Death's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels (12 page)

However, that said, there was a chance—slight but there—that his deadly sensitivity to the sun could be reversed, at least for a little while. One of his men, Asteraoth, or Adam, as he was called now, possessed the ability to both create and control fire. Kevin had been mixing and ingesting the blood of his fellow Adarians in order to absorb different powers and combinations of powers for weeks now. The new abilities he inherited were temporary, but strong and effective. If Kevin could successfully concentrate and ingest Adam’s power through his blood, he would gain the ability to withstand the damage that fire caused to his flesh for some small but essential amount of time.

And what was the sun but a giant ball of fire?

Kevin didn’t know enough yet about vampirism to guarantee that this endeavor would prove fruitful. But it was certainly worth a try.

In the meantime, Kevin had learned a lesson tonight. In Pittsburgh, Azrael and his vampires reacted to Kevin’s presence with such incredible speed and efficiency to protect young Miss Bryce, it was mind-boggling. Azrael was not an opponent to take lightly.

When Sophie did finally make her move to the City by the Bay, she wouldn’t come alone. Kevin knew that Azrael would be shadowing her, along with probably half of the vampires he had ever spawned. Kevin’s only hope was to strike fast, without warning. His best bet for this was to do so during the day. And for this reason, he hoped against hope that his little experiment worked.

Chapter Eleven

M
ichael pushed away from his desk and ran a hand through his thick blond hair. He was tired. Archangels weren’t supposed to get tired. He was working too hard, had too much on his mind. And the call that had just come in had a strange feel to it, just as the serial rapist case did.

It was a missing teenage girl, possibly a kidnapping—probably a murder. The crime scene was covered in blood, or at least that was how the girl’s parents had described it to the 911 operator.

Forensics would meet him at the site. “Pool, I’m heading out. Get me the file on Alexandra Thames, would you?” He turned to a sergeant who happened to be walking behind Michael’s desk.

The sergeant nodded. “Right away, sir,” he replied and turned on his heel to head back the way he’d come. Michael watched him go and then glanced toward the windows of the precinct. Darkness and a New York City night waited beyond.

Alexandra Thames was the last woman to have been victimized by New York’s newest and most enigmatic serial rapist. It was just a gut feeling, but Michael had an instinctive inkling that this missing-person case was related somehow. That was why he wanted her file. Maybe he’d overlooked something. . . .

His gaze dropped from the windows as Sergeant Pool returned, handing him the file. “Thanks,” he said. He moved around his desk and headed for the front door of the precinct, picking up his car keys with one hand while he flipped the folder open with the other. So far, none of the victims seemed to be linked to one another in any way but one—they were all women, all good people, and now they were all pregnant.

But that inkling of a feeling niggled at the back of Michael’s mind. Was this possibly the end of the serial rapist’s trail? Was this missing teenage girl the straw that broke the camel’s back? Was she a twist in the plot of this strange story?

Michael made his way out of the precinct building and to his issued car, tossing the file in the passenger seat. Thanks to Max and his ability to control human minds, Michael had never had to work with a partner, and no one questioned it.

Michael stood in the open door of the car and pulled out his personal cell phone. He dialed a number, and wasn’t at all surprised when the line was picked up before the first ring was half through.

“Michael,” said the gravelly voice on the other end. It belonged to Randall McFarlan, the cop who was one of Az’s created vampires. “Azrael told me you’d be calling.”

“I need your advice on something, Randy. You think you could get Az to let you use the mansion to get to New York?”

“I could do that,” came the easy reply.

“Good. I need you to meet me somewhere. Here’s the address.”

Thirty minutes later, Michael parked his flashing vehicle beside a host of other police cars and got out. Randall was already there, and thanks to his vampire powers, none of the other cops or crime scene investigators on the premises were bugging him in any manner.

Randall made his way gracefully through the crowd and met Michael at the crime scene tape. “There’s a lot of blood inside,” he told Michael without the preamble of a greeting.

Michael grimaced inwardly. Of course Randall would know; he’d be able to smell it.

“You wanna fill me in?” Randall asked as they both turned toward the two-story row house that was seeing a steady stream of officials in and out of its front door. They ducked beneath the crime scene tape and approached the building side by side.

“It started in February,” Michael began. “On Valentine’s Day.” He filled Randall in as quickly as he could as he nodded to men he knew and flashed his badge at the appropriate people.

Over the last few months, a serial rapist had been leaving a trail of victims across New York City. On the upside, the victims were neither physically harmed nor murdered. On the downside, there were more than fifty of them at this point, and each woman was pregnant.

To make matters worse, the women all came to the police with the same unbelievable story. Their husbands or boyfriends had been out of town. A very handsome man had entered their bedroom at night uninvited. The women had been overcome with desire, and—several hours later, the strange man disappeared, leaving a confused and pregnant woman in his wake.

They claimed that as the hours of the night wore on, they became more aware of what had happened to them and felt increasingly violated. Some of them had managed to procure “morning-after” pills. Others had not. But it didn’t matter; the pills never worked.

Now these rape victims were expecting children that they knew did not belong to their spouses or partners, and they were faced with a very, very difficult choice: give birth to a rapist’s child or have an abortion. Several of them had been having marital problems since the attacks. Two were filing for divorce. Another was separated.

Whoever this man was, he was carving a path of misery across the city and its surrounding areas.

The mortals Michael worked with as a police officer all had their theories about the perpetrator. Maybe he was using some sort of gas on the women to cloud their perception and judgment. The man was sometimes described as having blue eyes, other times green or brown. But because he was uniformly referred to as exceptionally handsome, several cops figured he was probably a performer of some sort, perhaps a model or a stage magician, and was using wigs and contacts to change his appearance. Others went the athlete route; the rapist was apparently very built as well. So far, talent agencies and sports teams alike had been questioned.

Michael had a much different theory.

The physical description of the rapist, as well as the account of what actually transpired within the bedroom, all reminded Michael of something he had dealt with before. Long ago.

It had been many, many centuries since the Warrior Archangel had come across a Nightmare. They were notorious for using human women as their breeders. It was how the incubi of the world continued to populate the planet; human women were the means to their species’ survival. However, Nightmares were not necessarily evil creatures. As far as Michael’s dealings with them were concerned, he’d never known them to be overtly selfish or cruel.

When an incubus, or Nightmare, impregnated a woman, he usually chose a woman who wanted children anyway. He made certain she would be a loving, caring mother. And when he had finished leaving his seed deep within her womb, he never,
ever
allowed her to remember the Nightmare’s visit.

It was essential to the woman’s happiness that her memory of the night of her child’s conception be wiped. The Nightmare child was then magically given physical traits of the woman’s significant other in order to further protect her in the months and years to come.

The little boy—it was always a boy—would be born happy and healthy. Approximately twenty to twenty-five years later, he would come to know what he was. His Nightmare powers would kick in and along with these powers, he would gain a profound understanding of the incubus culture and expectations. And the cycle would continue.

Michael would have been willing to bet all the gold he could create in a day that the rapist now leaving pregnant women in his wake was a Nightmare. The problem with that, however, was twofold. First, the Nightmares had disappeared long ago with the majority of Earth’s other paranormal creatures, and no one had heard anything from them for more than a thousand years. If this was an incubus, then the creatures had come out of hiding. Why?

And second, Michael knew the Nightmare king on a personal level, and there was no way in hell that Hesperos would have allowed one of his subjects to behave the way the rapist had been behaving. Which meant that the culprit had gone rogue and was no longer interested in playing nice.

“So you want me to sniff out the crime scene and let you know whether Nightmares were involved.”

“Yes,” Michael said as he gestured for Randall to precede him up the stairs of the victim’s house to the second level. “But I also want you to tell me whether any of this blood you smell belongs to the missing girl.”

“It doesn’t,” Randall said without hesitation. “And you’re right about the Nightmares,” he added, glancing over his shoulder at Michael. “Good instincts. But you’re falling short, my friend.”

Michael frowned as they reached the landing and turned down the hall toward the girl’s bedroom. Here the scene became more somber and the flash of an investigator’s bulb lit up the dim atmosphere. “How so?” he muttered, well aware that he needed to keep his voice down now that they were in close company and the din of the others had hushed.

Eyes watched them as they moved down the hall, and Michael’s gut clenched. They were warning him, those eyes. It was a cop’s way of saying, “Get ready. Try to keep your lunch down.”

“There are Nightmares involved, to be sure,” Randy drawled in his deep voice. They came to the girl’s bedroom door and peered in. “But Nightmares aren’t the only supernatural creatures with their hands in the pot.”

The room beyond was awash in red. The walls had been painted in streams of blood. The carpet was sticky with it. The curtains clung to the window, the red liquid acting as a magnet for the fabric.

“What the fuck . . .” Michael’s whisper drifted off. The blood didn’t affect him. His fellow police officers wouldn’t know it, of course, but as the Warrior Archangel, Michael was more than used to the consequences of battle. Blood was par for the course. What bothered him was the idea of a young mortal girl being caught in the midst of it.

“No human did this,” he said next.

“Nope,” agreed Randall.

“But no Nightmare did it, either,” Michael said. Nightmares were not violent like this. Not even the serial rapist had been violent with his victims. This kind of bloodshed simply wasn’t in their makeup.

“Nope,” said Randall again.

Michael turned toward him. “Then what the hell did?”

Randall took a deep breath and let it out in a heavy sigh. “Well, I’ve got good news and bad news for you,” he said. “Which do you want first?”

“Randy, just give it to me straight.”

“Okay,” said Randall, his blue eyes pinning Michael with their knowledge. “The good news is, this is Nightmare blood, but the incubi are alive. You know as well as I do that it takes a hell of a lot more than blood loss to kill a Nightmare.”

Michael could agree to that. If this was Nightmare blood, then the incubi had probably transported away once they were injured enough to scare them into flight.

“What’s the bad news?”

“That’s the interesting bit,” said the vampire. “When was the last time you came across a dragon?”

Michael’s heart hammered a little more solidly against the inside of his rib cage. “A dragon?” It had been centuries. Longer, even.

“Been a while, huh?”

Michael nodded.

“Well, I guess it’s about time, then. I’m fairly sure that the dragons I smell here were the ones doing the fighting,” Randall said as he gestured to the blood on the walls and floor. “But there’s another scent here as well; something that I don’t even recognize. And whatever they are, they took the girl with them.”

Michael’s head was spinning. Nightmares were one thing. Dragons were quite another. And from what Randall was telling him, it didn’t end there.

The supernaturals of the world were coming out of hiding.

The Adarians were out there scheming to do God only knew what. Samael was sitting in his tower in Chicago plotting something that was sure to be painful, at the very least. Nightmares and dragons were out in the open and fighting with one another, and now they’d waved their existence in humanity’s face by kidnapping a mortal. And somewhere in the world, two archesses remained to be found.

There was so much going on all at once, it made Michael dizzy. He glanced at the blood on the floor, the rumpled sheets, and the night beyond the windows. That night held a lot more danger than it used to.

Michael thought of his brothers, most important Azrael. He hadn’t spoken with the vampire archangel since he’d walked in on Az during Gabe’s wedding almost two weeks ago. Azrael was in San Francisco at the moment, preparing for a concert he would be giving over the next few days.

But Michael couldn’t get the image of the archangel bent over the sink out of his head. The mirror had been cracked, and the air in the room had been thick with the feel of Azrael’s power. There was so much more to Az than there seemed to be to the others, not only because of what he was now, but because of what he had once been. Michael knew that even after all this time, there was a lot about Az he and his other brothers did not understand.

Michael’s instincts in battle were legendary. Those instincts didn’t go away when he wasn’t fighting, and right now his intuition was telling him that as far as Azrael was concerned, something was
wrong
.

He wasn’t as worried about the others. Gabriel and Juliette were busy building a new home in Cruden Bay right beside the remains of Slains Castle, which they now had the rights to protect with utmost care. Uriel and Eleanore were with them. The brothers had agreed it would be a good idea to remain relatively close to one another at least until they figured out what was brewing out there.

The crime scene around Michael right now told him quite a
lot
was brewing out there. More than any of them had imagined.

Michael frowned as he considered this. Randall hadn’t said anything about the Adarians taking part in this mess, but Abraxos and his posse were a threat nonetheless. So far, the four brothers and the two archesses they’d managed to find had played on the defensive. They’d simply existed—and then when the Adarians struck, they’d fought back.

Michael didn’t like that. It wasn’t a good strategy. As far as he was concerned, the adage about the best defense being a good offense was true. If it were up to him, they would go after the Adarians instead of waiting around for the insane general and his men to strike.

But it wasn’t up to him. Michael’s hands curled tightly at his sides as tension rode its way through his tall, strong body. He realized what he was doing when Randall leaned over and nudged him.