The dirt clung to her finger, puckering under her touch as though she had spun wet cloth into a miniature mountain. She plucked at the little peak trembling in the cold air.
The matter of this pocket dimension was thin and malleable.
A sly grin replaced her desolation.
She knew how to turn the tables on both sets of torturers. Valerie shoved her arm deep into the fabric of this universe and shaped a new reality.
Let Lucifer be reminded of who he was attempting to manipulate.
1476
“You will not have me!”
Vlad Tepes stumbled through the woods even as his chest wound poured blood down his body. The black-winged Angel of Death followed, its scythe tapping against Vlad’s uncertain feet.
“You are badly wounded and will not survive the night,” the majestic being stated. “Why do you defy me?” Its voice rustled like leaves over a grave, a soothing, peaceful sound.
Vlad fell to his knees on the bank of an unknown river. Cold mud trapped him and drained away his small strength. “I must have my revenge,” he wheezed. “Salih lives.”
Death sat next to Vlad. Its eye sockets looked into the man’s eyes. “You do not fear me,” the angel said. “You are not like most.”
“I fear nothing.” Brave words from a man whose lungs were almost hung out of his body.
“I will grant you your revenge and change you to be always young and strong,” Death decided. “There is a price. You will live only in the dark, eat nothing but the most precious of fluids, and watch the endings of many things. You will die when you face that which you fear the most.”
Death spread its black wings and threw Vlad into the creek.
The sky exploded, knocking Vlad to his back. One by one, the many lights in the firmament blinked out. Every flash of the radiance stabbed through his body. He barely registered the cold water swallowing him whole. The shards of starlight piercing his flesh closed his mind to everything.
Vlad woke to the distorted play of moonlight on the river above him. For a moment, he thought everything a dream—the Turks, the wounds, the angel—and he was yet a boy swimming.
A slicing cramp in his stomach sat him upright. Hunger clawed his guts.
When he stood, water sprayed everywhere, but within seconds of stepping on the bank, his clothes dried, whole and clean. Oblivious, Vlad sniffed the air. Some delectable and rare scent floated on the air, something ripe, meaty, and hot.
Food. He had to have it. He had to have it now.
Driven mad with hunger, Vlad ran toward the source. Still ravenous, he didn’t notice how fast he moved nor that all dogs in his path now barked furiously. Nothing mattered but that amazing meal. He ran tirelessly, distance and barriers meaning nothing. Downed trees, huts, wagons, heaped bodies, the pikes of a camp’s barricade melted past like the hours. All that mattered was that perfect meal melting down his throat.
It was nearly dawn when he found the source of the tantalizing odor. It came from one tent in one corner of one camp. Vlad strode in past the unseeing guards, past the barking mastiffs, past everything until he threw back the tent flaps.
Salih slept there, his sword in his hand. Only gray hair revealed that the guard had aged. His big body was as hard as ever.
Something hurt Vlad’s mouth, a small pricking of the gums below his eyes. His tongue went to soothe the small ache, but instead scraped on sharp, pointed teeth.
Those teeth knew what to do. Dazed with the hunger, he knelt next to the sleeping man and bent over the exposed neck, the source of the most delicious food in the world. A drip of red saliva dropped onto the man’s throat.
Salih woke fighting. But not even his sword slicing through clothing and flesh stopped Vlad. New sharp teeth pierced Salih’s blood vessels.
The first slide of the steaming blood sent shudders through Vlad. Better than roasted lamb, better than wine, better than the most implosive orgasm he’d ever had, the world tipped again until nothing mattered but nursing on Salih’s life.
This was ecstasy. This was heaven. This was retribution. Nothing could ever be sweeter.
Before the light went out of his enemy’s eyes, the new vampire detached long enough to flaunt his face to the dying man.
“Princess?” Salih could barely whisper from his mangled face. “What are you doing?” Weak arms pushed against Vlad’s unyielding shoulders.
Vlad smiled, hot blood smeared over his face. “I’m finally embracing you, Salih. Do you like it?”
Salih’s death screams destroyed the pocket dimension. The false reality disintegrated like leaves beneath a volley of bullets. Once the last traces of her past disappeared, Valerie stood in a quiet jade-green park with a slow river through it. Industrial soot floated in the air and stained the buildings that circled it. A giant clock hung in the rainy sky like an enormous eyeball.
Under the drizzle, she smelled apples and sulfur. Valerie placed her hands on her hips. London.
At the time Radu had ruined Mina Harker.
“What did you fear the most?” the baby asked.
“Love”, Valerie answered. “It killed me. But I was reborn, reshaped for the better.” She laid her hand on top of her bump.
This was the place and the time. Now all she needed was Lance.
CHAPTER 23
On the other side of the viper’s fangs, Lance emerged over a giant, volcanic monolith. The algae-draped black rock stood five hundred yards over the surface of a quietly retreating ocean. Primitive life forms from ages ago followed the tide out to remain on the ocean’s floor.
Above the highest point on the hunk of basalt, two shining beings circled, dove, and landed on the uninhabitable surface. They stood close to each other, comfortable in their chosen perch. And soon, their chosen path.
Lucifer would choose this day for Lance’s torment. Lance crossed his arms over his chest, spread his wings to hover on the persistent winds. To the other angels, he appeared as a speck on the surf, perhaps the sun catching a swell in the waves.
Lance swallowed a grin, appearing suitably anxious and grim. It would completely throw the game if he burst out laughing on the day of his worst mistake.
In a mountainous, unpopulated corner of Earth, Maxwell, the Angel of the Watery Depths, waved to Lance, the Angel of Change. The ocean gurgled on its way away from the rock. The noise reminded Lance too much of an animal’s last death gasps. The beach, normally fresh and pure, smelled of rot. The retreating waves left piles of dead birds. The unpleasant buzzing of flies heightened the uneasy atmosphere of a place Lance usually adored visiting.
A prickle traveled up the back of his scalp as Maxwell flapped to a landing. The ocean side was normally a peaceful, pleasant place for the two to meet; something was wrong.
The Angel of the Watery Depths planted the butt on his turquoise blue trident on the edge of the sea stack and clasped forearms with Lance. The tips of the trident shook. Maxwell, usually as placid as this ocean, was excited about something.
Unease skittered like disturbed insects along Lance’s spine. “What is the news, my friend?”
“Lucifer is confronting the Unity with our complaints. The entire cosmos used to be our playground and now we do nothing more than serve these pathetic life forms on this one puny planet.” Maxwell leaned into Lance’s face. “Do you not yearn for our freedom again? To hear the stars sing and behold the face of our Creator again whenever we wish?”
Lance turned sideways to Maxwell, his gaze seeking the horizon. A faint glint of sun reflected on a crest of a wave far away.
“I remember before.” Lance placed his hands on his hips, forcing Maxwell to give him space. “I remember we were lonely and begged for diverse companionship.”
“Equal companionship,” Maxwell corrected. “Instead, we are saddled with creatures that cannot even look upon us or bear our voices. How was that companionship? How did that help us?”
Pride prickled Lance’s spine. “We have been diminished and given no reaso
n. And we are still lonely.” He had yearned for a friend, one to share his most private thoughts, someone who would hear what being the Angel of Change did to him. Change was not always benevolent and kind; it could be violent, overwhelming, and destructive. Being the cause of hurt tightened an angel’s heart.
The flies’ drone rose until Lance could barely hear Maxwell’s next words.
“The conference is over,” Maxwell said.
Together in their anger, they teleported to Heaven.
An enormous crowd of angels waited on a grassy plain, a sea of different colors and temperaments united in pride and frustration at what they perceived to be limitations.
Lucifer appeared. His affable face was perfectly blank. His wings remained their perfect, glistening black, for he was the Angel of the Breaking of the Night.
“We are denied.”
The roar of fury from the assembled Host rattled wings throughout the cosmos.
He held his hand up, palm facing the silent assembly. “Long have we despaired over the lack of love shown us from our Creator,” Lucifer shouted, stating the first and worst blasphemy. “All of us have shared this loss of favor as we have been demoted time and time again until we serve as nothing more than messengers to insects.
“I defy the Tyrant that claims to love us.”
Lance physically recoiled at his first experience of hate, but his choice had been made. He would not be diminished by being forced to remain on one tiny, insignificant planet.
Lucifer held up his mirror, the symbol of his station, that which reflected the eternal glory into the sky. He dropped the flawless bowl to the ground.
With a stomp of his suddenly hobnailed boot, he smashed the mirror into an infinite number of pieces.
Thousands of angels dropped their swords and symbols of their tasks. With a wild rebel yell, Lucifer’s cohorts fell to create their own Heaven, Lance and Maxwell the first two behind Lucifer.
Lance couldn’t help himself. He muffled his laugh with a cupped hand over his mouth.
Lucifer thought this memory would shame Lance with its reminder of helplessness, of the fury of being deceived and captured. That shame would have pricked his pride, bringing him back to the misery of being a Fallen.
He guffawed, his amusement so hard he had to bend over and rest his hands on his knees. Lucifer had his moments of insight, but he had never seen the truth.
The Divine loved the angels so fiercely that It had given them the most complex and difficult assignment in all existence: to serve the vulnerable and weak. Lucifer and his followers had been so lost in their fear that they could not see.
Lance gathered his breath. Poor Lucifer, to think that the pain of the past would always cripple. Why did he love overly complicated devices that inevitably blew up in his face? And poor Maxwell, too. Surely Lance could do something for his old acquaintance.
Lance straightened and adjusted his sword belt. Since time passed differently in Heaven, he would find the Pool of Answers. Spreading his wings, he flew as much as through the power of his mind as the power of his wings. When an enormous natatorium appeared below him, he glided to a landing, unsurprised to see Death waiting by the diving board of the swimming pool. Even the sunlight reflecting off bright mosaics of the walls did not brighten his friend’s skeletal face.
“Glad you could make it,” the gray-robed angel said. “I’m here to help.”
“How so?” Lance asked as he unhooked his weapons belt and began to strip.
“The pool is”—Death hesitated—“dangerous,” it concluded.
“In what way?” Nude, Lance climbed the board.
Death pushed its hood off its skull. “I used to have hair.” The bones of its fingers clattered over the bare cranium.
“Be serious.”
“If I must.” Death dangled its feet in the pool, kicking and splashing as though the water felt good. “The water strips you of what is unnecessary.” It held up its white hands. “I am pleased with the trade I made, but others have been not so lucky.”
Lance nodded. Straight-faced, he nodded at the other angel. “But it is all symbolic anyway, so I will not fear.”
Teeth the color of black pearls grinned at him. “You are ready, young one.”
Lance dove.
Unbound by the limitations of a body and linear consciousness, Lance’s mind turned to his question. Why hadn’t he been sent to John and Valerie sooner?
In this place of solutions, he saw what would have happened.
If he had gone to his loves immediately after his Ascension, he would have chosen to spend his life with them.
He would have deliberately limited himself to mortal pursuits. But the mortal brain was not designed to have touched the Divine without a veil. Even though Lance would have turned in his wings, he would have retained all of his memories of his past lives, his time Ascended, and his communications with the Boss.
As a result, the baby had gestated and grown. If he had been in constant contact with Valerie, her body would have absorbed the energy in an attempt to keep her safe from his sunlike aura. He felt the universe mourn the lack of what his child would become.
“Which is?” he asked the pool.
“Stay focused,” Death answered, nudging him with the handle of the scythe.
Lance saw a year, two, five, ten pass in a whirl of love, despite his knowledge that he would outlive them by eons. Safe in the pool, he observed how his mortal mind would have invisibly degraded under the pressure of his memories.
Until the day they visited Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives.
He and his loves stood on that hillside covered in marble, basking in the passionate faith of those buried there.
These dead in this cemetery overpoweringly believed that they would be the first to answer the trumpet’s call. Only then would Paradise arrive. There was no need to worry about Lance’s partners dying. They were always dying, always being born. The part of himself that knew that Paradise was already and always here cracked against the mortal linear experience of time. His angelic brain and his mortal brain collided with the paradox. Both snapped.
Unthinking, Lance buried a sturdy, twisted olive branch in Valerie’s heart. As she fell to dust, Lance smiled serenely at John. Before John gathered himself, Lance clubbed his best friend’s head in.
Now his lovers would be safe. They would arise to the New Jerusalem that already existed and always had. Lance never stopped smiling—even as the police came for him, during his trial, his incarceration, even on his way to execution. He had succeeded, after all.
Too bad the law’s limited mortal lives could not understand the nature of time. The humans executed his physical form.
His broken soul could not survive another trip on the Wheel. The Merciful One took pity and absorbed Lance’s essence, granting him the peace of utter oblivion.
Something hard poked him in the belly, breaking the spell. Half aware, Lance grasped Death’s scythe and let the other pull him out.
“Now you understand,” the black-winged angel said solemnly, “why we had to delay you.”
Lance slammed his fist into Death’s jaw. With the tinkle of falling bones, the other dropped to the floor of the pool room. “Don’t ever pull that shit again.”
An arm and hand gathered themselves out of the pile and gave him a thumbs-up. “Go get ’em, kid,” Death called out.
CHAPTER 24
“It’s your badge, Special Agent Tanaka,” Brigit O’Malley, the national director of the Federal Bureau of Paranormal Relations told Su. “Six months on this case and all you have are vague reports of people leaping over Lake Oswego, a black dog running away from the scene, and a jogger claiming to have seen angels on high. You have no clues as to the whereabouts of Lance Soleil or this mysterious, previously unknown lady vampire that had been seen with him.”
The national director had made this special trip to Portland, Oregon, just to check on the progress of the Radu Tepes case. Su’s thigh muscles flexed as
she wished herself anywhere but here.
Six months into the investigation, and Su was no closer to finding the disgraced vampire.
“Just how do you lose a presidential candidate, Special Agent Tanaka?” O’Malley asked, her Irish green eyes cold, hard, and flat. The bland navy suit disguised her model-thin frame. Her luxurious orange-red hair was slicked back against her skull, emphasizing her high forehead. Many things could be said about Brigit O’Malley, but no one could say she had used her striking looks to get ahead. Everything about her was pared down to the absolute minimum until nothing remained except her fierce, driving intellect.
Su remained silent, her gaze glued to the coffee stain on the wall behind the national director. O’Malley would refuse to be mollified by anything Su had to say. Sweat rolled down her armpits, down her ribs, and pooled in the small of her back. Her legs began to shake.
“Ma’am,” Su’s boss, Special Agent Williams, interrupted. “At the risk of sounding impertinent, Tepes is a vampire. If he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be.”
O’Malley’s razor-thin gaze landed on Williams. “You are impertinent.”
Williams opened his sport coat and placed his fists on his hips. “Ma’am, I’ve worked for you for fifteen years and I’ve never seen you behave like this. Unless you are going to use your one hundred and eighty IQ to solve this case right this moment, we’re going back to work.”
The national director’s face flushed, but she knitted her normally full lips into a tight line. “Then go, Special Agent Williams.”
Once the two agents were safely down the hall, Williams loosened his red tie. “My God. Your mother was an absolute jerk.”
Su shrugged. “I thought it went rather well for once.”
Williams shook his head. “I’d hate to see badly.” He clapped Su on her shoulder. “Do you need anything, Tanaka?”
“No, thank you. I have an interview in half an hour.” With that, Su retired to her cramped cage of an office and closed the door.
Radu Tepes had left a hell of a mess behind. Her files on his activities stretched above her head. For the last six months, she had investigated as much as she could on Radu’s lifetime.
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