More thunder.
I have to get out of here.
It was the overriding knowledge that drove her body to move, to force one foot in front of the other, to propel it across the gas station’s filling lot and back to her van. The pump had finished filling, and the handle had popped. She pulled it from the tank and put it away, closed the lid, and got back into the van.
Once behind the wheel, she realized she was not only crying, but shaking. Her grip on the steering wheel was white-knuckled, and her teeth were clenched tight to keep them from chattering.
On the same automatic function that had helped her walk out of the gas station and back to her car, Angel put her foot on the brake, pushed the start button, and listened to the engine start up. Then she put the car into drive, and pulled out of the lot.
She was stopped at the exit that would take her onto the frontage road when she realized she needn’t have stopped. There were no cars coming. In fact, there were no cars as far as she could see. There was no movement at all. No life.
Her breathing sped up. She floored the gas pedal and pulled out onto the frontage road before turning out onto the highway.
And then lightning split the road in front of her, slamming into the ground so hard, she felt the bolt’s aftershock like a physical wave that rolled into her. Her eardrums slammed shut to protect themselves, and that ringing in her ears became all-encompassing. Her foot crashed down on the brake, and the van came to a tumultuous stop.
A man was standing in the road in front of her. As fat droplets of rain began to splay themselves upon her windshield, she met his gaze.
He was tall, he had white-blonde hair, he was stunningly beautiful, and his eyes were the same dangerous shade as the approaching storm. Those piercing eyes speared through her physical form and seared straight to her quivering soul.
“They’re coming back, Angel. The Adarians have found you,” he warned her softly, but in a voice so powerful, it filled up the empty space for miles and rode calmly over the sound of the thunder. “Please. Come with me.”
Chapter Seven
Sam noticed that for once, Angel hadn’t bothered to change out of her natural appearance. Perhaps she felt it wasn’t necessary while she was on the open road in the middle of West Texas. She’d disguised herself innumerable times in the last three weeks, switching so fast and so frequently, he was left dizzy trying to keep track of the changes. He had taken to following her magical traces, her scent, her “feel,” and even the afterthoughts she sometimes carelessly left behind when she was tired – when he’d managed to wear her down just enough.
But even those, she quickly learned to cover up. She was so fast, so smart, so good… he had never been this close to madness.
But right now, miraculously, she was Angel, and her porcelain, doll-like features were her own. From her shimmering, layered, waterfall of naturally white-blonde hair to her startling silver-gray eyes, she echoed the fundamentals of his own appearance. She was so obviously a part of him. At least, it was obvious to him.
It seemed far less obvious to her.
He may have been the one standing in the middle of the road, but Angel was without a doubt the proverbial deer in headlights. Right now, those gorgeous, inhumanly vivid eyes were positively enormous in the frame of her perfect face.
“They were expecting you in Dallas,” he told her, using every last ounce of his dwindling willpower to remain standing there, calmly entreating. “But now they’ll return here, because they know you’ve taken another route.” Lightning laced through a darkening sky. “They’re on their way.” He could feel them drawing nearer. He wasn’t lying.
But he could feel her more. He could especially feel her fear, even through the electrically charged air and the separation of steel and glass between them. What he couldn’t figure out… was why. Why are you afraid of me?
A column of white-burning air slammed into the ground less than a quarter of a mile away, shaking the universe. Sam saw her jump behind her steering wheel. When he concentrated… he could hear her heartbeat. Fast and furious. Just like a hummingbird’s.
He focused on it, blocking out every other sound. Then, as he felt his eyes heat up like the electricity frizzing the atmosphere around them, he lowered his head, sharpened his gaze through the tops of his eyes, and reached out to her mind.
There was a wall around it that defied possibility. No one was stronger than he was. And yet, there was that wall, defying him as usual. It felt like metal against his spirit, thick and cold and impenetrable.
He had always been a tenacious man. His gaze narrowed – and he pushed.
Stop.
Sam blinked, freezing at the sound of her own beautiful voice in his head. This was different. This was new. Had he really heard her? Was she speaking to him telepathically even while he was unable to enter her mind?
This won’t work, Sam. Leave me alone. Deal with the Adarians and forget about me.
“Like hell.”
Now it was Angel’s turn to blink. She hadn’t been expecting that either. They were surprising each other this afternoon.
He watched her like a hawk across the very short distance between them, and took in every single miniscule detail of her features. She bit her lip, her eyes darted to the road around him, and he heard her heartbeat quicken further. She was embraced by indecision.
His vision sharpened, zooming in as if he possessed internal scopes. And there, in the swirling metal of her silver eyes, he saw his reflection.
Christ, he swore internally. He looked like a mad man. His countenance was as dark as the thunderhead behind him, his stature enormous, his hair wind-tossed, his eyes positively on fire. His expression was grim.
Now he understood her fear.
Another bolt of lightning speared the ground with fury, throwing thunder at them like solid sound that felt like an audible freight train.
No more running, Angel, he thought, knowing somehow that even if he could not penetrate her mind, she would hear him. He stepped toward the van and saw her grip tighten on the steering wheel. Come with me, damn it.
No.
He stopped. If it had been anyone else – anyone at all – defying him as she did, his knee-jerk reaction would have been to break something, probably the person defying him. But Angel was magic. She did things to him he did not allow, things he had no choice but to suffer. She got in under his skin and peeled it back even as her presence upon his bared insides was a salve.
When he’d begun dreaming of her about a year ago, he would ache for the tiniest glimpse of some miniscule part of her. An elbow. The side of her hand. A finger. Anything. And now, her presence had ridden the escalator of his soul to the top level, taking up permanent residence in his mind. In his heart.
If he had one.
She was everything he loved and all he wished he hated, and she was hope incarnate. So, for her, he forced a slow breath in through his nose and out just as slowly.
You don’t even know me. This is madness, she said very clearly in his head.
He felt her consciously back off then, as if she was done trying to reason with him and was focused on a way out of the corner he’d backed her into. If she transported away right now, he would easily follow her signature. She was right in front of him. He’d never gotten this close before. There was nowhere for her to go. Why wouldn’t she just surrender?
Why wouldn’t she just talk to him? Why couldn’t she stand to be near him in any capacity?
He would make it up to her. He would make it worth it to her. With everything he had, with everything he was, he would make being with him worth her time. He would earn her love. If she would only –
But his own thoughts suddenly came to a grinding halt when he heard something else. It was her thoughts. She was so distracted by her desperation, and he was so close to her, he was catching them loud and clear.
…can’t he see that? Can’t he feel how insane this all is? Him – chasing me – us both running, and the f
act that there’s this fate that slams us together in the first place? Can’t he understand that it’s not natural?! That we can’t possibly belong together when we have never even really spoken to each other before? We can’t do this! Everything will be lost! God damn it all to hell!
She broke eye contact with him and looked at the storm behind him. Then she turned and glanced back at the gas station.
He smiled. He couldn’t help it. It was a small victory to be able to catch pieces of her thoughts like this, as if he’d managed to touch her somehow. A brush against her mind was nearly as good as the brush of his knuckles against her cheek. He couldn’t help but grin.
He realized his mistake as soon as he made it. Angel saw that smile and alarm ramrodded through her so strong, he could feel it himself. He saw it in her face, her body as it went tense, her hypnotic eyes as they again went very, very wide.
And then he was literally swearing up a storm, and lightning was cascading all around him in furious rage as she vanished – transporting once more out of his sight.
At once, he was tracing her, reaching out with every magical tendril of power he possessed, until he at last brushed up against the sparkling, snowflake-like remnants of her own beautiful power. He grasped hold of it with a tenacious mental grip and was about to follow when he felt something else. It was something black and sticky, slimy and wrong. It was all too familiar, and far more unwelcome. Adarian magic.
They were close too, and the bastards were following Angel’s trail just like he was.
Sam swore some more, shot into the oblivion that was a transport, and raced after his woman with everything he had. As he came to the end of her trail and felt her presence growing closer, he noticed other presences. Hundreds of them.
Thousands.
As further expletives escaped his perfect, cruel lips, he found himself reappearing amidst an enormous crowd of mortals. At a concert.
At a Valley of Shadow concert.
He ran a hand through his hair and tried not to fist it tight enough to yank it out.
Clever girl. That was fast thinking. She would come here. It was quite possibly the only place in the world where her own magical signature would get lost to him amidst the similar magical signatures of other powerful, supernatural beings. Beings like vampires. And angels. And most importantly, vampiric angels.
“Fucking hell.”
Chapter Eight
“Where is Jason?” he asked impatiently as his gaze skirted over the faces in the crowd. There was a girl with spiky brown hair and green tips, a pale man who was far too skinny and whose pants were far too loose, a red-head with dread locks; face after face filled his vision, piqued his curiosity, and then was replaced by another. She could be any one of them. She had been disguising herself for centuries.
Beside him, two of the men who worked for him looked at one another helplessly. Finally, one replied, “We aren’t sure, sir. He hasn’t checked in today.”
Nor had he answered Sam’s summons yesterday. It was something Jason had never done before.
Jason had been his assistant for longer than most civilizations had existed. He had a secret that haunted him, and one that most people were unaware of. Sam was privy to it, however. Jason was a Nightmare, also known as an incubus, and once, long ago, he’d made a very grave mistake with a woman.
At that time, Hesperos showed mercy on the incubus, allowing him to live, but banished him from the Nightmare Kingdom. Jason went to work for Samael. He’d been loyal and trustworthy ever since. Always there.
Until now.
Something was wrong. But Sam didn’t have time to ponder the implications, nor did he have the time to search for the incubus. Angel was somewhere in this crowd, and he’d be damned if he was going to let her out of his web even one more time.
“She’s here,” he told the other men. The two he was speaking with at the moment were dragons. They, too, were outcasts from their kingdom, each for their own reasons. Sam was good at taking in the “fallen.” He just had a way of finding them, and them of finding him. No one but Lilith was aware of just how many he had accumulated over the years. There were a fair share. There was little more useful to a man with an agenda than a supernatural being who’d been scorned.
“You know what to do. Fan out and alert the others. I want everyone here and at the ready.”
The men left at once, and Sam could feel his orders being carried out. One by one, more of his people transported to the concert. He sensed their signatures, and knew they were fanning out as instructed. A veritable web of a barrier was being created, and as long as it was created fast enough, then like a fly on a filament, Angel wouldn’t be able to leave the crowd without detection.
Up on stage, Azrael, the “Masked One,” was putting on quite a show. Sam had to give him credit. There was no entertainer on Earth like him. A black leather mask hid the more prominent features of his face from his fans, but his eyes burned like double suns, and the cameras that had been set up for the concert caught them from all angles. It drove the crowd wild, the way he seemed to peer at each and every one of them individually, the way he literally appeared to “burn” for them and them alone.
Sam was well familiar with the technique. The media went crazy for it – and he owned the media – so he knew what sold and how to do it. But with the veritable king of the vampires, it was more than simple technique and “selling the crowd.” What Azrael did worked because he did what he felt, and he meant what he said. He was the soul behind the words that drove the hearts in his audience. He was ancient, and he had been lonely and in pain for a very long time. It had taken two thousand years of lost agony before he’d found his soul mate and that suffering had, at long last, come to an end. There was no greater empathy than that kind of pain.
Sam would know.
The cameras turned, fire exploded on the stage, and the crowd wailed. Uro played his axe as if it were a lover, wringing sounds from its strings that should have been impossible, and striking nerves that made the women in the audience hold their breaths. The drums beat out a rhythm that hypnotized, forcing hearts to pound to the same mesmerizing cadence.
And Azrael crooned, his voice snaking out amongst the sweating, undulating horde to wrap around his fans like steel coils….
A stranger among us in cloak and scythe
Walks in the valley of shadow and lies
Run little fallen, he’s gaining behind,
I’ll be your shelter; look into my eyes.
As if he were obeying, compelled to do exactly what Azrael instructed, Sam glanced at the nearest oversized screen. A fire flickered in the depths of Az’s compelling gaze, an actual, volatile flame that was both a temptation – and a threat. Sam saw it clear as day.
Az was communicating with his vampires. His words were a warning to them, alerting them to the fact that Samael and his men were in the crowd.
Sam’s only hope was that the vampires, and the angels, for that matter, were smart enough to realize Sam wasn’t the only predator moving through the writhing, worshipping prey that night. Abraxos and his Adarians were somewhere in that mess too.
Mere seconds after he’d first appeared on the scene, Sam was moving through the audience like Moses parting the Red Sea. Where he went, the people separated, affording him a wide bubble of personal space. He scoured the faces of everyone he passed, and as his eyes met theirs, they froze under the intensity of his gaze.
The vampires were mobilizing. He could feel them closing in on him. If he didn’t find his wayward mate soon and get the hell out of there, he would have a battle on his hands. An epic one. In the midst of thousands of innocent mortals.
*****
Angel popped back into existence smack-dab in the middle of an undulating crowd of concert revelers. She could instantly smell alcohol, the sickly-sweet scent of burning grass, and the stronger taint of real drugs along with the stench of sweaty bodies. It wasn’t a cold night, and there was barely breathing room between each person.
She changed form at once. No one was looking at her anyway. Every eye in the audience was pointed at the stage or at one of the multitude of ginormous screens that had been erected here and there to reflect what was happening with the band. This was a Valley of Shadow concert.
Right on top of the Four Corners Monument.
The Four Corners Monument was where four of the states in the US actually met up at perfect right angles: Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. Angel had known long in advance that they were going to put on this concert here. For quite a while, online chatter had joked that the “Masked One,” the lead singer of Valley of Shadow, was some kind of supernatural monster. The way he moved on stage, the sound of his voice, the mesmerizing properties of his eyes, were all nudging people into whispered imaginings.
Publically, fans would joke, “He’s magic,” or “He’s a vampire,” or “He’s some sort of alien.” They took it as far as writing fan fiction about him, giving him the powers of a superhero. One particularly popular fan fiction story was turned into a comic strip and then a graphic novel, in which the Masked One could duplicate himself and stop crimes in more than one place at a time. “He can be anywhere at any time!” the victims would warn as they were being robbed. And sure enough, the Masked One would come to the rescue.
Supernatural powers or not, to its fans, one thing Valley of Shadow seemed to have in spades was a sense of humor. To play right along with its fans, and offer up a light-hearted joke at the same time, Valley decided to prove it could be in more than one place at once. In fact, it could technically be in four.
The Four Corners marker was on Navajo land, so lucky for the band, the Navajo happened to be huge fans. And, it didn’t hurt that an enormous donation was being made to the tribe. Posters for the event went up months in advance, advertising the concert with vivid imagery, stark color contrasts, and the type of font that steadfastly appeals to “Valley Walkers,” as fans were called.
Samael Page 4