Samael

by Heather Killough-Walden

  Despite her radiated strength, there was a hollowness under her brown eyes, deep and dark. She rested against one of the posts surrounding the archery range, her arms crossed over her chest. There were people shooting nearby, but whether they were part of her party or not, Angel couldn’t tell.

  “She’s beautiful,” she whispered. Like Hesperos, she could see the good or bad inside a person as well, and the woman was not only attractive on the outside, she was very much so on the inside. That kind of goodness radiated from a person. It was difficult to describe.

  Angel was still reeling from the fact that both men were there at the faire, standing on either side of her, and hadn’t realized that she’d spoken the words out loud until Hesperos responded.

  “Indeed,” he agreed, his heated gaze still locked on his unwitting target.

  Angel looked from him to Sam, who stood behind her, watching her as intently as Hesperos watched the woman by the archery range.

  Before Angel could say anything to him, the Nightmare King turned back to face them. “Well, Angel, I think you’re in good hands here. If you’ll excuse me.”

  Angel’s eyes grew very, very wide. “What?” She couldn’t help but ask.

  It wasn’t that she wasn’t glad to avoid trouble, it was just…. He was going to just leave her? Leave her with Sam of all people? Since when did he trust Sam that much? How could he just aban–

  But Hesperos left the drink stall, his beer vanished from his hand, and she watched in stunned silence as he approached the archery range, moving around the brown haired woman’s location like a shark determining the perfect angle for attack.

  Feeling the world shift under her feet, Angel turned to Samael, who was now smiling. “The Nightmare King and I came to an agreement of sorts a few nights ago as we were being ambushed by the Adarians.”

  She swallowed hard as little motes of light floated in her vision. “Oh?” she asked weakly.

  “We agreed that he would stay away from you and I wouldn’t pick off his incubi one by one until he was ruling a nation without any people in it.” He looked down at his beer mug, which also happened to be a commemorative mug. “I’m pleased we were able to work something out. I appreciate the man’s sense of humor and would rather not destroy him.”

  Angel was at a very real lack of words.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “I’m afraid I’ve finished off your beer,” Sam said, eyeing the empty mug in his hand. He seemed perplexed. He blinked. “May I get you another?”

  Angel swallowed hard. The truth was, she was very thirsty. Inordinately so. She nodded. “Yes, please.”

  This is insane.

  Sam brushed past her, his strong shoulder touching hers as he moved to the booth. Electricity sizzled down her arm where he’d touched her.

  As if on cue, thunder rumbled in the distance.

  Absolutely nuts.

  She shook herself and forcibly turned her body around so she couldn’t watch him. Instead, she looked at the clouds drawing nearer a few miles away. They were dark and tall.

  She frowned at them a moment, then her eyes found the Nightmare King, who was talking with the girl at the archery range. As she watched, the woman walked to a faire employee nearby and said something to him. He smiled, nodded, and reached behind his little booth to extract a rather complex looking compound bow and a quiver of arrows.

  Clearly, they were hers.

  Hesperos looked taken aback, but only for a second. He grinned and shrugged, a good sport. The employee handed him one of the meager make-shift bows the faire supplied. It was composed of a bent stick and string and not much else. Hesperos took it with a firm hand, and Angel could hear his deep laugh roll across the field. Women around the range stopped what they were doing and looked, something inside telling them to hunt out the source of that deeply pleasant sound.

  The archery range employee gestured for the two of them to make their way to the shooting station. It was a line drawn in the dirt. Twenty yards away, two targets were set up by two other employees, and then everyone moved out of the way.

  The woman was going to crush Hesperos. Of course, he could cheat. But Angel had a feeling he wouldn’t. There was little sport in it, and winning wouldn’t endear the woman to him.

  Angel looked down when a second, frosted-over mug of beer was placed gently in her hands. It was much colder than the last had been. It didn’t make much logical sense, so it was Sam’s magic at work, no doubt.

  She didn’t even care. Without pausing to give it untoward thought, she raised the mug to her lips and took a long, thirsty pull. The liquid slid like a winter drug over her tongue, then quenched her thirst to her core as it slipped down her throat and into her stomach. She kept drinking. It was so good.

  “How are you feeling?” Sam asked when she at last finished and lowered the mug.

  The question took her by surprise. How was she feeling? Why would he ask her that? What did he mean? She was an archess. They almost always felt just fine. And the question just seemed so very unlike him.

  But there was real concern in his charcoal colored eyes. There was something else there too, but she couldn’t identify it. It was yet another secret that was part of the mysterious composition of Samael.

  “I’m fine,” she replied. That’s what people always said, even when they weren’t. Perhaps especially when they weren’t. “But I have no idea what to do now.” Sometimes, honesty was best. Hell, usually honesty was the best.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  How many horrible conversations began that way?

  Angel looked down at her mug and closed her eyes when another wave of dizziness swept over her. But it wasn’t an unpleasant dizziness this time, despite the foreboding of it. She chalked it up to doing way too much lately, and shook her head to clear it.

  “I’m aware,” she shot back softly. She shrugged. “I was just hoping, I guess… to delay the inevitable.”

  “Time has run its course,” he told her.

  He seemed closer, taller, stronger than before. She looked up – then over his shoulder, where the clouds in the distance had drawn nearer. The air around her was heavier. The clouds building overhead were thicker. A storm was about to strike the renaissance festival.

  “Is that you doing that?” she asked, absolutely certain he would admit that it was.

  But he shook his head, despite the flash of lightning in his eyes. “Not this time.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Not to you.” He smiled, and it was a little sad and a lot beautiful. “The world is a crazy place, Angel. It’s been spinning in its spot around the sun for eons. But like a top, it needs only a slight bump, a gentle push. And it begins to wobble.” He shrugged. “The weather is unpredictable. Now more so than ever.”

  She understood. It would take a special kind of stupid not to.

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” she said.

  “Really?”

  She blinked and looked away from the approaching storm to stare up at him. He was watching her so intensely, she felt immobilized before him.

  “Would you really like me to tell you something you don’t know, Angel?” he asked. He stepped toward her, closing the distance between them. His power washed over her like a tide, as electric as the gale in his irises. She felt stifled and alive at the same time, and she reeled back a little. But his arm snaked around her waist, holding her in place, and the world suddenly felt like a Faraday cage, surrounded by Tesla’s deadly magic.

  “Ignorance is bliss,” he said, and his eyes flicked to her lips as she licked them. There in his arms, she felt even stranger than before. Dizzier. Her fingers and toes were tingling, and her tongue felt bigger than it had moments ago. Strangely, she also felt at ease and uninhibited. In fact, if she didn’t know any better, she’d say the beer she’d just downed had gotten her buzzed. Or even drunk. Which was impossible, of course because she was an archess. Her powers kept her from getting drunk.

 
; “Ignorance is bliss, but it’s also ignorant,” she replied, feigning strength.

  “Very well,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. He leaned in, and she could feel his words as they floated from his lips to hers. “You are inebriated, Angel. Yes, I know what you were thinking. And this time, you’re right. The beer I just gave you is working on you the way it would a mortal.”

  That made no sense. What did he just say?

  “Would you like to know why?” he asked, as if he hadn’t just told her something completely nuts.

  “Why?” she asked, like a monkey right on cue.

  “Because your powers are waning as we speak. Soon they will run out completely.”

  Angel frowned. Her stomach seemed to drop out from her midsection and land on her feet. That electric world closed in around her cage, and her chest grew tight. Her mouth went dry. There was no duplicity in his gaze. There were no lies coming from his tongue.

  Lightning struck not more than a mile away, and its riotous twin announced its arrival noisily upon the air.

  But he wasn’t finished. “When the spell I’ve cast on you has run its course, you will be as human as those around you.” His sad smile held as many secrets as his eyes, and his hand on her back pressed tighter. “And so will I.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Storms outside, in nature, are nothing compared to the ones that take place on the inside of a person. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, hail stones, tidal waves… you wouldn’t know it to watch the news and see the devastation. But that was just it. People were always so much more impressed by what they could see.

  If they could see what was going on inside a person in turmoil, they’d run for cover. And if they could witness what was happening within Angel in that moment, it would have made the evening broadcast.

  “You… what?”

  All traces of numbness were leaving her system. She suddenly felt uncomfortably grounded, as if gravity had reached up and taken hold of her ankles to anchor her in place. “What are you talking about?”

  She stepped back, and though his grip at her back temporarily tightened, he allowed her to leave his embrace. He was clearly unworried that she would escape, and she should have wondered why.

  “What spell?” The tongue that had been a little large in her mouth just moments earlier was now dry as a bone.

  Sam lifted his chin a touch, the ravishingly handsome man filled with pride. His eyes flashed. “The spell I’ve had cast upon us both,” he replied coolly. “To level the playing field and put an end to this ceaseless game.”

  “You leveled the playing field, alright,” came a new voice. They both looked to see that Hesperos had returned and was standing beside them. The rain was falling steadily now, and she hadn’t even noticed it. The archery range behind Hesperos was being shut down, and there was no sign of the woman Hesperos had come to the faire to meet.

  Angel was a little shocked to find him suddenly standing there beside them, and from the look of it, Sam was surprised too. Which was strange. Nothing took him by surprise.

  He does seem more mortal now.

  Oh God.

  “If you really did what you just said you did, Fallen One,” Hesperos continued, “then how exactly do you intend to deal with them?” He was looking over Sam’s shoulder at something in the distance.

  Angel followed his gaze. A group of men was entering the field. They were as beautiful as the incubi, but there was something very, very wrong about them. They were pale. Their hair was unkempt. Their eyes shone far too brightly.

  If there was ever such a thing as a fallen angel, Samael was not it. The Adarians were.

  “Abraxos,” Angel whispered, her chest filling with cold dread.

  “We need to get out of here,” Sam said, taking hold of her arm in a firm grip.

  But Abraxos must have heard her – must have sensed her – because even from across the field, his head swiveled, and his eyes zeroed in. His gaze locked on hers.

  He smiled.

  “Oh God.”

  “Right,” Sam said, pulling her swiftly from the area in front of the booths to an alley behind them. It was muddy from all the rain, and the storm was picking up in fury. She stumbled a little, as her legs were heavy and still being held back by those long arms of gravity. But Sam lifted her easily, and as soon as he saw an opening in the wall surrounding the faire, he took it.

  They shot out into the parking lot beside the festival grounds, and Sam continued to pull her, picking up speed until they were diving head-first into the forest lining the lot. Wet leaves left their moisture on her face, and their pace left her breathless. She’d never become breathless from running before.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, feeling a lot like a character in a movie or book.

  “Somewhere they won’t think to look for us,” Samuel Lambent replied. That’s who he was to her in that moment, large and in charge, and so much more capable of handling things than she was.

  He stopped once they’d gone around a hundred feet and were surrounded by the thick green of woods on all sides. “Come here,” he commanded, pulling her toward him so hard, she fell against his chest, her arms barely managing to come up in time to lessen the impact.

  New warmth moved through her when her fingers brushed the obvious hardness of the muscle beneath his black thermal shirt. He slid his arm around her, holding her in place, and she had no time to recover before a portal was opening up around them. A transport spell.

  Apparently, he had enough magic left for that. Or maybe he was lying to her about the spell he claimed to have cast on them.

  She closed her eyes as the transport took hold. She opened them again a moment later, when the ground felt once more solid beneath her feet.

  The air felt strange here. She smelled something slightly metallic, and also caught the pleasant scent of well-oiled leather. She shoved herself out of Sam’s grip, fueled by confusion and anger and uncertainty, and turned a slow circle where they’d landed.

  She was surrounded by another world. A gentle beeping could be heard, as well as what sounded like bubbles rising somewhere. There was an odd sensation that her ears needed to pop, but she opened her mouth automatically, stretching her jaw muscles, and her ears did just that.

  The light was pleasantly low, generated by low-watt bulbs and what looked like flickering gas lamps in the corners of the room. All around her, piping was visible. It appeared at intervals along the walls, and then disappeared once more behind them. The metal was copper or gold – with Sam, it could literally be either – and the “steampunk” vibe was strong.

  High quality leather furniture was tastefully laid out in the recessed center of the room around a small beautifully polished round wooden table, which miraculously, was already set with a steaming teapot, cups and saucers, and all manner of cakes and cookies.

  It was all so impressive. Most impressive of all, however, was the thing that Angel saw beyond the enormous floor-to-ceiling reinforced windows.

  She slowly moved down the steps into the recessed area, and then up the steps on the other side to approach the windows. As if in a dream, she placed her hand against the cool, triple-paned glass. A fish swam by, close enough to make eye contact with her.

  They were under water.

  “Where are we?”

  “Under Lake Michigan.”

  Angel turned to face Sam, who was still standing in the same spot they’d reappeared in after the transport. He was just watching her.

  “We’re under Lake Michigan?”

  He smiled. “That’s right.” He pulled something out of his jeans pocket – a handful of round pea-sized objects that glowed like lit up tapioca balls, and placed them in a bowl on a nearby table.

  Angel was flabbergasted. “How?” she asked. She blinked. “And why?”

  Sam took the stairs down to the center of the room and proceeded to pour himself a cup of tea. It was an odd thing to see – Samuel Lambent, drinking tea while wearing worn b
lue jeans and a tight-fitting thermal shirt. But the dichotomy of laid back-sexy and sophisticated was surprisingly very much Sam.

  “How is easy,” he replied calmly after his first sip. “Magic, of course. And knowledge. Not that the two are distinguishable at all times.” He shrugged pleasantly. “I built this place just under two hundred years ago.”

  That explained the gas lamps and the piping, which now that she really looked, she would swear was gold. Gold didn’t rust.

  “As to why,” he continued, pouring her a cup as well and taking it with him up the steps to the window. He stopped and handed her the second cup, which she took numbly. “That’s even simpler. I am a man with powerful enemies. The universe has been on a catastrophic collision course for so long… and I knew that one day, it might come down to me having to, for lack of a better word, hide.”

  Okay… she could actually see that. He was the Fallen One. “But why under a lake? Why not under, I don’t know, the Pacific?”

  “That’s easy too. No one would ever think of it.” He grinned and cocked his head to one side. “If one were to ask you, ‘Where in the world would Samael go with his archess to escape Gregori and the Adarians?’ would you ever, in a million years, reply, ‘Under Lake Michigan’?”

  Chapter Twenty

  “Rhee?”

  Rhiannon stopped what she was doing and froze beside her bed. She wasn’t expecting company just then. In fact, her bedroom door had been locked, as had her apartment door. But the girl speaking behind her had never let locked doors stop her before.

  Rhiannon turned slowly around to face the ten-year-old red-head. It seemed impossible, but Rhiannon could swear the girl had grown an inch overnight. Her jeans were rolled up a bit to disguise the fact that they were now a little short. It wasn’t that she didn’t have the money to buy new jeans, it was just that she just abhorred clothes shopping.