by Nalini Singh
She said nothing as they emerged into his yard and entered the house. Montgomery was waiting. His distress at Raphael’s injuries broke through his usual reserve. “Sire? The healer?”
“That won’t be necessary.” When the vampire continued to wring his hands, Raphael put a hand on his shoulder. “Be easy. It will heal by nightfall.”
Montgomery relaxed. “Should I bring up the meal? It’s close to noon.”
“Yes.” He turned to Elena as the other man moved down the corridor. “It seems we’ll share a second bath.” Geraldine and Michaela had both left their mark on him, not to mention the scarlet stain of his own injuries.
She winced, touching the cuts on her cheeks—from the flying debris. “Just a quick shower for me. If I soak, my skin might peel off.” A glance at her bloody clothes, a result of being carried by Raphael. “Damn, I don’t think I packed any more spares.”
About to reply, Raphael heard the sound of approaching wings, a rustle that announced another angel—one who wanted to be heard. When he looked up, it was to find Jason in his sights. The angel bowed his head in respect, his black hair pulled back in a queue. “Sire, we have a problem.”
35
Elena couldn’t help staring at the new angel. His face . . . she’d never seen anything like it. The entire left-hand side was covered in an exotic tattoo composed of fine dots and swirling curves, the ink pure black against his glowing brown skin. There was a hint of Polynesia in that skin, that tattoo, but the sharpness of his facial features hinted at part of her own ancestry. Old Europe mixed with the exotic winds of the Pacific—it was one hell of a sexy combination.
“Jason,” Raphael said in greeting.
“You’re injured.” The new angel’s eyes went to Raphael’s wing. “This can wait.” He shifted slightly, the rustle of his wings alerting Elena to the fact that she hadn’t truly seen them. Frowning, she squinted into the dimness of the hall—the stained glass dull without sunlight—but still saw nothing aside from an indistinct shadow.
She had to ask. “Where are your wings?”
Jason gave her an inscrutable look, then flared out a wing in silence. It was a deep, sooty black. The wing didn’t reflect light but seemed to absorb it, the edges fading into the spreading gloom. “Wow,” she said. “Guess you make one hell of a night scout.”
Jason glanced from her to Raphael. “The report can wait, but it’s important you hear it.”
“I’ll join you in an hour.”
“Sire, if early evening would suit, I’d like to fly out to check on something else.”
“Contact me when you return.”
With a short nod, Jason left. Elena didn’t say anything until after both she and Raphael had cleaned up and were tucking into the food Jeeves had brought up. But first things first. “Your butler laundered my clothes,” she said from her cross-legged position on the bed. The cargos and T-shirt from yesterday had been waiting for her, washed and ironed.
Raphael raised an eyebrow in front of her, having chosen to sit on the bed, too, one leg on the mattress, the other foot-first on the floor beside it, his injured wing draped gently across the sheets to promote optimal healing. To her pleasure—and she was too achy and frustrated to lie to herself about how he made her feel—he’d asked her to spread a special ointment on the injured section. She knew full well it was a measure of how their relationship had changed that he’d kept her with him while he was injured. No Dmitri tying her to a chair this time. “I highly doubt that,” he said now. “Montgomery runs the house—he’d never sully himself washing clothes.”
“You know what I mean, Archangel. He’s like the house-work fairy—only better!”
“Somehow, the idea of Montgomery as a fairy doesn’t have the same effect on me as it appears to have on you.”
“Give it time.” She bit into her everything-and-more sandwich. “So, Jason’s your spy. Or should I say, spymaster?”
“Very good, Guild Hunter.” He ate the other half of the sandwich in about three bites. “Though some would say his face makes him too distinctive.”
“That tattoo—it had to have hurt.” She winced, having been too chicken to get inked herself. Ransom had tried to talk her into one when he’d gotten the band around his arm. Watching the blood being blotted off his skin hadn’t inspired her to follow suit . “How long do you think it took?”
“Exactly ten years,” Raphael said, watching her with those eyes that seemed to see straight through to her soul.
She shook her head as she finished off the sandwich. “Crazy comes in all forms, I guess.”
Raphael held up an apple. “A bite?”
“Tempting me, Archangel?”
“Ah, but you’ve already fallen, hunter.” He used a sharp knife to cut into the fruit and put a slice to her lips, watching her bite off the end with concentrated interest. “Your mouth fascinates me.”
The languid heat in her body, ever present around Raphael, seemed to grow, spread, until it was in every part of her, a living, demanding beat. Swallowing her bite of apple, she crawled around the food to kneel in front of him. When he raised the rest of the slice to her lips, she bit down, holding on to his wrist.
Eyes locked, the living warmth of him against her fingertips, it was more erotic than a kiss from another man. Her lips brushed his fingers.
Something hot and male spread across his face, a look that told her very well where he wanted her to put her lips. But what he said was, “Another slice?”
She shook her head with regret. “You have to heal and I need to start running the trace again.” Uram couldn’t have gone far. Most likely he’d been forced to return to one of his earlier hiding places. Which meant there was a high chance it was in the circuit they’d already mapped out. “This could be our best shot.”
Raphael put down the knife and the rest of the apple, tracing her lips with his finger. “Did you hear what Michaela said?”
“That he’s all monster?” She shrugged, even as lust snaked around her like a heady perfume. “No surprise after what we saw at that warehouse.”
“Would you hunt me, Elena? If I became bloodborn?”
Her heart froze in her chest. “Yes,” she said. “But you’ll never become a monster.” Yet she remembered the knife cutting into her hand, remembered, too, that vampire in Times Square.
A humorless smile. “That’s hope, not knowledge.” He shook his head. “We’re all as susceptible to the lure of power. The blood makes him stronger, harder to defeat.”
Cupping his face in her hands, she looked into eyes that had seen thousands of sunrises before she was even a glimmer in the scheme of the universe. “But you have an advantage,” she whispered. “You’re a little bit human now.”
Angel of Blood
They thought he was down.
That was their mistake.
Agony shot through his wing and chest as remnants of Raphael’s blue fire attempted to take hold and burrow. Gritting his teeth, he left his hiding place and flew a short distance to a normally inviting public area that had turned murky in the cloudy weather, full of shadowy corners that made it the perfect hunting ground. The glamour served him well, and he tore out the throats of two vagrants before they ever knew they were stalked.
Their blood raced through him like lightning, pushing out the blue fire until it dissipated harmlessly in the air. No longer fighting off an attack, his body focused on repairing torn muscle and cartilage. By the time he bent his head over the fifth throat—the soft, delicate flesh of a young female, his preferred kind of sustenance—he was ready to fly again . . . at least enough to take the mortal hunter out of the equation. Once she was dead, no one would be able to find him.
He smiled and wiped the blood from his mouth with a clean white handkerchief. Yes, warm was best. For a tempting moment, he considered taking another, but knew he didn’t have the time. He had to hit before he was expected, while Raphael’s defenses were down and the hunter thought herself safe.
After that, he would sink his fangs into Michaela’s heart, drink her blood straight from the source. And he’d keep her, he decided. The urge to tear her apart was overwhelming, but he’d fight it. Why kill that which could provide so much exquisite power? Mortals were too weak, but an archangel . . . Ah, he could drink from Michaela for eternity. She’d heal every time.
He wondered if Michaela had told Raphael he’d already fed from her once. He licked his lips. She’d been sweet. Powerful. Piquant. And now she carried a little bit of him within. Yes, an archangel would make the most perfect of refreshments. He’d build her a pretty cage, so she could watch as he played with his other pets—so she’d know that she was the lucky one, the one he’d chosen to sustain him for eons.
But first, he had to break the hunter’s neck.
36
Raphael walked out onto the third-floor balcony, Elena’s words still vivid in his mind. You’re a little bit human now.
Lijuan had warned him to kill Elena for that very reason. His reaction to being shot, the pain, the blood, had strengthened his belief that this hunter was dangerous to him. But what if, with the danger, came something else, an immunity to the madness of power, of age? After all, he’d wakened from the Quiet much sooner than he should have.
As he waited for Jason to arrive, he considered who he’d been when he first met Elena. He’d torn into her mind, terrorizing her without the least care. Could he do so again? Yes, he thought, having no illusions as to his natural goodness. He was fully capable of doing the same again. But whether he’d choose to do it . . . there lay the true question.
Jason entered the balcony from above, landing in a neat way that made him the most perfect of spies. “I expected to see Illium here.”
“He’s keeping watch over Elena.” Raphael would’ve preferred to give her a vampiric driver as well, but another vampire that close would hamper her ability to pick up Uram’s trail. So she was driving herself, with Illium flying above. Raphael was housebound by his angelfire-scored wing—it was healing at a rapid pace, and he could still fly, but to do so would strain the injury and he needed to be in top condition for when Uram rose again.
Elena had been gone for most of the day, calling him with updates as she cleared one section of Manhattan after another. It was strange to realize that despite having a myriad of other matters on his plate, he . . . missed her. She’d become important to him, this mortal with the spirit of a warrior. “Now, tell me.”
“It’s as you thought,” Jason said. “Lijuan wakes the dead.”
Raphael felt the biting freshness of the water-tinged breeze coming off the river, and wondered if Lijuan would be as she was if she hadn’t killed the human who’d threatened to make her a little bit mortal. “Are you certain?”
“I saw her raise them.”
“Do they live?” He turned to face the other angel.
Deep revulsion whispered in the depths of Jason’s eyes. “I wouldn’t call it life, but there is some spark within, some glimmer of the person they once were.”
This was worse than anything Raphael had thought. “Not puppets as we believed?”
“They are that, but they’re also more. Abominations that walk, see, hear but never talk. Their silence is drowned out by the screams in their eyes. They know what they are.”
Even an archangel’s soul could feel the chill hand of horror. “How long can she maintain them?”
“Of the reborn I saw, the oldest was a year old. He was starting to become senile, that spark long gone.” A pause, and then the usually temperate angel said, “It’s a mercy when that part of their soul dies.”
“And Lijuan has complete control over these reborn?”
“Yes. For now, she plays with them as one would with a new toy. But there may come a time when she turns them into an army.”
That cold hand closed around his heart. For if the reborn marched on the living, civilization would fall as terror overtook the world. “Those she wakes—are they the newly dead?”
“No,” was the disturbing answer. “Those are easier, but she’s begun on the older dead—even those that have . . . rotted. She’s somehow able to clothe them in flesh.” Jason paused.
“What is it?”
“It’s rumored their new flesh comes from consuming the bodies of the more recently dead, the ones Lijuan does not wish to reawaken, and I know they must then drink blood to survive.” Jason’s voice dropped even lower. “There are also whispers that she gains something from the rebirths, somehow absorbs power.”
A bloodborn of another sort, Raphael thought, knowing that no hunter had been born—human, vampire, or angel—who could destroy Lijuan should that prove true. “Have your men maintain watch.” Jason was the perfect spy, but as Elena had guessed, he was an even better spymaster. “We must know if she begins large-scale rebirths.” The Cadre of Ten could do little while Lijuan played in her own lands. More, most of the members would choose to do little. They each had their own games, their own perversions. Raphael couldn’t judge them—he’d countenance no interference in his domain, either.
Elena saw a fragment of humanity in him. But was he human enough to save himself from becoming another Lijuan? “Go. Rest. We’ll talk more later.”
Jason dropped off the balcony before rising in a steep climb, his wings visible until he rose up above the cloud layer. It was why the angel much preferred the night.
Dmitri.
Sire. The response was close. The vampire entered the balcony a few moments later, having just returned from their healers. “Venom reports that the cleanup at and around Jeffrey Deveraux’s office, as well as at the museum, was completed earlier this afternoon. Geraldine is dead.”
Raphael’s first thought was of Elena—she’d be saddened at the death, though the woman had been all but a stranger. “What of the survivor we found at the warehouse?”
“I was able to trace her identity. Her name is Holly Chang, age twenty-three.” Dmitri folded his hands behind his back. “She doesn’t carry the mutant variant of the toxin, but she does carry something.”
Raphael remembered his conversation with Elena. “Does she need to die?”
“Not at this stage. She’s not contagious—and we need to discover the truth of whatever it is Uram did to her.”
“Is she human still?”
Dmitri paused, frowned. “No one is certain what she is—she needs blood, but not as much as a vampire, and she does gain some energy from food. She may be the result of an aborted attempt at conversion.”
“Without the proper procedure and with the mutant strain in Uram’s blood, it should have been impossible.”
“The healers and doctors think she may simply have been unlucky enough to be one of those who are easily Made—but now that she’s been partially transformed, an attempt at full conversion may kill her.” There was a long-buried edge in Dmitri’s voice. Like Holly Chang, Dmitri had been Made against his will.
All because Isis had known Raphael’s weakness—that he had a heart. More, she’d known that Dmitri was the descendant of a mortal Raphael had once called friend. So she’d stolen Dmitri’s mortality . . . and made Raphael watch. That had been almost a thousand years ago. And Raphael had thought his heart dead for most of them.
Before Elena began to matter.
“Be easy, Dmitri,” he said now. “We won’t abuse her, but we must monitor her progress.” If she carried the taint of the bloodborn, she had to die.
Dmitri nodded. “I’ve got her under twenty-four-hour watch.” Another pause. “If I may, sire.”
“Since when do you ask for permission?”
The vampire’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Elena makes you vulnerable. I don’t know how, but she does.” His eyes went to the injured wing. “You’re healing at a slower rate.”
“Perhaps an immortal needs a vulnerability,” Raphael said, thinking once more of Lijuan’s “evolution.”
“I—” A cell phone rang.
Raphael nodded at Dmi
tri to go ahead and answer, readying himself to take off. Dmitri’s raised hand stopped him. “It’s the Guild Director.”
Raphael took the phone. “Director.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’ve got Ellie into but I have a feeling it has to do with the girls disappearing around town.” Her dislike of him was a taut thread that vibrated with pure anger.
“Elena is lucky to have you for a friend.”
“If anything happens to her, I don’t care who you are, I’ll shoot you myself.” Worry mingled with the violent anger to turn her voice harsh.
Had it been anyone but Sara making the threat, Raphael would’ve meted out swift punishment—perceived weakness in an archangel could lead to death for millions. But he’d never been a hypocrite. He’d done unconscionable things in the Quiet, crossed an inviolable line when he forced this woman to betray one of her deepest loyalties. The scales were not close to even. “Do you have something to share, Director?”
“Five bodies were just found in Battery Park, all drained of blood. They were hidden very well.”
Uram had acted fast to replenish his energy. “Have the authorities been alerted?”
“Sorry, couldn’t stop it,” Sara said, telling him she had her finger very much on the pulse of the city. “But the bodies are in transit in morgue vans—I’m guessing you have to make them disappear. Don’t kill the attendants when you do it.”
“That won’t be necessary.” Sometime after his two-hundredth birthday, Venom had gained the power to entrance humans, much as a cobra did its prey—something Raphael was sure Elena would be aghast to discover. The vampire used it rarely as Neha would not be pleased to realize she’d lost so valuable an asset. However, it would come in useful today—none of Uram’s victims could be allowed to be put under the microscope. Holly might be the only survivor, but that didn’t mean Uram wasn’t forcing the others to drink his toxic blood . . . or worse. “Thank you for the information.”