by Nalini Singh
“I need you to assist Aodhan in organizing that shift.” Aodhan was yet new to the territory, having previously been Galen’s right hand in the Refuge. “I have Illium focusing on creating new working squadrons.” With so many angels down, the current squadrons had become unbalanced in critical areas.
“Sire, do you wish me to return to the city?”
“No,” Raphael said, conscious Dmitri’s wife was still regaining her strength after her transformation from mortal to vampire. “Your continued absence serves my purpose for the time being.” Everyone knew Dmitri was the oldest of Raphael’s Seven, the one Raphael considered a friend. “When the war breaks, I’ll want you by my side, but that time isn’t now.”
Not quite yet.
* * *
Elena landed in front of an old-fashioned two-story villa set in the middle of a derelict street twenty minutes after her call from Sara and stared. Surrounded by tall weeds and smothered in ivy on one side, the building in front of her could’ve stood in as the prototypical haunted house; in point of fact, the entire street had escaped any attempt at modernization. Even the streetlamps were wrought iron, the frames rusted, the glass cracked to splinter the pavement, not a single electrical or telephone wire in sight.
That was hardly surprising in a city filled with angels and vampires, not all of whom embraced change. If, however, this place belonged to an immortal or almost-immortal, it had been permitted to fall into remarkable disrepair. The older ones who liked to keep things the way they’d been at some point in the past, took great pride in maintaining the historical detail and beauty of their properties.
It didn’t appear anyone had touched this house for decades.
The paint, which might’ve once been white, was peeling and blackened from the dust of the city streets, the windows shattered, the eaves hung with cobwebs thick and sticky, the curtains within rotten shreds from what she could see from her position on the street. The wood itself was warped out of shape, until the house couldn’t be in any way weather-tight—and an unusually tall tree had fallen onto part of the roof, caving in one side of the house.
“What the hell is this place?” she said to Ransom when he appeared from the other side of the porch.
Green eyes vivid against skin of copper-gold, he raised an eyebrow. “Are you talking about this multimillion-dollar piece of real estate?”
“Seriously?”
“When’s the last time land went for sale in Manhattan?” he asked, shrugging wide shoulders hugged by the battered black leather of his motorcycle jacket, his legs encased in old blue jeans over scuffed heavy-duty boots. “This entire street is one parcel. Developers have fucking public orgasms dreaming about getting their paws on it.”
Elena whistled. “Someone’s sitting on a gold mine.”
“He was. Now he’s dead.”
Heart slamming against her ribs, she jerked her attention from the rotting house next door. “Not—”
“No, it wasn’t Darrell, but it’s someone the Tower’s going to be interested in.” Ransom’s blade-sharp cheekbones cut against his skin as he said, “We need to clear this fast and continue with the hunt.”
Agreeing, she walked gingerly up the front steps, not trusting them not to collapse and dump her on her ass. “How do we get in?” Front door was boarded up, the nails corroded and the wood obscene with graffiti.
Angling his head to the left, the glossy black tail of his hair tied at the nape of his neck with a strip of rawhide, Ransom led her around the house. “Your angel friends okay? That young blond one who follows you around like a big, goofy puppy?”
Stabbing pains in her stomach, her mind rebelling against the brutal images of Izak’s torn-off legs, his flayed skin. “He’s hurt bad.”
“Shit. He’s just a kid.”
Elena’s throat knotted as she thought of the other young soldier who hadn’t survived, whose family even now held vigil for the return of his body. “The angel you rescued from in front of the truck?” she said, forcing herself not to give in to useless anger. “It’ll take time, but she’ll heal.”
Ransom blew out a jagged breath. “I didn’t think she’d make it. She was . . .” He shook his head. “I had to collect her arm from under the tires, Ellie.” Gesturing for her to take care over a broken board, he said, “What I found today? It’s going to add to the shitpile.”
Fuck. The city didn’t need any further problems. “You tracked Darrell here?”
“Darrell didn’t go loco right after that clusterfuck with the mother and the kid,” was the surprising answer. “He came in, had counseling, said all the right things, and was assigned a slam-dunk retrieval to ease him back into things.”
Reading between the lines, Elena realized the counselor had known something was off and asked for Darrell to be kept within reach.
“Vamp who owned this place was his assigned target.” Ransom drew his guns from the shoulder holsters he wore under his jacket, the action deadly silent. “I figured I might as well use him as a starting point for the track, since Darrell did send in a report to say he was on the guy’s trail.”
Elena had her throwing blades in hand when they turned the corner. Half of the back wall was just gone, leaving a gaping entrance filled with street detritus, dead leaves, discarded hypodermic needles, and other things she didn’t want to think about too deeply. Trying to keep her wings from trailing in the crap, she took a step inside . . . and a rat as big as a goddamn cat scurried over her boot.
Biting back her instinctive scream, she glared at Ransom—who was very conspicuously not grinning. “You couldn’t warn me?”
“You’re a tough-ass hunter who gets naked with a freaking archangel, has a miniature flamethrower—which, by the way, you should leave to me in your will—and a crossbow, all within easy reach.” His cheeks creased, eyes glinting. “Rats quiver at your presence.”
“Now I remember why you’re only an almost-friend.”
“Oh, Ellie, you wound me.” He paused. “Did you stop and get the masks?”
“Yeah.” Reaching into a side pocket of her pants, she passed him a collapsible mask. Like her, he was hunter-born, his sense of smell acute.
“Thanks.” He pulled it on over his mouth and nose, tightened the elastic band. “Smell’s worse upstairs.”
Since it reeked down here—a disgusting miasma of droppings, spoiled food, and urine—Elena didn’t waste any time following his lead. Tugging out a pair of latex gloves from another pocket as Ransom did the same, she nodded at him to lead, and they skirted past what looked like the mummified body of a feral cat, and out of the kitchen.
The hallway beyond was narrow enough that Elena had to lean slightly to the right to avoid scraping her wing over the dark brown thickness smeared on the wall, all her air coming in through her mouth now . . . because her brain had identified the major component of the putrid stink as that of a decomposing corpse.
6
Stopping at the foot of the narrow staircase that ran along one wall, Ransom murmured, “Keep to the left and wait till I’m at the top, then come up.”
The stairs creaked under his weight, again under Elena’s, but held.
Guns out, Ransom led her down the upstairs hallway and into a room so pungent with death her stomach would’ve revolted if she hadn’t steeled herself against the gag reflex. The second slap was of humidity, something about the way the room was built acting to trap what little heat there was . . . and accelerate the decomposition process.
Immediately identifying the filthy mattress below the boarded-up windows as the source of the scent of putrefaction, Elena walked across, trusting Ransom to watch her back. The body was bloated with the gases of death, skin a sickly green, but the head remained attached to the neck, and the shirt-clad chest was unmolested, judging from a surface glance. That meant his heart was likely still inside his body.
Going down on her knee, Elena blinked rapidly to dry out eyes that threatened to water from the pulsing waves of smell, ignore
d the maggots, and peeled back the corpse’s lip.
Canines, sharp and gleaming white.
“He isn’t a baby vamp,” she said through gritted teeth, “so this isn’t a Making gone bad.”
“Look at the throat.”
Wings rustling against God knew what on the dirty floor, she retrieved the slimline flashlight she kept tucked alongside the knife on her left thigh and pointed the beam at the victim’s neck. “Hell.” Thick pustules filled with bloody fluid covered the male’s throat, all the way to the open collar of his shirt . . . and down.
“Smell’s getting to me, Ellie,” Ransom said, just as her own stomach began to churn.
“Me, too.”
They both ripped off their masks to take deep gulps of the crisp winter air the instant they hit the street. Gloves went next, Elena’s skin itching to breathe. When Ransom retrieved a couple of bottles of water from the panther-black body of his motorcycle, throwing her one, she took it with a nod of thanks.
“Vampires aren’t supposed to get sick,” he said, after emptying half the bottle.
Splashing some water into one hand, Elena wiped it over her face, knowing it would take multiple showers to get that foul smell out of her nose. “No, they’re not.”
“Chop off their heads, they die,” Ransom continued. “Set them on fire, or cut out their hearts, they die unless they’re strong and old old. But soon as they’re Made, they don’t get sick. One thing’s for sure—Darrell definitely didn’t have anything to do with this.”
Elena agreed. “I’m going to have to bring in a consult from the Tower.” One of the more experienced angels or vampires; maybe there was a weird vamp virus that got a minority of them and she simply didn’t know about it. “Whoever it is will probably ask you to sign a nondisclosure agreement in blood.”
Ransom pretended to plump up a vein while she made the call to Aodhan. “I think this is serious,” she said to the angel, after describing the situation. “Ransom and I need to continue our hunt—can you spare someone to guard the body until it can be moved to a morgue?”
Aodhan asked her to give him five minutes but it was almost fifteen minutes later that he personally escorted another angel to the site. A bare five foot six and slender as a boy, the unexpected angel’s uptilted eyes were a gentle brown, his lips lush in a face saved from near-feminine prettiness by the sense of sheer maleness that clung to Keir.
Her frustration at the wait dissolving into deep affection, she leaned down into Keir’s kiss on the cheek. “You must have left the Refuge as soon as it happened.” It. The Falling. An awful malice reduced to two simple words.
“Raphael had a jet prepared for me so I would not be tired upon my arrival,” he told her, eyes painfully wise. “It was strange to fly in the belly of a metal creature when I have wings of my own, but he was right.”
When Aodhan was unexpectedly recalled to the Tower a second later, Elena remained at the house to watch Keir’s back, while Ransom continued to circle out from the house, searching for any sign that Darrell had made it this far. Stomach muscles clenched against the noxious stink, Elena led Keir to the corpse, where the healer examined it in silence, not saying a word until they were back out on the deserted street.
“A true infection.” Troubled darkness in the lush brown of his eyes. “I must autopsy the body under better lighting, see if I can pinpoint how the infection was introduced into his body.”
“Ransom and I were talking before you arrived, and we thought maybe the victim drank from the wrong person.”
His expression grew darker, even more serious. “The bodies of our blood kin,” Keir said, “are built to filter out impurities in blood—that is why a vampire can feed from any donor, even the most diseased.” Strands of silky black hair fell across his dusky skin as he looked at the ground, lost in thought. “If that mechanism failed . . .”
A sudden brilliance of blue, Illium landing in front of her. Having contacted her while Keir looked over the body, he’d brought a body bag to transport the victim to the research labs underneath the Tower, a small biohazard container for her, as well as better masks and replacement gloves, and didn’t argue when she made him use the safety gear.
“This house needs to be burned to the ground,” he said when he returned with the body, his expression harsher than most people ever saw. “We can’t take the risk that the cause of the infection might lie within.”
Sensing Keir was anxious to examine the body, and aware Raphael had to need Illium, she told the blue-winged angel she’d take care of the situation and made a call to Ransom as soon as they lifted off. “I’m going to do a final run through the house.” After which she had an idea about its destruction. “I need to finish this”—stop the disease here if it hadn’t already spread—“so if you want to—”
“No, it’s okay,” he interrupted. “I’ll join you. Trail’s so dead it’s in rigor—don’t think Darrell made it this far. Background report should come in soon, so we’ll have a better idea of other places he might frequent; may as well try to figure out what happened here in the meantime.”
Freshly gloved and masked, she and Ransom went through the entire place one more time, looking for anything that might provide a clue. “Why did you say this track was a slam-dunk?” she asked, placing the hypodermic needles she’d noticed earlier into the biohazard container.
“Vamp wasn’t a runner. He just got homesick every so often—his angel would give him three or four days, then send a hunter to pick him up.” The quiet pity in his tone resonated with the same emotion inside Elena. “Records say he never resisted, was always polite and apologetic and full of stories about his plans to renovate the house.”
It was a poignant image, of a harmless man who hadn’t deserved death. As the five angels Nimra’s squadron carried home in flower-strewn biers hadn’t deserved it. Embers of anger burning slow and dark inside her, she didn’t reply and the two of them finished the rest of the sweep in silence.
“I have to agree with the pretty boy—house needs to be toast,” Ransom said, once they were back out in front of the dilapidated villa.
“You’re calling Illium a pretty boy?” Elena snorted, glad to focus on something other than the heavy cloud of death that hung over the city. “Have you looked in the mirror lately?”
“I have scars, like any respectable male.”
“Tough guy.” Staring at the house where a vampire had died in what she hoped was a quick death, she put her hands on her hips. “Think Sara would be pissed if we just set it on fire and said ‘oops’ when the fire department arrived?”
“I don’t think she’s forgiven you for the whole being-chased-by-a-vampire-through-Manhattan incident.” He rubbed his jaw. “Arson would make a good cover story, though. It’s just the kind of place some firebug would light up.”
An hour later and thanks to Sara’s connection to every agency in the city, the house underwent a controlled burn initiated by the fire department. If only, Elena thought, they could as quickly erase the threat posed by a disease that had decimated the cells of a near-immortal.
* * *
Having flown to the Tower to drop off the biohazard container, Elena took the chance to duck into her and Raphael’s private suite to shower and change. Ransom had roared off to do the same—not only were they stabbing blindly in the dark with the background report still MIA, neither one of them would be much good at sneaking up on a fellow hunter with the stink that clung to their clothes and skin.
“Might as well wear a bell,” had been Ransom’s succinct assessment.
She’d just finished scrubbing her hair and body clean several times over when her cell phone rang, Jeffrey’s name on the screen. Grabbing fresh gear from the clothing she kept at the Tower, she let the call go to voice mail, having no intention of hashing this out over the phone.
Once dressed, her hair braided and her weapons in place, she got in touch with Ransom. “Do you need me right this sec?”
“No, I want to
check out a tip on my own.”
Figuring he needed to connect with one of his street contacts, wary people who trusted Ransom alone, she agreed to meet up with him at an Upper East Side address in an hour and, walking out to the balcony, flew off into the cold wind coming off the water. She’d spoken to Raphael while she’d been in the shower, so she knew he was heading back to the Tower over that water, Aodhan by his side and two integrated squadrons at his back, having just completed a critical drill.
Preparation, Elena thought, for an unprovoked and already ugly war.
Words that might as well apply to her relationship with Jeffrey.
The woman who opened the door to the brownstone office had skin of gleaming mahogany, her hair cut in a glossy bob and her body encased in a neat skirt-suit of jewel green. Nothing at all like the vamp-addicted brunette who’d been Jeffrey’s last assistant, her skin pale from too many donations in too short a time.
“Do you have an appointment?” the current PA asked, her throat moving as she swallowed.
“No. Tell Mr. Deveraux I’ll wait for him in the back garden.” As she made her way to that tiny green enclosure through a narrow access path, her mind filled with images of another brownstone, another door. Sara and Deacon had changed the layout and size of their house so that Elena would feel welcome, and yet her own father had done exactly nothing to ensure the same. Not that Elena was surprised, only furious at herself for continuing to permit him to wound her.
Jeffrey appeared in the back doorway as she arrived. “Elieanora. I have a meeting in five minutes.” Curt impatience in eyes of pale gray set in an aristocratic face and hidden behind spectacles framed in fine gold, his pure white hair combed with neat perfection, his stone gray suit sitting easily on his shoulders.
No doubt, her father was a handsome man, the kind of confident male irresistible to women young and naïve enough to think they could penetrate his icy exterior. He’d have no trouble finding another mistress to take the place of the one who’d been brutally murdered during the hunt that had forever altered Elena’s life. Perhaps he’d already done so, already replaced the woman who’d looked nothing like the elegant beauty who was Jeffrey’s current wife. No, the poor woman had been a pale imitation of Marguerite . . . and a living symbol of the pain her father had never once acknowledged aloud after those first brutal days.