Archangel's Consort (Guild Hunter #3)

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 fucking 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 fucking 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.

Elena brushed the fingers of her free hand over the edge of one of his wings. He spread them wider, giving her easier access. A drop of water from a disturbed cluster of tiny white blossoms trickled along his feathers as, taking the invitation, she touched him with a firmer stroke. “Which do you believe?”

He settled her into the vee of his thighs, bracing her so both her hands would be free. “My mother,” he said, “loved things of beauty. Do you recall the ruby on the shelf in my Tower office?” The priceless gemstone was flawless in its faceted splendor. “She gave it to me for my tenth birthday.”

“She had impeccable taste.”

“Amanat,” Raphael continued, “was her jewel of jewels. She loved that city, truly loved it. I spent many of the happiest years of my childhood running wild above its paved streets.”

“Angels are so protective of their young,” Elena murmured, continuing to caress the insides of his wings with those hands that bore calluses from weapons training—a warrior’s hands. He wanted none other on him.

“My mother,” he began, speaking of the dawn of his existence, “trusted the people of Amanat in a way an archangel seldom trusts anyone.” Memories of hot summer days spent flying above ancient buildings carved out of rock; of playing with mortal friends and being petted and adored by adults. “And they loved her. It was not the kind of worship Lijuan or even Neha inspires. It was ... untainted in a way I cannot describe.”

“You just did,” Elena murmured. “Love. What they felt was love.”

He bent his head a fraction, bringing one hand up to play with the curling tendrils of hair that licked at her temple. “She was a good ruler. Before the madness, she was what an archangel should be.”

His consort’s eyes softened to a warm, liquid mercury. “The histories Jessamy gave me to read, they said the same. That she was the most beloved of the archangels, that even the rest of the Cadre gave her their respect.”

He widened his stance, tucking her close enough that she nuzzled her face into his neck, one hand closing around his nape, the other continuing to caress the sensitive arch of his left wing. “The reason the people of Amanat loved her so”—he breathed in the spring and steel scent of his hunter—“was that she loved them in turn.”

Faded echoes of his mother laughing with the maidens who served in her temple, the sunshine of her smile as she gifted a maid about to marry with a dowry of gold and precious silks. “So when a group of vampires from outside came in and hurt two of Amanat’s women, she did not look the other way because the women were mortal and the vampires over four hundred years old.”

Elena’s body turned rigid, her breath warm against the hollow of his neck.

He tightened his hold against the nightmare memories that stalked her. Elena.

“It’s okay, Archangel. Tell me.”

He had never spoken of these events, but they had shaped him as much as Caliane’s disappearance. “The vampires kept the women for three days. Three days in the span of a mortal lifetime can feel like three decades.” His mother’s words. “Since the women were returned alive, she decided not to execute the vampires. Instead, she sentenced them to the same kind of terror they’d inflicted.”

Elena sucked in a breath. “She hung them, in a way calculated to ensure they wouldn’t die.”

“No, Elena. She did not hang them. She made them hang themselves.”

Elena flexed her hand on his nape, the bite of her nails tiny kisses. “That explains why I couldn’t pick up any other scents on the rope or on the bodies on the bridge. They were compelled to do what they did.”

“Yes.”

“Those vampires in Amanat, the three days must’ve—”

“No, Guild Hunter. Remember ... three days of terror in a mortal lifetime can feel like three decades.” He spoke with his lips against her skin, the warmth of her, the life of her, shoving away the cold that had been inside him for so long. “Vampires live far beyond a human lifetime.”

“Three decades?” A disbelieving whisper. “How did they stay alive?”

“They were fed enough to ensure they lived, and left hanging from a specially constructed gallows in a field where crows liked to rest.”

Elena shuddered at the image that bloomed fully formed in her mind. “The birds would’ve plucked out the eyes, other soft flesh,” she whispered. “The parts would have grown back, and the crows would’ve come again.” An endless cycle. “How long did they survive?”