by Nalini Singh
The female archangel continued to look at Elena, her head cocked in a way that was creepily inhuman. Elena had the feeling of fingers crawling across her mind, trying to pry their way in. Bile rose in her throat, but she held her position, realizing that if Michaela had to try to find a way in, it meant Raphael was protecting her. She wasn’t stupid enough to rebuff that protection.
“So weak.” A statement almost without malice—as if Elena was simply below her notice. That scared Elena even more. Because no matter what, Michaela had always been very human in her emotions. Right now, she could have been in the Quiet.
Turning back to Galen, Michaela raised a hand. Galen swayed as if hit by a blow, but stood his ground. Michaela laughed, made a hard slicing motion. This time, the big, heavily muscled angel slammed into the wall, saving his wings only by dint of twisting his body so he hit that wall face-first.
Blood smeared the stone, but Elena’s attention was on Venom. The vampire had struck while Michaela’s attention was on Galen, burying his fangs in the archangel’s neck the moment after Galen hit the wall. Elena released her blade at the same instant. It hit home on the other side of Michaela’s neck.
Screaming in rage, Michaela tore Venom off, throwing him so hard, he ended up motionless and twisted at the other end of the corridor. Then she reached up to pull the knife out as if it was nothing more than a toothpick, her arteries sealing up before Elena’s eyes. The knife hit the floor with a metallic sound as she lifted a finger at Elena. “Which limb would you like to lose first?”
Jesus. Jesus. Elena knew there was no way she could stop Michaela when two much older immortals had failed—the archangel would crush her heart before she managed to get to the gun, much less pull the trigger. Where are you, Raphael?
The sea crashed into her mind, a violent storm. I’m on my way. Keep her calm. If she releases her power, it’ll destroy the Refuge itself.
Making a split-second decision, Elena wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, the cuts on her lips still seeping blood. “I’ll take you to Sam.”
The female archangel waited.
The hairs on the back of her neck rising in primitive warning, Elena took the lead, hearing the whisper of Michaela’s dress as she followed. Galen and Venom are both down. Galen’s eyes had blinked open in the last few seconds, but Venom looked bad, really bad. I think she broke his spine, maybe his neck. And a vampire could die from a broken neck if enough other damage had been done.
He’s not dead yet.
The last word was curt. A chill curled around her heart. She’d never thought she’d mourn his loss, but Venom had shown himself willing to lay down his life to protect a child. It made him better, far better, than an archangel who’d level the Refuge while enraged with power. It reminded her too much of another archangel—one bloated with toxin. Just how much of Uram did Michaela carry?
Heart thudding, Elena stopped in front of the glass enclosure where Sam lay in peaceful sleep. She saw Keir arrive out of the corner of her eye and tried to warn him off with a frantic movement of her hand, but Keir shook his head. “Sam’s resting,” he said in an easy tone, as if an archangel wasn’t about to go nuclear beside them. “The healing is progressing extremely well.”
“He won’t be scarred?”
Elena found Michaela’s question peculiar until she realized Michaela wasn’t talking about the boy’s superficial injuries.
“No, there’ll be no permanent damage.” Keir put an arm on Michaela’s, braving the heat that blazed from her skin. “He’ll grow up as he should.”
Elena watched Michaela place her hand on the glass. “He’s so fragile.” The blaze faded in a slow wave. “So breakable.”
“Children always are,” Keir said, his tone gentle, his eyes ancient in that youthful face. “It’s a risk we take.”
“Too much,” Michaela whispered. “The risk is too much.”
The tableau froze in Elena’s mind—an archangel of impossible beauty dressed in blood, her hand lying on the glass, her fingers trembling with emotions that brought tears to Elena’s throat. What would Michaela have been, she wondered, if she hadn’t lost her child? Would the selfishness that touched her every move have matured into something better? Or would she have become another Neha, creating her child as a poisonous mirror?
“Better to break their necks when they’re born.”
Elena slid out the gun. If Michaela made a single move, she’d empty the entire clip into the archangel’s wings before Michaela could turn, use her powers to disarm Elena. Because given the choice of a possible ricochet versus certain death for Sam, she’d chance the ricochet.
“Don’t you think so?” the archangel said to Keir in a voice that was jarring in its thoughtfulness.
“We do not kill our young.”
Silence. When the archangel drew back from the glass, her face was as Elena had always seen it—perfection without mercy. Turning away with a nod to Keir, she left in a sweep of bronze wings and white silk stained dark red, her beauty imprinting an afterimage that was hard to ignore.
Elena let out a shuddering breath. She’s gone.
Take Keir to Venom.
Elena was already moving in that direction, Keir at her side. They arrived to find Galen—his face a mess of blood and torn skin—kneeling beside the fallen vampire. “He’s severely injured. Snapped spine, fractured skull, collapsed lung. His heart may have been pierced by a broken rib.”
“He bit Michaela,” Elena said, not sure if that made any difference.
“Then he likely discharged the poison in his fangs.” Keir began to run featherlight fingers over Venom’s body. “That’ll make him easier to handle.”
“Can his poison harm an angel?”
“Not in an enduring way,” Galen responded, “but it causes violent pain in most.”
“He’s dying.” Sitting back on his heels, his face white with strain, Keir nodded at Galen. “Will you carry him to the treatment room?”
Galen slid his arms beneath Venom’s broken body. Elena bit back her negative response, born of the mortal knowledge that said the victim of a spinal cord injury shouldn’t be moved. Keir surely knew a lot more about treating such injuries in vampires than she ever would. As they moved to the room, she felt the scent of the sea, the wind, fill her mind. Relief kicked her like a bucking horse. “Raphael’s here.”
But could even an archangel save a vampire so broken? What would it do to Raphael to lose one of his Seven?
31
Elena was wiping the blood off her cheeks when Raphael left Venom’s room. “I have need of your gifts, Elena.”
She put down the damp towel she’d found in one of the empty treatment rooms. Her face still hurt, but not as much as it would have if she’d still been human—healing had already begun on some level. “The dead angel?”
A nod.
“Venom—is he . . . ?”
“He’s not easy to kill.”
They didn’t speak on the flight to the body. The site where it lay was a huge tumble of rocks. Making a quick appraisal of the dangerous, uneven area, she realized landing was going to be problematic. Pride might have led her to attempt it anyway, but she was supremely conscious that right now, Raphael needed her functional, capable of doing a task only she could. A little help.
Changing position so he flew above her, Raphael ordered her to fold her wings. It was surprisingly hard to go against her newborn instincts, but she managed to snap them shut. Raphael caught her before she could even begin to fall, taking her down to a perfect landing on the nearest stable piece of rock.
“Thanks.” Mind already on the body, she shifted closer. From above, it had appeared as if the angel had been thrown onto the rocks, his bones shattered, his limbs so damaged that not all were whole. Now, she saw that his head had been separated from his torso, his chest a gaping hole missing not just his heart, but all his internal organs.
“Someone wanted to make very sure he wouldn’t rise.” The angel’s rib cag
e gleamed in the mountain sunlight, his blood no longer wet but holding a hard sheen that had her leaning forward in frowning concentration. “It’s like his body’s turning to stone.” The carapace of dark red was strangely beautiful.
“It’s an illusion,” Raphael said. “His cells are trying to repair the damage.”
She jerked back. “He’s still alive?”
“No. But it takes a long time for an immortal to truly die.”
“It’s not immortality is it? If you can die?”
“Compared to a human life . . .”
Yes. “So cut off the head, remove the organs for extra insurance.”
“His brain was also removed.”
Elena stared at the head. “It looks whole.” She reached forward, then drew back. “I really can’t catch anything?” she asked, her fingers curling into her palms as she neared blood-matted hair that might’ve once been blond.
“No.” But he was already crouching on the other side of the body, his hand lifting up what remained of the angel’s head.
The back of it was gone. An empty husk. Feeling her face heat with a wave of disbelief, she nodded at him to put it back down. “Thorough job.”
He placed it on the rock, face up. “His name was Aloysius. Four hundred and ten years old.”
It was somehow harder, when you had a name. Taking a deep breath, she began to separate the scents. There were so many. “A lot of angels have been down here.” And it looked as if her developing angel-sense was functioning just fine today.
“There was hope he might be able to be revived until his brain was discovered to be missing.”
She stared at Raphael across the body that was nothing but the emptiest of shells. He had told her, but—“The victim honestly could’ve survived the rest of it?”
“Immortality isn’t always pretty.” An answer that left no room for ambiguity. “He was most likely conscious while his organs were being removed.”
Swallowing, she shook her head. “I’m too young for that, right? If someone decides to fillet me, I’ll lose consciousness?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She wasn’t the giving up kind, but neither did she want to know what it did to a person to survive this kind of torture. “Given the blood splatter, he was dropped from a fairly impressive height.” She was trying not to think too hard about what might be sticking to the soles of her shoes—the M.E. would have had her behind bars for compromising a scene like this, but she salved her conscience with the fact that the scene was already so compromised it was worthless to anyone but a hunter-born.
“However,” she continued, “it wasn’t so high that it tore his body completely apart—do you have any way of knowing if he had his organs at that stage?” It was impossible to tell in all the gore.
“Yes.” Raphael pointed to the open chest cavity. “Some of them left pieces behind.” He reached in and picked up what appeared to be a hard pink stone, ragged at the edges. The stone gleamed a deep rose quartz in the sunlight. “A segment of his liver.”
Goose bumps broke out over her skin. “Are you sure he can’t feel that?”
“He’s dead. What his body is doing, it’s akin to a chicken running around after its head has been cut off.”
“A nerve response.” It made sense that it took longer for an older immortal to fade.
Returning the stone to the chest cavity, Raphael pointed at the head. “Parts of the brain were also found scattered on the rocks.”
She was going to throw away these shoes the instant she got home. “That hard an impact would’ve turned his organs pretty much into soup,” she said. “Wouldn’t that make it more difficult to remove them?”
“Not if the ‘surgeon’ waited for him to heal enough for the organs to become viable again.”
She’d been handling the gore fine, but ice filled her veins at the cold-blooded nature of the kill. “Jesus.”
“Use your senses, hunter.” It was a gentle reminder. “The wind is holding but it can change without warning.”
Shaking off her horror, she began to filter out the scents she already knew—separating the good guys from the bad could come later. She was midway through the process when her angel-sense cut out without warning, leaving a single clean thread behind. “A vampire was here.”
“Not with the rescue team,” Raphael said, his expression intent.
“Means he was here before.” Trying not to gag on the sickly sweet smell of the body in front of her—a body that didn’t smell like death should—she arrowed her senses to that vampiric thread.
Cedar painted with ice, an unusual scent, full of elegance.
Her eyes snapped open. “Riker. Riker was here.”
Raphael found Michaela hours later, high in the night sky above her home, her body clad in a catsuit that turned her into a sleek, dangerous predator. There was no hint of the insanity Elena and Galen had both seen in her, her body as clean and as lushly graceful as always.
“Raphael,” she said, coming to a vertical hover beside him. “Are you here to warn me off your hunter again?”
Elena, Raphael thought, might see in Michaela’s past a hurt that had turned her bitter, but Raphael had known the young angel she’d been, her ambition a pyre on which she’d sacrifice anything. “You walked into the Medica with the intent to do harm.”
A smile coated with the purest malice. “There was no intent until your pet hunter and her friends got in my way.”
“You injured several healers on your way in. And you waited until after you knew Elena was inside.”
“Does it not disgust you?” she whispered, her voice sliding from poison to purring sensuality in the blink of an eye. “That she’s so weak?”
“Power without conscience rots the soul,” he told her, watching her eyes harden even as her lips remained uptilted in a smile that promised the darkest of sins, the most excruciating of pleasures. He thought of Uram, falling into the trap of that smile, the selfish beauty of that mind—but then, the dead archangel had chosen his path long before Michaela was even born. “Why did you kill Aloysius?”
“Clever, Raphael.” A small bow of her head, genuine delight in her eyes. “He was one of mine, became mine when I took over part of Uram’s territory.”
“What did he do to merit such an execution?” As the archangel who ruled his territory, Michaela had had the right to put Aloysius to death, but to have that death come at the hands of one of the Made—a vampire who’d likely been allowed to feed from the dying angel—was a ritual humiliation.
Michaela’s green eyes turned into narrow slits of light. “He helped abduct Sam.”
Any sympathy Raphael might’ve felt for Aloysius died a quick and permanent death. “Did you take his memories?”
“Useless.” She slashed out a hand. “He was a bit player, a gullible sheep in this faceless would-be archangel’s army.”
“Were you able to discover anything that may lead to the identity of the one we seek?”
“No. Aloysius was but a pawn.”
Raphael saw the truth in the small smile that flirted with her lips. It was cold, merciless, satisfied. “You lost your temper, killed him before taking all his memories.”
“He laughed while he put Sam in that box.” A thin line of red circled her irises. “I saw it when I looked into his mind.”
“Is that when you dropped him?”
“Yes.” A shrug. “I’d already broken his wings. Riker took care of the rest.”
Raphael reined in his frustration. “How did you discover his involvement?”
“He was afraid his master had come to see him as expendable, couldn’t keep from spilling his fears to his lover.” A slow smile, that of a snake in the grass. “And loyalty is such a rare commodity when riches are involved.”
Elena felt almost surreally calm as she stepped onto the plane the next day. They were flying to Beijing two days ahead of the ball itself, would arrive one day before the other archangels. “Venom?” she asked.
“Good.” She gripped the armrests. “I feel for Michaela, I do.” Losing a child . . . she couldn’t imagine the pain.
Her father had lost two daughters.
Because of Elena.
Swallowing the pain-lashed guilt that sat like a stone on her chest, she turned to look at the archangel she called her own. “But she was out of it at the hospital. All it would’ve taken was one conversation with you and there would’ve been no violence.”
“You’re expecting her to act human, Elena.” An answer laced with cold. “Archangels aren’t used to asking permission for anything.”
She was no longer the same woman who’d woken from the coma, their relationship a complete mystery. She knew pieces of him now. Enough to ask, “What’s wrong?”
Raphael glanced at her with eyes that had gone that metallic shade that never augured anything good. “What Michaela did to Aloysius? I wouldn’t have been that merciful.”
Her palms grew damp. “You call that mercy?”
“He died quickly.” Frost in that gaze, a chill immortal winter. “I would’ve kept him alive for days while I tore his mind apart.”
She blew out an unsteady breath. “Why are you telling me?”
You need to know who I am.
Elena thought of that, gave him her answer. “If Slater Patalis was standing in front of me, I’d do the same.”
Raphael ran the back of his hand over her cheek. “No, Elena. I think your anger is a far hotter flame.”
Reaching up, she tangled their fingers together. “I’ll try to stop you if it ever comes to that.”
“Why? Do you pity those who’d harm the innocent?”
“No.” She brought their clasped hands to her lips. “I care about you.”
Raphael felt the cold in him shift, begin to heat from within. “So you’ll try to save me.”
“I think it’ll be mutual.” A voice husky with shadowed memories. She’d woken on a scream again today, her mind locked inside a horror almost two decades in the past.