Page 116 of Angel Betrayed

Foolish. No one had ever been able to cheat him. He’d been delayed before, but not stopped.

“Did you see that in your mirror?” A vague curiosity pushed Azrael to voice the question.

“Aren’t you going to help him?” Mateo asked instead of answering. “After all, he is your brother.”

The smoke curled thicker in the air. Now, he could hear the rough sound of growls coming from the house. The growls were too deep for wolves or coyotes, and they were growls that he would have preferred to never hear again. “Someone has let the hounds loose.”

“Sam will trade his life for hers,” Mateo said.

Now that made Azrael look at him, but Mateo’s stare was on the fire. “Sammael won’t trade his life for anyone’s.” That was a sacrifice his brother would never make.

“He’d die for her.”

Impossible. Sammael couldn’t?—

“Even the mighty fall, sooner or later.”

Azrael remembered screams. Women. Children. He remembered his brother cutting a path through the dead with eyes gone pitch-black as he killed and killed and killed.

Punishing?

No, Sammael had lost his control. The beast inside his brother was too strong. “He won’t sacrifice for anyone.”

“You’ll see. He’ll burn.” Mateo advanced slowly toward the rising smoke. “An angel dies…”

Azrael stared after him, watching, torn.

His heart raced too fast. His palms were sweating. His muscles locked too tight.

Sammael.

Sacrifice?

He hadn’t understood the emotions he’d seen in his brother’s eyes that long ago day. But those same emotions—they’d glittered in Sammael’s stare when the succubus vanished earlier.

Sammael had always felt too much, and those emotions had been the problem.

Azrael’s hands fisted. Now it’s my problem, too.

Because he wasn’t just going to stand back while Rogziel killed his brother.

Azrael stared at the blaze, heard the hungry growls, and he whispered, “Come get some, hound. Come get me.”

This hellhound was even bigger than the one before. Bigger, darker, with a mouth that was at least twice the size of the last beast’s that had come at them. Just staring at the hound made Seline’s knees shake.

This hound had driven its teeth into Tomas’s shoulder. Blood spilled beneath him. Tomas tried to grab the hound’s head and almost lost his fingers.

But Sam was there. She watched as he shoved his foot into the hound’s head, giving a kick that made the beast howl.

Tomas leapt to his feet. “Get the fuck back to hell!” Tomas roared and lifted his hands. Fire blasted out at the hound.

“No!” Seline yelled, but the fire had already reached the hound. It absorbed the flames, and its eyes flashed an even brighter red. Then the hound got bigger.

Dammit.

“Help me!” A woman’s scream came from inside the room. Oh, no, that woman—Sierra—had actually been trapped in there with the hound? And the monster hadn’t eaten her?

Tomas’s head jerked at Sierra’s cry, and he rushed forward. Right into the path of the hound.

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