Archangel's Consort (Guild Hunter 3)

He held out a hand. “Dagger.”

Glad he no longer looked as tormented as he had the previous evening, she slapped one of her knives in his hand and watched as he flew in, somehow executing the tightest of turns before reaching over and cutting the rope. The vampire dropped. But Illium was faster. He scooped the male up before the vampire’s dead weight of a body could touch the water. Elena followed him up onto the bridge itself—which the cops had cordoned off at both ends, making themselves real popular with commuters—and landed.

Soon as Illium placed the male on the road and dove off to get the rest of the victims, she took out another knife and began to cut through the vampire’s shirt, pulling away the matted fabric and wincing at the chunks of skin that came with it. But she had to see the damage. Santiago, having come down on his haunches beside her, watched in silence as she succeeded in revealing the ruin of the vampire’s chest.

It sure as hell looked like he’d suffered major damage to the region around his heart, but there was so much dried blood tangled up in thick curls of black chest hair that she couldn’t tell for sure. Unhooking the wireless device over her ear, she gave it to Santiago before reaching into one of the pockets of the fleece-lined vest she’d put on as protection against the wind, and pulling out a pair of latex gloves.

Santiago took the chance to lean forward and hold the screen of his cell phone a scant inch from the vampire’s mouth. “Shit,” he muttered when the screen began to mist with steam. “For a minute, I thought you’d lost it down there. But shit.” He glanced over her shoulder to where Illium was landing a second time.

Elena was ninety-nine-percent certain she might actually have lost it if she hadn’t been so f**king shocked out of her mind. “I need something with which to wash off the blood.” The irony of the fact that the East River churned below wasn’t lost on her.

“Wait.” Santiago returned moments later with two water bottles as well as a pack of tissues. “From the squad cars. Medics are on their way.”

Vampires didn’t need medics to heal, but during the regeneration process, their bodies hurt the same as a mortal’s. The paramedics could at least give them drugs, knock them out for a while. “Good.” Dampening a wad of tissue, she cleaned the male’s chest with quick, careful motions as Santiago went to check the other bodies.

Great gouges marked the vampire’s flesh beneath the clotted black of his blood, as if someone had tried to dig through his skin.

A flash of memory, Raphael’s hand punching through a vampire’s sternum to remove his still-beating heart.

“But that,” she muttered, trying to keep things practical, logical, “was a single strike.” Quick, brutal, efficient. This, by contrast, had been done by someone who didn’t have Raphael’s strength—because while the male’s chest looked as if it had been through the shredder, his heart beat safe behind his rib cage.

“They’re all alive.” Santiago sounded shaken. “Christ, it’s like someone f**king clawed this guy.”

That was what Elena was thinking. “The question is, who?”

A strange silence.

Following the detective’s gaze as he came down on his haunches again, the wind flipping his tie over his shoulder, she watched as he put a gloved hand under the victim’s. The vampire’s fingers and nails were encrusted with blood and what might well have been bits of flesh. “He did it to himself.” A cold far deeper than the winds that buffeted the bridge slid through her veins.

Santiago glanced at the row of bodies Illium had laid out. “They all did.”

Elena knew from her lessons at the Refuge that very, very few angels had the power to compel a man to savage himself. To kill, yes. But to mutilate and torture? No, that power was reserved for the Cadre ... and the Sleepers who had once been Cadre.

24

Having been away from the city when he received Elena’s call, Raphael now landed beside the Central Park pond where she stood watching the ducks. “We have been here before.” She’d been mortal then, a hunter he intended to bend to his will.

No smile on that expressive face; the rustle of the leaves were secret whispers in the air. “I wondered if you’d remember.”

“Tell me what you found.”

Elena glanced around the quiet but not deserted area. “Not here.”

Taking her into his arms, he rose up into the sky. The flight across the Hudson took only minutes, and then he was landing near the house of glass his consort so loved, his gaze on her as she flared out her wings to descend. Your control is improving.

“I’m nowhere near the level I need to be if I’m going to be effective in a hunt.” Tucking her hair behind her ears, she walked into the warm humidity of the greenhouse. “I sensed black orchids. It’s such a unique scent, it’s impossible to mistake.” Touching her fingers to a blush pink bloom, she shook her head. “The purity of it bothers me for some reason—my perfumes contact is trying to get me a sample so I can figure out why.” Gray eyes solemn with concern met his as he closed the door behind them.

Instinct and experience told him to reject her worry, her care. An archangel did not survive by being weak. He survived by being more lethal than any other. Come here, Elena.

When she shifted to stand bare inches from him, he curved his hand around the back of her neck, rubbing his thumb over her pulse. “Not many know of this particular punishment.” But he did. He’d been there, a young child who’d understood even then that justice had to be served. “My mother did not wish to be a goddess like Lijuan or Neha. Neither did she wish to rule empires like my father.”

Elena’s hair fell in a silken waterfall over his arm as she raised her head so she could watch him as he spoke. She didn’t ask questions, but every part of her stood with him, unflinching against the darkness coming inexorably closer.

“But she was treated as a goddess, and she did rule,” he murmured, “as I rule.” He had learned about ruling from his mother, learned that there was a way to do it that would inspire both respect and awe without the debilitating fear that surrounded so many archangels. “She ruled Sumeria, but there was one particular city she treated as home. It was called Amanat.”

His hunter’s hand came to rest on his waist as lines formed on her brow. “I’ve heard about it. On a TV special about lost cities.”

“Amanat and its people disappeared when Caliane vanished.” Some say she took her people into Sleep with her, so that they would be there to welcome her when she woke. Most believe she murdered them all before she took her own life, for she loved them too well to leave them under another’s rule, and that Amanat is her grave.