by Nalini Singh
However, the other scent, the fresh apples and the snow, that wasn’t a vampire. The composition of it was unique, unlike anything she’d ever before tasted. She did a double check. No, categorically not a vamp. And not, as she’d first thought, merely a magnification of the scents floating in the atmosphere. It was another person.
The fresh, exhilarating bite of the sea. Wind scouring her cheeks.
A taste of spring, sunlight, and freshly mown grass.
And beneath it all, the flickering, familiar taste of fur against her tongue.
But it wasn’t Dmitri playing with her this time. “Who lives here?” she managed to ask through the chaos of impressions. “Snow and apples and fur and spring.” It made no sense, but Raphael was in her mind almost before she finished speaking. She fought her instinctive attempt to repel him, realizing he needed to know what she’d picked up.
Sam is the snow and the apples, his father the fur, his mother the spring.
Her heart froze in her chest as she met the excruciating blue of his eyes. “Where’s Sam?”
“Taken.”
The tiny female angel lifted a fist to her mouth, her hand so small it could’ve been that of a child’s. “Find my son, Guild Hunter.” The same words, said by Raphael, would’ve been an order. From this woman, they were a plea.
“I will.” It was a promise and a vow. Hunkering down, she drew in the scents again, then stood, angling her head like the bloodhound she was.
The faintest trace of oranges.
Following the tug, she walked past Raphael and Sam’s mother to place her hand on the back doorknob. The scent rocked through her. “Yes,” she whispered, her hunter senses singing in recognition. Pulling open the door, she stepped out . . . into nothing.
14
She’d fallen before. But then, she’d been held in the arms of an archangel. This time, there was nothing between her and the unyielding embrace of the rocks below. Panic threatened but was beaten into submission by her will to live. Elena P. Deveraux had never given up yet.
Gritting her teeth, she spread out her wings. They faltered, still weaker than necessary for flight, but managed to slow her descent. Not enough, she thought, her eyes tearing against the wind, her back muscles starting to spasm. Even an immortal—especially a young immortal—couldn’t survive such a crippling fall.
Her body would be shredded by the velocity of the impact, her head separated from her body. That killed vampires. And Raphael had said—“Oh!” A wash of powerful air that sent her spiraling, terror a shock through her bloodstream. Then arms grabbing hold of her with a steely strength she’d never mistake for anyone but Raphael’s.
They fell several more feet, their velocity accelerated by the impact, before Raphael steadied and they began to rise in a storm of speed. She wrapped her arms around his neck, shaking with relief. “Seems like you’re always catching me when I fall.”
His answer was a hard squeeze.
They landed on an empty section of the cliff, the nearest angelic home hidden from sight by the jutting teeth of the craggy rock face. “Okay, lesson number one,” she said, trying to relearn to breathe as Raphael put her down, “never assume there’s going to be earth beneath my feet.”
“You must stop thinking like a human.” Raphael’s voice was a whip. “It could’ve gotten you killed today.”
She jerked up her head. “I can’t simply stop. It’s all I’ve ever known.”
“Then learn.” He gripped her chin between his fingers. “Or you’ll die.”
Her first instinct was to strike back, but something stopped her. Perhaps it was the more important life at stake, or perhaps it was the way his wings came around her, sheltering her from the snow-laced wind even as he spoke to her in such anger. “I need to get back inside,” she said, “see if I made a mistake in the track.”
Raphael held onto her chin for another second before placing his lips over hers. They were still locked in the angry relief of the kiss as he rose into the air, flying her to the front entrance of Sam’s home. Shaken but determined, she walked through the house, every sense on alert . . . and came to the same conclusion.
“He went out through there,” Elena said, glad Sam’s mother was no longer in the room. It was impossible for Elena to look at her and not remember another mother’s anguish in a small suburban home almost two decades ago.
“That means he had an angelic accomplice.” Raphael’s voice was toneless—and all the more terrifying for it. In this mood, the Archangel of New York might kill without remorse, torture without compassion. “You picked up the members of Sameon’s family—can you separate out the angel’s scent?”
“Raphael,” she asked, needed to ask, “are you going Quiet?” He’d become someone she didn’t know in those terrifying hours before she’d shot him, an archangel who’d stalked her across New York, relentless in his menace.
No.
Her heart still erratic with fear—for him, for what the Quiet might take from him if he fell into it again—she returned to the now open doorway, attempting to intentionally trigger what appeared to be an extension of her abilities.
Spring and fur.
Apples dusted with fresh sno—
A crackle of white noise.
Disappointment stabbed her, harsh, final. “If my Making altered my hunter senses, the change isn’t complete. It seems to be cutting in and out.” She shoved a hand through her hair, falling back on her training and experience. “He likely didn’t touch the door in any case—the vampire’s scent was too rich, too strong to have been diluted.” Looking down into the inky depths of the ravine, she felt her cheeks turn to ice. “How strong would an angel have to be to catch someone if they knew that individual was about to jump?”
“No one younger than three hundred.” His wing brushed hers as they stood side by side, staring at the dense blackness. “I’ll begin sweeps of the area.” And then he said what she hadn’t been able to articulate. “There’s a chance the fall wasn’t successfully executed.”
Elena’s whole being rebelled against the idea of Sam’s small body lying irrevocably broken in the cold dark. “If those bastards have hurt him, I’ll gut them myself.”
That is why you’re mine, Elena.
Watching as he stepped out into the night air, she closed the door and walked back to the front. All the angels were gone, but a vampire moved out of the shadows as she exited the house. His skin was a shade that drew the eye, inviting tactile contact—a dark, dark brown with an undertone of true gold. The color was so rich, so warm that it shimmered even as the moon slid behind a cloud, enveloping the Refuge in purest night. But his eyes, a brilliant, impossible silver, pierced the darkness as if it didn’t exist. Hair of the same shade as his eyes fell around his face, sleek and cut in jagged lines that accentuated the angle of his jaw.
“A tiger,” she whispered, watching him walk to her, though to call it a walk was a gross disservice. His stride was the fluid, silent prowl of the animal she sensed around him. “You have the scent of a tiger on the hunt.” Rich, vibrant, deadly.
“I am Naasir.” His voice was cultured, his words gracious, but those metallic eyes watched her with unblinking focus. “Dmitri asked me to assist you.”
“You’re one of the Seven.” There was power in Naasir, not like Dmitri’s—sensual and lethal—but sharply feral, as if that exquisite, strokable skin was nothing but a mask for the predator within.
“Yes.”
The clouds parted, throwing a beam of moonlight onto his face. And she realized the vampire’s eyes reflected as brilliantly as a cat’s. Impossible. But Naasir wasn’t the mystery she had to solve tonight. “I’m going to start canvassing the area,” she said, “see if I can find a landing point.” It’d be a crapshoot given how far angels could fly, but she needed to do something.
“Dmitri’s organizing the vampires and younger angels into a similar search.”
And, Elena thought, they’d cover ground far faster than she could—e
specially when she had no starting point for a scent-track. But she needed to do something. Looking away from Naasir’s unblinking stare, she found her eye caught by a needlelike formation in the distance. Her heart ricocheted off her ribs. “How well do you know the Refuge?”
“Very.”
“Show me to Michaela’s section.” Raphael had been ruthless with the other archangel’s humiliation. Maybe the angel who’d brutalized Noel had crawled back out of his hole . . . or maybe Michaela had decided on payback, striking at the heart of those who looked to Raphael for protection.
“This way.” Naasir began to move with the preternatural grace of a being at home in the night.
She could only just keep up with what she guessed was a crawl for him.
Stepping out into an open area a few minutes later, he raised his arm in some kind of a signal before turning to her. “Michaela’s home is far on foot.”
Elena felt her spine lock as Illium landed less than three feet from them. She trusted no one but Raphael to carry her. Not only did she have a problem with trust, the act seemed too intimate, too close. Especially given the near painful sensitivity of her wings. However, tonight, there was a far more pragmatic reason for her reluctance. “I go up,” she said, “I might miss the vampire’s scent on the ground if he wasn’t flown straight to Michaela’s.”
Illium held out a hand. “It’ll be much quicker for you to fly to Michaela’s, check the grounds, then return.”
Knowing he was right, she squelched her personal reluctance and went to him, aware of Naasir vanishing into the dark. “Is it me or is Naasir about as tame as your average mountain lion?”
“Compared to him, the lions are tabby cats.” Illium closed his arms around her waist as she wrapped hers around his neck, her wings held tight to her spine. It made her easier to carry—and it hid the incredibly sensitive inner curve where her wings grew out of her back.
“Your bruises.”
“Don’t drop me because you’re worried about holding on too hard.”
“I won’t let you fall.” It was an intimate whisper against her ear as he rose into the air.
“Famous last words,” she muttered, the wind whipping the hair off her face, threatening to steal her breath, her words.
“You’re spoiled, Ellie. You’re used to being carried by an archangel.” He skimmed under several other angels, heading toward an elegant group of buildings on a relatively smooth piece of ground. The land around the buildings was lit with delicately shaped metal lanterns, the paths a lilting melody of form and function.
“Are there gardens down there?” she asked, Illium’s breath warm against her cheek as he bent his head to catch her question.
“She rarely visits, but Michaela’s gardens are famed in the Refuge. Even in the cold, she finds things that will grow, sometimes even bloom.”
Bloom.
Her mind cascaded with images from the garden of wildflowers—blood-soaked petals littering the ground, maimed bodies crushing the flowers, and most powerful of all, the setting sun glinting off Illium’s sword as he amputated wings with merciless efficiency. She wondered if those angels were still there, lying forsaken in the dark.
“She may be many things—cruel, malicious, selfish,” Illium murmured as he brought them to a smooth landing on the outer terrace of Michaela’s home, “but I don’t think the Queen of Constantinople would harm a child.”
“You didn’t see the look in her eyes at the pavilion.” Stepping out of Illium’s arms, she wasn’t surprised to see Riker appear in front of the closed doorway. She’d picked up his scent—cedar painted with ice, evocative and unexpected—the instant they landed. “Hello, Riker.” It took effort to keep her voice civil—the last time she’d seen Michaela’s favorite guard, he’d been pinned to a wall, his heart skewered by the torn-off leg of a table, but the time before that, he’d tried to play a very nasty game with her.
Riker stared at her in that way he had—cold-blooded as any reptile. “You’re in my mistress’s territory. You have no protection here.”
“I’m looking for Sam,” Elena said. “Illium tells me Michaela wouldn’t hurt a child, so I’m hoping she’ll give us permission to search the grounds—in case the vampire passed through here.”
“My mistress has no need of your approval.”
Elena shoved her hand through her hair, attempting to keep her tone temperate though a helpless urgency pumped through her blood. “Look,” she said, “I’m not here to pick a fight. And if your mistress truly cares about the young, she won’t be happy to find that you blocked us.”
Riker didn’t move, those reptilian eyes never shifting off her.
Feeling time slipping through her fingers, she was about to ask Illium if he could simply fly her over the grounds so she could see if the scent lingered in the air, when Riker reached for the doorknob. “The mistress will allow you to walk through the house.”
Surprised, Elena made no delay in following Riker, with Illium at her back. Michaela’s home took her breath away—the entranceway alone was worthy of the term “work of art”; the tiles beneath her feet were ebony veined with quartz, the walls on either side painted with scenes that sent the mind soaring. Elena was no sophisticate, but even she recognized the artist. “Michelangelo?”
“If he did,” Illium murmured, “he’d have forgotten it the moment he left. No mortal must know of the Refuge.”
And yet, Elena thought, Sara did. Her heart squeezed. She knew Raphael had allowed it because of—and for—her, taking a far bigger step than she’d ever have expected of the archangel she’d met on that windswept roof in New York. “He remembered somewhere deep in his soul,” she said, checking out a room that flowed off the entranceway.
It proved clean. She picked up the scents of several other vampires as they continued to walk, but not even a flicker of the one she’d sensed in that small kitchen drowning in the salt of a mother’s tears. But they’d barely scratched the surface. Looking up at the soaring central core, she put her hand on the banister. “I need to go upstairs.”
“You will keep your distance from the mistress’s quarters.”
“Fine.” If Michaela was protecting the vampire, it wouldn’t do any good for Elena to go barging in and get both herself and Illium killed before they’d gotten Sam out of danger. All she had to do was find the merest trace of scent.
But the second floor proved as pristine and as elegant as the first, each sculpture placed in exactly the right position to enhance the overall grace of the house, the rugs beneath her feet drenched with color. It was as she was crossing the ruby and cream one near the second set of stairs that it hit her.
Oranges dipped in chocolate.
Her entire body stiffened. Spinning on her heel, she sprinted down a hallway that Riker had specifically warned her not to enter, instinct overriding common sense. This was what she’d been born to do, her senses honed to—
An arm around her waist, pulling her back against a firm, muscled chest, her wings screaming against the overload of sensation. “Riker would like nothing better than to have a legitimate excuse to kill you.” Illium’s voice, that faint British accent laced with a steely thread of warning.
“Right.” She shook her head to clear it, suddenly aware of Michaela’s favorite vampire standing only inches from her side. And she’d let him get that close, she’d been so blinded by the compulsion to follow the scent, to bring back the child. “Right.”
Illium continued to hold her until she pushed at his hands and took a step to the left, creating more distance between her and Riker. “Raphael?”
“It’s done.” Eyes the rich, unique color of Venetian gold looked into hers. “He won’t be long.”
Elena had to fist her hands, grit her teeth, to fight the thundering need to run after that fading scent. Riker stood on Illium’s other side. But his eyes, they never moved off her. The hairs on the back of her neck rose. Michaela had obviously never rescinded the order she’d once given Riker—
to kill Elena.
“You run to your master,” the vampire said without warning. “Like a child.”
“Raphael is my lover, not my master.” She cursed herself for responding to the barb the instant the words left her mouth.
“Is that what you think?” he said, and it was a croon, soft and mocking in its sweetness. “They call you his pet.”
Her spine went rigid, the words too close to the ones Raphael had said to her when she’d woken. “How’s that purse your mistress had made?” she asked, reminding him that Michaela had once flayed the skin off his back, then cured it. “She still taking good care of it?”
“The best.” His tone didn’t change, and that was the creepiest thing of all. Riker was so far in the abyss that he liked it. “Your master comes.”
Refusing to respond to the taunt, she waited until Raphael walked up to stand beside her. “Michaela is not pleased,” were his first words.
“Do you care?”
We’re in her home, Elena. The rules of Guesthood apply. She tried to temper her tone, but it was difficult, her hunter senses shoving at her with escalating force. “I can smell the vampire who took Sam. The scent leads that way.”
“Follow it.” Michaela is furious, but she wishes to see you humiliated more.
Then she’s going to be disappointed. But it niggled at her, that the other archangel would be so sure of Elena’s failure, because the vampire who’d abducted Sam had been here, no ifs, no buts. The tart bite of orange, the sweetness of chocolate—she could all but taste it.
It was so pungent, so rich, she almost missed the scent hidden beneath.
Snow falling on apples.
15
“Sam.” It was less than a whisper as she began running, far more interested in that gentle scent than the one that had drawn her here. The hallway ended at a door, a heavily carved slab that had been varnished until it glowed darkest amber.
Her palms slammed up against it as she came to a halt. “He’s behind here.”