Wesley was already taking out his cell phone. “You going to check the trail?”
“Yes, but someone needs to talk to the principal, find out—” A new scent curved into the room, erotic and luscious and flavored with sensual decadence. It was a lure, that scent, a trap that caught only the hunter-born in its jaws, and Dmitri knew how to use it to its greatest advantage.
5
Instinct had her stepping out to meet the leader of Raphael’s Seven in the corridor. The vampire with his chocolate-dark eyes and black hair was dressed in what looked like a ten-thousand-dollar suit from some fancy store like Zegna’s, the ensemble black on black with an amber-colored tie that threw the tanned color of his skin into sharp relief. Except as she knew all too well, that color wasn’t a tan.
“I heard,” he said when she reached him, and for once, his voice carried no hint of the double-edged blade of sex. He sounded as she’d once imagined him—a battle-hardened warrior with scimitar in hand, ancient runes carved onto the weapon’s very surface. His scent, too, she realized, was being held in fierce check.
He spoke again before she could say a word. “You need to return to the Tower.”
Elena scowled—the day she let Dmitri give her orders was the day ice-skating became a regular activity in hell. Part of it was simple contrariness because he’d made it crystal clear he considered her a weakness in Raphael’s armor, but part of it was self-preservation. Because the instant Dmitri decided she wasn’t only a weakness, but actually weak, he’d stop fencing with her and come at her full tilt.
Raphael would kill him for it, but as Dmitri had once said to her, she’d still be dead. So she folded her arms, braced her legs. “The second body could—”
He sliced out a hand, cutting off her words. “Raphael isn’t acting right.”
Their eyes met in dangerous understanding. “Has he gone Quiet?” The terrifying emotionless state that had once turned Raphael into a monster, driven her to shoot him in violent self-defense, scared Elena even now.
“No.” A single precise word. “But he is not acting himself.”
“No,” Elena agreed. Raphael was an archangel, could be merciless in his punishments, but he was also piercingly intelligent. He shouldn’t have needed her to remind him that they needed to know why Ignatius had done what he had. That was something the Raphael she knew would’ve considered long before it got to the point of execution—but today, it was as if he’d been driven by untrammeled rage. “Have you seen him like this before?”
“No. And I have known him near to a thousand years.”
Elena sucked in a breath. In spite of the fact that he was almost impossibly good at hiding the sheer power within him, she’d known Dmitri was old, but even then, she hadn’t come close to guessing the depth of his age. “Does this place have a balcony I can use as a launch point?” She’d pursue the mystery of Dmitri later. Right now, she had to go to her archangel.
“A small one upstairs. If you stand on the railing, you should have just enough lift to rise.” He pointed to a staircase she hadn’t seen till that moment. “I’ll organize a search for the second body,” he said as she took the first step up, “ensure the medical examiner knows you’ll need to look at the remains.”
Elena’s hand clenched on the balustrade. The lives of two innocent families were about to be smashed to splinters that would never again form a complete whole. “My sisters?” she asked, fighting her mind’s attempt to shove her back into the horror-filled past of another family, one that had broken forever in a small suburban kitchen almost two decades in the past. “The other girls?”
“Being sent home. Your father dispatched a car to pick up your sisters—they left fifteen minutes ago.” Still no sarcasm, no attempt to unsettle her with that scent of his.
Dmitri’s restraint worried her more than anything he could’ve said.
Leaving him the task of locating the second body, she made her way to what proved to be some kind of an art studio surrounded by huge windows designed to catch endless sunlight. But there was no luxuriant warmth, no shimmering gold today. The world outside was a sullen gray, the atmosphere suffocating in its heaviness.
Shaking off the thought that nothing could fly in such leaden air, she made her way onto the attached balcony. Dmitri had told the unadulterated truth when he’d termed it small. It took all of her balancing skills to get herself onto the tiny railing, and even then, the ground looked far too close.
Sucking in a breath, she flared out her wings ... and dove.
The ground rushed up at blazing speed as she beat her wings hard and fast, muscles straining to painful levels. In the end, she could’ve skimmed her fingers over the grass, but she got airborne, pulling herself up until she was high enough to ride the air currents. Her shoulders ached from the unaccustomed amount and type of flying she’d done today, but not enough to make her worry about falling out of the sky.
Having caught her breath on a fast current, she stroked her way even higher—so that no one looking up would immediately recognize the unusual colors of her wings. The wind whipped her hair off her face, threatened to lay frost on her skin. The cold distracted her enough that she almost ignored the fleeting glimpse of black high above.
Jason.
Watching over her.
It would’ve annoyed her on a normal day, but today, she was too concerned about Raphael to bother. Instead, she made a mental note to ask the other angel to teach her some tricks about blending into the sky—she loved her wings with mad passion, but unlike Illium’s distinctive silver-edged blue, they didn’t blend into daylight skies. As with Jason, her wings were fashioned for the rich black of night, and perhaps most of all, for the hue of twilight.
Finding a thermal, she surfed it like a young fledgling, giving her muscles a break in the process. The thought conjured up images of Sam, the child angel who’d been caught in the middle of a narcissistic adult’s attempt to grab at power. Elena couldn’t think about how she’d found him—his small body curled in on itself, his wings broken—without feeling a chaotic mix of rage and pain. The only thing that made it bearable was that he was well on the way to being healed.
A rush of wind had her blinking furiously. When it passed, she saw Archangel Tower rising out of Manhattan, a proud, uncompromising structure that dwarfed the tallest of skyscrapers. Even on a day like this, with the sky a menacing slate gray blanket, it pierced the skyline, a gleaming column of light. She arrowed her way toward it using the last vestiges of her strength, certain Raphael would have headed to what was effectively the place from which he ruled his territory.