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

roamed the Earth, claiming Azrael as their father.
    Uriel, for his part, had never really felt that there was a niche in the mortal realm he could comfortably fill. He’d once been the Angel of Vengeance. He had once punished the plethora of evildoers that the Old Man had created and unleashed upon the world. Along with the conception of humans had been the making of various animals and creatures. Some of these creatures had come to be known in the mortal realm as demons, devils, ghouls, and goblins.
    When he’d resided in the archangel realm, it had been Uriel’s task to seek out these creatures and the humans who joined them. But now that he was on Earth . . . it wasn’t as easy to tell the monster from the human. And punishing them was no longer his task anyway.
    He still knew right from wrong. He still hated evil and felt the need to protect innocence. But finding a way to do so on the mortal plane was not easy. It hadn’t taken Uriel long to tire of his role as human assassin for the troublemakers in human history, as sharpshooter in war after war, as a sniper, as a double agent, as a killer. In the end, he’d realized that he was tired of being Uriel. He wanted to be someone else for a while. And so he’d answered a casting call pinned to the wall of a coffee shop in California. After all, acting was all about pretending to be someone you weren’t.
    And now here he was, in a limousine on his way to a signing because he’d suddenly become as popular as the Masked One. The movie, Comeuppance , had been so overwhelmingly successful, they’d turned it into a book and now the cast members were signing copies of it all over the country.
    Outside the car window, the blur of buildings passing by slowed down and the car pulled to the right, gently rounding a corner into a drive. Overhead, a built-in speaker came to life.
    “We’re here, Mr. Gillihan.”
    Max sat up a little straighter and nodded at Uriel. “All right, here’s the deal. The bookstore said there would be a pull of two to five hundred people today—”
    “Here?” Uriel was certain his expression matched his emotions. He was an actor, after all, and expression was everything. “In this Podunk little town?”
    “There are teenyboppers everywhere, Uriel,” Max explained calmly. “When it comes to you and your fake set of fangs, they’ll come out of the woodwork if they have to eat their way out.”
    “Nice visual.”
    “I know, isn’t it?” Gillihan laughed again.
    The limousine slowed to a stop and thunder rolled over the top of the car. Uriel frowned. A storm was coming? He hadn’t sensed it, and usually he could. He must have been incredibly distracted not to notice.
    “I told Nathan to pull to the back of the store to give us a little time to prepare before we head in,” Gillihan continued, suddenly all business again.
    “Did you hear that?” Uriel asked, interrupting him.
    Max frowned and then blinked. “What? The thunder?”
    “Yeah,” Uriel replied, peering out the window at the gathering darkness as he pulled on his leather jacket. “Did you notice it coming before?”
    Max seemed to consider this for a moment. He glanced out the window and his brow furrowed a little more. “Actually, no. But this is the Southwest. These things come up out of nowhere and all of a sudden.” He shrugged as he pulled a few new pens and a file folder filled with photographs out of his briefcase. “I grew up down here.”
    Uriel rolled his eyes. Max Gillihan hadn’t “grown up” anywhere. He’d simply existed for two thousand years. But, for some strange reason, he always waxed nostalgic when they visited a new location, and insisted that he’d been raised there.
    “In a place not too far from here, actually. Called Lovington. It was a crap-smudge on the map thirty years ago, and it’s even less than that now,” Gillihan continued, shaking his head as he effortlessly doled out the lie. “But I remember the storms. Blew the roof off our