Archangel's Consort

Ransom lifted a gun, shot, even as she drilled one of her blades into the vampire’s skull. The male fell, his body twitching as if he was fighting to rise in spite of the fact his brains were leaking down his temples. But, he was damaged enough that they didn’t have to worry about him for a while.

Fingers, slick and cold on the tip of her wing.

No. Her wings were highly sensitive and she hated having them touched by evil. The urge to spin, to act without thought was almost blinding, but she fought it and instead turned Deacon’s blade-bow backward, calculating the location of the vamp from the scent of honey and marigolds so thick in her nose.

A gurgling sound, fingers spasming then slipping away told her she’d hit her mark. Firing the flamethrower at a vamp who was running toward her in a fucking four-legged lope, she fried the petite brunette midjump before swiveling on her heel to turn the flames on the vampire who’d touched her wing ... and who was trying to clamp his bloodstained teeth onto her feathers.

When he met her eyes, he smiled. “She wakes.” It was a near-sibilant whisper, his throat almost destroyed by her blade—and still his eyes, they gleamed with an unholy joy. “She wakes.”

Shaking off the shiver crawling up her spine, Elena said, “Yeah, well, it’s goodnight for you.” With that, she turned the flamethrower on the sucker.

When she swiveled back around, it was to a scene of carnage . . . with only two other people left upright. Ransom held two smoking big-ass guns, one on either side of his body, his legs spread as he stood checking to see if any of the vamps near him still breathed. His face was bloody with claw marks, his black T-shirt almost shredded off him, and his hair, having come loose in the struggle, ran a silky black rain down his back.

By the door near where she’d been attacked stood Venom, blades swiveling in his hands, his suit jacket and tie gone, his white shirt splattered with blood. His hair, for once, wasn’t GQ-perfect. Instead, it tumbled over his forehead, and paired with his feral smile, it turned him shockingly attractive in a very disturbing way.

His eyes, slitted and inhuman, met hers at that moment. “I can’t hear any pulses.”

“We’ll check one by one to be sure,” she said, chest rising and falling in short, sharp breaths like the two men. “This group was far too organized—we don’t want any of them waking up.”

Silently, they did exactly that, covering every inch of the warehouse. “I count fifteen,” Ransom said, when they met in the middle.

“Yeah, that’s what I got,” Venom added. “There’s one outside, too, so sixteen in total.”

Ransom really looked at the other man for the first time, shook his head, stared again. “Holy hell, your eyes are like a fucking viper’s.”

Venom raised an eyebrow. “You have hair prettier than one of Astaad’s concubines.”

Ransom gave the vampire the finger. Venom grinned.

Certain that all was now well in the male world, Elena reached into her pocket and pulled out a spare hair tie, throwing it to Ransom. “I’d say this was impossible if I wasn’t standing in the middle of it. We have what, maybe three rogue vamps in the state in a year?”

“Rogues, yes,” Ransom pointed out, pulling his hair back in that rough way men had of doing. “Bloodlust? We’d get maybe one that was totally whackjob.”

“The Sire keeps a tight control on his vampires,” Venom said, going down on his haunches to wipe off his bloody blades using the shirt of a fallen vamp. “This simply shouldn’t have happened.”

Remembering what that last vampire had said, Elena knew there was a high chance Caliane was behind this, but she kept her mouth shut. Much as it pained her to keep a secret from Ransom and the Guild, she’d agreed to be Raphael’s consort. He had her first loyalty. She wouldn’t betray that trust—more, she wouldn’t share the shreds of information she had when nothing could be done about it.

“We need to ID the vampires,” she said, bending to strap the blade-bow to one thigh and the miniature flamethrower to the other, “notify the authorities.”

“I’ll do the authorities,” Ransom said, pulling out his cell. “They know I was on this track.”

“I know at least two of the vampires from sight,” Venom said, disappearing his blades into the crisscrossing black sheaths on his back that she could see now that he wasn’t wearing his jacket. “Give me a few minutes to see how many others I can ID.”

As Venom did that, Elena went around checking for wallets where they hadn’t been fried by her flames or otherwise destroyed. She ended up finding seven pieces. Venom ID’ed four others from sight, which left them with five unknowns, most of them either charred beyond recognition or missing a face courtesy of Ransom’s gun.

“The angel in charge of this region is on his way with the authorities,” Ransom told them, closing his cell phone. “He’ll take care of the rest of the IDs. Looks like he’s going to need to break out the DNA kit for a few.”

Elena looked toward the hole in the roof where she’d entered the warehouse and found rain still pouring in. “I think we all need a shower.”

The men didn’t say anything as they followed her out of the warehouse and into the torrential downpour. The water around them turned to rust, then a pale orange, then sepia, until finally, it ran clear. Blinking the rain from her eyes, she walked back to the door.

“Ellie.” Ransom’s voice. “Our job is done. We just hold the scene until the cops arrive.”

Elena nodded. “I know, but I want to check their scents. This kind of a mass outbreak . . . for all we know, it could be a mutant virus.”

Of course both men fell into step beside her, though they’d already verified that every single one of the vampires was well and truly dead. Vampires weren’t true immortals. They could be killed not only by other vampires and angels, but also by humans—beheading and fire were the best methods, though removal of the heart also worked if you then cut or, in Ransom’s case, blew off the head to make certain.

Leaving the two men to talk in quiet tones near the doorway, she went from body to body, searching, searching . . .

Dark, lyrical, lush.

There it was again, that haunting, intricate scent beneath the more brash smells of the fallen vampires. She was almost certain she’d scented the same thing when the wind threatened to crash her into the Hudson . . . except something niggled at her, some “off” note she couldn’t quite identify. “Damn.” She knew for certain she’d be tracking down the essence of this particular black orchid as soon as she got back to the city.

Deep in the heart of Manhattan, Raphael snapped the neck of a bloodlust-ridden vampire after blazing through his mind to take what he needed to know. That information proved both sickening and . . . sad. Some would have said the Archangel of New York had no mercy in him, but he didn’t enjoy the waste of life. Most of these vampires had gone mad beyond any hope of recovery.

An insane vampire could not be allowed to continue to live, because driven by the urge to consume blood far beyond that which was necessary for life, that vampire would kill hundreds of innocents. “Under five decades old,” he said to Dmitri as the leader of his Seven came to stand beside him after dispatching his own prey. Around them, the city lay wrapped in a cloak of fear and danger, the lights in the high-rises fragile bulwarks against the dark that had fallen an hour earlier.

“Mine, too,” Dmitri replied, the edge of his long black coat lifting slightly in the breeze. “Venom just sent me a message—all the ones he recognized in Boston were young. No one over six decades old.”

“She is not yet conscious in truth, her strength weak,” Raphael said. “Yet she can do this.” Cause carnage on a scale unseen for centuries, turning formerly sane vampires into killing machines.

“Sire . . . Aodhan and Naasir, how close are they to finding her?”

Raphael looked up at the sliver of moon visible in the cloud-heavy sky. “My mother,” he said to one of the very few men he trusted, “was intelligent even in her final madness. She has not been found for over a thousand revolutions of the earth around the sun. Even if we do manage that, it will be no easy task to contain her.” But he must attempt it.

For she lived because he had failed.

“Shh, my darling, shh.”

The final words she’d spoken to him as she walked away, her delicate feet getting ever smaller as she almost danced over the dew-laden grass. Dew glimmering with droplets of crimson, a sudden burst of color that had sprayed the meadow when he fell from so high; his wings crumpled, his body hitting the earth at a velocity that had torn off parts, left his mouth overflowing with blood, his ribs crushed into his heart and lungs, the leg that had remained attached to his body smashed into at least fifteen different fragments.

As he’d lain there, vulnerable in a way he hadn’t been since childhood, she’d crouched down beside him, her fingers gentle and maternal as she pushed back blood-soaked strands of his hair.

“Oh, my poor darling. My poor Raphael. It hurts now, but it had to be done.” Her blue, blue eyes awash in tenderness. “You will not die, Raphael. You cannot die. You are immortal.” A kiss on his broken cheekbone, light as a butterfly. “You are the son of two archangels.”

He said nothing, couldn’t speak, his throat crushed. But she understood what was in his eyes—immortals could die. He’d watched his father die. At his mother’s hand.

“He had to die, my love. If he had not, hell would have reigned on earth.” A slow smile when he continued to stare up at her, saying a thousand things even in his silence. “And so must I—that is why you came to kill me, is it not?” Laughter, soft and full of a mother’s delight in her son. “You can’t kill me, my sweet Raphael. Only another of the Cadre of Ten can destroy an archangel. And they will never find me.”

Her feet moving light and graceful across the grass, the soles of her feet tinged with the red of his lifeblood. Angel-dust trailing from her wings, sparkling and glittering with a purity that mocked.

“Come, Dmitri,” he said, shoving the memories back into the shadows where they had remained for most of his adult life. “We must continue.” Not since he’d first taken the city as his own had he had to help run such a patrol—he was an archangel, his focus on larger matters.

But today, as evening turned to night, he needed to fly, to sweep across his city and clear it of the evil that Caliane had unleashed. His mother would not take his territory. And he would not fail again—even if it meant killing the woman who had once cradled him in her arms with such infinite love that the echo of it haunted him even now.

17

Elena and Venom helped Ransom sweep the rain-slick streets of Boston after the authorities cleared them to leave the warehouse site. They found only one other vampire—but he was so deep in bloodlust he didn’t even look up from nuzzling his victim’s mutilated neck when Ransom walked up behind him. His head rolled off his neck an instant later, spraying Ransom with blood once again.