“When we decided to remain on Earth rather than return to the angel realm, you were incensed. And you took it out on the woman I loved.” He reached the bottom step as Angel’s mind spun. She tried to think back to that time long, long ago. But part of her memories were with Sam, and this had happened when he was in charge – the power, the pride, the quintessence that had until recently been the Old Man.
Still, she recalled enough.
Gregori had been the angel realm’s first general, the first warrior in charge of the Old Man’s army. As such, he’d been on the front lines during countless battles with other realms. On those front lines, he had witnessed things that changed him.
One day, he’d approached the Old Man with questions about death and misery. The Old Man had chastised him for questioning anything at all. Questions led to dissent. And dissent led to revolt. And that simply wasn’t allowed in the angel realm.
But Gregori could not be silenced. He was ancient, he was tired, and most of all, he was lonely. Millennia of killing will do that to a man. Taking life after life and never bringing any back into the world. It is the loneliest thing of all.
So he snuck away, and with him, he took a handful of his most trusted warriors. They fled to Earth amidst the ramshackle “garbage” that had been recently tossed out of the realm.
“I trusted you,” said Gregori softly, drawing Angel’s attention out of her memories. He watched her carefully, silently and seethingly. “I believed you so much that when I came to Earth, I fully expected to find junk. Rubbish. I thought I would land amidst a pile of waste that was not fit for existence.”
His eyes lightened for a moment. “But, instead….” The lines of his face softened, and his expression became lost in wonder. “I found her.”
He shook his head and turned away. Angel began descending the stairs.
“I found her people in the desert. They’d made a home for themselves in the sands. My men and I disguised ourselves and asked them for shelter. They welcomed us with open arms, sharing food and drink, giving us a place to lay our heads.”
He paused as Angel reached the bottom step. She stopped too. She was caught in his words as if his tale held a spell over her. She felt his pain as if it were her own.
“We hadn’t realized that we could feel so grateful for such a simple gesture. We hadn’t known that on Earth, you can grow thirsty. You have to drink, you have to sleep.” He turned to face her. “Amara approached me. She smiled at me. She laughed with me – sometimes at me. But always in kindness.”
Angel pictured the scene in her mind. She pictured Gregori sitting near a campfire. Beside him sat a beautiful woman with long, thick black hair, eyes as dark as Gregori’s, and a smile as warm as the fire they sat beside. And Angel knew she was seeing it as it actually had been.
“I realized that you were wrong. Those you had tossed away were not trash, Old Man. They were treasures.” He stepped toward her.
Angel could not move back. She didn’t want to. She stayed where she was and heard him out.
“The world was young then, and magic had not yet been spread too thinly among its inhabitants. There was enough to go around. Amara and her people showed us how to use it to get by. We fashioned clothing for ourselves out of nothing. We created food when there was none, and drink when the sky ran dry. We created fire and told stories around its crackling flames. We laughed and knew companionship. It was something none of us had ever before experienced.”
He paused, and closed his eyes. “It was good.”
It was good, Angel’s thoughts echoed. He was so right. It was good.
But then he opened his eyes again, and now that red spark was back, and burning bright. “So I approached you. I snuck back to the angel realm and told you what I had found. You were furious. You banished me and my men from your realm and cursed us to forever remain with the mortals on Earth.” He smiled, but it wasn’t a kind smile. “You know, I didn’t even care. Why would I? So I couldn’t go back and kill for you any more. I had something better on Earth. I had Amara. I had her magic. I had her love.”
Now he came toward her again, and Angel felt a wave of something dark wash over her. It was wrath, good and strong.
“And when you realized I didn’t care, it was the most galling of all. You couldn’t take it. You could not accept that someone could get along without you, could defy you and actually win. No. Your damnable pride would not allow it. So you went after Amara.”
He stopped directly in front of her, and Angel realized she was having trouble breathing. She gazed up at him with wide eyes as he leaned over her. “Her people began to die. The entire world’s inhabitants began to die too soon. They started aging at an accelerated rate. They became sick, and their lifespans were sliced into a miniscule fraction of what they’d been. My defiance was where human misery began. I would no longer be taking lives for the angel realm, so you took them for me on Earth. You cut their fates short and sent Azrael after them early.” He shook his head, just once.
Angel felt dizzy as he leaned in, and his words whispered softly across her lips. “And of all of them, Amara went the fastest.”
“And for that, Gregori, I will forever be sorry,” said Samael.
Angel felt a rush of warmth move through her at the sound of his voice. Gregori froze above her and blinked. His brow furrowed – and he straightened.
Angel found she could move, and instantly, she was turning around. There at the top of the stairs where she and Gregori had first appeared in this dark flower-like structure, stood the Fallen One.
Chapter Fifty-Three
This time, it was Samael who wore the lighter color, a gray not quite white just as Gregori’s clothing was not quite black. “Gregori,” he greeted officially.
Gregori’s burning eyes widened. He stared at Sam in disbelief. “How did you… how could you have found us?”
“We are truly one, Sam and I,” Angel said. Now she understood that the reason she hadn’t heard Sam respond to her is because he was following close behind all the while, and didn’t want Gregori to know. She saw into Sam’s mind, saw the field of black dandelions, and saw him instantly transport away, following her signature as if it were his own.
Gregori turned back to face her. His expression was one of surprise, but anger still radiated from him like static.
“We cannot be parted,” she explained.
Gregori’s expression darkened. The black walls of his strange dark home took on a reddish cast, mimicking the fire in his eyes. Flames reflected in their depths, and the emptiness flanking the stairwells heated up as well. She watched as fire flickered to life out of nowhere and bordered the steps on either side.
Within seconds, it had gone from darkness to hellish.
Gregori spun to face Samael once more. “Am I to believe that you came here to save your archess, Samael?”
“I will always come for her,” Sam said.
“Why? Because you love her?” Gregori spat. “You aren’t capable of love!” he roared.
“No,” said Samael. “I wasn’t. Not as I was, not as the being you once knew. Not as the immortal Old Man.” He shook his head. “You’re so very right, Gregori. That man was not capable of love. As a being who had never felt pain, loss, or hope, he was literally incapable of empathy.”
“And empathy is love,” Angel told him softly.
Gregori turned to face her.
“But once we left the angel realm and lived among the humans….” She looked down, breaking eye contact. Her eyes felt hot, and she knew they’d begun to glow. At the same time, they grew wet as well, and she knew they’d begun to cry.
She felt a trickle break free from beneath her long lashes and trail down her cheek.
“Then I understood,” finished Samael.
Angel opened her eyes and looked up. Sam caught her gaze and held it as he descended the steps. Fire leapt to angry life on either side of him, a reflection of Gregori’s desire to strike him down.
To
burn him.
“What I did to you was wrong, Gregori,” Sam said. “But it was me, not Angel. She is everything good that there is in the world. She is its salvation. She is my salvation.” He stopped directly in front of Gregori, and the other man straightened to meet him eye-to-eye. “Just as Amara was yours.”
Gregori swallowed hard, then said, “So I should take her from you just as you took mine from me.”
“You could do that,” said Sam calmly. “But if you do, you will repair nothing. You will mend nothing. You will only turn me into the same man who struck you down and damned you in the first place. Without Angel, I am only the Old Man. I am weak. With her, I am whole.” He stopped and his voice lowered. “And I can make amends.”
Angel knew full well what Sam planned to do because she would have done it too. When he did it, their choice would be made for them. Their decision whether to return to the angel realm or remain on Earth would have been decided. That would be that.
For doing what Sam wanted to do was, quite simply, against the rules.
In breaking those rules, he would ironically damn them both to the same fate that had befallen Gregori. They would have to remain in the mortal realm and never return to that from which they’d come. They would never again occupy the same single body. They would be forever two people, two minds, two hearts. And they would never leave Earth.
But….
Sometimes, when there were no options left, and fate pushed you too hard, you had to say, “To hell with the consequences.” You had to buck the system. Because sometimes rules were just plain wrong. And the only way to set things right was to break them.
Besides, they would still have each other.
Gregori stared long and hard at Sam as the Fallen One continued. “Gregori of the Angel Guard, General in the First Rank, and Follower of the Angel Code, hear me now.”
It had begun.
Sam didn’t even have to ask Angel whether he was making the right choice. He knew he was. He knew she agreed. They were one in their souls, regardless of their separate bodies.
As he spoke, Angel joined him, lending her strength to his. Her body felt prickly as her power was pulled to its surface in preparation of what she was about to do.
“For countless generations, you took lives in the name of your position – in the name of your king,” said Samael.
Angel picked up the reigns. “You blindly followed my orders and unfailingly defended our world. For that,” she said, “you have earned a boon. It is the last and the only thing your creator can give you.”
Sam said, “It is something that never should have been taken from you to begin with.”
Sam and Angel stepped back together. They were synchronized now, well and truly one for the last time.
Gregori, seemingly frozen to the spot, could only watch them as Angel raised her left hand, and Sam raised his right. Their fingers intertwined.
“Treat it well, Gregori. For life is fleeting, no matter how long it is,” Sam warned.
“And you already know well that it is precious,” Angel added.
She felt the magic skating over her body slide up her arm and coalesce in the hand that clasped Sam’s. There, it met his, and warmth and heat radiated outward. She closed her eyes. In that darkness behind her shut lids, she imagined Amara.
She imagined her laugh and her smile, her warm and welcome arms. She imagined all that Gregori had come to know and love about her, and once she found it all, she gathered it together and held on to it tight as her power filled in the gaps, pulled at the fabric of space and time, and broke the rules.
Chapter Fifty-Four
“Have ye any idea where the dead go when they die, Az?” Gabriel asked with a sidelong glance at the former Angel of Death beside him.
Az shook his head and laughed softly. “Would you believe I don’t?” he said frankly. “I just waited for their spirits to leave their bodies and sent them on their way. I never had any clue where exactly I was sending them to.”
Uriel chuckled darkly. “That just figures,” he said. “But no matter. We’ll be finding out soon enough.”
“Aye,” agreed Gabe as he lifted his flaming sword of gold and readied himself for the oncoming pandemonium.
The world had turned dark in Sam and Angel’s absence. Gregori’s army was nearly upon them, and it was thousands – tens of thousands – deep. It had breached the confines of the Old Man’s private realm because the only force in the realms as blatantly powerful as love was hate. And this was an army forged of pure, unadulterated hatred.
None of them had ever imagined anything like it. Hollywood crews had CGI’d scenes that were perhaps similar, small fragments of the terror that rode ever closer like a black tide. Earthquakes had caused destruction that felt like what they were about to experience. But short of natural disasters and all-out wars combined, there had simply never been anything like this.
“You think we’ll find each other again on the other side?” Eleanore asked. She glanced at Uriel. Then she glanced at her sister archesses and the other archangels.
They all nodded.
“Damn straight we will,” said Michael.
The army pulsed closer. A beat passed.
The archangels crouched, and the archesses each flicked the lighters they’d grown accustomed to carrying in their pockets. With them, they drew fire into their open palms and held that fire at the ready.
They’d elected to remain in the mortal realm, outside of the angel world, and at that moment, they could have returned to Earth. But they knew Gregori’s army would only follow them there. It would follow them anywhere. And on Earth, innocent mortals would die.
It was best to face them here. It was their only choice.
“So here it ends,” said Juliette softly.
“I always wanted to go out in a blaze of glory,” said Rhiannon. She winked at Juliette, and the other red-head grinned winsomely.
“Right,” Jules said with a nod. “Me too, actually.”
Michael raised his sword, a glowing white weapon of absolute glory. “What do you say, boys and girls? If we’re headed for Hell, let’s take as many of them down with us as we can!”
The eight of them cried out in agreement, their voices ringing loud and clear to fill the black-flower field.
From behind them, a beat later, came another battle cry. Michael glanced over his shoulder to find Abraxos and the Adarians flanking them. They, too, held weapons they’d no doubt fashioned out of their returned angel magic.
Michael met Abraxos’s gaze, and the former army General nodded. Just once.
Brax supposedly had a woman waiting for him to find somewhere in the angel realm. All of the Adarians did. They could have returned at any time; the way was cleared for them. And yet they’d elected to remain there with the archangels and fight.
I pegged you wrong, thought Michael. But he simply nodded back. It was gesture enough.
He turned back to face the oncoming slaughter a split-second before it descended upon them like a cloud of black. He braced himself, brought back his sword arm – and swung, meeting thin air.
He stumbled forward slightly, but righted himself at once and spun to swing again. This time, however, there was not even anything to swing at.
Silence filled the field.
Gregori’s army was gone.
Just like that, the thousands of dark soldiers had up and vanished. One moment, they were bearing down on the archangels and Adarians, and the next, there was nothing there at all but dandelion pollen and a cloud-filled sky.
“What the –” Confusion took over for Michael, and he turned in place. That was when he caught sight of the people up on the hill.
Sam and Angel were back.
But they weren’t the only ones who had re-appeared in the field. Down below the hill, at the center of the black dandelion field, stood Gregori.
He was dressed in dark gray slacks and a gray shirt, and it was the first time Michael had ever seen him witho
ut his white suit. For some reason, it made him seem a little less formidable. A little less frightening.
But it might have just been that Gregori wasn’t paying attention to him. His attention was on the woman several yards away.
Standing alone, wearing long white shimmering robes, stood a woman Michael had never before seen. Sandals adorned her feet, and like a new bride, she carried before her a small perfect bunch of snow-white dandelions wrapped with a string. She was medium-height and curvy, with olive gold skin that glowed with health, and long black hair that shimmered with the same. That hair had been intricately pleated behind each ear, and white dandelions had been weaved throughout it.
Her facial features were slightly familiar, and Michael realized she resembled Angel in a superficial way. Their eyes were the same shape, maybe. Or perhaps there was a magical air about them both, or one of mystery.
She had dark, dark eyes. And she was smiling.
The archangels, archesses, and Adarians turned to face the two people at the center of the field. Michael watched on in silence as Gregori gazed at the woman. He seemed lost for words. In fact, it seemed the man could barely breathe.
But when he did manage a breath, he used it to form a single word. “Amara….”
She laughed, very softly. “Hello Gregori.” Then she shook her head. “Still causing trouble, I see.”
Gregori stumbled forward to fall at the woman’s feet. Michael could tell the man was crying. His large body shook, his back bent, his head bowed low. The woman he’d called Amara leaned over and gently touched his cheek.
He lifted his head. “Can you ever forgive me?”
Her smile was warm, her gaze eternal. “Always, my wayward soldier. That’s my job.” She leaned further, and he wrapped his arms around her waist as she touched her lips to his.
Samael Page 24