Warrior's Angel (The Lost Angels Book 4) (25 page)

This red dragon had clearly
issued fireballs here and there at his target, who was obviously Michael. The scorch marks along the walls and the burned areas of the rug were evidence to that end. But at the moment, the red dragon wasn’t watching Michael. He also didn’t bother looking up at Rhiannon as she halted in her tracks on her way into the living room. Instead, he was watching Mimi.

Mimi – who
was screaming at the tops of her lungs and looking down at her own arms and hands. Before their eyes, Mimi’s body transformed. Her skin darkened from white to pink, and then to a deep blood red. Her fingers elongated, and her fingernails grew, inching their way into actual claws. She whimpered, breathing hard, and Rhiannon saw puffs of smoke emit from between the child’s lips.

Mimi looked up from her hands, and somehow found Rhiannon.

Their eyes met, and Rhiannon stared back, trapped in the red and orange flickering gaze of a very young, very inexperienced, and very scared red dragon.

Chapter Thirty-One

Max pocketed his phone as he turned. He caught Eleanore’s gaze. “That call we were waiting for from Michael?” He looked up at Uriel next, who was standing behind Eleanore at the couch. “He just made it. We’ve got to go.”

It must have been something in his voice, or maybe Michael’s brothers simply
knew
. Hell Max was pretty sure there had been something in the air of late because Uriel, Gabe, and Az were all there together in the mansion, and they had been for days. Normally, they would all be off doing their own things, traveling across countries or oceans, going on tours, filming on location or taking fishing trips out on the North Sea.

But this week, they’d found excuses to stay in, to stay home, and to stay close.

They’d known. Just like Max had. He’d felt it in his blood.

For the last two hours,
they’d roamed aimlessly through the mansion’s rooms, pretending to do paperwork or use the mansion’s gymnasium, or read books whose pages never seemed to turn. Their minds had all been on Michael.

Even Az was there with them, having risen early that night. Most likely on the same uneasy notion.

Uriel said nothing. He just faced the nearest doorway, which led from the mansion’s library to the hallway, and began to call up a portal that would take them to Michael’s apartment in New York. No doubt, they’d heard the girl’s screeching words through the cell phone and didn’t need Max to tell them where to go.

Az was already stepping into the shadows in one corn
er of the library, most likely sending out a mental call to his vampires as he went. Max was glad of that. From the sound of things, the world had been coming to an end on the other side of that phone call, and they would need all the help they could possibly get.

Sophie, Eleanore, and Juliette gathered together behind Uriel and Gabr
iel, exchanging glances of shared fear and reassurance. They’d become sisters of a sort, closer than the closest of friends. It made sense; they’d been created together. They shared a sort of soul.

Max considered this as he grabbed his bag of supplies from the nearest fainting couch and hoisted it over his shoulders. The girls shared a soul with one other
woman as well – Michael’s archess.

He wondered if they would find her, too, on the other side of that portal.
If they did…. Max swallowed hard and went still for a moment.

The others noticed, and before Uriel stepped into the swirling gateway that would take them to New York, he turned a questioning gaze on Max. “What is it?”

Max was quick to reply. “Nothing.” What he was thinking, he sincerely did not want to voice. Because he was thinking that if Michael’s archess was with the Warrior Archangel, then chances were they had already mated. And if they had, then all four of the Four Favored will have found their archesses.

Which meant that what the brothers and Max might actually be heading into was not just anothe
r fight between good and evil, but the Culmination, itself.

*****

Rhiannon landed on her knees beside Mimi’s transforming body. There was no revulsion involved, and strangely, there was also no surprise. All Rhiannon felt as she took the terrified child into her arms was a need to comfort her. A need to protect her. All she felt was love.

“We’re all special, Mimi,” Rhiannon whispered to her fiercely. “None of us is what we seem. We’re all something more.”
They were words issued quickly, and through clenched teeth. Rhiannon’s was spiraling downward. Her body wanted to be healed. There were broken bones, there were lesions, and her brain was bleeding into her skull; she could feel it all now. Stars were swimming in her vision. Her stomach was clenching horribly.

But her arms held Mimi with absolute and fierce determination, tender but protective, warm and tight and right.

Sometimes there were things in life that were literally more important than life, itself. This was one of those things, and this was one of those moments. This, right here. This was the moment Mimi would remember for her entire existence. It was the moment that would paint the colors of the rest of her life.

Rhiannon would die before she allowed the child to face
that life in fear or confusion. She would rather die than allow Mimi to face it
alone
.

She could hear the gargoyles making their way down the hall; they’d chosen to remain in full gargoyle form, most likely for the intimidation factor. Their stone wings carved furrows in the walls on either side of them, the space too small to allow them to pass unhindered.

Rhiannon turned slightly to peer at them over her shoulder. Something inside of her sizzled and sparked, like a live electric wire dropped into a rain puddle. Her eyes flashed; she saw it from her side like the sudden aura of a migraine. And then the first gargoyle in the line of men heading toward her suddenly lifted from the floor and went sailing overhead.

He wasn’t flapping his wings, and he had no control over where he was going.
It was Rhiannon making him fly. She was throwing him with her telekinesis.

She’d never lifted a living being before.

She gave herself no time to question it, and she didn’t look to see where the first gargoyle was going to land, choosing instead to focus on the next gargoyle. He, too, lifted from the ground, this time crying out in surprise and waving his arms and legs in a helpless, rather comical struggle.

Rhiannon felt Mimi stop crying and pull slightly back from her
as if to watch what was happening over her shoulder.

Rhiannon didn’t stop
, however. There was power swarming loose within her now; the concussion had knocked something free. She knew that. It felt like killer bees escaping from a broken hive. She also knew it was deadly. She had no idea how long she could remain conscious. But she also didn’t care. There was a fury building inside her now, new and strong, steady and determined – like a warrior.

Something near the door flashed outward, and Rhiannon glanced in its direction. A portal was opening, a swirling gateway the likes of which the Swallowtail Foundation might have created for a movie with computer graphics. Only, this one was real. She watched long enough to see several men step out of the portal
, followed by three women. Rhiannon knew them all at once.

From the other side of the apartment, in a shadowy corner of the living room, several more figures emerged. They were tall and handsome and as instantly recognizable as the people from the portal.

The rest of the Four Favored and their archesses had come to join the battle, accompanied by several vampires and Max, their Guardian. At once, they were struggling with the monsters in the room. The gargoyles were forced to turn their attention to them rather than Rhiannon, freeing her up momentarily.

But someone out there must have been desperate. Someone must have been more determined than anyone had ever been in the course of human existence, because no matter how many wraiths, leeches, gargoyles, and phantoms the archangels killed, more appeared to take their place
s.

The
bad guys were dwindling, but with excruciating slowness. It was
barely
noticeable. The phantoms arrived more slowly. The wraiths were just a touch more hesitant. The leeches waited a little longer before vulturing in for their meals.

But it came at great cost.
Wraiths were re-opening deadly wounds in the brothers, and she imagined things like red dragon poison and broken bones piercing vital organs. Rhiannon saw one of the archesses go down after a gargoyle strike directly to the skull. Her mate knelt beside her, protecting her, taking mortal wound after mortal wound to cover her body with his.

Rhiannon
watched all of this and felt an odd sensation, like that blessed numbing that came when you were finally buzzed or the pain killers at last kicked in. She felt detached, yet outraged.

She felt a second wind.
It was a wind she couldn’t stop, too; it was building into a gale.

The sky was electrocuting the earth
with renewed fervor, zapping it here and there with errant, non-stop lightning. Somewhere out in the street, cars were crashing, lights had stopped working, and sirens blared.

Rhiannon
released Mimi to come slowly to her feet. She felt that wind around her, wrapping like a cloak, turning her hair into a halo of long, red tendrils. She felt a heat in her eyes, burning them from the inside, and Michael’s apartment slid into stark, brightly-hued contrasts. She felt her fingertips heat up, as if magic were collecting there, buzzing and zapping and ready to be used.

The pain of her injuries receded one by one, taking a back seat to the power surging through her.
She felt invincible.

It’s a lie,
she thought haphazardly.
I’m imagining this; it’s the concussion.

But she knew that wasn’t true. And she wouldn’t have cared if it was.

The leeches in the room turned toward her, their eyes widening in restored interest. More began pouring over the ragged glass lips of the windows, drawn to her like moths to a flame.

“Rhee… you look like
Jean Gray!
” Mimi exclaimed in a stunned whisper. “As the
Phoenix!
”

The phantoms that had been
flanking Michael and Abraxos began to turn toward Rhiannon’s side of the room. More popped into existence, transporting into the fight from some unknown location. As they did, they, too, focused on Rhiannon and her glowing form. They were followed in turn by the wraiths, whose slick black skin fidgeted and twitched, expressing their shifting attention.

Rhiannon smiled at them all as if to say,
Bring it.

And then electricity exploded from her fingertips, shooting in long sparking streams of blue-white light to slam into the crouching forms of the nearest leeches. They screeched in surprised agony
as the electricity x-rayed their forms, turning them transparent. But the lightning didn’t stop there. It leapt from them to the next two monsters, and from those to two more. Within seconds, every slithering creature in the room was sliced-through with Rhiannon’s electric power.

She felt it pulling itself out of her as if she were a battery being drained.
But there was so much more where that came from.

She cried out in fury, the scream coming from the core of her, where she had shoved and stored away every pain-filled witnessing of rape or torture or bigotry,
of abuse and apathy. It was a cry of outrage for the shallow, pathetic state of the world, of its intolerant bullying, cowardly men, its so-called leaders, and its utter, despicable evil.

She screamed
in rage. And the lightning-encased beasts in the apartment rose into the air on a telekinetic wind, spinning around as if stuck to toy tops. They continued to sizzle and crackle, slowly and painfully cooking to death. There were dozens of them. The lightning exited the apartment, striking monsters that had not yet even entered the fray. It slipped into invisible portal-ways, zapping unsuspecting phantoms before they could even arrive on the scene. It stretched beyond the boundaries of space and time and speared monsters where they hid or skulked or hungered.

It was an exacting sword, that lightning, that power. It sliced swiftly and in a kind of justice that could only have been called
divine
.

And then Rhiannon felt the last of her power slip away, sapped suddenly, unexpectedly. It was a butterfly battery, the one in her soul. It was beautiful and it was powerful, capable of changing fate with a single flapping of its wings. But it was short-lived.

Rhiannon cried out again, this time in desperate weakness and pain. She fell to her knees. The electricity disconnected from her body – and the floating, spinning monsters hovering above the apartment complex
exploded
.

One after another, their bodies popped, rupturing and discharging like massive
Black Cat
fireworks. Nothing was left after the blasts. The lightning ate it all up, dried it all out, and disintegrated every last molecule of evidence that the beasts had ever existed at all.