by Nalini Singh
“Do what you must. Ours are the only eyes that’ll see this.”
She swallowed. “And their families?”
“Would you leave them with this image of suffering?” A cold blade of anger in every word. “Or a story of a sudden plane crash or car accident in which the body was destroyed beyond recognition?”
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Deluged with blood and death on every side, her brain struggled to fight the memories of old horrors, things no amount of time would wipe away. “He didn’t drain the others. Just these three.”
“The others were for play.”
And somehow, she knew the evil that had butchered the ones above had done so in front of the living girls, shoving terror through them, feeding on their fear. She stepped nearer the drained girls, having skirted the dripping nightmare above. Going down on her haunches, she moved long black hair away from a slender neck. “In cases where a human dies, I usually get the strongest scent impression at the point where blood was taken,” she said, talking to drown out the pervading, endless sound of blood hitting concrete. “Oh, Jesus.”
Raphael was suddenly on the other side of the bodies, his wings flared out in a way that struck her as odd . . . until she realized he was attempting to keep them out of the blood. He hadn’t been wholly successful. A bright red splash marked the tip of one wing. She looked away, forcing her gaze back down to the shredded neck of the girl who’d looked so peaceful from a distance. “This wasn’t a feed,” she said. “It’s like he tore out her neck.” Remembering Michaela’s “delivery,” her eyes dipped. The girl’s heart, too, was gone, ripped out of her chest.
“A feed would’ve been too slow,” Raphael said, continuing to keep his wings off the floor. “He must’ve been starving by this point. He needed a bigger hole than the fangs provide.”
The clinical description actually helped calm her. “Let’s see if I can pick up his scent.” Tightening every muscle in her body, she leaned close to the dead girl’s neck and breathed deep.
Cinnamon and apples.
Soft, sweet, body cream.
Blood.
Skin.
A jagged lash of acid. Sharp. A scent with bite. Interesting. Full of layers. Pungent but not putrid.
That was what always amazed her. When vampires went bad, they didn’t magically gain an evil scent. They smelled the same as they always had. If Dmitri went bad, he’d retain his allure, his seductive chocolate cake and frosting and sex with all the toppings kind of smell. “I have it, I think.” But she had to confirm.
Standing, she waited until Raphael had risen before gritting her teeth and stepping below the abattoir hanging from the ceiling. She took every step with slow deliberation, knowing she might just run screaming from this warehouse if touched by even a single drop of cold blood.
Drip.
A splash by her foot. Close, too close.
“Far enough,” she whispered and then went absolutely still, sorting through the scent layers once more. It was harder here, much harder. Terror had a scent, too—sweat and urine and tears and darker fluids—and it overlaid everything in this area. Like a thick perfume that had been sprayed with wild abandon, cloaking anything more subtle.
She dug down, but the terror was a choking grip around her throat, a hand clamped over her mouth, stopping her from sensing anything else. “How long ago did they die?”
“We estimate two to three hours, perhaps less.”
Her head jerked up. “You found the location so soon?”
“He made a lot of noise toward the end.” A tone so glacial, she barely heard Raphael in it, and yet it was chill with rage, not like when he’d been Quiet. “A neighborhood vampire called Dmitri after coming to investigate.”
“You told me this morning I’d be earning my paycheck. You expected this?”
“I knew only that Uram had to be reaching a critical point.” His eyes moved over the nightmare. “This . . . no, I did not expect this.”
She didn’t think anyone could have—it was something that simply shouldn’t exist. And yet it did. “The vampire—what will happen to him?”
“I’ll take his memories, make sure he remembers nothing.” Said without the least apology.
She wondered if that was what he planned for her, but this wasn’t the time to ask. Instead, she set her shoulders and dug deeper. Nothing. “There’s too much fear here. I’ll have to go with what I got from the body.” Stepping away with as much care as she’d entered, she tried not to think about what hung above.
Drip.
A drop of blood splashed off the shiny black of her boot. Her gorge rose. Turning, she ran, not caring if it betrayed weakness. The damn door had been pulled down behind them and now refused to open. Her hand slid off the hot metal. She was at screaming point when it shifted a fraction. She fell to her stomach and squeezed out into the dead earth of the yard.
The sun shone bright overhead as she stood bent over, retching. She was aware of Raphael coming to stand beside her, his wings spreading out to shade her from the sun. She waved him down. She craved the heat—her soul was cold, so icy cold.
She didn’t know how long she stood there bent in half, but when she rose, it was to the awareness of being watched. The vampires she’d sent from the warehouse? Illium? Watching the hunter lose her breakfast.
Her mouth tasted disgusting as she used the edge of her T-shirt to wipe at her lips. She wasn’t the least bit embarrassed. To see that and not be affected . . . it would’ve made her a monster akin to the killer who’d anointed her in blood before she’d even been old enough to date.
“Tell me why,” she said, voice husky.
“Later.” A command. “Search for him.”
He was right, of course. The scent would fade if she didn’t hurry. Not replying, she kicked some loose dirt over her recently lost breakfast and began to jog slowly around the warehouse, attempting to pick up Uram’s exit point. Most vampires used doors but you could never tell. And this killer had wings.
A sharp bite of acid.
She halted, finding herself in front of a small side entrance. From the outside, it looked normal, but when she tugged it open, she found the inside covered with bloody handprints. Too small to have been made by a man of Uram’s size. She followed the line of sight . . . and saw the hanging shadows deep in the warehouse.
She slammed the door shut. “He let them run, let them think they had a chance to escape.”
Raphael stayed silent as she zigzagged out from the doorway.
“Nothing,” she said. “His scent is there because one of the girls managed to get out and he had to retrieve her.” She bent down to stare at the brown grass. “Dried blood,” she said, swallowing past the raw flesh of her throat. “Poor kid actually managed to crawl this far.” She frowned. “There’s too much blood.”
Beside her, Raphael went very still. “You’re right. There’s a trail leading away from the door.”
She knew his eyesight was keener than hers. Like raptors, angels could reputedly see the tiniest of details even during flight. “It can’t be Uram’s,” she murmured. “I’d have scented it.” She followed Raphael as he walked the trail—she could no longer see anything past the first few feet. “Did he drag a body out here, maybe?” They were at the chain-link fence. She went down, examined the small hole at the bottom. “There’s blood on the edges of the metal.” Excitement slammed into her, a two-fisted punch.
“I’ll have to fly across.”
As he winged over, Elena found another hole to push through. The blood was more obvious on the other side—there was no grass to hide it, just hard-packed dirt. Her excitement turned into an almost painful hope. “Someone crawled through that hole.” Rising to her feet, she found herself staring at the closed door of a small shed. It looked like it might once have been a guard station for the abandoned parking lot behind it.
There was blood on the door.
“Wait here,” Raphael ordered.
She gripped the closest part of him—his wing. “No.”
The look he shot her was not friendly. “Elena—”
“If we have a survivor, seeing an angel is going to freak her out.” She let go of his wing. “I’ll check first. She’s probably dead, but just in case . . .”
“She lives.” An absolute statement. “Go. Get her. We can’t waste time.”
“A life is not a waste of time.” Her hand fisted hard enough that she knew she’d have crescent-shaped marks in the flesh of her palms.
“Uram will kill thousands if we don’t stop him. And he’ll get more and more depraved with each kill.”
Snapshots of the mutilated bodies inside the warehouse cascaded through her mind. “I’ll hurry.” Reaching the guard station, she took a deep breath. “I’m a hunter,” she said loudly. “I’m human.” Then she pulled open the door, making sure to stay out of the line of fire in case the person inside had a weapon.
Pure silence.
Using the utmost care, she looked around and . . . into the face of a small woman with darkly slanted eyes. The woman was naked but for the rust red stain of blood, her arms gripping her raised knees as she rocked soundlessly, blind to anything but the terrors of her mind.
24
“My name is Elena,” she said softly, wondering if the woman even knew she was there. “You’re safe now.”
No response.
Backing out, she looked to Raphael. “She needs medical attention.”
“Illium will take her to our healer.” He came closer but the woman started whimpering at the first glimpse of his wings, her muscles locking so tight Elena knew they’d have to break her bones to release them.
“No.” She stood to block the view. “It needs to be one of the vampires. No wings.”
His mouth was a flat line, whether in anger or impatience, she couldn’t tell. But he didn’t seize control of the woman’s mind. “I’ve asked Dmitri to come. He’ll take care of her.”
Her heart froze. “As in kill her?”
“Perhaps she would welcome mercy.”
“You’re not God, to make that decision.”
Raphael’s face was a study in silence. “No harm will come to her while you are gone.”
She read between the lines. “And when I return?”
“Then I will decide if she dies or lives.” Eyes of blue fire. “She might be infected, Elena. We must test her. If she is, she has to die.”
“Infected?” She frowned, then shook her head. “I know—later.”
“Yes. Time is passing.” His head angled slightly to the left. “Dmitri comes, but he can’t approach until he poses no danger to the scent trail. Leave the woman—the leader of my Seven has a weakness for innocents caught in violence.”
Elena nodded at the oblique reassurance, and bent down. “Dmitri is going to help you. Please go with him.”
The woman didn’t stop rocking but she was no longer making that keening sound and her body wasn’t so tense. Praying that Dmitri would be able to get her out without harming her, she made her way back under the chain link and to the other side.
“Can you check the roof—see if there’s any sign he took off from there?” As Raphael nodded and flew up, she circled her way around the building. She finally found Uram’s exit point on the right side of the warehouse, a few feet from a gaping hole in the chain link.
Aware of Raphael following overhead, she made her way through the hole to the grassy wilderness of the neighboring lot. Blood coated the tips of the grass, as if Uram had run his hand along the top. She found a feather—a brilliant, silvery gray that shimmered with flecks of amber. Its delicate beauty was an insult, a mockery of the blood and suffering she’d seen inside the warehouse. Fighting the urge to crush it, she held it to her nose, drawing in the richness of Uram’s true scent. That bite of acid but other things, too. An edge of metal, a dark blade. Blood refined, she thought. Acid and blood and something else, something that spoke of . . . sunlight. She shivered, shoved the feather into her pocket, then carried on.
The scent simply ended in the middle of the lot. “Shit.” She put her hands on her hips and blew out a breath, waving Raphael down. He landed in a feat of pure grace.
“Uram took flight.”
“Yes,” she said. “I never had that problem with vampires—that’s how I can track them. I can’t track a being who can fly!” It made her blood boil. She wanted to make the monster pay for the bright young lives he’d stolen. “Dmitri?”
“I’ve told him to approach. And angels don’t always fly,” Raphael said. “You’re the only one who has any chance of finding his scent on the streets.” He paused. “We’ll return, so you can bathe and gather your things.” He glanced at his wing, distaste open on his face. “I must also clean off the blood.”
She blushed at the reminder of how ripe she had to be by now. “Why do I need to gather my things?”
“This hunt won’t be long, but it will be intense.”
“He’ll keep killing,” she guessed, fists tight. “Leaving a trail.”
“Yes.” Raphael’s anger was tightly controlled, but the sheer force of it almost cut her skin. “You need to stay close to me or one of my angels so that you can be flown out immediately after we discover a fresh kill.”
She realized he wasn’t giving her a choice. “I suppose if I say no you’ll just make me?”
A moment where the only sounds were those of the grass rustling and the whispers of wings at her back as other angels landed—to begin cleanup, she guessed.
“Uram must be stopped.” Raphael’s face was quiet, expressionless . . . and all the more dangerous for it. “Would you not say that goal excuses any and all means used?”
“No.” But her mind filled with an endless slideshow of images—of a woman with her mouth full of organs that should’ve remained inside her body, another whose head had been impaled on her arm, a third who stared sightlessly out of empty eye sockets. “I’ll cooperate.”
“Come.” He held out an arm.
She went closer. “Sorry if I stink.” Her cheeks heated.
His arms closed around her. “You smell of angel dust.” With that, he lifted off—and turned them invisible.
She closed her eyes. “I’m never going to get used to that.”
“I thought you liked flying.”
“Not that.” She held on harder, hoping she’d laced her boots up tight. She wouldn’t want to accidentally brain someone. “The being-invisible thing.”
“The glamour does take some getting used to.”
“You aren’t born with it?” She fought a shiver as they rose higher.
“No. It’s a gift that comes with age.”
She bit her tongue at the question that wanted out.
“Learning discretion, Elena?” A tinge of amusement dulled the fury she could sense just beneath his skin.
“I—I—” When her teeth began to chatter, she decided to hell with discretion, and pretty much crawled onto him, wrapping her legs around his waist. He was so deliciously warm. “I’m trying to limit the reasons for which you might have to kill me.”
He changed his hold to accommodate her. “Why should I kill you when I can wipe your mind?”
“I don’t want to lose my memories.” Even the bad ones, they were what made her who she was. Now, today, she was a different Elena to the one who’d never known what it was to kiss an archangel. “Don’t make me forget.”
“Will you trade your life to keep your memories?” A soft question.
She thought that over. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I would rather die as Elena, than live as a shadow.”
“We’re almost to your apartment.”
Forcing open her eyes, she turned to look at her home. The blown-out window had been covered by some sort of clear plastic, but whoever had done it hadn’t bothered to anchor it in anything but a cursory fashion. One side was down, flapping in the wind. Her eyes watered. She told herself it was caused b
y the rush of air cutting over her face.
Raphael flew to that corner and had her tug at the plastic until enough of it was free that she could squeeze inside. Once she was in, she made a wider hole and he walked in, snapping his wings closed behind him. The wind whistled into the apartment as she stood there taking in the mess and feeling her heart break.
The glass was still where it had been when Raphael had shattered the window. So was the blood. Raphael’s blood. Her own where she’d cut herself. But a massive wind had come through the living room at some stage, throwing her bookshelf to the floor and breaking the twin to the vase in her bedroom. Papers littered the carpet and the walls were streaked in a way that said there’d been a small squall, a flash of rain that had destroyed what wasn’t already broken. The carpet felt damp, the air musty.
At least the door had been fixed enough that it shut. She wondered if it had been boarded over from the outside, nails pounded into the beautiful wood.
“Wait,” she said, scooping up her—thankfully—still functional cell phone. “I’ll get an overnight bag.” With that, she walked over the glass and carpet toward her bedroom, back ramrod straight. “Do I have time to shower here?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t give him time to change his mind, heading into the bedroom to grab a towel and some underwear.
“I don’t like the color scheme.”
She paused with her hand on a pair of plain cotton panties. “I told you to wait.”
He strolled in, went to her French doors, and pushed them open. “You like flowers.”
“Raphael, leave.” Her hand trembled she was clenching it so hard.
He looked over his shoulder, a lethal chill in his eyes. “You’d cause a fight over my curiosity?”
“This is my home. I didn’t invite you in, not when you blew out the window and destroyed my living room, and not today.” She stood her ground, seconds from a breakdown. “You will respect that, or I swear to God, I’ll shoot you again.”