But he didn’t. He wouldn’t.
Not with her.
“Yes,” he said. “I am.”
* * *
Something banged on the door of Sophie’s memory. It rapped, tapped, and waited, a big bad wolf waiting to huff and puff. Thunder rumbled and her head felt light again. But her eyes were glued to Azrael’s. It was all she could see, all she could concentrate on; it monopolized her every breath, her every firing neuron.
Azrael, the vampire.
It made so much sense. The almost-fangs, the perfect grace, the voice that mesmerized millions. Billions.
In the Dr. Seuss illustration of what life had become over the course of the last hour, it made perfect sense. He had been at the hockey game—what a coincidence. It was as though he’d known she loved hockey. Because he had known. Because he’d been reading her mind.
She’d only ever seen him at night.
He’d parted the fog because he’d known she wanted to see the Golden Gate Bridge.
Thunder rolled somewhere overhead; it was close. There was electricity in the air. It ran along her skin like liquid static. She frowned—and in her mind’s eye, she saw the gun that had discharged to cause the thunder. It was shaking; the hand that held it trembled furiously. The blued metal was slick with sweat. It smelled like fear and brimstone.
Sophie’s vision receded, as if the image before her were strapped to a tide and the tide was ebbing away.
“Yes,” said Azrael, but his voice was distant. “I am.”
I know, she thought numbly. She already knew he was a vampire. In the fevered shifting of her mind, it was no longer even a question. Everything she’d once thought make-believe was real. Time was moving differently inside her now. In one place, she was confronting Azrael, coming to grips with his secret, accepting it and moving on. In another, she was living a waking memory. It was unfolding before her and holding her captive as sense and reason fled and her world fractured.
Her knee hurt and she remembered skinning it. In her mind, she looked down to see it bleeding, the jeans torn open and caked with mud and wet grass. Her hip hurt, her back felt bruised. She tasted metal in her mouth.
“Sophie?”
She heard his deep voice; its vampire-angel resonance had somehow made it through the wall of her reverie and into this other world. But Azrael was no longer standing before her. There was no fireplace or wall with torches or big black bed with its black sheets that were so very “vampire” she was surprised she hadn’t figured it out sooner.
In their place was a cemetery shrouded in mists. It rolled into the distance, a green and gray rise and fall of headstones, tended grass, and fog. She felt the pain of a grave marker digging into her back.
Her foster father took the waistband of her jeans in his hand and threatened to yank them painfully off of her. She screamed, a voiceless, soundless cry that had been swallowed up by the mists more than a decade ago.
She fought, she lashed out, and she felt herself frozen inside, petrified in the quicksand of this horrific memory. Her hand shook; she’d found something to save her. Her eyes saw red.
She yanked the gun from under his waistband. It hurt; he was pressing her into the ground. She thought she aimed—she tried so hard beneath his horrible, sweaty weight.
Lightning crashed; she felt the trigger give beneath her finger. It jerked violently and her foster father went limp above her. Madness swept over Sophie, a harsh, tangy hysteria that clung to the top of her mouth like a cold spoon. Sophie barely registered what she was doing as she shoved her foster father’s deadweight off of her own small body and stood. Lightning crashed again, white light blotted out the world, and Sophie saw no more.
* * *
“Sophie?”
There was something wrong. The lightning above them was constant now, parading down upon the outside of the cave with incredible fury. Pebbles rolled off the walls to the stone floor like miniature waterfalls and the ground shook as if from the effects of an earthquake.
Sophie’s eyes were no longer seeing him. They were looking at him, she was still standing, but her gaze had shifted somehow—as if she were looking through him. The color had drained from her face, and her teeth were no longer clenched. Her lips parted, her jaw went slightly slack, and her fists unclenched at her sides.
Azrael frowned, taking the final step that closed the distance between them. She didn’t step back; it was his first alarm bell. “Sophie?” he said as he curled his finger beneath her chin and tilted her face so that she looked up at him.
She swayed again, and he steadied her with a hand on her arm. Her gaze became unfocused and Azrael realized she was no longer in the room with him. And then the unmistakable darkness of terror flickered in her beautiful eyes and she made the tiniest, most telling sound. A whimper.
Azrael swore internally and rushed her with his dark, penetrating magic, delving into the complexity of her mind with fast and furious intent. The effort was immediately draining. She’d grown stronger in spades. The labyrinth of her memory had complicated itself exponentially.
She was trapped somewhere within it, and wherever that place was, it was horrible. It was the deepest and darkest of her memories, the place that had been shut off not only from him but from her conscious mind as well—blocked out and hidden from her for the sake of sanity. He could feel the inky blackness of it clinging to his being as he traversed her neural pathways and dove into the well of her subconscious.
In the real world, Azrael scooped Sophie into his arms and sat down on the bed to cradle her against him. His eyes glowed furiously, his body radiating magic. The fire in the hearth and the torches along the wall reflected this magic in the way their flames climbed and danced, leaping to enormous, unnatural life. Outside, the lightning played, an electrical storm the likes of which no one had ever seen.
In the realm of Sophie’s mind, Azrael stood amid headstones, and a mist curled around his legs, hiding his boots from view.
No, he thought. Not here. Not again.
A premonition thrummed through him. The souls of the dead recognized him, a sovereign who had occupied the throne long ago. At one time, their ancestors had looked into his eyes and crossed out of this world and into another. They’d left as children, as mothers, as sons, and they’d gone unwillingly. Almost always, there was a strand of a being that was unwilling at death. Almost always. And that strand remained behind—and remembered.
Azrael never entered cemeteries, for that very reason. Chances were, he would be able to move through them undetected while spirits rested. But sometimes, something tipped them off and his identity was made clear.
Samael had known about Azrael’s weakness months ago; he’d used it against the former Angel of Death when Sam and Uriel were fighting over Eleanore. In a cemetery, Samael had called the spirits forth and revealed to them Azrael’s presence. The battle had taken a turn for the worse.
The dead were more powerful in the realm between here and there, between the past and nonexistence. It was as if they knew that the end was coming, that time would blot them out for good, and they were desperate. If they awoke now and saw him for what he was, the results could be devastating.
Az was already weak. Sophie’s mind had taken too much energy for him to traverse. She seemed to fight him, even unconsciously.
And now his fears were coming to fruition. He felt a multitude of presences tug at him. The wills of the dead were weighing on him, their angry little fists yanking on the cloak of his spirit, trying to pull him under.
Azrael’s fangs lengthened in his mouth and he felt the heat of his glowing gaze as he stood in the shrouded graveyard and turned a full circle. Sophie was here somewhere; he could feel her presence like a spot of warmth in all this cold. He just had to find her. And soon.
A scream pierced his reverie, somewhat muffled by the clinging fog. Az zeroed in on the direction it came from and blurred into motion.
Despite his speed, his progress through the cemetery wa
s hard. Fingers of yesterday clung to him, trying their damnedest to slow him down. Memories were a strange thing to move through; they were as real as the everyday world, sometimes more so. But attached to them were emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, regret. Those emotions painted the world in light and sound and dictated how easy it was for Azrael to traverse them.
He had always been able to do this. As the Angel of Death, he had looked into people’s hearts and known their deeds—both good and bad. For him, the past was as much a living, breathing thing as the present.
And Sophie’s past was a veritable snarling beast.
As he grew closer to her, the warmth she shed grew, but the atmosphere tore at him more. It was trying to rip him to shreds, trying to drain him dry—it even felt as though it were trying to kill him.
How ironic.
Azrael shoved through the boiling fury of her memory, concentrating harder than he’d ever had to in his incredibly long life. And then he felt it. . . .
Here? he thought, bewildered. But just as he had out on the bay beneath the bridge, he recognized the scent, the feel, the sensation of pure, emotionless evil.
A phantom was in the cemetery. Since phantoms could not enter a person’s mind, much less view a person’s past as Azrael could, the fact that Az sensed one now meant that a phantom had been present on this day in Sophie’s past.
The improbability of such a coincidence paled in comparison to the foreboding he felt creeping across the gravestones. It was too real to ignore. It nearly brought him to a halt.
Azrael had heard humans talk about the strange, slow-motion run they often got trapped in while dreaming at night. That sensation of trying as hard as they could—and still not getting anywhere—haunted many mortals. Yet he had never fully understood how frustrating and dire the sensation was until tonight.
Now he struggled, fighting tooth and nail to cross the valley of the dead amid screaming souls that only he could hear and the terrible nearness of a heartless assassin. Until finally, he came over a rise in time to hear the unmistakable sound of a gun going off.
Azrael stopped short and scanned the mists. They parted on a hill fifty yards away. There, a young Sophie Bryce, perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old, lay beneath the bulky, immobile body of a middle-aged man.
Azrael’s senses were pricked by the sharp smell of gunpowder, fear, and freshly spilled blood. Sophie’s sobs were dimmed by the fog, but still echoed across the small valley between them. Az tried to move forward, to reach her as Sophie frantically heaved the large, heavy body off her, but he was frozen in place, locked in the static importance of this particular moment in Sophie’s past.
Who is that? he wondered, wishing he had power over the strands of time. He closed his eyes and backtracked through the channels of Sophie’s mind. There. The man’s name was Alan Harvey. He was her foster father. One of many.
Here, in this cemetery eleven years ago, Harvey had tried to rape and murder Sophie Bryce. But before he could do either, she’d killed him instead.
Azrael’s eyes opened as Sophie unsteadily got to her feet. She was covered in blood, none of it hers. The stench wafted across the graveyard, assaulting Azrael in its profuse abundance. He watched, in stunned silence, as Sophie looked down at the gun in her hand.
All around Az, the sense of wrongness, of evil and danger, was nearly overwhelming.
The mists parted behind Sophie. A phantom stepped into the clearing.
It had been so long since Azrael had seen one, to look upon its form now was mesmerizing in the same manner as was an accident scene on the freeway. The phantom smiled at Sophie’s back through teeth that were black, in sharp contrast to the milky white of its long, skinny body. It stood more than seven feet tall, and its skin writhed and swirled as if it were coated with the same fog that blanketed the cemetery.
Azrael’s lips parted, his instinct to yell at Sophie to look behind her—to turn around—to run. Not that it would have done her any good. He knew that any attempt he made to interrupt the flow of her memory would prove fruitless. He was here as an observer, despite the very real pull of the dead on his now weary body. The dead had no concept of past or present. Their essences existed in all times, in all places, and in every one of those instances Azrael remained the former Angel of Death.
He watched as the phantom floated toward Sophie, its body moving in strange conjunction with the rest of the world; it walked as if it had feet to push along the ground, but those feet did not touch the earth. Instead, it hovered several inches above it and moved at a speed that belied its odd gait.
Azrael’s entire body tensed, his muscles bunched, and the monster in him rushed to the fore, all fang and claw and hunger as the phantom closed in on Sophie and raised its white, withered, semi-material hand. In one clean swipe, the phantom sliced its hand across Sophie’s body. But there was no destruction, no open, gaping wound in her torso where the phantom’s hand had passed through her. Instead, she simply went limp and fell to the ground.
The gun she’d held in her hand tumbled across the wet grass and slid to a stop a few feet down the hill. Then the phantom moved to the dead body of her foster father and stood over it, looking down.
What the monster did next would have given any mortal a bone-deep chill. The phantom threw back its head and laughed. It was the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard amplified by the hollow-lunged evil of the creature that made the sound. Azrael’s heart hammered hard, and his body ached where he fought the petrifying effects of Sophie’s memory. But all he could do was watch as the phantom lowered its head and then moved over the dead body.
Its own form began to dissolve into the mists that seemed to make it up. Those mists covered Harvey’s corpse, enveloping it in white.
A few seconds later, the fog began to drift away, and Harvey’s body was gone. It was no more than the rest of the mist that coiled and eddied and parted across the rolling hills of the New York cemetery.
Chapter Eighteen
When Azrael came to, he was lying on his own bed and Sophie was lying beside him, her golden hair spread across his chest and the black satin comforter.
Azrael gazed down at her; his eyes burned furiously in his skull, his teeth ached painfully in his gums, and his body shook—trembled uncontrollably—with need. His golden archess was still unconscious. And he was in agony.
Only twice in his life on Earth had he ever felt this weak and this hungry for blood. Twenty centuries had passed since the initial, hellish moments of his life in this realm. He’d had two thousand years to get over the pain he’d suffered during his transformation. It had barely been enough.
The second time he’d felt this suffering was several months ago. Samael had cast that spell upon Azrael in the cemetery, awakening the spirits so that they clawed at him and ripped apart his spirit. The physical pain it had caused was immense. It had taken days and many feedings to heal.
And now that pain was back.
Azrael rose from the bed in one fluid movement and forced himself to take a step away from it. His entire body ached, throbbed. He could actually feel the emptiness in his veins. It was as if they were drying out, cracking, sending searing pain through the very fiber of his physical being.
Sophie stirred on the bed. Her head turned so that she faced him. She frowned in her sleep, and then the lines of her beautiful face smoothed out as if she’d found peace once more. Az’s gaze traveled from her plump lips to the smooth curve of her chin and the long, graceful line of her throat.
He caught the beat of her heart, heard the small sounds of her breathing, and smelled the temptation of her blood where it flowed, innocent and waiting just beneath the surface of her neck.
He’d wanted her before. Out on the bay, at the hockey game, as he watched her sleep in her Pittsburgh apartment. He’d wanted her at the wedding, at the restaurant, out on the pier, where she’d strolled across the boardwalk and fed the seagulls what remained of her lunch. Azrael had wanted to taste Sophie from the mo
ment she had appeared in her maid-of-honor gown and walked down that aisle behind her best friend.
And now he was going to have her.
Azrael was already bending over his archess when he heard the distinctive sound of a footfall in the darkness behind him.
“My lord, please believe me when I tell you that you do not wish to do that.”
Azrael froze, the presence of the other ancient vampire rolling over him in all its power. Only Uro could have followed Azrael through the shadows. Only Uro knew of this cavern.
Slowly Azrael straightened. The pain was making him mean. Every ounce of him was the monster now. There was no room for anything else. Uro may have been his best and oldest friend, but he was getting in the way of what Azrael wanted more than anything he had ever wanted in his ancient, worthless existence.
He slowly turned to face the other vampire and then cocked his head to one side. “Wanna bet?”
There was no warning then. Neither of them was a speaker of unnecessary words. Their bodies blurred into motion and, at the center of the enormous cave, they met, a clash of growls and snarls, fangs bared, claws out, bodies spinning with insane momentum.
No human eye would have been able to follow the progress of their struggles. Several seconds later, something hard hit the wall of the cave and Azrael had Uro pinned, a hand around his throat, his fanged face inches from that of his closest friend.
“I took you from death’s clutches, Uro, but I can throw you back just as easily.”
“I know,” Uro said, grinding the words out through clenched teeth. His red eyes flared and his fingers grasped Azrael’s wrist tightly. “If that’s what it takes to save you from yourself, so be it.”
Azrael looked into those red eyes and saw the fire of Uro’s spirit. It raged and roared and yet only now did it show itself. Only now, when his king and maker needed him most, did he break the facade of calm that composed his outer shell.
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