by Nalini Singh
Elena knew that because she’d made it a point to find out. It didn’t matter that the three of them were only connected by the frigid ties of Jeffrey’s blood—Evelyn and Amethyst were still her sisters, still hers to watch over. If they ever needed her, she would be there ... as she hadn’t been able to be there for Ari and Belle.
Heart encircled by a thousand shards of metal, each a stabbing blade, she began to head for the entrance. That was when she saw Evelyn shake off her older sister’s hold and run down the front steps toward her. “You’re not a vampire.”
Rocking back on her heels at the challenge in that small, rebellious face, in those bunched fists, Elena said, “No.”
An instant of searing eye contact, gray to gray, and Elena had the feeling she was being sized up. “Do you want to know what happened?” Evelyn asked at last.
Elena frowned, glanced at the porch—to see no one else making a move to come forward, the adults appearing as shell-shocked as the majority of the girls. Returning her attention to her sister, she fought the urge to touch her, hold her close. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
“It was awful.” A whisper, nothing but horror on that soft face that was of a child’s yet, not of the woman she would one day become. “I went into the dorm and there was blood everywhere and Celia wasn’t there even though we were supposed to meet. And I can’t find Bets—”
“You discovered this?” Feral protectiveness bared its teeth. No, she thought, no. The monsters wouldn’t steal another one of her sisters from her. “What did you see?” Her gut knotted, bile rising in her throat.
“Nothing after that,” Evelyn confessed, and the relief threatened to send Elena to her knees. “Mrs. Hill heard me scream, and she dragged me out the door almost straightaway. Then they made us all stand out here, and I heard wings ... but I didn’t see your archangel.”
At that instant, Elena glimpsed a shrewdness in those gray eyes that reminded her of Jeffrey’s. It caused a painful twisting in her chest—because she, too, was her father’s daughter, at least in some part of her soul. “I’ll take care of things,” she promised. “But I need you to go back up and stay with Amethyst until I figure out what’s going on.” It could only be a vampire gone rogue if Raphael had called for her.
Evelyn turned and ran back up to the porch, sidling up to her older sister’s stiff form.
Raphael.
For an instant, the only thing she heard was infinite silence. No deep voice laced with the arrogance of more than a thousand years of living. No rush of the wind, the rain in her head. Then it thundered, until she almost staggered under the unleashed power of it. Of him.
Fly over the first building and—
I can’t. I landed already. She wasn’t yet strong enough to achieve a vertical takeoff, something that required not only considerable muscle strength, but a great deal of skill.
Come in through the front door. You will find your way.
His certainty—knowing the only thing that could’ve caused it—made her stomach clench, her spine go stiff. It took conscious effort to sweep aside the sensations and narrow her focus to the upcoming hunt. Contracting her wings as close to her back as possible so they wouldn’t inadvertently brush against those huddled on the porch, she walked up the stairs and across aged but solid brick identical to that of the building itself.
Whispers surrounded her on every side.
“Thought she was dead—”
“—vampire—”
“I didn’t know they Made angels!”
Then came the secretive clicks that announced cell phone cameras in operation. Those pictures would hit the Web in minutes if not seconds, and the news media wouldn’t hesitate to pounce the instant after that. “Well,” she muttered under her breath, “at least that takes care of announcing my presence.” Now all she’d have to deal with was the media scrum that was sure to hit like a freaking tornado.
Whispers of iron in the air.
She jerked up her head, her senses honing in on that thread that spoke of blood and violence. Following it, she made her way down the deserted hallway carpeted in burgundy, its walls lined with class photographs spanning decades past, the students starched and pressed, and to a staircase that curved sinuously up from her left.
In spite of the fact that the building was old, its bones heavy, the corridor was filled with light. She saw the reason why when she stopped on the first step, glanced up—a magnificent glass skylight, domed and gilded with gold, and caressed by a few errant strands of ivy. The leaves looked like emeralds scattered against the glass. But that wasn’t what caught her attention.
Iron again, so rich and potent and thick that it sighed of only one thing.
Death.
“Upstairs.”
Startled, Elena turned to find herself facing a skeletal-thin woman garbed in an elegant suit that straddled the border between pale olive and deep gray. The color appeared almost harsh against skin of a pale, papery white. “I’m Adrienne Liscombe, the principal,” the stranger said at Elena’s questioning look. “I was checking to make sure all the girls got out.”
Having noticed the signs on the doors that opened off the right side of the corridor, Elena said, “This is the office building?”
“This floor,” Ms. Liscombe said, her words crisp, correct. “The second floor houses the library and work spaces for the girls. Above that are a number of dorm rooms, with further facilities on the fourth floor. We function as a home to many of our students—and the staff offices are set up as studies since a significant proportion of us also live in. A girl can come down from her room at any stage to talk to a member of the staff.”
Elena realized that notwithstanding her clear-cut enunciation, her immaculate suit, and her precise gold jewelry, the principal was rambling. Gut-wrenchingly conscious of what might have reduced a woman who gave every indication of having an almost austere toughness of spirit to such a state, she said, “Thank you, Ms. Liscombe.” Drowning as she was in the acrid scent of blood—and of thicker, more viscous fluids—it took conscious effort to make her voice gentle. “I think the girls could use your guidance outside.”
A sharp nod, light glinting off the sleek silver of her hair. “Yes, yes, I should go.”
“Wait.” The question had to be asked. “How many of your pupils are unaccounted for?”
“A full roll call hasn’t yet been taken. I’ll do it now.” Shoulders being squared, professional calm reasserting itself in response to the concrete task. “Some of the girls are away on a field trip, and we have the usual number of absences, so I’ll have to cross-check the list.”
“Please get it to us as soon as you’re able.”
“Of course.” A pause. “Celia . . . she should be here.”
“I understand.” Walking up the varnished wooden stairs that spoke of another time to the muted sounds of the principal’s retreating footsteps, Elena reminded herself to keep her wings raised. It wasn’t quite second nature yet, but she was far more adept at it than when she’d first awakened. Her original motivation had come from not wanting to have them dragging through the dust and dirt of Manhattan’s streets.
Today, she needed the reminder for a far more sinister reason.
Entering the third-floor hallway, she ignored the exquisite oil paintings that spoke of money and class to follow the stench of iron and fear to the room at the very end, a room that held an archangel with eyes of pitiless blue. “Raphael.”
She halted, tried to breathe. The cloying richness of the smell threatened to choke her as she took in the blood-drenched sheets, the pool of dark liquid edged with red on the floor, splattered on the walls, the most unspeakable graffiti. “Where’s the body?” Because there would be a body. A human being couldn’t lose this much blood and survive.
“In the woods,” he said in a tone that made the hairs on the back of her neck rise, it was so very, very, very calm. “He dragged her there to feast on her, though he spilled most of her blood here.”
Elena stiffened her spine against the flood of pity. It would do no good to Celia now—and would get in the way of what Elena could do, the justice she could help attain. “Why did you ask me to come inside?” If she was to track the vampire, her best bet would be to begin at his last known position.
“The body was discovered floating in a small pond. It’s likely he bathed in it before he left.”
Elena jerked up her head. “You’re telling me he’s thinking ?” Because water was the sole factor that could confuse the bloodhound senses of the hunter-born. Vampires caught in the grip of bloodlust—the only thing that could explain the savagery of this attack—did not think. They rampaged with unstoppable violence, were most often caught while they gorged on the blood of their victims. “Is it”—another Uram? she finished, conscious that the darkest of angelic secrets could not be spoken aloud, not here.
“No.” Raphael’s voice was, if possible, even more gentle.
Cruelty wrapped in velvet, she thought. He was riding the razor’s edge of rage.
“Find his scent, Elena. This is the place where it will be strongest.”
He was right. Anything she got near the pond would be diluted. Here, he’d killed, perhaps shed some of his own blood if the victim had been able to claw at him as she fought for her life. Taking a deep breath, Elena shut out everything—including the icy knowledge that this could have been one of her sisters—and focused on the rich strokes of scent that saturated the room.
The easiest to identify was Raphael, her anchor.
Then the metallic kiss of blood. And ... a stormy scent licked with fire.
Her eyes snapped open. “Jason was here?” Her ability to track angels continued to be wildly erratic, more often off than on, but she knew that combination of notes, knew also that it was rare for the black-winged angel to make a daylight appearance.
Yes.
Chilled by the way Raphael stared unblinking at the pool of blood, she pushed aside the question of why Raphael’s spymaster had passed through here—why, indeed, the Archangel of New York was on a scene that should’ve been filled with cops and hunters—and focused her senses once more. It was startling, what little effort it took to isolate the vampiric thread. Unlike most places in the state, this school was apparently free of vampiric employees, a humans-only zone.
No wonder Jeffrey had chosen it for his daughters.
But one vampire had invaded this sanctum, a vampire with a sickly sweet edge to his smell.
Burnt treacle . . . and slivers of glass, heavier notes of oak underneath.
Tugging on that thread, she angled her head toward the window. “That’s how he got out.” But she left the room through the door, knowing she’d never be able to squeeze out the same way, given her wings. She was aware of Raphael at her back as she found an exit and stepped outside, rounding ivy-covered walls until she stood below the window.
That particular section of wall was clear of the dark green vine. “Place has high ceilings.” Which, since the room was on the third floor, equaled the window being a considerable distance off the ground. “How did he get up?” Most vamps wouldn’t have been able to jump that high. However ... She pressed her nose to the wall, drew in a breath.
Crushed glass, oak leaves.
Then she saw the streak of red by where she’d placed her right hand, palm-down.
Dropping it, she looked around her feet as she spoke. “He climbed up and down like a fucking spider.” There was only a subset of vampires who could pull off that particular trick. “Should help narrow down his identity.”
“His name is Ignatius,” Raphael said to her surprise—just as she glimpsed droplets of dark liquid on the grass. “I felt his mind turn bloodred when I touched it.”
Elena wasn’t sure of Raphael’s range, but if he’d touched Ignatius’s mind, then there was something wrong here. “You weren’t able to execute him.” She followed the trail across the manicured green of the inner lawn, through the heavy archway carved out in the middle of the long school building at the other end, and into the woods that normally provided a serene backdrop—but today seemed an ominous mass, the leaves dull beneath a sky that had shifted from azure to dirty gray in the minutes she’d been inside.
Not answering her implied question, Raphael rose into the air as she tracked Ignatius through the woods, her wings catching on branches and thorny bushes. Wincing at the uncomfortable sensations, she tucked them even tighter to her body but didn’t slow her progress through the trees. She hesitated at one point, certain she felt the tug of something to her right, but the trail of oak and glass was vivid straight ahead.
Shaking off the impulse to turn, explore, she continued the track. Jason’s black-winged form appeared out of the looming dark of the woods less than five minutes later—he stood unmoving as stone, guarding a body that lay beside the placid waters of a small pond.
The girl was still wearing her school uniform, her entire frame soaked. Her blouse should’ve been white. It was a nauseating salmon pink, and shredded as Elena knew her flesh would’ve been shredded. Strangling the pity that threatened to derail her, Elena didn’t move toward the body—her priority was to track the killer, to make certain no other girl would end up a broken doll beside a pond that should’ve been a place of play, not a macabre bath flavored with death and horror.
You were right, she sent to Raphael, he washed in the pond, cut off the scent trail. But he would have had to get out at some point. So, leaving Jason to continue his silent vigil, she began walking across the moss-laden stones that rimmed the water gone murky with churned up silt ... and other, darker things.
It only took a minute to find him again. The scent trail was weaker, drenched in water until the oak alone remained, but that was all she needed. Drawing the crisp forest air into her lungs, she began to run, determined to hunt the vampire to ground. He was fast, she realized almost at once, glimpsing the tracks he’d left behind in the damp patches of earth caused by last night’s storm. In contrast, she was no longer as quick and agile as she’d once been, unused to running with wings.
But it wasn’t a disadvantage, not today. The vampire had slowed down maybe five hundred yards into his escape, probably figuring the water had erased his scent. It would have if he’d taken a bit more care. Then again, Raphael had said the girl’s body had been in the water, too. Her murderer had likely dragged her in there with him because he couldn’t stop feeding.
The end result was that given the small size of the pond, the blood and death had polluted it, destroying its ability to wash the vampire clean of his sickening acts of violence. Good girl, she thought, speaking to the child who lay so motionless under wings of midnight black. You marked the bastard even in death. Elena would hunt him down using that mark.
Half an hour into the run—through twisting paths that tried to muddy the trail and confirmed the vampire was rational—the sun weak and sluggish overhead, she began to feel a stitch in her side. “Damn it.” She didn’t need Raphael’s sadist of a weapons-master, Galen, to pound at her to know she wasn’t in full hunting shape.
Breathing past the stabbing pain, she snapped up her head as the shadow of wings swept along the ground in front of her—to see Raphael flying to a location just beyond the rise, his speed breathtaking.
Archangel, what do you see?
4
There was no answer, only the painful bite of ice in her veins.
Rage.
Pure and violent and cold, so cold.
“Shit.” She pushed up her pace, cursing the fact that she couldn’t do a vertical takeoff for the billionth time. It could take years to master, she’d been told—perhaps longer seeing as she hadn’t had wings since childhood. Well, fuck it, she thought. If she had to ask Galen to come to New York to torture her again every single day for the next year, she was going to learn.
Raphael dived in front of her and by the time she crested the rise, her chest heaving, he had his hand clamped around the neck of a va
mpire whose clothing remained damp enough to stick to his skin. The Archangel of New York was holding the panicked creature at least two feet off the ground with no visible effort. The vampire’s eyes bulged, blood vessels popping as he scrabbled at the hand around his throat, his legs kicking at the air in a futile attempt to escape.
“You are not in bloodlust,” she heard Raphael say in a voice so clear, it was a blade, slicing and brutalizing without mercy.
Instinct, paired with what she’d learned of Raphael in the time they’d been together, had a very bad feeling forming in the pit of her stomach. Scrambling down the rise without caring about the mud that streaked her jeans and wings both, she looked into the vampire’s face. The male’s reddened eyes were lucid . . . but for the terror in their depths. His mouth was another matter. Rimmed with dried blood that had survived his impromptu bath, it turned his face into a grotesque mask.
“Why?” Elena asked, knives in hand though she had no memory of drawing them from the sheaths strapped to her forearms. “Why did you do it?” The image of the girl’s ravaged body played over and over on the screen of her mind. That could’ve been Evelyn, could’ve been Amethyst. Her sisters. Again. The thought echoed until it was almost all she could hear.
Raphael began to squeeze the vampire’s throat. “It matters little why.” Blood trickled from one of the vampire’s eyes, a macabre tear.
“Wait.” She put her hand on the corded strength of Raphael’s forearm. “Your vampires don’t disobey you. Not like this.” They were too aware of the brutal justice of his punishments. The fact that this Ignatius had done what he had in spite of that ...