Death's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels (29 page)

Chapter Thirty-one

H
e’d clothed them both again. The sea air was cold, and though he couldn’t feel it, Sophie certainly could. He also created a few extra blankets, and he snuggled beneath them on the beach with her now.

The night was in its winter hours and dawn would approach soon. He would have to take them to his resting place up the beach; a multi-roomed chamber he’d fashioned long ago from the very rock of the cliffs. But for now, they rested beneath the moon and stars, and Azrael was at peace. The only magic he had to use was the occasional burst of warning toward any sea or sand creature that threatened the edge of their blankets.

They lay on their sides, he spooning her. In his arms, Sophie breathed a sigh, her hand moving atop the soft coverlet, and Azrael glanced up at the movement. When he did, he caught sight of the mark on Sophie’s palm. It had faded significantly, but was still there.

Azrael couldn’t help the twinge of fear he felt at the sight of it. What more could he do to rescue his archess from the influence of the man in white? Trepidation wedged its way into his heart as he hugged Sophie close and closed his eyes, wanting only to make this moment last a little longer.

But Sophie shifted uncomfortably, and Azrael loosened his hold, the fear in his chest growing. “Are you okay?” he asked, not knowing what else to say.

“Yes,” she said quickly. “I think I just need to stand up and walk around.”

She was feeling suddenly antsy. It wasn’t a good sign.

Azrael felt a flash of heat go through his eyes, momentarily lighting them up. But he shut them tight again, pulled his power in around him, and forced himself to take it easy.

He let her go and Sophie rolled over to rise from the blankets. He stood after her.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said, taking hold of her marked hand. She didn’t pull away, but he felt her stiffen a little in his grip.

Azrael turned and began leading her down the beach as his blood heated in his veins. If he ever came face-to-face with the man in white, he was going to do everything within his power to kill the bastard.

They were silent for several minutes. The tide was low and myriad seashells littered the wet sand. Azrael noticed a perfect white sand dollar beside a boulder and remembered something he wanted to share with Sophie, but she stopped beside him, pulling his attention back to her.

“Az . . . ,” she started, and then paused. She licked her lips, pulled her hand from his, hugged herself, and looked away. “I feel so confused right now.”

Warning bells went off in Azrael’s head. “I know,” he said, moving forward as her distress drew out the need in him to protect and comfort her.

But she stepped back and immediately held up her hands. “No, you don’t,” she told him gently but firmly. “You’ve always been an archangel—and then a
vampire
,
Az. You can’t really have any idea what it’s like to be
powerless
, to have your destiny picked for you while you stand there and have one load of crap after another dumped all over you.” She shook her head, turning her back to him in a show of hastily renewed frustration. “Az, you . . .” She trailed off, as if afraid to finish.

Azrael was no longer able to tell what she was thinking. Once again, she was closed off to him—just like that. Whether it was a side effect of Gregori’s influence over her or she was simply coming to be Azrael’s equal in her archess abilities, he found it impossible to read her mind in that moment. And he desperately wanted to hear what she’d been about to say.

Even while he was terrified of her saying it.

“I
what
, Sophie?” he asked softly. The night grew silent as the sea and sky and sand waited for her reply.

Sophie shuddered and he saw her fingers go white where she hugged herself tightly. “You took my parents from me.”

A wave crashed onto the shore. An arc of pain sliced through Azrael’s chest.
No
, he thought desperately. Sophie couldn’t be more wrong. Azrael had nothing to do with her parents’ deaths. He had no control over that aspect of existence. He hadn’t worn that particular uniform in two thousand years, and even when he had roamed the universe as the Angel of Death, he’d wielded an unexplainable power, immense yet severely limited.

He’d taken souls from one place to another, but they came when they came and not a moment sooner or later. Sophie spoke of destiny. But destiny was something no being had ever escaped. It was as much a part of existence as was conscious awareness. Everything and everyone was a slave to some kind of fate. Fate moved through life and twisted it around and pushed it through to the other side.

Azrael had never had any power over his own destiny. If he
had
, if he’d been given the choice—he would not be what he was . . . what he had once been. If he could change his past and present and future, he would no longer be hated by those who had passed—and by those they had left behind.

That he had never had any more control over a being’s death than
they
had was something no mortal could comprehend, much less accept. There was too much pain involved with the phenomenon of death.

Azrael had not taken Sophie’s family from her. But she was trapped in the idea of having lost what she might have had, and nothing burned so much as the acid of resentment.

“Sophie,” he whispered as he moved forward again, coming to stand just behind her. “Sweet Sophie.” He closed his eyes, which now burned bright and hot in his skull, and he swallowed hard. “I didn’t kill your parents,” he said. “And if I had been there to take them when they died, I would have moved heaven and earth to change things.”

He shuddered and looked up, as if expecting lightning to strike as he realized the full weight of what he was about to say. And then he didn’t care, and he said it with the fierce resolve of a man who is both telling the truth and making a promise. “I would have laid down my wings to save you from that grief. Sophie. . . . I would have stepped down and turned away from everything I’d ever known if it meant that you could know the warmth of your mother’s smile and your father’s laugh for even a minute more.”

In front of him, Sophie went completely still. The surf climbed the sand a hundred feet away and seagulls rounded a band of rocks up ahead, searching for a washed-up meal. The sky was more or less quiet . . . but Azrael could hear Sophie’s blood rushing through her veins, pushed hard by a heart that raced maniacally. It pounded with deafening ardor, testament to her complete surprise.

Slowly, stiffly, she dropped her arms and turned to face him. He stared down at her through gold eyes filled with so much emotion that they burned painfully in his skull. He heard her breath catch and wondered if he was frightening her.

“Az . . . ,” she began, her voice shaking, “are you telling me—” She broke off, blinked, and started again. “Are you telling me you would have stood up to the Old Man in order to . . .” Again she trailed off. It was as if she was just as afraid of saying it as he had been of thinking it.

But there was no hesitation now as he replied, “To protect you, Sophie, I would do anything.”

* * *

Sophie couldn’t speak. She could barely think. Azrael stood before her a monument of a man, tall and dark and incredibly dangerous. His inhumanly beautiful eyes glowed with a hellish gold fire, bright and hot. They pulled her in with their blazing emotion, scorching her from the inside out.

She couldn’t move while trapped in that sway; she could only stand there and let the wind whip through her hair as her mind tried to come to grips with what Azrael had just told her. It literally took the breath from her lungs.

But Azrael spared her any further speech by looking away for a moment and composing himself. Then, with paramount grace, the tall, dark archangel brushed past her to move several feet down the beach. Sophie, wrapped in her stunned and heavy silence, could only turn and watch him.

Az stopped beside a smooth black stone that rose from the wet sand like the back of an Orca whale. Then he bent gracefully and Sophie saw him pick something up. He straightened, coming back to his full impressive height, and gazed down at what he held in his hands. But his back was still blocking her view, and curiosity pulled her across the sand toward him.

When she was three feet away, he turned and held out his hand. In his palm was the perfect white disc of a large sand dollar.

“It’s been years since I thought about it, but the Old Man made these for us,” he said. “Sand dollars.”

Sophie blinked, her brow furrowing, her voice entirely gone. He’d completely changed the subject, as if he couldn’t bear to think any longer about her loss and the part she felt he’d played in it.

In the silence, he went on. “He made them for me and my brothers.” He smiled, just a little, and the moonlight sliced across his piercing eyes. “In other parts of the world, they’re known as sea cookies or snapper biscuits. Some people believe they’re the coin of merfolk. In reality, they’re the skeletons of echinoids, nothing more.” He paused, running his thumb idly over the surface of the endoskeleton. “But the Old Man had always been most proud of our wings.” He chuckled, and it was a melancholy sound, sweet and lilting and filled with unspoken sadness. “So, in secret, he reproduced them.” He looked up as Sophie inched closer.
“Here
.
”

Sophie watched as the perfect sand dollar split slowly in half, a hairline crack forming across the middle of the object from one side to the other. When it was finished, Azrael pulled the separate pieces apart and tipped one of them over his open palm. Five tiny objects poured out.

Sophie leaned in to see better. “They’re angels,” she whispered, finding her voice at last. Tiny white objects that honestly looked like miniature angel sculptures rested in his open hand.

Azrael chuckled again. This time it was a little less sad. “There are five in every sand dollar,” he said. Sophie looked up at him, her gold eyes meeting his. “Four represent Michael, Uriel, Gabriel, and myself. The Old Man wouldn’t tell us what the fifth was for.” His voice had dropped to a whisper at this point. Very gently, he took the tiny white delicate angels between his fingers and dropped the sand dollar casings. Then, with a gentle touch that sent a rush of warmth up Sophie’s arm and across her chest, Azrael took her right wrist in his fingers and turned her own hand over.

The mark that Gregori’s black dandelion had given her was still there, but it was greatly faded, as if the ink had washed away with time.

If Azrael saw it now, he made no mention of it. Instead, he very carefully set one of the tiny angels in the middle of her palm. It lay atop the black dandelion, stark in its whitewashed beauty. “But I’ve figured it out,” he said softly, drawing her gaze to him. His eyes were searching, deep and mesmerizing. “The fifth is that which the four of us search for. It’s that piece of us that was made with us, surrounds us in spirit, and leaves us incomplete until we find it again.” He paused, allowed his next words to be said in the waiting silence, and then spoke them aloud for good measure. “For me, that’s you, Sophie.”

Sophie stood numb and still for a long while. Then she looked down at the tiny angel in her hand. It seemed so small—yet so significant. Finally, she looked back up at Azrael. Her chest ached. It was a real, physical kind of pain that gnawed at her and yet filled her with something for once substantial. There was a brief moment, a pulse in time—eternally long—that was gone in an instant.

And then Azrael was kissing her.

No. That wasn’t right.
She
was kissing
him
.

She wasn’t sure what had given her the push, but she stared up at him standing there, wrapped in regret and wishes as thick as her own, and knew that she was gazing at not only the most outwardly beautiful man in the world, but the most inwardly beautiful as well.

She suddenly realized that while she had been trapped in her own destiny—so had he. They were angels in a sand dollar, adrift in a sea and split apart to be lost and separated for two thousand years.

And now here they were, standing on the shore once more. And Sophie knew—she
knew
—she’d loved this man from the very beginning. She’d loved him from the moment she’d heard his voice crooning over the radio. She’d ached inside, wanting to pull back the mask he wore onstage so that she could look into the face that she had already fallen for.

She loved him. Despite the fact that he’d been the Angel of Death, despite the fact that he was tied to her through some divine destiny, and despite the fact that he was a vampire. Despite everything—or maybe
because
of it.

I love you
, she thought.

And then she was moving forward and standing on her tiptoes to shove her hand through his long, thick black hair and pull his lips to her own. It took no time at all—none passed—before Azrael was sliding his strong arm around her waist and using it to pull her body against his.

She melted into the tall, hard frame of him, at once enveloped in his warm darkness and his incredible surge of power. She gave herself up to it—to him—and let him take control for the second time that night. She had no choice.

His lips claimed hers in a way that chased the uncertainty from Sophie’s mind like the sun on the fog. His grip on her was tight with desperation; his kiss was just as desperate. She caught the scent of leather and felt his hair brush her cheek as his tongue expertly, insistently, opened her up beneath him.

And just like that, once again, she was delirious. The night danced around her. She felt his hand in her hair, tilting her back as he drew her every breath into himself, devouring her heart and soul. She heard a moan and knew it was her own but could not remember making the sound.

There was sudden sharp pain in Sophie’s palm and she jerked slightly in Azrael’s embrace. At once, he broke the kiss and gazed down at her, concern clear in his handsome features.

Sophie frowned and looked down at her hand, which was curled tightly into a fist. With a rapidly pounding heart, she uncurled her hand and stared at her palm. The mark Gregori had given her was now gone. But so was the tiny white angel Azrael had given her. In their place, etched perfectly into the skin of her hand, was a shimmering pair of golden wings.