had taken on the form of a stone woman, curves, breasts and all. That female then went from stone to flesh, clothing itself in the process, until Michael’s hand was wrapped around the throat of what appeared to be a slender, middle-aged woman with dark blond hair and amber eyes.

Michael at once released her completely, moving his hand back to his side. The woman rubbed her neck gingerly and eyed him with astute wariness.

“Who are you?” she asked, her voice gravelly from Michael’s grip.

“
It isn’t important. I need to speak with you about Rhiannon Dante.”

The woman blinked, her brow furrowing. “The Fire Healer.”

Fire Healer
. That makes sense
, thought Michael. Rhiannon’s hair resembled fire, and she could control fire. She could also heal.

The woman
nodded, but her look was despondent. “I know very little. The men in our horde are the ones with the knowledge. They keep it to themselves, knowing that it gives them power.”

Her voice seemed to lower a bit, and she glanced around nervously.

“There are no others here at the moment,” Michael assured her, realizing she was afraid to talk to him for fear she would be overheard.

She looked back up at him, and her eyes filled with questions. “What are you that you can control the shadows enough to open the passageways of the gargoyles and sense their nearness?”

“As I said, it isn’t important,” he repeated, attempting to remain patient with her. “Tell me everything you know about the Fire Healer. I especially need to know who informed the men of your horde that she could heal.”

Again, the female gargoyle shook her head. She closed her eyes, sighing. “Like I said, my sisters and I know little. Our horde is a rogue horde, broken off from the Dynasty ages ago to escape the king’s rules. He determined females and males were equal. Our males, however, felt differently. My sisters and I were taken from our
rock beds to help fuel their bloodlines and satiate their desires.” She seemed to shrink into herself, just a little, and her arms wrapped around her middle. “It’s been centuries.”

Michael listened with that detached horror that cops so often felt when yet another la
yer of evil was draped over all the others like sedimentary strata. They added up, a timetable of the misdeed, misfortune and meanness that made up humanoid life.

“All I know is that a man came. He wasn’t a gargoyle, but whatever he was, he wasn’t human either.
He was dressed like human money, though. Very expensive suit. And he smelled nice, by human standards, which I happen to love. When you’re made of rock, you come to appreciate the scent of things
other
than rock. Like plants and things.” She seemed to be drifting off on a tangent, one created by personal misery. “Our men never smell nice unless it rains.” She looked up at him now, and her expression was one of quiet, resigned pleading. “That’s all I know, I promise.”

Michael believed her.
And he was beginning to get a very good inkling of who’d had a hand in Rhiannon’s betrayal.

He schooled his building anger and focused on the female before
him. He was worried about her, and about the other females in her horde.

“Why hasn’t the Gargoyle K
ing brought an end to the disobedience of your horde’s men?”

The woman’s eyes got wide, and she took a deep breath as if she was now able to talk about something she truly wanted to. “
Believe me, he’s trying. I listen, and I hear things. Rumor is that his search for us takes up much of his time, even though the other kings are facing problems they could use his help with. Rather than divide and weaken himself in order to aid them, he’s made us his priority.” She shook her head. “None of what the women of my horde are suffering can be deemed his fault.”

When she referred to the “other kings,” Michael knew she was speaking of the rulers of other supernatural factions. There were more than a dozen, that he knew of. It was a strange and terrible and beautiful world, Earth. She spoke with such fervor on the subject, Michael also had to wonder w
hether she knew the Gargoyle King personally.

“
He sends out hunting parties led by the Montem Warriors. But thus far, they’ve failed to take any of our men alive for questioning so the rest of us can be rescued. The men kill themselves by melting into dust before they can be interrogated. As soon as word reaches us that someone’s been taken, the rest of us are moved.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“I can’t remember. Time moves differently when there are no suns or moons to mark the passage of day and night. We began with a horde of nineteen hundred. There are now less than seven hundred of us remaining.”

Michael knew the question was overly simplistic. Things were never as easy as a knee-jerk reaction made them out to be. But he had to ask anyway. “You’re alone
right now. Why don’t you escape?”

“They have my daughters,” she said. Her voice had instantly become hollow.

It was the sound of hopelessness.

“You don’t know what they do to females who are caught attempting escape. And what they do to their families as punishment.” She turned slightly away from him and the fabric over her shoulder morphed, becoming the stone she was constructed of. That stone, however, had
massive grooves carved into it. There were four of them. Claw marks.

“I
t would be worse for my eldest daughter, Hazel. She is a lovely thing.” A glimmering tear escaped from the woman’s eye and cascaded partway down her cheek before it crystallized into quartz and stayed there. “Whoever this Fire Healer is, I admit… I hoped she would destroy the men, even if it meant she destroyed us all.”

A glimmer of something different passed over her features. The quartz tear cracked away, and fell to the ground to shatter. A small smile played across her lips. “She did get quite a few of them though, didn’t she?” She laughed then, and it sounded like diamonds tinkling against each other in a gem bag. “Only twelve of the thirty
men that went out after her last time returned, and two of them had lost limbs.”

Michael took a deep breath and stepped back.
His mind was spinning. He was going to have to track down the Gargoyle King at some point in the very near future. “I thank you for your time and help, Miss….”

“
Allerea,” she said softly. “My name is Allerea.”

“Thank you for your help, Allirea. Please keep this conversation to yourself.”

“Trust me,” she said solidly, every ounce of her radiating tired and wise determination. “I will.”

Michael was about to bid her farewell and step into his own shadows to transport away, when he sensed another pres
ence in the darkness behind Allerea. The gargoyle woman seemed to spot the change in him, because she went still, and her eyes grew wide. The amber within them began to crystallize and shift.

“What is –”

He shook his head briskly and placed his finger to his lips, signaling for her to remain quiet. She understood, going still as a statue, in a literal sense.

Michael waited another two seconds – and then his arm shot once more i
nto the shadows, right over Allerea’s shoulder. She stifled a screech, making a grating squeaking sound instead, and Michael hauled the intruder out of the blackness.

It was a
male this time, and at once, he began to fight Michael. He solidified much more quickly, going stone before the archangel could manage a firm grip around his throat. But Michael was an archangel, and now he was sporting the talents of both vampire and incubus as well. He shifted into vampire immediately, his fangs lengthening, his eyes glowing red.

In the next instant
, the gargoyle male was hurled telekinetically down the alleyway to crash into its brick end, stone on stone. A loud cracking sound preceded a grunt of pain, but Michael gave the gargoyle no quarter. At once, he drew him out again, pulling him through the air and toward him down the alley like a ragdoll, only to brutally change directions half-way and hurl him a second time against the back wall.

This time the crack was followed by a splintering and crumbling sound.

Michael finished the job, however, concentrating on the molecules that made up the sluggish stone-blood that moved through the gargoyle’s veins. It was like cold magma until Michael’s power flowed over it, transforming it to liquid gold.

The gargoyle rippled and changed, and a heartbeat later, a
24 karat man-shaped monument dropped from the wall to hit the ground with a resounding
clank
. The soft metal statue dented and rolled to come to a stop a foot from where it had fallen.

Michael watched the unmoving, g
limmering yellow sculpture, knowing that what he’d just done to it was the equivalent of turning flesh to stone. The gargoyle was dead. He’d never before turned living or moving tissue to gold. He’d never murdered anything or anyone in such a decidedly cold fashion.

His vision slowly evened out, shifting
back from the stark colors of his vampire sight into the full-color spectrum of humanity. He felt his fangs recede, though they left behind a further burgeoning hunger. His eyes were hot in his head. He closed them for a moment, and took a very deep breath, hoping the air would reach down inside him through his lungs and clean away the cloying black that was ever threatening to take him over.

At last, he
turned back to face Allerea. She was staring at him as if she he could go volatile at any moment. She didn’t want to make any wrong moves. She had no idea who or what he was, but had just learned first-hand that it was something inextricably linked to death.

“I’m sorry,” he told her frankly. But this time, he knew he was lying. He wasn’t sorry he’d killed the male gargoyle. The man had been an asshole; his ignorant,
bigoted evil had radiated all around him like a stench. He’d caught loads of the same stench when he was fighting them in the studio.

The male had
been sent to retrieve the female, and the way he’d been skulking lumberingly up behind her in the shadows told Michael he’d planned on having a little fun with her before bringing her back. The world was better off without him.

If
Michael was sorry for anything at all, it was for scaring the woman.

And… for the fact t
hat his own darkness was clearly growing stronger.

Alle
rea looked at him in silence for a long, long while. He wondered what mental processes were going on behind those yellow crystal eyes. He wasn’t even going to try reading her mind. It would be next to impossible without using a vast amount of his power, and right now, he didn’t trust himself to use any of it at all.

Finally, she
blinked. And then she nodded. “I know you are.”

S
he looked at the fallen gargoyle, a smooth gold remnant that would probably weigh more than several of the taxis out on the street put together. “But I know you’re not sorry about
him
,” she said, gesturing with her chin. “And you shouldn’t be.” She met his gaze. “And neither am I.”

S
he stepped back, shifted into stone, and melted into the wall behind her. Before she disappeared completely, he heard the rock whisper, “Your secret’s safe with me. Good luck with the Fire Healer.”