Avenger's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels Read Free

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