Angels' Blood (35 page)

Michaela sat up, not bothering to cover her bare chest. It was a weapon, her body, one she wasn’t hesitant about using. But that wasn’t what she was concerned about right then. “Won’t that lessen my status as a tempting target?” In that moment, she was an archangel, knowing only that Uram had to die.

“He’s arrogant enough not to worry about even other archangels, you know that better than anyone.”

She looked up, a spark of true pain in her eyes. “I did love him. As much as an archangel can love.”

He said nothing, leaving her to consider what immortality had made her as he went to find Elena. She was waiting for him outside, on the edge of the lawn where the woods began. Her eyes immediately shot to his wing. “He damaged you.” Anger whiplashed through the air.

“I damaged him worse.”

“Bastard got away.” She kicked at the leaves as they walked. “How’s Her Royal Bitchiness?”

“Alive.”

“Pity.” The word was caustic, but he remembered the compassion.

He gripped her upper arm. “Don’t ever feel sorry for Michaela. She’ll use that vulnerability to destroy you.”

“Yet you saved her life.”

He slid his hand down to her elbow, then off. “She’s necessary. Impossible as it may seem, Michaela is more human than Charisemnon and Lijuan.”

She said nothing as they emerged into his yard and entered the house. Montgomery was waiting. His distress at Raphael’s injuries broke through his usual reserve. “Sire? The healer?”

“That won’t be necessary.” When the vampire continued to wring his hands, Raphael put a hand on his shoulder. “Be easy. It will heal by nightfall.”

Montgomery relaxed. “Should I bring up the meal? It’s close to noon.”

“Yes.” He turned to Elena as the other man moved down the corridor. “It seems we’ll share a second bath.” Geraldine and Michaela had both left their mark on him, not to mention the scarlet stain of his own injuries.

She winced, touching the cuts on her cheeks—from the flying debris. “Just a quick shower for me. If I soak, my skin might peel off.” A glance at her bloody clothes, a result of being carried by Raphael. “Damn, I don’t think I packed any more spares.”

About to reply, Raphael heard the sound of approaching wings, a rustle that announced another angel—one who wanted to be heard. When he looked up, it was to find Jason in his sights. The angel bowed his head in respect, his black hair pulled back in a queue. “Sire, we have a problem.”

Elena couldn’t help staring at the new angel. His face . . .
she’d never seen anything like it. The entire left-hand side was covered in an exotic tattoo composed of fine dots and swirling curves, the ink pure black against his glowing brown skin. There was a hint of Polynesia in that skin, that tattoo, but the sharpness of his facial features hinted at part of her own ancestry. Old Europe mixed with the exotic winds of the Pacific—it was one hell of a sexy combination.

“Jason,” Raphael said in greeting.

“You’re injured.” The new angel’s eyes went to Raphael’s wing. “This can wait.” He shifted slightly, the rustle of his wings alerting Elena to the fact that she hadn’t truly seen them. Frowning, she squinted into the dimness of the hall—the stained glass dull without sunlight—but still saw nothing aside from an indistinct shadow.

She had to ask. “Where are your wings?”

Jason gave her an inscrutable look, then flared out a wing in silence. It was a deep, sooty black. The wing didn’t reflect light but seemed to absorb it, the edges fading into the spreading gloom. “Wow,” she said. “Guess you make one hell of a night scout.”

Jason glanced from her to Raphael. “The report can wait, but it’s important you hear it.”

“I’ll join you in an hour.”

“Sire, if early evening would suit, I’d like to fly out to check on something else.”

“Contact me when you return.”

With a short nod, Jason left. Elena didn’t say anything until after both she and Raphael had cleaned up and were tucking into the food Jeeves had brought up. But first things first. “Your butler laundered my clothes,” she said from her cross-legged position on the bed. The cargos and T-shirt from yesterday had been waiting for her, washed
and
ironed.

Raphael raised an eyebrow in front of her, having chosen to sit on the bed, too, one leg on the mattress, the other foot-first on the floor beside it, his injured wing draped gently across the sheets to promote optimal healing. To her pleasure—and she was too achy and frustrated to lie to herself about how he made her feel—he’d asked her to spread a special ointment on the injured section. She knew full well it was a measure of how their relationship had changed that he’d kept her with him while he was injured. No Dmitri tying her to a chair this time. “I highly doubt that,” he said now. “Montgomery runs the house—he’d never sully himself washing clothes.”

“You know what I mean, Archangel. He’s like the house-work fairy—only better!”

“Somehow, the idea of Montgomery as a fairy doesn’t have the same effect on me as it appears to have on you.”

“Give it time.” She bit into her everything-and-more sandwich. “So, Jason’s your spy. Or should I say, spymaster?”

“Very good, Guild Hunter.” He ate the other half of the sandwich in about three bites. “Though some would say his face makes him too distinctive.”

“That tattoo—it had to have hurt.” She winced, having been too chicken to get inked herself. Ransom had tried to talk her into one when he’d gotten the band around his arm. Watching the blood being blotted off his skin hadn’t inspired her to follow suit . “How long do you think it took?”

“Exactly ten years,” Raphael said, watching her with those eyes that seemed to see straight through to her soul.

She shook her head as she finished off the sandwich. “Crazy comes in all forms, I guess.”

Raphael held up an apple. “A bite?”

“Tempting me, Archangel?”

“Ah, but you’ve already fallen, hunter.” He used a sharp knife to cut into the fruit and put a slice to her lips, watching her bite off the end with concentrated interest. “Your mouth fascinates me.”

The languid heat in her body, ever present around Raphael, seemed to grow, spread, until it was in every part of her, a living, demanding beat. Swallowing her bite of apple, she crawled around the food to kneel in front of him. When he raised the rest of the slice to her lips, she bit down, holding on to his wrist.

Eyes locked, the living warmth of him against her fingertips, it was more erotic than a kiss from another man. Her lips brushed his fingers.

Something hot and male spread across his face, a look that told her very well where he wanted her to put her lips. But what he said was, “Another slice?”

She shook her head with regret. “You have to heal and I need to start running the trace again.” Uram couldn’t have gone far. Most likely he’d been forced to return to one of his earlier hiding places. Which meant there was a high chance it was in the circuit they’d already mapped out. “This could be our best shot.”

Raphael put down the knife and the rest of the apple, tracing her lips with his finger. “Did you hear what Michaela said?”

“That he’s all monster?” She shrugged, even as lust snaked around her like a heady perfume. “No surprise after what we saw at that warehouse.”

“Would you hunt me, Elena? If I became bloodborn?”

Her heart froze in her chest. “Yes,” she said. “But you’ll never become a monster.” Yet she remembered the knife cutting into her hand, remembered, too, that vampire in Times Square.

A humorless smile. “That’s hope, not knowledge.” He shook his head. “We’re all as susceptible to the lure of power. The blood makes him stronger, harder to defeat.”

Cupping his face in her hands, she looked into eyes that had seen thousands of sunrises before she was even a glimmer in the scheme of the universe. “But you have an advantage,” she whispered. “You’re a little bit human now.”

Raphael walked out onto the third-floor balcony, Elena’s
words still vivid in his mind.
You’re a little bit human now.

Lijuan had warned him to kill Elena for that very reason. His reaction to being shot, the pain, the blood, had strengthened his belief that this hunter was dangerous to him. But what if, with the danger, came something else, an immunity to the madness of power, of age? After all, he’d wakened from the Quiet much sooner than he should have.

As he waited for Jason to arrive, he considered who he’d been when he first met Elena. He’d torn into her mind, terrorizing her without the least care. Could he do so again? Yes, he thought, having no illusions as to his natural goodness. He was fully capable of doing the same again. But whether he’d choose to do it . . . there lay the true question.

Jason entered the balcony from above, landing in a neat way that made him the most perfect of spies. “I expected to see Illium here.”

“He’s keeping watch over Elena.” Raphael would’ve preferred to give her a vampiric driver as well, but another vampire that close would hamper her ability to pick up Uram’s trail. So she was driving herself, with Illium flying above. Raphael was housebound by his angelfire-scored wing—it was healing at a rapid pace, and he could still fly, but to do so would strain the injury and he needed to be in top condition for when Uram rose again.

Elena had been gone for most of the day, calling him with updates as she cleared one section of Manhattan after another. It was strange to realize that despite having a myriad of other matters on his plate, he . . . missed her. She’d become important to him, this mortal with the spirit of a warrior. “Now, tell me.”

“It’s as you thought,” Jason said. “Lijuan wakes the dead.”

Raphael felt the biting freshness of the water-tinged breeze coming off the river, and wondered if Lijuan would be as she was if she hadn’t killed the human who’d threatened to make her a little bit mortal. “Are you certain?”

“I saw her raise them.”

“Do they live?” He turned to face the other angel.

Deep revulsion whispered in the depths of Jason’s eyes. “I wouldn’t call it life, but there is some spark within, some glimmer of the person they once were.”

This was worse than anything Raphael had thought. “Not puppets as we believed?”

“They are that, but they’re also more. Abominations that walk, see, hear but never talk. Their silence is drowned out by the screams in their eyes. They know what they are.”

Even an archangel’s soul could feel the chill hand of horror. “How long can she maintain them?”

“Of the reborn I saw, the oldest was a year old. He was starting to become senile, that spark long gone.” A pause, and then the usually temperate angel said, “It’s a mercy when that part of their soul dies.”

“And Lijuan has complete control over these reborn?”

“Yes. For now, she plays with them as one would with a new toy. But there may come a time when she turns them into an army.”

That cold hand closed around his heart. For if the reborn marched on the living, civilization would fall as terror overtook the world. “Those she wakes—are they the newly dead?”

“No,” was the disturbing answer. “Those are easier, but she’s begun on the older dead—even those that have . . . rotted. She’s somehow able to clothe them in flesh.” Jason paused.

“What is it?”

“It’s rumored their new flesh comes from consuming the bodies of the more recently dead, the ones Lijuan does not wish to reawaken, and I know they must then drink blood to survive.” Jason’s voice dropped even lower. “There are also whispers that she gains something from the rebirths, somehow absorbs power.”

A bloodborn of another sort, Raphael thought, knowing that no hunter had been born—human, vampire, or angel—who could destroy Lijuan should that prove true. “Have your men maintain watch.” Jason was the perfect spy, but as Elena had guessed, he was an even better spymaster. “We must know if she begins large-scale rebirths.” The Cadre of Ten could do little while Lijuan played in her own lands. More, most of the members would choose to do little. They each had their own games, their own perversions. Raphael couldn’t judge them—he’d countenance no interference in his domain, either.