Messenger's Angel: A Novel of the Lost Angels by Heather Killough-Walden Read Free Book Online

up. “The name’s Albert.” He held out his hand.
    Juliette hesitated briefly and then grasped it firmly, never one to give a limp handshake, no matter what the circumstances. “I’m Juliette,” she replied. Then she glanced at the cars around them. Sirens could now be heard in the distance. Someone was arguing over a fender bender about twenty cars down. Juliette and the BMW guy were starting to acquire an audience.
    “Oy! Are you okay, there?” A pair of teenage boys was peeking tentatively around the car behind the smoldering BMW. They appeared genuinely concerned.
    “Do we need the paramedics?” one asked.
    “One’s already on the way, James. Can you no’ hear it?”
    Their conversation continued and Juliette ignored them. She leaned a little closer to Albert. “Can you stand?”
    “I think so. I thought the lightnin’ had done me in bu’”—he looked at his arms and felt his face—“I guess I was wrong. Me ears are no’ even ringin’ or anythin’.”
    Juliette knew why. As the storm quieted around her, reflecting her own emotions, that truth stomped its foot and banged on the door of her consciousness, asserting itself blatantly. Albert had been
plenty
hurt by the lightning and she’d been the reason for that damage, not any deity. She was also the reason he wasn’t hurt now.
That
was the truth.
    However, what she said was, “Maybe God doesn’t like your ex-wife better than you, after all.”
    Albert met her wry smile with a lopsided grin of his own and she helped him stand.
    Twenty minutes later, the police arrived and managed to get everyone back into their cars—except of course for Albert, whom they forced into an ambulance on the sheer principle that he’d been inside of a car struck by lightning.
    Juliette caught his good-bye nod, returned it, and got back into her own car at the behest of the police. As she settled, still shaking, into the driver’s seat and looked over the steering wheel, her gaze met one of stark blue.
    It was the man that she’d given money to. She’d forgotten about him. He’d watched her heal Albert.
    Juliette swallowed hard and peered into the man’s eyes. Slowly, he lifted the coins she had given him for her to see. Then he nodded once, slowly and surely, as if to say
I understand
, and
Thank you
. And then he put the coins back into his hat, turned around, and walked away. She lost sight of him as he rounded the corner beneath the overpass.
    A few seconds later, Juliette followed the car in front of her as traffic began its slow crawl back to life. The rain had all but stopped and the sun peeked through the clouds up above. And Juliette was no longer uncertain of her sanity. Now she was uncertain of just about everything else.
    * * *
    Daniel knew he was on borrowed time. His plan had taken him from the Adarian complex and across the Atlantic to where the second archess had just landed. It was a risky plan and it wouldn’t be easy to execute.
    But his life depended on it.
    Abraxos was going to kill one of his men. The tall and handsome, raven-black-haired, blue-eyed Adarian General had been the first archangel in existence. He was the leader of the Adarian army, which had been tossed out by the Old Man eons ago and had been forced to scratch out an existence on this trash heap of a world the humans called Earth.
    And now, because the General knew of the existence of the archesses and their inherent healing power, the Adarian leader was evolving a horrid plan. That plan involved kidnapping every one of the archesses and murdering them so that the General, and a few select Adarians, could live out the remainder of their immortal lives enjoying the healing power of their archess blood.
    Only a few would be chosen to receive the blood. Daniel knew he was not to be one of them. In fact, he knew that if he had remained behind, he would have been killed outright. That much had been painfully clear. The General believed that Daniel’s ability to become