Samael

by Heather Killough-Walden

  At the moment, she was wearing a T-shirt she had made herself on one of those sites where you could custom design your own top, whether it was a T-shirt or a sweatshirt. It was a light gray scoop neck that read:

  If it’s gross, sniff it.

  If it’s dead and gross, roll in it.

  - Strike

  Strike had been Mimi’s retriever-shepherd mix dog. He’d died recently… had been murdered, actually. And Mimi was dealing with the death in her own way. She had half a dozen such shirts in her dresser drawer, each with a different quote on it, and she pulled a different one out every day.

  “Mimi, what is it?” Rhiannon asked, not bothering to ask the girl how she’d gotten into her apartment. Mimi had her ways.

  “You guys were talking about that girl, Angel, weren’t you?” Mimi asked. She had a strange look on her face. It was sort of wary, almost distrusting.

  “When?” Rhiannon asked, but she knew exactly when Mimi was talking about. Around an hour earlier, she and the other archesses and their archangels had met with Max in one of the private meeting rooms at the Swallowtail Foundation headquarters. Max had decided the Mansion might not be safe any longer for discussing truly important, private things. It was developing cracks in its walls, and earlier that day, a window had just shattered of its own accord.

  So the nine of them had gathered around a long table in a sealed-off room and discussed what they were going to do about Gregori and Samael. Angel had indeed come up in the conversation, because now it was very clear that Angel was Sam’s archess, as unlikely as it seemed that Sam would have an archess in the first place. Much less that it was someone like Angel, who was clearly a good person, and the exact opposite of Samael.

  “You know when.”

  Rhiannon blinked. Then she sighed. She felt immediately stupid for trying to pull one over on Mimi in the first place. The girl was not only remarkably bright and talented, with the empathy and intuition of a sensitive genius – she was a dragon. Dragons could sense things humans could not; like cats, they had a sixth sense, pulling vibrations out of the atmosphere that mortals did not even know existed.

  “Okay,” Rhiannon admitted calmly. “Yes, it was Angel.”

  Mimi had met Angel at a Swallowtail Foundation warehouse not long ago, and the two had hit it off, and over the last few weeks, they’d exchanged emails and grown closer. The thing was, it wasn’t just Mimi who knew Angel. All four archesses knew Angel. Each of them had been conversing with the woman online or through snail mail, or had even met her face-to-face, and now they all wanted to know why. Why had Angel known all of them? How had she known them all? Why had she befriended them? And what else did she know?

  The archesses were torn. Each of them was beyond grateful to have found her archangel and to have been reunited with him. They didn’t want to deny Angel this fruition. But Sam was… well, he was Sam! He was the Fallen One! He was Samuel Lambent, ruthless media tycoon with a sharp eye, a strong hand, and supernaturally shrewd professional abilities. He was often brutal in his business dealings. And he’d been more than brutal in his personal dealings as well. Did Angel deserve to be strapped to such a man?

  Then there was the attack on Sophie.

  None of them knew what to think of that. Had Sam really commanded the attack? Jason had been Sam’s loyal right-hand-man for as long as any of them could remember. It was hard to think of a reason for such an assault other than Sam wanting to get the archangels out of his way.

  But it was also hard to imagine Sam making such a foolish or short-sighted move. Anyone with half a brain would know attacking an archess would have the opposite effect on the archangels, forcing them to rain down upon the attacker like hell fire.

  And not one of them trusted Gregori, no matter what he said.

  It was all so confusing.

  “What are you going to do?” Mimi asked, moving further into the room. Now Rhiannon understood the expression on her face. It was concern for Angel and for Rhiannon. She must have heard them talking about Gregori, and she unfortunately knew first-hand how dangerous the man could be. Gregori was the one responsible for killing Strike, after all.

  “I’m going someplace where I can hopefully find some answers,” Rhiannon told her.

  “Where?”

  Rhiannon was actually packing in order to head directly into Samael’s territory. She was going to the Sears Tower. And if that didn’t work, she was going to visit each and every one of Samuel Lambent’s extravagant homes. Eventually, someone who worked for him would notice, and Sam would be contacted. Then, hopefully he would contact Rhiannon, and not just outright kill her.

  “I’m going to speak with someone, that’s all.”

  “Who?”

  Rhiannon gritted her teeth. “I’m going to see Mr. Lambent.”

  “You mean Samael.”

  Okay, once again, she felt stupid for trying to keep anything from Mimi. Clearly, Mimi was now fully in the know.

  Rhiannon nodded. She was the only one among them experienced enough with infiltrating buildings to do something like this, though Michael would insist he go with her if he knew what she as planning. Hell, they all would. That’s why she hadn’t told them.

  As far as Rhiannon was concerned, Az was temporarily out of commission with what had happened with Sophie. It would be foolish to take him along; he would just kill anyone who got in his way right now. Uriel and Eleanore were not really the infiltrating type; they were more the “make things even” type. Frankly, neither were Juliette and Gabriel. They were the North Sea fishing type.

  It was up to Rhiannon.

  “I want to go with you.”

  Rhiannon blinked and recoiled a bit. “I’m sorry, you what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “You know I’ll just follow you anyway. But if you let me come with you, then you can keep an eye on me. And I’m not exactly just a kid. I am a red dragon. And Calidum did say that I needed to get more training in. Dragons usually start their battles much younger than me. Draycus has already earned his gold scales, and he’s only two years older than I am. This might be the perfect chance for me to catch up.”

  “I’m fairly sure Cal never intended you to get your training in by going up against the Fallen One.”

  Mimi pursed her lips, then expelled air in a frustrated sigh. “Look, Angel is a friend and so are you, and I don’t want to lose anymore….” Her words trailed off. She grew quiet for a moment. But then, as if noticing her own weakness, she cleared her throat. She rolled back her shoulders and crossed her arms over her chest, sticking out her chin. “I don’t know why you’re so worried. You never said anything about going up against the Fallen One. You said you were just going to go and talk with him. Get some answers. Were you telling me the truth? Or is this actually a lot more dangerous than you’re letting on? Should I be scared that you won’t come back alive?”

  Rhiannon’s eyes grew wide.

  “Or are you gonna let me come with you?”

  God, Mimi was good. She was really, really good.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Okay… he had her there too. No one was going to guess they were at the bottom of a lake, and if they did make such a wild guess, they’d choose Lake Superior or something like that, no doubt. Not Lake Michigan.

  She sighed, wanting to clear her head. “You know, it looks like the Nautilus in here.” Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was one of her favorite books. It had been since Jules Verne had given her a personal, hand-written copy of the manuscript more than a hundred and fifty years ago.

  Sam chuckled. “Where do you think Mr. Verne acquired the idea?”

  Angel blinked. If what Sam was insinuating was true, then the entire Steampunk style had actually generated from Samael.

  “Drink the tea,” he said. “You need it, trust me.”

  Angel looked down at the cup he’d placed in her hands. Steam trailed up from the liquid’s surface. It had milk i
n it already, but she hadn’t seen him pour any.

  “The teapot is enchanted. It was given to me by an exceptionally old, overtly intuitive witch.” He took another sip of his own and lowered it with a satisfied sigh.

  It was strange to see him temporarily relaxed and inordinately pleased by something as small as tea. It made him appear more vulnerable, and vulnerability was something Sam never showed to the world.

  “It automatically pours the drinker’s preferred type of tea,” he explained, “served just the way they like it.”

  Not knowing what to say, Angel took a drink. It was a heady black tea with vanilla and caramel notes, creamy white with milk, and it was the perfect temperature. She took another sip and actually closed her eyes. “Who is this witch?”

  “Miss Chantelle? I’m sure you’ve never met her.” Sam moved away, and Angel opened her eyes to follow his progress. He climbed the steps on the other end of the recessed room and moved to a window, where his gaze became distant, even though the water was right up against the glass. “However, if you’d like, and you give me the chance, I can introduce you to her.” He looked at her over his shoulder, storm gray eyes catching her own. “I’d be willing to bet she already knows who you are.”

  “She’s that powerful, huh?”

  Sam smiled. “The world is vastly more complicated than you know. The Lost Angels are not the only entities working hard to save it.”

  Angel took another slow sip of her tea, finishing the cup. As she gently placed it back into its porcelain saucer, she said, “That’s one of the many problems with you, Sam. You think you always have the upper hand.” She turned, set the tea down on the nearby coffee table, and put her hands on her hips. “You treat the world as if it is less than you – less knowledgeable, less intelligent, less capable – right down to me. Your cocky hubris is frankly insufferable. For your information, I know good and well who Lalura Chantelle is.” The old witch was famous in mage circles; Angel would have had to be living under a rock not to know her.

  “I’m also quite aware that the ‘Lost Angels,’ as you snidely put it, are not the only ones trying to make this world a better place to live in; there is far more to the multiverse than what meets the eye. But what I’m most aware of, at this particular point in time, is that we just now left a crowd of innocent humans at a very tumultuous faire grounds in the midst of extremely dangerous Adarians, who have been ripping people’s hearts out and eating them?”

  Sam stared at her in outwardly surprised silence, but she wasn’t done yet.

  “And speaking of leaving the renaissance festival, I noticed you cast a transport spell. And yet you claim to have taken away our powers – ” She broke off when she looked at her arms and noticed that her skin color had gone from gold-tan to very, very fair.

  She gasped and spun to look at her reflection in the window. She was Angel. From her tall, willowy figure and long, thick ash-blonde hair to the nearly translucent pale skin and stormy gray eyes that so perfectly matched Sam’s… she was herself. There was no magic disguising her at all any longer.

  Her voice was very quiet when she asked, “What have you done to me?”

  “I already told you, Angel.” His voice was quiet too.

  When she slowly turned to face him, his expression was only slightly apologetic. Mostly, it was determined, his jaw set, his eyes narrowed in stalwart tenacity. “I’ve disposed of our powers. There will be no more running.”

  Fury bubbled up inside Angel, sudden and hot. Never mind how he had done it. She wanted to get to the very heart of the matter. “What the hell made you think you had the right to do this to me?”

  “Everything.”

  “Everything?” She looked around desperately, as if she could find the answer to this insanity in the room around her. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Everything that I am, everything that you are,” he told her as he strode down the steps and made his way toward her, “and everything that is happening to us, is what made me think I had the right to do what I did.”

  She felt her blood boil through her veins like a geyser, and for the first time in her life, she understood what it meant to “see red.” Her vision actually tainted itself, painting everything in an indistinct, scary light. “How dare you. You presumptuous bastard.”

  “Maybe,” he said, but it wasn’t in a brash manner. He sounded on edge, as if anger were surging through him as volatilely as it was through her. “But, what would you have me do?” He ran a hand through his white-blond hair and turned away from her to pace around the small coffee table. But when he looked back at her, his eyes flashed, and if it hadn’t been water outside those huge, thick windows, she imagined she would have seen clouds building. “Tell me that, Angel. If you were in my shoes, what would you have done?”

  “Your shoes?” she countered, feeling the anger rise up in her chest like heart burn. “Oh, Sam, I couldn’t possibly hope to ever fill shoes like yours. Where would I get all the evil I needed? To command all of those hostile takeovers and layoffs? To make people work the long hours you make them work? To send them headlong into dangerous situations for news stories, situations that were not only deadly but that you – you of all people – could have stopped with powers like yours? You’d rather have the coverage than save lives, wouldn’t you?”

  He watched her silently.

  “Think of everything you could have done over the last two-thousand years with your abilities. But instead, you used them to manipulate, to threaten, and to firmly plant yourself on top of a world that is choking on its own misery.”

  She spun away from him, grabbed her tea cup, and stormed back to the teapot, where a shaky hand poured a second dose. The first had almost made her feel calmer; maybe a second would actually succeed. She knew she was exploding, she knew she was on a runaway train, but for some reason, she had no control over her fury.

  “And speaking of that power, by the way, I don’t know what I would have done in your big, badass shoes Sam, but I know I would not have taken away someone’s gift without asking and without a very good reason. Do you take away a singer’s voice? Do you chop the legs out from under a dancer? Not unless you’re a real bastard, you don’t! Those powers were the only thing that made me feel my presence here on this planet was worth a damn! They were my way of helping, my way of not feeling useless!”

  She took a big drink of tea, realized far too late that it was quite hot, and swallowed it anyway, searing her tongue and throat as she shoved it down. Unable to stop, and unwilling to look stupid in front of the man across the room, she not only refused to make a pained face, she took a second drink for good measure.

  The pain added to her fury like gasoline on a fire.

  “And don’t try to tell me that you took that magic away from us both, because mine is good and gone, and you just transported us here. Sending a couple of people across several states and then underneath a lake takes a good amount of strength, Sam. You not only screwed me over, you lied to me.” She shook her head, and her white hair went flying. “I don’t know what you hoped to accomplish by bringing me here, but I can tell you that unless it was to make me hate you, you’re failing big time!” She threw the tea cup at him.

  He ducked easily and expertly, well avoiding the flying porcelain. It hit the opposite wall, clanged noisily against an exposed golden pipe, and fell harmlessly to the floor. The fact that it didn’t shatter was both a relief and a frustration to Angel. It was a beautiful cup, and clearly it was magic. But damn it, she’d really wanted to break something just then.

  When Sam straightened again, it was with a demeanor so outwardly calm, it was a stark contrast to the rage she was exhibiting.

  He cleared his throat, glanced at the tea cup, and then looked back at her. “Well, now that we’ve heard your side of my story, Hummingbird, how about we hear mine?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  When Rhiannon and Mimi stepped out into the alley behind the Swallowtail Foundation’s main
building, it was to come face to face with a group of people. Who were glaring at her.

  “Seriously, woman, are ya really so daft as to believe we wouldna' be on to ya?” Gabriel asked her with a disappointed shake of his handsome head. Beside him, Juliette gave Rhiannon an exasperated look.

  The archangels all stood with their arms crossed over their chests. The archesses, with their hands on their hips. Sophie, who was completely healed now, stood particularly tall and strong, as if she knew she needed to be this way in order to keep Az from destroying half a city block.

  Azrael, for his part, seemed oddly collected. The calm before the storm.

  Eleanore and Uriel looked positively pissed. The two were so closely linked with justice and vengeance – and the fine line between them – she could understand them being the angriest at her wanting to leave them out of this.

  Even Mr. Verdigris was there, the man who was not only Rhiannon’s employer, but one of her closest friends, and one of Mimi’s caregivers. He was an older man with white hair, white beard, and starkly green eyes, and Rhiannon had a strong feeling he was not nearly as human as he appeared. At the moment, Mr. V was dressed in a crisp light gray suit complete with suit vest, and he leaned slightly, but somehow gracefully, on an expensive dragon-headed cane. He wasn’t looking at Rhiannon. He was looking at Mimi, and the expression wasn’t a pleased one.

  Michael, who stood apart from the others and leaned casually against the wall, was peering straight into Rhiannon’s soul.

  “Yeah…” Mimi said light-heartedly. “I saw this coming.”

  Michael pushed off the wall and strode toward her, his blue eyes positively blazing. He stopped in front of Rhiannon, who almost cringed when he leaned in. “Going somewhere, Fire Healer?”