Chapter Two
Max looked up from the desk at the sound of someone approaching his office door. But he blinked repeatedly, and hurriedly removed his glasses when he saw who it was.
“Lilith!” It was a shocked whisper. He was up and out of his chair so fast, it toppled behind him. She wasn’t supposed to be there. His office was in the Mansion, and only the archangels, archesses, and he alone, were supposed to be able to traverse the corridors of the Mansion.
But a moment after the initial surprise washed over him, it was gone. It vanished with one look at her face, her eyes, and the small smile that played about her full lips. Of course she could use it. He should have known.
“Hello Max,” she greeted softly. Then her smile became strained. “I’m afraid I’ve come with unpleasant news.” As usual, she was dressed like the parody of a sexy librarian, in a woolen pencil skirt, black heels, a silk blouse of some sort, open at the collar, and a dainty necklace that brought his eyes to her neck over and over again. Her black hair, she kept up in a loose bun that allowed tendrils to frame her beautiful face. A long gold chain held a pair of reading glasses that dangled, unused for the moment. Her eyes were the darkness of the Cosmos. And just as mysterious.
“Please,” he said, correcting his horrendous manners by stepping around the desk and smoothing his clothing. “Come in and sit down.” He gestured to the other chairs in the room the Mansion had created for him, replete with tall oak shelves, stacks and stacks of books, and plenty of soft, oversized seating to read them in.
She smiled graciously and came into the office, choosing a chair opposite the desk. She sat with grace, crossing her long legs at the knee. He leaned up against the desk, choosing to stand in order to be closer to her. He always would.
“How are you?” he asked, meaning the question. For most, it was a platitude, something you said just to be nice and pass the time and bear some sort of semblance of human normalcy. No one really cared how you were doing. But he cared how she was doing. Again, he always would.
Her smile turned warm. “I’m fine. Everyone else?” She laughed softly. “That’s another matter.”
He waited, not saying anything, as obviously this was a lead into what she’d come here to tell him.
“As you no doubt have learned by now, Samael is searching for someone. Some of your archesses believe it might be a woman by the name of Angel. You also need to know that while his fury at not being able to locate her is what is causing the storms over Chicago and much of the surrounding area, it’s quite imperative he not find her. Not yet.”
Max wanted to ask why, but he knew Lilith. Lilith was a wellspring of untold knowledge. She’d been the first to come to Earth all those years ago. She knew things others could only dream of knowing, and he knew that she wasn’t going to share what she felt she shouldn’t. So he didn’t ask. Besides – he had his ideas.
He nodded, just once in acceptance, and remained silent.
“Gregori is as aware of this importance as I am, I’m afraid. The difference is, he’s willing to go to extremes to keep them apart. In short,” Lilith explained, “he is determined to locate Angel and destroy her at all costs.”
“So you want us to find her first and protect her.”
Lilith smiled. “If such a thing is possible, then you are the ones who can do it.”
Max absorbed that as well, and took it in stride. This wasn’t his first rodeo.
“I bring even more news, however,” Lilith went on. “Abraxos and the other Adarians have been taken under Gregori’s wing.”
Max nodded. He was, unfortunately, quite aware of that little fact. The archangels had dealt with a few of the Adarians during their battle at Michael’s apartment when his archess had earned her wings. Much had taken place that night. It had been a turning point of sorts.
“I’m sure you also know that the Adarians have undergone… a transformation, for lack of a better description.”
“I know that Abraxos became a vampire not long ago, along with a few of the others. I know they turned on one another, and Gregori came upon Abraxos after he’d been murdered by his brothers,” Max filled in, sharing what little he actually did know. He pushed off the desk and made his way to a bar across the room. There, he turned to glance at her over his shoulder. “Can I get you a drink?”
Lilith’s smile became a grin. “Welch’s Grape Soda in a bottle.”
Max shook his head. He’d known she would request something obscure and probably retro, and because the Mansion took care of its inhabitants, and she was aware of this, she also knew that whatever she asked for, it would provide. A Welch’s Grape Soda, in a bottle, appeared in the bar’s refrigerated compartment. He grabbed her a glass, took ice cubes from the ice container that was never melted or empty, and took both the glass and the bottle back to her.
Lilith waited for him to hand her the drink and glass, set the glass down, took a sip directly from the bottle, and her grin widened. She nodded her thanks, and then sat back a bit, holding the bottle above her lap. “Abraxos’s killers went rogue after their attack. But Gregori caught up with them.” She sighed heavily, took another drink, and paused, gazing over the lip of the bottle at something he couldn’t see. She seemed suddenly lost in her own thoughts until she said, “Now all thirteen of the fallen angels have been killed in one way or another, resurrected for better or worse, and are under Gregori’s control.”
“When you say they’ve been resurrected… that’s what you’ve really come to talk to me about, isn’t it?”
She nodded, giving him a smile that look that told him she knew he’d figure it out. “Max, they’re changing in a terrible way. Reports have been coming in… I hear things. Apparently, they’re attacking mortals.” She paused and gazed hard into his eyes. “They’re eating human hearts.”
*****
“The Armageddon. That’s what people are calling it.” Max stood leaning against the hearth in the family room of the Mansion where they normally met. This hearth seemed to be the center of so many such meetings. If fire could talk, the things it would whisper about in its hissing voice….
The archangels and archesses sat or stood around the room in various poses, their expressions attentive. Uriel was the first to speak up after Max finished relaying what Lilith had shared with him.
“Unexplained weather phenomena, and people behaving like zombies. I can see how some would jump to the conclusion that the world was ending.”
“That’s because they’re all like you. They’ve spent far too much time in Hollywood’s make-believe land,” said Michael, who was shaking his head with reproach. But his expression was mild. He was teasing his brother, nothing more.
“At least he’s on the other side of the camera,” Eleanore, his archess, defended him. “He’s the one doing the fooling, not the one being fooled.”
“Unfortunately, at the moment there’s no make-believe going on at all,” said Max softly. “I’m afraid the blood and guts are quite real this time around. What’s more, the meteorological dissent seems to be spreading. Outlying areas are reporting odd weather as well.”
“So people in those areas are probably also scared the zombie thing will spread,” said Eleanore.
The group fell silent to further process the news.
And then Max felt it. It was like the beginnings of a panic attack, this sudden sensation that something was not at all right. That something was coming. That it would be bad. He opened his mouth to say something, perhaps to warn the others, but before a word left his lips, a rumbling began.
Max had been around for some time, and had a few experiences under his Guardian belt. When the rumbling began in the Mansion, it instantly reminded him of something he’d felt more than a century earlier in San Francisco.
“An earthquake?” Sophie Bryce asked softly as her hands went instinctively to the cushioned arm rests of her chair. Her archangel mate, Azrael, came up behind her like the protective shadow he very much was.
; “It’s not possible,” said Gabriel, who put down his bottle of beer and widened his stance, as if he instinctively knew the rumble would get worse.
And that, it did.
Within seconds, a crack opened up in the marble at the base of the very hearth beside which Max was standing. He backed up a few steps, caught his balance against the couch where Eleanore and Juliette were sitting, and watched with wide, shocked eyes as the crack ran straight into the fireplace, sending crackling sparks flying. It continued to spread, racing up the back of the hearth, through the top of it, and then up the mantle.
There, it stopped. A second later, the crack that had formed yawned further open, and the Mansion gave an odd wail-like moan. It was a sound Max had never heard before. It felt like the Mansion were alive and screaming in pain.
“What the bloody hell –”
Gabriel’s exclamation of confusion and fear was echoed in everyone’s faces. But not a single one of them knew what to do. They remained where they were, bracing themselves against whatever they were sitting or leaning on, until at last, the rumbling stopped, and the crack that had formed in the Mansion’s façade remained behind.
Like a reminder.
Or a warning.
“Someone’s discovered how to get into the Mansion, haven’t they?” Sophie asked. Her voice was tentative, but her question was sure. She knew what they all knew. The Mansion had been compromised. The question was, by who? Samael?
If he’d wanted to get into the Mansion that badly, he would have done so centuries, if not millennia, ago. No. This was someone else. Or something else.
“It’s Gregori,” Azrael stated calmly.
“It’s not safe here anymore,” Max agreed. And that was something he never thought he would say about the Mansion. Where did they go now?
“Maybe they’re right,” Eleanore said. “Maybe it is the end of the world, after all.”
Chapter Three
The dream left him covered in sweat, and the sheets torn to ribbons around him. Once again, he’d fallen victim to sleep and its endless torments. Every nightmare was worse than the one before, filled with more… fear. There was no other way to describe the dreamscape. They defied account, doing no more than oozing darkness and insecurity. He was always surrounded by a miasma of sticky, gooey blackness that held him down and suffocated his breath as the dream taunted him with echoes of far-off laughter and the scent of rain, like his own, but different. Because it was hers.
When he finally managed to pull himself free and awaken, he would find his room in disarray and… part of him changed.
It was more than an existential change. It wasn’t only that he was less patient and more angry. It wasn’t just that with each morning, he hired more searchers, spread his web further, and hunted harder for her than he’d ever hunted for anything in his life. That was only part of the change.
It was a physical change. This morning was exponentially more difficult than the morning before it, and that one had likewise been exponentially more difficult than the previous one, and at this point, he felt very much as if someone had taken a cheese grader to both his nerve endings and his patience.
At the moment, the sky over Chicago echoed his distress, mirroring his exhaustion with deep, dark, low-lying, and slow-spinning clouds, and reflecting both his fear and fury with bouts of lightning and hail that put lightning rods and tiled roofs through their paces. Occasionally, wind would carry this turmoil to Sam’s window and buffet it with moisture that blurred the scenery beyond. It felt fitting somehow.
There was a sound behind him, coming from the hall outside his office.
He didn’t bother to turn around. “Any word?” His question was terse, and his gaze was distant, focused somewhere over Lake Michigan while his fingers tensely gripped the glass of liquor in his right hand.
“If you don’t mind my saying so, you look like hell, Sam.”
Samael’s brow furrowed. He turned from the window. She’d done it to him again. He’d heard someone come up behind him, but he’d thought it was Jason, his assistant, whom he’d sent for moments earlier. He hadn’t been expecting Lilith to show up in his doorway.
She was as beautiful as ever, demure in her pencil skirt and glasses. Those had always confused him – those glasses. Why should anyone as so obviously inhuman as Lilith need glasses? But he’d never asked her.
He realized now, as he stood there staring at her, that there had been a lot of things he hadn’t done during his time on Earth. Two thousand years, and you’d think you would cover all the bases. But no. As it so happened, no matter how much time a person was given, there were just some things you wouldn’t think to do.
“I’m assuming you want to tell me the Adarians look worse?” she asked, as she continued into the office on the 66th floor of the Sears tower and moved toward the window where he stood.
“Bragging is ungentlemanly,” he quipped in his tired voice, returning his attention to the watery nothingness out beyond the storms and city. “But yes.”
He knew this latest struggle with the Adarians and Hesperos had left him particularly drained. It was almost as if Gregori were sending the Adarians after him for the sole purpose of wearing him slowly down. There could be no other reason; he was stronger than the lot of them combined. Gregori had to know that. So why else throw them at him again and again if not to very slowly physically destroy him?
The dreams weren’t helping, either. He’d caught a glimpse of his haunted reflection in the glass during a string of lightning strikes. He wouldn’t be making televised public appearances any time soon. As it was right now, stocks in his companies were flying high, especially with the frequent reports the media were making on the weather phenomena. It was of a particular benefit to be able to both make news and profit from it at the same time. But if he went on camera right now, looking as strung out as he did, the public might begin wonder whether he were sick. His stocks would probably drop, and that wouldn’t be good. His money, after all, financed so many things.
“You know…” Lilith began softly and casually, as she always began her more serious conversations, “some people say you can actually catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Or something to that effect.”
“I’m not after a fly. Flies are irritating and incessant, and when they come around, I summon a fly swatter and deal with them.” It was odd that he couldn’t help but picture the Adarians at the mention of flies and fly swatters. “No.” He took a drink from his glass and gritted his teeth when it burned. “I’m after a hummingbird.”
Lilith turned toward him, and her expression softened, her eyes taking on renewed interest. He had no idea why he’d said that. Why he’d likened Angel to a hummingbird. It just came out.
“I received a card recently,” Lilith told him, “and do you know, there was a passage on the back that said hummingbirds floated free from time? Lovely card. By Papyrus, I think.”
Hummingbirds floating free of time… They did seem to move at inconceivable measures. In his mind’s eye, he saw an image of a bird as brightly hued as gemstones, with wings that beat so fast, they blurred. As if they weren’t there.
Invisible wings.
He swallowed hard and looked down at the liquid in his glass as he idly swirled it. “I’m guessing you received the card from Max.”
Lilith smiled. “Jealousy is ungentlemanly too.”
That made him smile. She knew damn well he wasn’t jealous. He just hated the Guardian. But her teasing eased a touch of his pain somehow. It was strange how she could do that. Leave it to a woman; they had a way that baffled the male mind. It was an intangible kind of thing, this talent for calming the soul and easing disquiet. It was a magic power.
But a moment or two later, his smile slipped. He realized, quite suddenly, that she had a reason for coming to see him. She always did.
And just as suddenly, he realized what it was.
He lowered his glass. His gaze re-focused, his body re-awakened, and every o
ne of his raw, cheese-graded nerve endings fired to furious life. “You know where she is.”
Of course she would. The damned woman knew everything.
Lilith lifted her chin and took a deep breath, letting it out in a sigh. “I can give you this.” She pulled a small folded piece of paper from somewhere under her blouse, no doubt her bra, as there was nowhere else to keep anything, and held it out to him. “And the only reason I’m sharing it is because you aren’t the only one looking for your hummingbird. Frankly, despite everything, I think she would be safer with you.”
Sam did away with his drink by simply making it vanish, then took the paper from her and unfolded it. By the time he’d finished reading it, Lilith had already made her way back to the door across the room.
She stopped and glanced at him over her shoulder. “But Sam, please remember what I said about flies and honey,” she told him softly. “As it so happens, hummingbirds like it too.”
Chapter Four
Fog kissed Azrael’s eyelashes and curled the ends of his long black hair. He smelled salt, as well as the blood that yet clung to the edges of his senses. He’d left his victim long behind, the body destroyed beyond the end of Pier 19, deserted and desolate this time of night. All that remained of the criminal low life were ashes, and those would be washed away by the incoming tide. But as always, the blood remained with him. It was in his nostrils, in his throat, coating the inside of his mouth, despite the magic he’d used to clean it out. He could always still feel it there.
He didn’t have to feed from them any longer if he didn’t want to. He had Sophie…
At the thought of her, he stopped in his tracks and closed his eyes. She washed over him, like a blanket of white light, warm and clean, and for just an instant, he could actually feel her silken hair brush against his cheek. He could hear her laughing.
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