Avenger's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels (54 page)

BOOK: Avenger's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels

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The women’s bathroom was as good a place as any. She would wait there until the train took off again. It was a shitty plan, but it was better than no plan at all.

Gabriel’s blood was on fire in his veins; he’d never felt like this before. Juliette was ripping him apart inside. He’d felt her give in to him. He’d won her surrender with his kiss and he knew that if he’d wanted to, he could have taken her right there on the seat on the train. Not that he would have. Well, maybe.

But then he’d felt something else. It was a vibration in the air, a thickness to the atmosphere, charged and negative and wrong. And he would recognize it anywhere. The Adarian was on the train. Not only was he on the train, but he had been in that coach with Juliette, invisible and lying in wait like an unseen serpent. He might have even been sitting across from her—watching her all along.

Gabriel wasn’t sure why he hadn’t sensed it at first. It might have been that he was so focused on Juliette, nothing else registered. It might have been that the Adarian was so good at hiding, Gabe hadn’t felt the change in the air until the man moved right by him.

That
he had felt. It was a shift in the air, like sandpaper molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide scraping along his flesh and soul as the Adarian moved past him and down the aisle.

He had no idea what the man was waiting for. He could only guess that the Adarian hadn’t attacked Juliette outright because there would be no easy way to get an unconscious body off the train without being seen. And then Gabriel had shown up and most likely thrown a wrench into the Adarian’s plans. He’d left the coach while Gabe and Juliette were kissing. And now he was somewhere—somewhere on this train. And Juliette was alone in her car and Gabriel wasn’t an idiot. He knew she would try to escape. He knew that once he gave her enough space to think, she would come to her senses and a good, hard, healthy fear would set in. She had no reason to believe that his intentions were pure. She was right about the way some men set women up with the good-guy, bad-guy routine. Michael had come across many a rape scenario in his line of duty as a cop in New York, and he’d shared enough of those stories over the years.

Men could be monsters. And Juliette had a good head on her shoulders. She would run. He’d seen the thoughts in her eyes as he’d left her. He could threaten and try to scare her all he wanted, but it wouldn’t work. In the end, she would flee.

At least there was nowhere she could go on a moving train. She was too smart to try to jump off, and the doors wouldn’t open in that fashion while the train was moving anyway. For the moment, she was stuck, giving him the time he needed to track down the Adarian.

What was confusing Gabe, however, was the apparent absence of any of the other Adarians. Where was the General? Why hadn’t Abraxos made his infernal appearance yet? What the bloody hell was going on?

Gabriel strode through the aisles of the train, honing his senses for that familiar spark of negativity that would tell him the Adarian was near. He cursed his luck that just as he was finding the woman he had searched two thousand years for, his enemy had found her, as well. At least he didn’t have to deal with Samael the way Uriel had when he’d found his archess months ago. Small blessings.

Nonetheless, the Adarian’s intrusion was like watching the Roman army lay siege to Gabriel’s homeland. She was his—and
only
his. It was time to deal with the intruder once and for all.

Gabriel ignored the stares he got as he passed through the compartments. He was too focused to pay them any heed. But the farther down the train’s length he got, the more agitated he became. The air was clean of the feel of the Adarian. There was no static, no thickness, no wrongness—not like there had been in Juliette’s cabin. Where had the intruder gone?

And then something niggled at the back of Gabriel’s brain—and the train began to slow.
No.

Gabriel stopped in the aisle and turned to face the direction from which he’d come. The LCD screen at the end of the car read “Muir of Ord,” and a few people were grabbing for their luggage. Gabriel broke into a near run, brushing rudely by the people who had claimed space in the aisle. The doors opened for him as he neared them and he shot on through.

But by the time he reached Juliette’s car, the train had been stopped completely for several seconds and his fears were confirmed.

She was gone.