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Authors: Heather Killough-Walden

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BOOK: Avenger's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels
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He knew only that he had gone through a transformation as he’d taken on this human form. Michael was not as powerful as he’d been before their descent. The nature of his powers was the same, more or less. But the scope of those powers had diminished greatly. He was able to affect only what was immediately around him, and for only a relatively short period of time. His body grew weary. He knew hunger. He often felt weak. He had changed drastically.
But not as much as Azrael.
As the former Angel of Death, Azrael’s change was different from Michael’s. It was darker. It was much more painful. It was as if this new form were steeped in the negative energy he had collected during his seemingly endless prior existence. As the reaper in the field of mortal spirits, Azrael had taken so very many lives. There was a weight to that many souls, and they carried him down with them now. His altered form bore the fangs of a monster, a sensitivity to sunlight that forced him to hide in the shadows of night. Worst of all, it demanded blood.
Always blood.
“Please, Michael.” Azrael’s broad shoulders shook slightly as he curled his hands into fists and the powerful muscles in his upper body drew taut and pronounced. His skin was pale, his hair the color of night, his eyes like the sun. He looked like a study in contradiction as he gritted his teeth, baring his blood-soaked fangs. “Don’t make me beg.”
Michael got his legs beneath him and stood. He backed up against one of the few trees in the area and had opened his mouth to once more refuse his brother’s request when Azrael was suddenly blurring into motion.
Michael’s body slammed hard against the tree’s trunk and the living wood splintered behind him. He was weaker than he’d been several minutes before; blood loss drained precious momentum from his reflexes. Though he was able to heal his wound, he was not able to replace the blood that Azrael took from him.
He’d been here before. He and Azrael had been here every night for two weeks.
Michael didn’t know how long he would be able to engage in this nightly battle with his brother. Azrael was very strong. Even half-crazed with pain, he was most likely the strongest of the four of them. The monster that he had become was eating him up inside. It was devouring the core of his being, leaving him an empty shell.
Life was different on Earth. There had been no discomfort before this. No hunger. No thirst. These sensations were novel to Michael, but whatever discomfort he was experiencing because of his new, more human form, Azrael was obviously suffering a thousandfold. His transformation was brutal and it was killing him.
But Michael wouldn’t give up on him. Not now—not ever. With great effort, he shoved Azrael off him and prepared himself for another senseless battle with his brother and best friend.
Somewhere, Uriel and Gabriel were most likely struggling as well; either with themselves, or with each other. Or with both. Michael had to find them. He
had to find them
, and bring the four of them back together. They were on Earth for a reason. They had come in order to find the women, the soul mates, that the Old Man had created for them. They’d come to Earth to find their archesses. And they didn’t stand a chance at finding their archesses until they found one another.
Worse, Michael knew that they hadn’t made it to Earth alone. He knew the four of them had been followed. Samael was the one archangel they had reason to fear. He had always been stronger than Michael, and at one point, he had been the Old Man’s favorite. But that was a long time ago and now, due to his jealousy over the archesses, he had come to Earth to find the women for himself.
Over the years, Samael had proven himself to be a charismatic, cold, calculating, and wholly dangerous rival.
Michael didn’t know what would happen if Samael got to the archesses first. He had no idea, in fact, what would happen if he and his brothers found them, as they were meant to. All he knew for certain was that he wasn’t willing to leave this to chance. Each archess was too important. Michael and the others had experienced loneliness for too long. These women would be the end to that. They meant everything.
Time
meant everything. Michael gritted his teeth, narrowed his gaze, and rolled up his sleeves. Azrael came at him like lightning, and like thunder, Michael met him halfway.
CHAPTER TWO
 
H
e’d been warned, hadn’t he? Again and again and again . . .
The archangel Uriel blew out a sigh and ran his hand over his face. Then he clenched his jaw and looked back out the limousine window. He watched, distractedly, as the car passed several shop windows decorated in larger-than-life movie posters of the blockbuster
Comeuppance
. It was late afternoon on Saturday and the town was small; the shops were closed. But the posters were still larger-than-life. He flinched when his own ice-green eyes stared back out at him from a backdrop of crumbling castle walls, lightning-marred skies, and beautiful costars that hung on his well-muscled arm.
“Christ.” He looked away and sank farther down into the leather seat.
“You’d better not let on to Gabriel that you’re regretting this in any way, because he sure as shit won’t let you live it down.” Across from him, Max Gillihan, Uriel’s agent, sat with crossed legs and a knowing smirk, his own dark brown eyes glittering from behind his wire-rimmed glasses. As usual, he wore a three-piece business suit in muted colors and his brown hair was cut short and styled neatly. He smiled, flashing white teeth.
“Ever.”
“Tell me about it,” Uriel mumbled under his breath.
He was more than aware of what his brother would think of his newfound sense of regret. Especially since Gabriel had repeatedly warned him against taking on the world of fame and fortune, shaking his damned raven-haired head and touting his counsel in his deep Scottish brogue. He’d warned against becoming too well known and having his face plastered to the sides of buildings. The archangels were immortal; they didn’t age. What kind of fake disaster was Uriel going to have to fabricate in order to keep the world from noticing that he hadn’t grown any older in decades? Gabriel was right, as much as Uriel hated to admit it. Forget that he was drunk when he had doled out his unwanted advice. Whether he was sober or not, Gabriel was never wrong.
And that irked Uriel to no end.
“You shouldn’t be regretting it anyway, Uriel. Hell, you’re Christopher Daniels and he’s a big movie star now,” Max told him, using Uriel’s stage name.
Uriel’s right brow arched in that irritated way that drove women crazy on the big screen. “And I care about that
why
?” he mumbled.
Max threw back his head and laughed. “You cared plenty enough a year ago, when you signed the
Comeuppance
contract.”
Uriel crossed his arms over his chest and looked away. It was as good as admitting defeat.
Again, the man across from him chuckled, this time adding a head shake. “Two thousand years and you never get any credit. Give yourself some now, Uriel. You’re an
archangel
, for Christ’s sake. You’re
supposed
to be in the limelight.” He paused for effect.
“Right?”
“You sound like Samael when you argue like that,” Uriel muttered.
“I bet I do. He may be a royal pain in the ass, but you have to admit he’s got great business sense.” Gillihan’s smile never wavered. The man was multitalented. He was Uriel’s agent, and he was also their guardian. As a guardian, he was a very old, very wise man, despite his wrinkle-free face and the youthful glint in his chocolate-brown eyes.
Uriel shook his head. He felt strange in that moment—displaced. He was an archangel—or he had been many years ago. Give or take a century, two thousand years ago, he and his brothers had given up their positions with the Old Man and elected to come to the mortal realm in order to find the one thing they lacked in their own realm—a mate.
Being an archangel was a gift and a curse. They were the favored ones, closest to the Old Man, and together, they had all of the power in the universe. The Old Man had created his archangels as perfect male specimens. But a male naturally desired a female. And because there were no female archangels, they each felt a gaping loneliness that nothing seemed to fill.
So two thousand years ago the four favored archangels, Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, and Azrael had been gathered to speak with the Old Man. He’d told them that as a reward for their continued loyalty, he had created for each of them the most precious gift of all: a female mate.
These he called archesses. Uriel closed his eyes as his memories turned dark. He and his three brothers had never had a chance to claim their archesses. Before they could accept them, disaster struck and the women were lost—scattered on the winds of Earth.
The archangels decided to go after them.
They’d thought it would be easy. They were archangels, after all. Nothing had ever been difficult for them. But decades passed and centuries crawled by and the four brothers found no trace of their archesses. Instead, they found themselves trapped in bodies that were more human than archangel. They experienced human emotions and felt human agony. After a while, they found that just the struggle to survive the human condition was a constant distraction from their search for their archesses.
Michael was the first to make his stand in the human world. He was the warrior among them and had joined every army, had fought in every war, and had volunteered for every dangerous job humanity required: spy, fighter pilot, rebel. He had moved from village to village, town to town, and city to city, leaving friends behind as time passed and it became clear he wasn’t aging. Life was hard, but as the years went on he had assimilated, along with his brothers. Michael was now a police officer in New York City.
Gabriel, the former Messenger Archangel, had lived in Scotland off and on since his arrival on earth. He possessed an affinity for the land and its people, but he, too, needed to be exceedingly careful with the passage of time. Every twenty years or so, he regrettably departed the land of the Thistle and was away for some time. He was on one of those breaks now and working as a firefighter in New York City, not too far away from Michael.
Azrael, the former Angel of Death, didn’t keep to any particular place on Earth. His existence was even more difficult than that of the other three brothers. At first, they hadn’t understood what had happened to Azrael when they all came to Earth and were transformed. His form had been altered in a cruel and painful manner. But now the archangels knew what to call his transformation. They knew what he was. He’d been the first, in fact—the first vampire.
As such, he visited a different city every night. He stayed in the shadows; he fed and he moved on. He never killed when he fed. He drank from abusive drunks and addicts, evening out the score for the humans they would have harmed, and he was never hurt by the taint in their blood.
For centuries, Azrael had kept to this pattern of constant movement. However, in the last few years, he’d changed his behavior somewhat. Now when he wasn’t sleeping or drinking from some unsuspecting mortal, Azrael was onstage, dressed in black leather and a black half mask. That was the costume he used when he performed his music, hiding part of his face from the prying eyes of his millions upon millions of screaming fans.
Azrael was the Masked One, lead singer of Valley of Shadow, an immensely popular rock band that had taken the world by storm ten years ago. He had always had an amazing voice. It was mesmerizing, literally, and it had propelled him to the top of the charts in no time flat.
Occasionally, Az was approached by someone who recognized him for what he was. A rare individual would sometimes come forth, knowing that Azrael was a vampire and desperately wanting that vampirism for themselves. Seldom did Azrael oblige. However, once in a while, he felt the choice to turn a mortal was the right decision. He would feed from that individual a certain number of times—and the change would take place. Over the course of thousands of years, even a seldom-granted request will add up. Whether he approved or not, vampires now roamed the Earth, claiming Azrael as their father.
Uriel, for his part, had never really felt that there was a niche in the mortal realm he could comfortably fill. He’d once been the Angel of Vengeance. He had once punished the plethora of evildoers that the Old Man had created and unleashed upon the world. Along with the conception of humans had been the making of various animals and creatures. Some of these creatures had come to be known in the mortal realm as demons, devils, ghouls, and goblins.
When he’d resided in the archangel realm, it had been Uriel’s task to seek out these creatures and the humans who joined them. But now that he was on Earth . . . it wasn’t as easy to tell the monster from the human. And punishing them was no longer his task anyway.
He still knew right from wrong. He still hated evil and felt the need to protect innocence. But finding a way to do so on the mortal plane was not easy. It hadn’t taken Uriel long to tire of his role as human assassin for the troublemakers in human history, as sharpshooter in war after war, as a sniper, as a double agent, as a killer. In the end, he’d realized that he was tired of being Uriel. He wanted to be someone else for a while. And so he’d answered a casting call pinned to the wall of a coffee shop in California. After all, acting was all about pretending to be someone you weren’t.
BOOK: Avenger's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels
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