"There was hope he might be able to be revived until his brain was discovered to be missing."
She stared at Raphael across the body that was nothing but the emptiest of shells. He had told her, but - "The victim honestly could've survived the rest of it?"
"Immortality isn't always pretty." An answer that left no room for ambiguity. "He was most likely conscious while his organs were being removed."
Swallowing, she shook her head. "I'm too young for that, right? If someone decides to fillet me, I'll lose consciousness?"
"Yes."
"Good." She wasn't the giving up kind, but neither did she want to know what it did to a person to survive this kind of torture. "Given the blood splatter, he was dropped from a fairly impressive height." She was trying not to think too hard about what might be sticking to the soles of her shoes - the M.E. would have had her behind bars for compromising a scene like this, but she salved her conscience with the fact that the scene was already so compromised it was worthless to anyone but a hunter-born.
"However," she continued, "it wasn't so high that it tore his body completely apart - do you have any way of knowing if he had his organs at that stage?" It was impossible to tell in all the gore.
"Yes." Raphael pointed to the open chest cavity. "Some of them left pieces behind." He reached in and picked up what appeared to be a hard pink stone, ragged at the edges. The stone gleamed a deep rose quartz in the sunlight. "A segment of his liver."
Goose bumps broke out over her skin. "Are you sure he can't feel that?"
"He's dead. What his body is doing, it's akin to a chicken running around after its head has been cut off."
"A nerve response." It made sense that it took longer for an older immortal to fade.
Returning the stone to the chest cavity, Raphael pointed at the head. "Parts of the brain were also found scattered on the rocks."
She was going to throw away these shoes the instant she got home. "That hard an impact would've turned his organs pretty much into soup," she said. "Wouldn't that make it more difficult to remove them?"
"Not if the 'surgeon' waited for him to heal enough for the organs to become viable again."
She'd been handling the gore fine, but ice filled her veins at the cold-blooded nature of the kill. "Jesus."
"Use your senses, hunter." It was a gentle reminder. "The wind is holding but it can change without warning."
Shaking off her horror, she began to filter out the scents she already knew - separating the good guys from the bad could come later. She was midway through the process when her angel-sense cut out without warning, leaving a single clean thread behind. "A vampire was here."
"Not with the rescue team," Raphael said, his expression intent.
"Means he was here before." Trying not to gag on the sickly sweet smell of the body in front of her - a body that didn't smell like death should - she arrowed her senses to that vampiric thread.
Cedar painted with ice, an unusual scent, full of elegance.
Her eyes snapped open. "Riker. Riker was here."
Raphael found Michaela hours later, high in the night sky above her home, her body clad in a catsuit that turned her into a sleek, dangerous predator. There was no hint of the insanity Elena and Galen had both seen in her, her body as clean and as lushly graceful as always.
"Raphael," she said, coming to a vertical hover beside him. "Are you here to warn me off your hunter again?"
Elena, Raphael thought, might see in Michaela's past a hurt that had turned her bitter, but Raphael had known the young angel she'd been, her ambition a pyre on which she'd sacrifice anything. "You walked into the Medica with the intent to do harm."
A smile coated with the purest malice. "There was no intent until your pet hunter and her friends got in my way."
"You injured several healers on your way in. And you waited until after you knew Elena was inside."
"Does it not disgust you?" she whispered, her voice sliding from poison to purring sensuality in the blink of an eye. "That she's so weak?"
"Power without conscience rots the soul," he told her, watching her eyes harden even as her lips remained uptilted in a smile that promised the darkest of sins, the most excruciating of pleasures. He thought of Uram, falling into the trap of that smile, the selfish beauty of that mind - but then, the dead archangel had chosen his path long before Michaela was even born. "Why did you kill Aloysius?"
"Clever, Raphael." A small bow of her head, genuine delight in her eyes. "He was one of mine, became mine when I took over part of Uram's territory."
"What did he do to merit such an execution?" As the archangel who ruled his territory, Michaela had had the right to put Aloysius to death, but to have that death come at the hands of one of the Made - a vampire who'd likely been allowed to feed from the dying angel - was a ritual humiliation.
Michaela's green eyes turned into narrow slits of light. "He helped abduct Sam."
Any sympathy Raphael might've felt for Aloysius died a quick and permanent death.
"Did you take his memories?"
"Useless." She slashed out a hand. "He was a bit player, a gullible sheep in this faceless would-be archangel's army."
"Were you able to discover anything that may lead to the identity of the one we seek?"
"No. Aloysius was but a pawn."
Raphael saw the truth in the small smile that flirted with her lips. It was cold, merciless, satisfied. "You lost your temper, killed him before taking all his memories."
"He laughed while he put Sam in that box." A thin line of red circled her irises. "I saw it when I looked into his mind."
"Is that when you dropped him?"
"Yes." A shrug. "I'd already broken his wings. Riker took care of the rest."
Raphael reined in his frustration. "How did you discover his involvement?"
"He was afraid his master had come to see him as expendable, couldn't keep from spilling his fears to his lover." A slow smile, that of a snake in the grass. "And loyalty is such a rare commodity when riches are involved."
Elena felt almost surreally calm as she stepped onto the plane the next day. They were flying to Beijing two days ahead of the ball itself, would arrive one day before the other archangels. "Venom?" she asked.
"He's safe." Raphael told her as they took flight. "I've moved all three - Sam, Noel, and Venom - to another location. Galen has gone with them."