Samael (11 page)

Did they even deserve it? Did they warrant her pain?

That’s a hell of a question,
she thought. And she knew it was one thought in anger.
You know they deserve it. At least, most of them. And besides, it’s not just you,
she told herself firmly
. It’s the others from the angel realm as well. Think of all Rhiannon does. Think of everything they all do! Together, you’re better than nothing.

Yes, it was worth her pain. If maybe some days, just barely.

Angel opened her eyes and trembled. Her mouth was dry. She felt strange, and it wasn’t getting any better. Maybe she needed a drink.

She looked around quickly, spotting the edge of the food court area of the faire across a clearing and beside an archery range. A cold beer would go down nice right now. It couldn’t get her drunk, as angels had to drink a hell of a lot of alcohol to feel any effect. But over the years, she had developed a taste for the liquid. A good, extremely cold beer was smooth, not sweet, and more refreshing than anything else she could think of.

She took off in that direction. What could be the harm in just staying for an hour or so? There was no way Sam could have detected her transport from the concert, much less her various transports after that. He had no idea where she was, which was back in Texas, just outside of Austin. This was probably the last place he would expect her to return to after just recently having left the same state. She’d put some thought into her destination, after all.

As she walked, she passed a variety of actors and actresses in ren faire garb. There was a fortune teller in more silk than most pirates managed to steal on the open seas. There was a group of teenagers dressed as League of Legends characters. There were knights and princesses and ladies in waiting. There were children dressed as fairies or wearing masks like dragons. There was a Skyrim group wearing silver Skyrim pendants. There were men in black leather armor, very tall and graceful, with well-built physiques and piercing, vividly colored eyes.

Wait.

Angel stopped in her tracks just short of reaching the beer stand. She recognized those men in black at once, especially since they were all staring at her. And smiling.

They had such beautiful, promising smiles.

Angel’s breath quickened. She turned in a slow circle, feeling them watching her from all angles now. There was one beside the corset tent. He nodded politely at her. There was another by a shop selling dragon jewelry. He, too, acknowledged her with a nod. Another stood beside a booth that sold leather armor. He smiled rapaciously and winked. And another two were waiting on either side of the astrolabe entrance, as if they’d known good and well she would eventually make her way there.

They were all around her.

How could she not have noticed them before? Was she really that out of it? All the
other
women at the faire had certainly noticed. They stared covertly at the men from under lowered lashes or from behind their friends’ shoulders. She could hear them giggling and talking amongst themselves.

The men were beautiful. They
would
be. They were incubi, otherwise known as Nightmares.

Slowly, as if in a dream, Angel again faced the beer stand. In front of her, another man in black armor had his back to her. He said “thank you” to the sales person at the stand and then turned around, a frosty mug of beer in each hand. His inhuman eyes sparkled with sexy amusement and even sexier secrets.

“Hello Angel,” said the Nightmare King.

Chapter Seventeen

“Hesperos.”

Hesperos’s green-gray eyes glittered. He handed her one of the beers, and not knowing what else to do, she took it. “You look ravishing,” he said softly.

Angel was surprised to see him there. But then again – she also wasn’t.

“Thank you,” she said softly, glancing down at her beer longingly before taking a big drink. She knew, as she always did with Hesperos, that when he gave such a complement, he meant it thoroughly. He meant that she was not only ravishing on the outside, but on the inside as well. In fact, the inside was what mattered most to the incubi. This was especially true for their king.

He frowned, gazing steadily at her over the lip of his commemorative mug. “You also look ravaged.” He slowly lowered his drink. “I’m guessing
you
have something to do with that, Fallen One.”

Angel’s eyes popped, and she spun, sloshing a little beer.

“Well,” said Sam casually, as he took the drink from her hands, and she did absolutely nothing to stop him. “The thing about running is that no one can do it forever.” He took a drink of her beer, and his eyes flashed, glowing one second, and shifting back to their deep, tumultuous gray the next. “It does get tiring.”

“That must be why you don’t look any better,” said Hesperos, with a gleam and a smile.

Sam was unruffled. He looked around, as if he hadn’t heard the Nightmare King. Angel stood glued to her spot, her body going strangely numb as she took in his appearance. He was dressed all in black, just like Hesperos. However, his countenance and stature were such to suggest that he was no less than the
king
of the faire, and by the way the people around her were behaving toward him, Angel would almost believe they were under the hypnotic misconception that he was exactly that.

In fact, as Sam lowered his mug – or,
her
mug, rather – two “ladies in waiting” nodded respectfully at him and blushed when he smiled back.

“So, which of these unsuspecting females are you here to deflower, Hesperos?” Sam asked. “And do you plan to share with all your men?” He gestured to the other incubi Angel had noticed standing around the faire. The men were watching silently, their smiles gone.

“That one, actually,” said Hesperos, shocking Angel. “And no.” He smiled suddenly. “Unless she’s up for it.”

He was nodding toward a middle-aged woman who was standing beside the archery range. She didn’t know he was watching her. In fact, she was perhaps one of the only women in the park who seemed relatively oblivious to all the drop-dead gorgeous men in black leather meandering through the faire. Instead, her gaze was distant. She seemed sad, in fact.

She had very long, well kept brown hair that was clearly a feature she’d taken great care with. Unlike so many of the revelers around her, she was dressed in plain street clothes. Despite the warm humidity, she wore blue jeans that hugged ample curves, and a white loose fitting V-neck tee that revealed healthy striations in strong pectoral muscles. Her arms were also well muscled, not overly so, but with the appearance of genuine strength. She was on the shorter side, no taller than five-two or five-three, but her rugged engineering boots had a little heel to them, and she stood with her shoulders back and her chin up, making her appear taller.

Despite her radiated strength, there was a hollowness under her brown eyes, deep and dark. She rested against one of the posts surrounding the archery range, her arms crossed over her chest. There were people shooting nearby, but whether they were part of her party or not, Angel couldn’t tell.

“She’s beautiful,” she whispered. Like Hesperos, she could see the good or bad inside a person as well, and the woman was not only attractive on the outside, she was very much so on the inside. That kind of goodness radiated from a person. It was difficult to describe.

Angel was still reeling from the fact that both men were there at the faire, standing on either side of her, and hadn’t realized that she’d spoken the words out loud until Hesperos responded.

“Indeed,” he agreed, his heated gaze still locked on his unwitting target.

Angel looked from him to Sam, who stood behind her, watching her as intently as Hesperos watched the woman by the archery range.

Before Angel could say anything to him, the Nightmare King turned back to face them. “Well, Angel, I think you’re in good hands here. If you’ll excuse me.”

Angel’s eyes grew very, very wide. “
What?
” She couldn’t help but ask.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t glad to avoid trouble, it was just…. He was going to just
leave
her? Leave her with
Sam
of all people? Since when did he trust Sam that much? How could he just aban–

But Hesperos left the drink stall, his beer vanished from his hand, and she watched in stunned silence as he approached the archery range, moving around the brown haired woman’s location like a shark determining the perfect angle for attack.

Feeling the world shift under her feet, Angel turned to Samael, who was now smiling. “The Nightmare King and I came to an agreement of sorts a few nights ago as we were being ambushed by the Adarians.”

She swallowed hard as little motes of light floated in her vision. “Oh?” she asked weakly.

“We agreed that he would stay away from you and I wouldn’t pick off his incubi one by one until he was ruling a nation without any people in it.” He looked down at his beer mug, which also happened to be a commemorative mug. “I’m pleased we were able to work something out. I appreciate the man’s sense of humor and would rather not destroy him.”

Angel was at a very real lack of words.

Chapter Eighteen

“I’m afraid I’ve finished off your beer,” Sam said, eyeing the empty mug in his hand. He seemed perplexed. He blinked. “May I get you another?”

Angel swallowed hard. The truth was, she was very thirsty. Inordinately so. She nodded. “Yes, please.”

This is insane.

Sam brushed past her, his strong shoulder touching hers as he moved to the booth. Electricity sizzled down her arm where he’d touched her.

As if on cue, thunder rumbled in the distance.

Absolutely nuts.

She shook herself and forcibly turned her body around so she couldn’t watch him. Instead, she looked at the clouds drawing nearer a few miles away. They were dark and tall.

She frowned at them a moment, then her eyes found the Nightmare King, who was talking with the girl at the archery range. As she watched, the woman walked to a faire employee nearby and said something to him. He smiled, nodded, and reached behind his little booth to extract a rather complex looking compound bow and a quiver of arrows.

Clearly, they were hers.

Hesperos looked taken aback, but only for a second. He grinned and shrugged, a good sport. The employee handed him one of the meager make-shift bows the faire supplied. It was composed of a bent stick and string and not much else. Hesperos took it with a firm hand, and Angel could hear his deep laugh roll across the field. Women around the range stopped what they were doing and looked, something inside telling them to hunt out the source of that deeply pleasant sound.

The archery range employee gestured for the two of them to make their way to the shooting station. It was a line drawn in the dirt. Twenty yards away, two targets were set up by two other employees, and then everyone moved out of the way.

The woman was going to crush Hesperos. Of course, he could
cheat
. But Angel had a feeling he wouldn’t. There was little sport in it, and winning wouldn’t endear the woman to him.

Angel looked down when a second, frosted-over mug of beer was placed gently in her hands. It was much colder than the last had been. It didn’t make much logical sense, so it was Sam’s magic at work, no doubt.

She didn’t even care. Without pausing to give it untoward thought, she raised the mug to her lips and took a long, thirsty pull. The liquid slid like a winter drug over her tongue, then quenched her thirst to her core as it slipped down her throat and into her stomach. She kept drinking. It was
so
good.

“How are you feeling?” Sam asked when she at last finished and lowered the mug.

The question took her by surprise. How was she
feeling
? Why would he ask her that? What did he mean? She was an archess. They almost always felt just fine. And the question just seemed so very unlike him.

But there was real concern in his charcoal colored eyes. There was something else there too, but she couldn’t identify it. It was yet another secret that was part of the mysterious composition of Samael.

“I’m fine,” she replied. That’s what people always said, even when they weren’t. Perhaps
especially
when they weren’t. “But I have no idea what to do now.” Sometimes, honesty was best. Hell,
usually
honesty was the best.

“We need to talk,” he said.

How many horrible conversations began that way?

Angel looked down at her mug and closed her eyes when another wave of dizziness swept over her. But it wasn’t an unpleasant dizziness this time, despite the foreboding of it. She chalked it up to doing way too much lately, and shook her head to clear it.

“I’m aware,” she shot back softly. She shrugged. “I was just hoping, I guess… to delay the inevitable.”

“Time has run its course,” he told her.

He seemed closer, taller, stronger than before. She looked up – then over his shoulder, where the clouds in the distance had drawn nearer. The air around her was heavier. The clouds building overhead were thicker. A storm was about to strike the renaissance festival.

“Is that you doing that?” she asked, absolutely certain he would admit that it was.

But he shook his head, despite the flash of lightning in his eyes. “Not this time.”

“You’re lying.”

“Not to you.” He smiled, and it was a little sad and a lot beautiful. “The world is a crazy place, Angel. It’s been spinning in its spot around the sun for eons. But like a top, it needs only a slight bump, a gentle push. And it begins to wobble.” He shrugged. “The weather is unpredictable. Now more so than ever.”

She understood. It would take a special kind of stupid not to.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” she said.

“Really?”

She blinked and looked away from the approaching storm to stare up at him. He was watching her so intensely, she felt immobilized before him.