by Nalini Singh
Rich, dark, chocolate. Sinful. Seductive.
She halted, sniffed. “Dmitri.” The vampire had either passed this way or was in the vicinity. With most vampires, it wouldn’t have mattered—she could separate out the scents. But Dmitri’s presence was too strong, and when added to the fact that Uram’s trail was older . . . “Shit.” Pulling out her phone, she called Raphael.
“Elena.”
Her blood fired from the inside out at the sound of that voice—sex and ice, pain and pleasure. “Dmitri’s scent is messing up my trace.”
“You’ve found signs of Uram?”
“Yes. Can you get Dmitri out of here?”
A pause. “He’s already leaving.”
“Thanks.” She ended the call. Much longer and that voice of his would creep into her soul and take up residence. Instead, she cleared her head, centered herself, and began scanning again.
Dmitri’s scent was fading at a phenomenal rate. Unless he could run very fast, he’d had access to a vehicle. She didn’t particularly care. All that mattered was that she’d lost—No, there it was. She turned left, moving at a light jog.
She was five blocks over when something made her glance up. The previously bright sky was turning a dull gray, heavy with clouds. But she caught a flash of blue, one that disappeared in the next instant. Illium. Bodyguard duty? Shrugging it off, she came to a standstill in the midst of an area that seemed mostly residential, though she could see a grocer’s tucked discreetly between two apartment buildings.
Foot traffic was lighter than in the crush of shops she’d left behind, but steady. She attracted a few nervous stares and it was then that she realized she had one of her long, thin throwing knives in hand.
“Ma’am.” A shaky voice.
She didn’t turn. “Officer, I’m on a hunt. My Guild card is in the left back pocket.” Hunters had carry permits for all sorts of weapons. And she never went anywhere without them.
“Ah—”
She showed him her empty left hand. “I’m going to reach for it. Okay?” Acid on the wind. Thick, dark blood. Damn, damn! She needed to be chasing that, not pandering to some baby cop who didn’t know enough about hunters to be out on the streets. What the hell were they teaching them in the Police Academy these days?
A cry from the woman in front of her and then a flash of blue swept down the street. Elena glanced at the cop, saw him staring up dumbfounded, and ran. She knew he wouldn’t come after her. He’d had that look on his face. Angelstruck. Approximately five percent of the population was born susceptible to the phenomenon. She’d heard they’d discovered medication to combat the effect, but that most people didn’t want to be “cured.”
“When I see an angel, I see perfection,” one man had said in a recent documentary. “For the fragment of time I spend caught up in their magic, real life ceases to exist and heaven is in my grasp. Why would I give that up?”
For a small, painful instant, Elena had envied the angelstruck. She’d lost her innocence, her belief in a heavenly caretaker, eighteen long years ago. Then the camera had cut to an image of the speaker as he was angelstruck and she’d come close to throwing up. Pure adoration, worshipful and blind. A devotion that turned angels into gods.
No, thanks.
Ten minutes later, the scent was an ache in her throat, a layer of fur on her tongue. She looked around and found herself in one of the moneyed areas of the city, somewhere east of Central Park. Very, very moneyed, she realized, looking at the elegant size of the buildings. No huge apartment complexes here. A moment’s pause and she had it—the locus. Leaving it to Raphael to smooth things over if anyone spotted her, she climbed over the locked wrought-iron gate to land in front of a freestanding town house. Seeing a very narrow pathway to the right-hand side, she walked down and around to the back.
“A private park.” Amazing. She hadn’t known anything like this existed in Manhattan. The rectangular patch of lush green was bordered on every side by similar town houses, all vaguely European in design. Frowning, she touched the wall nearest her and felt no sense of age or time. Fake, she thought, disappointed. Some developer had bought up an undoubtedly pricey piece of land, created an English-type garden complex, and probably made megabucks.
Angels had money to burn.
And the scent, it was so powerful here . . . but not fresh. “He was here, but he’s gone.”
“Are you sure?”
She jumped, knife hand raised, and found Raphael standing behind her. “Where the hell—glamour?”
He didn’t answer her question. “Where was he?”
“In the house, I think,” she answered, trying to quieten her racing heartbeat. Also trying not to stab Raphael through the heart for doing that to her. “I thought you didn’t show off in public.”
“No one’s watching.” His eyes went to her hair. “They’re too busy admiring Illium’s acrobatics.”
She ignored the possessive darkness crawling to life in his eyes. “We need to get inside the house.” Walking around him, she was about to head up to the back door when his hand clenched on her upper arm.
She stilled, ready to throw him off, when she realized he was only interested in removing the blue feather from her hair. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she muttered. “Happy now?”
He crushed the feather in his fist. “No, Elena. I’m not.” His hand opened and glittering blue dust floated to earth.
She decided not to ask him how he’d done that. “You mind a little breaking and entering?”
“Venom tells me there are no heartbeats inside.”
Her stomach curled. “Death? Does he smell death?”
“Yes.” Releasing her arm, he took the lead.
Elena looked around the side of the house and to the street, spying Venom standing unmoving on this side of the closed—but likely no longer locked—gate. He looked like a bodyguard-cum-driver. Normal for a ritzy neighborhood like this. Satisfied he’d keep them from being interrupted, she followed Raphael to the door. “Wait,” she said when he put a hand on the doorknob. “We might set off an alarm, attract attention.”
“It’s been taken care of.”
She thought of how fast some vampires could move. “Venom?”
A slight nod. “He’s adept at such things.”
“Why am I not surprised?” she muttered, swallowing her gorge at the scent that whispered out from the house. “Oh, God.”
Raphael pushed the door fully open. “Come, Elena.” He held out his hand.
She stared at it. “I’m a hunter.” But she curled her fingers around his. Some nightmares were too vicious to face alone.
They stepped over the threshold together, Raphael’s wings fitting easily through the door. “Built for an angel,” she said, staring out at the open-plan design. There were no dividing walls in the entire first floor. The carpet in the living area was a Rorschach painting in red on white.
It should have been a violent explosion of color, but instead it was an odd sort of formless gray, the curtains drawn, the inside of the apartment dull with a heavy kind of shade that seemed to muffle sound . . . amplify everything else.
Decay. Acid. Sex.
The tastes mingled on her tongue, threatening to turn her stomach. “He had sex with them.”
Raphael looked at the bodies strung up from the rafters, his eyes blue flame. “Are you certain?”
“I can smell it.” While vampires were the only ones she could track by scent, her sense of smell was far better than that of a normal human’s. And, it appeared, even an archangel’s.
“No blood.”
She stared at the stains on the carpet. “What do you call that?” She wouldn’t look up again, she told herself, wouldn’t reinforce the pieces of horror burned into her mind from a single fleeting glimpse.
Hanging limbs waving in the air-conditioned breeze, faces frozen in a rictus of terror. Pale skin torn open, lips colored blue, hair used as a noose.
Raphael’s hand tightened on hers, pulling he
r back from the edge of the beckoning abyss. “He didn’t take their blood. The wounds are brutal but there are no signs of feeding.”
She already knew there would be no medical examiner to verify the findings. If they were to have any chance of finding and stopping Uram, she had to look, had to make sure. It was her job. “Cut them down.” Her voice was hoarse. “I need to see the wounds up close.”
He released her hand. “Your knife.”
She put it flat in the palm of his hand, watched him walk to the vermilion explosion of the living room, his wings held out and slightly flared so they didn’t trail on the floor. Then he pushed off with a single powerful beat of his wings. It generated wind.
The bodies swung.
Elena ran out the door and into the garden, where she proceeded to lose everything she’d eaten for the second time that day. Her stomach cramped painfully even after it was all gone, and when the nozzle of a hose was handed to her, she grabbed it like a lifeline, washing out her mouth and drenching her face before guzzling the plastic-tasting water as if it was nectar. “Thanks.” She dropped the hose and looked up.
Venom smiled, slow, mocking. “Big, tough hunter, scared at the sight of a little blood.” He turned off the tap. “My illusions are shattered.”
“Poor baby,” she said, wiping a hand down her face.
He showed her teeth, bright white against that exotic skin. “Feeling better?” Insincerity dripped from every word.
“Bite me.” Turning her back, she forced herself to take the steps that would return her to the abattoir.
“Oh, I intend to.” A drawl full of innuendo. “Everywhere.”
She threw a knife in his direction without looking, had the satisfaction of hearing him swear as he caught it by the wrong end and sliced open his palm. Strength restored, she walked over the threshold.
Raphael was in the living area, laying the last of the bodies on the carpet. He held the woman gently, cradled against him. As he placed her on her back at the end of the line of similarly positioned bodies, Elena swallowed and walked toward him. “Sorry about that.” She didn’t explain, couldn’t tell him the truth. Not about this.
He looked up. “Don’t be. It’s a gift to feel horror.”
It made her wonder. “Do you?”
“Too little.” An ancient darkness swept over his face. “I’ve seen such evil, even the loss of so much innocence barely touches me.”
The inhumanity of it made her heart twist. “Tell me,” she said, kneeling, “tell me the horrors you’ve seen so I can forget this one.”
“No. You already have too many nightmares in your head.” He met her gaze. “Go, track Uram. This can wait.”
Knowing he was right, she walked outside and spent the next ten minutes trying to find Uram’s exit route. It was with frustration churning in her gut that she returned to the house. “He flew from here.”
Raphael nodded to the bodies. “Then we need to examine the fallen, see if they can tell us anything.”
She gave a jerky nod and went to kneel by the first body. “She was cut open by a dull blade from neck to navel.” The girl’s internal organs were no longer in her body. “Did you find the rest of her?”
“Yes. There is a . . . collection in the corner behind you.”
Bile burned in her throat, but she gritted her teeth and kept going. “No bite marks, no signs he tore into her with anything but a knife.” As she moved on to the next body, she realized she hadn’t looked at the girl’s face. And that was a mistake. Uram could’ve taken the blood from her mouth. She’d once seen a body that had been sucked dry from a kiss.
Stomach tight enough to hurt, she went to touch the face, stopped. “I need gloves.”
“Tell me what you need to see.” Raphael’s wings filled her vision as he appeared on the other side of the body.
“Don’t be stupid,” she muttered, pushing off his hand as he reached out to touch the corpse, forgetting he’d carried it down. “She could’ve been infected with a human virus, or Uram might’ve infected her like you were worried he’d infected the survivor.”
Blue, blue eyes met hers. “I’m immortal, Elena.” A soft reminder that smashed into her with the force of a ball-peen hammer. Of course he was immortal. How could she have forgotten?
“The mouth,” she said, looking away from that face that could belong to no mortal, no matter how blessed. “Open her mouth.”
He did so with clean efficiency. Thankfully, rigor had passed, so he didn’t have to break the dead girl’s jaw, though she knew it would’ve been child’s play for him to do so. Retrieving a slender torch from the side pocket of her cargos, she shined it inside the woman’s mouth. “No bites.”
They went through the other bodies with methodical precision. Each had been shredded by a knife, some more mercifully than others. The first victim had been alive at the time of her disembowelment, the last dead. “No bite marks. Doesn’t mean he didn’t suck up the blood from the wounds.” Or the entrails.
“Taking blood with the fangs is part of the pleasure.”
“Then he definitely didn’t feed.” Just tortured.
“One of the bloodborn wouldn’t be able to resist feeding.”
The pieces clicked. “He did this first, the bodies in the warehouse second.” The air-conditioning had kept these bodies from decaying, but now that she was looking, she saw a number of signs that this had happened at least a day, more likely two days, past—the color of the dried blood on the walls, the lack of rigor, the bruises that had bloomed on the girls’ bodies as blood followed gravity.
All hunters were required to take a course in the general details of death—they were often the first people to find a vampire’s kill. Now, pressing against the bruises, she saw no change in the discoloration—the skin didn’t pale, then fill back with blood. Livor mortis was fixed. “These girls were practice.”
“Yet you followed his scent here.”
30
She rocked back on her heels, staring at the single blood-stain that didn’t fit the timeline—the one on the carpet. It was too fresh. “You’re right. The bastard came back to admire his handiwork!”
“I’ll put watchers in place.” He rose to his feet after her, his fingertips dusted with blood, his clothing stained where the bodies had brushed up against him. It made her remember the last time she’d seen him, a bloody fist, the panicked beat of a pulsing heart.
Somehow, it no longer seemed horrific. Not after this. Uram had played with his victims—like a cat with a mouse it doesn’t want to eat but simply torment. Say what you would about the Archangel of New York—pitiless, hard, certainly lethal—he didn’t torture for the sake of it. Everything Raphael did had a purpose. Even if that purpose was to scare people so badly that no one would dare betray him again.
She spoke as he walked to the kitchen area to wash his hands. “I don’t think he’ll come back—he returned after the warehouse kills, maybe to gloat, maybe to rest, but look at this.” She pointed her foot at a bowl that had rolled under a table. “He threw this—probably after finding the blood he’d saved didn’t satisfy him.”
“This was his funhouse, but he’s realized he prefers live playthings.”
“Yes, he’s going to want fresh meat.” The words sounded cold but she had to stay on that level. If she allowed herself to feel . . .
Raphael nodded. “Do you think he’ll rise to feed again tonight?”
“Even if he’s continuously in bloodlust”—and that was a nightmare she didn’t want to contemplate—“I’d say it’s unlikely, given the way he glutted himself at the warehouse.”
That was when rain thundered to earth outside, as if some great faucet had been turned.
“Shit!” She swiveled to the door. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
Raphael just watched her have a fit, then calmly asked, “I thought you said Uram flew?”
“Scent markers like the ones that led me here are now all gone! He’s been erased from the entire city.” S
he gave a little scream. “Rain’s the one thing that messes up the trail this bad—vampires who have any idea of what they’re doing run to the wettest places on this earth.” She wanted to kill the rain gods, settled for kicking the stone of the counter. “Fuck! That hurt!”
Raphael nodded at the doorway. “Take care of it.”
She didn’t have to turn around to know Dmitri had arrived. His scent wrapped around her like a damn coat. “Turn it off, vampire, or I swear to God, I’ll stake you with your own leg.”
“I’m not doing anything, Elena.”
She glanced over, saw the tight lines of strain on his face, and knew he wasn’t messing with her. “Double-shit. I’m wired, too much adrenaline, I’m going to crash soon.” Her ability always spiked before a crash. “Might as well give in to it and catch a few hours’ shut-eye.” She hadn’t slept much more than an hour or two last night, that damn chair had been so uncomfortable. “I won’t be able to get anything now until Uram moves again.”
Until he killed again.
“Are you keeping an eye on Michaela?” she asked Raphael. “She might be our best bet for catching him.”
“She’s an archangel,” Raphael reminded her. “To augment her resources with my own would be to say I consider her weak.”
“She’s refusing?” Elena shook her head. “Then I hope to God she has good men and you have good spies.” Pissed at the arrogance of angels, at the rain, at the whole fucking universe, she strode out without a backward look. Venom was at the gate. Damn man looked good wet. “I need a car.”
To her surprise, he dropped keys into her palm and pointed across the road to the sedan she’d left double-parked somewhere. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
She decided the vamp was playing with her, couldn’t be bothered to snipe at him. Pushing through the gate, she walked toward the car.
Go to my home, Elena. I’ll meet you there.
She opened the door and got in, brushing rain from her face, tasting the freshness of it on her tongue. But no, that was Raphael. He was waiting for an answer. “You know what, Archangel? I think it’s time I took you up on your offer.”