Angels' Blood (19 page)

“I want to know about my apartment—the wall, did you close it off?”

“Why should we?” He shrugged and turned away. “It’s only a human dwelling.”

“You piece of—”

He snapped around, face different, lethal, unearthly. “I’m hungry, Elena. Don’t make me break my word to Raphael.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Push me and I will. I’ll get punished, but you’ll still be dead.” Then he was gone.

Leaving her alone with a racing heartbeat and a lancing pain in her heart. Her home, her haven, her damn nest was being destroyed right this second by the wind, dust, and rain if the heavens opened. It made her want to curl up and bawl her eyes out.

It wasn’t the individual things in the apartment that she worried about, it was the place itself. Home. She hadn’t had one for a very long time—after her father had thrown her out, she’d been forced to bunk permanently at Guild Academy. There was nothing wrong with the facility, but it wasn’t
home
. Then she and Sara had finished their training and shared an apartment for a while. That had been a home, a welcome one, but it hadn’t been hers. But the apartment, it was hers in every way.

A single tear streaked down her face. “I’m sorry,” she said, telling herself she was talking to her ruined home. But the truth was, she was speaking to an archangel. “I never meant to hurt you.”

A cool sea breeze in her mind.
Then why were you carrying a gun?

Elena went utterly quiet, much as she imagined a small
mouse might in front of a very big, very bad cat with large teeth. “Raphael?” she whispered, though she knew that fresh, clean, rainy scent as well as her own. And that was something that made no sense at all—how could he have a scent inside her head?

She took a deep breath. “How are you—the injury?”

“Yes.” She waited for an answer to her own question.

Then the sense of him was gone from her head. She whispered his name again, but knew he was no longer listening. Her guilt soon morphed into anger. The bastard—he could’ve had her released, but he’d left her tied up. Her wrists were sore, her back hurt from the damn chair, and—“And he’s got a right to be pissed.” Raphael had terrified her on that ledge tonight, but he hadn’t actually harmed her. Meanwhile, she’d shot him. If the man was furious, he had reason. That didn’t mean she had to like it.

And there was still the matter of his compelling her to have sex.

Humiliating as it was, she’d told him the truth tonight—if he’d only waited, it was highly likely she’d have crawled all over him voluntarily at the first opportunity.

Her cheeks burned. She was going to have
Idiot
tattooed on her forehead as soon as she got out of here. From the start she’d told herself to be wary, to never forget that she was nothing but a throwaway source of entertainment for Raphael. Apparently that didn’t matter to her hormones.

The archangel made her burn.

The worst thing was, she couldn’t blame the fascination on lust alone. Raphael was far too intriguing a male for anything that simple. But tonight, tonight he hadn’t been right. Or maybe, another part of her whispered, he
had
been—what if the stranger she’d shot had been the real Raphael . . . the Archangel of New York, a creature capable of torturing another being until that person was nothing but a screaming, destroyed piece of monstrous art.

 

 

Raphael’s eyes were closed, but he wasn’t truly asleep. He
was in a semiconscious coma, a condition for which humans or vampires had no equivalent. The angels knew it as
anshara
, a state of being that could be achieved only by those who had lived longer than half a millennium, and that allowed both reason and deep rest at the same time. Now, the conscious part of him was absorbed in knitting the wound Elena had made with her little gun, while the rest of him slept. A useful state. But not one that could be brought on by choice.

Anshara
only came to pass when an angel had been badly injured. That had happened rarely in the last eight hundred years of Raphael’s existence. When he’d been young and inexperienced, he’d damaged himself—or been damaged—a few times.

Images of dancing in the sky before his wings tangled, and he plummeted to earth with the certain understanding that his blood would paint a red carpet across the meadow floor.

Ancient memories. Of the boy he’d been.

Broken arms, broken legs, blood spilling out of a shattered mouth.

And her. Standing over him, crooning. “Shh, my darling. Shh.”

Sheer terror racing through his bloodstream, his heart heavy with the knowledge that he was helpless to stop her . . . his mother, his greatest nightmare.

Black haired and blue eyed, she’d been the feminine image from which he’d been cast. But she’d been old by then, so very old, not in appearance but in the mind, in the soul. And unlike Lijuan, she hadn’t evolved. She’d . . . devolved.

In the present, he could see his wing knitting together filament by filament but it wasn’t enough to keep the memories at bay. During
anshara
, the mind disgorged things long locked away, covering the soul in a layer of opaqueness no mortal could hope to understand. These were the memories of a hundred different mortal lifetimes. He was old, so old . . . but no, he wasn’t ancient. These memories weren’t all his. Some were those of his race, the secret repository of all their knowledge, hidden inside the minds of their children.

Caliane’s memories rose to the surface.

And he was looking down at his bleeding and broken body from a crouching position, watching his/her hand stroke his hair off his face. “It hurts now but it had to be done.”

The boy on the ground couldn’t speak, drowning in his own blood.

“You will not die, Raphael. You cannot die. You are immortal.” Leaning down to press a cool kiss against the bloody ruin of the boy’s cheek. “You are the son of two archangels.”

The boy’s miraculously undamaged eyes filled with betrayal. His father was dead. Immortals could die.

Sadness shifted through Caliane. “He had to die, my love. If he had not, hell would have reigned on earth.”

The boy’s eyes grew darker, more accusing. Caliane sighed, then smiled. “And so must I—that is why you came to kill me, is it not?” Soft, delighted laughter. “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.”

A shocking transition into his own mind, his own memories. Because he had none of Caliane’s after that—she’d made the memory transfer as he lay so badly injured he hadn’t even been able to crawl for months. Nor had he been able to lift his eyes to watch her take flight. Instead, his last memory of his mother was of the sight of her bare feet stepping lightly across the verdant green of the meadow, a trail of angel dust sparkling in her wake.

“Mother,” he tried to say.

“Shh, my darling. Shh.” Then a gust of wind blew dirt into his eyes.

When he blinked awake, Caliane was gone.

And he was looking into the face of a vampire.

“What time is it?” he asked, his voice strong.
Anshara
had done its work. But he’d have to pay the price it demanded soon.

“Dawn,” Dmitri answered in the old way. “Light is just touching the horizon.”

Raphael got out of bed and flexed his wing. “The hunter?”

“Bound in another room.”

The wing was back to normal except for one thing. He looked down at the inner pattern. The smooth brushstrokes of gold had been interrupted at the point where Elena’s bullet had torn through. Now the bottom half of that wing bore a unique pattern in gold on white—an explosion from a central point. He smiled. So, he would carry the mark of Elena’s burst of violence.

“Sire?” Dmitri’s voice was questioning as he noted the smile.

Raphael continued to look down at the wing, at the mark caused by the Quiet. It would serve as a useful reminder. “Did you hurt her, Dmitri?” He glanced at his second, noting the disheveled hair, the wrinkled clothing.

“No.” The vampire’s lips curved upward in a feral smile. “I thought you’d enjoy that pleasure.”

Raphael touched Elena’s mind. She was asleep, exhausted from a night spent attempting to break her bonds. “This is a battle between me and the hunter. No one else will interfere. Take care the others know that.”

Dmitri couldn’t hide his surprise. “You won’t punish her? Why?”

Raphael answered to no one, but Dmitri had been with him longer than any other. “Because I took the first shot. And she is mortal.”

The vampire’s expression remained unconvinced. “I like Elena, but if she escapes punishment, others might question your power.”

“Make sure they understand that Elena occupies a very special place in the scheme of things. Anyone else who dares challenge me will soon wish I’d shown them the same mercy I showed Germaine.”

Dmitri’s face paled. “May I ask one question?”

He waited in silent permission.

“Why were you so badly injured?” Dmitri pulled out a gun he’d had tucked into the small of his back. “I checked the bullet she used—it should’ve only caused minor damage, given her a head start of ten minutes at most.”

“I needed to be injured,” he responded obliquely. “It was the answer to a question.”

Dmitri looked frustrated. “Can it happen again?”

“I’ll make sure it doesn’t.” He took pity on the leader of his Seven. “Do not worry, Dmitri—you won’t have to watch the city shudder under the rule of another archangel. Not for another eternity.”

“I’ve seen what they can do.” The vampire’s eyes swirled with the rivers of memory. “I was under Neha’s tender mercies for a hundred years. Why didn’t you stop me when I rebelled against your authority?”

“You were two hundred years old,” Raphael pointed out, heading toward the bathroom. “Old enough to choose.”

Dmitri snorted. “Old enough to be cocky with no real knowledge to back it up. A damn pup with delusions of grandeur.” A pause. “Have you never wondered—if I’m a spy?”

“If I had, you’d be dead.”

Dmitri smiled and there was a loyalty in his eyes that surprised Raphael each time he saw it. The vampire was incredibly powerful, could’ve set up a stronghold of his own, but he chose to give his life over to an archangel. “Now I will ask you a question, Dmitri.”

“Sire.”

“Why do you think I intend to spare Elena’s life?”

“You need her to track Uram,” Dmitri responded. “And . . . there is something about her that fascinates you. Not much fascinates an immortal.”

“Feeling the stirrings of ennui?”

“I see its edge on the horizon—how do you fight it?”

Raphael wasn’t sure he had been fighting it. “As you say, very little fascinates an immortal.”

“Ah.” Dmitri’s smile turned sexual in the way of vampires. “So you must savor that which fascinates.”

 

 

Elena woke when her bladder protested. It was a good
thing hunters were trained to restrain their natural urges in such circumstances—some hunts involved hours upon hours of immobile watchfulness. Still, it wasn’t comfortable.

Her face went so hot, it felt like she had third-degree burns. “Do you always spy on people?” It was tempting, but she didn’t try to use that headache-inducing shield thing she seemed to have developed. Better to save that for when he was really messing with her.

The arrogance of the answer was stunning . . . and welcome. This was the archangel she knew. “I’m not letting that vampire escort me to the bathroom. He’ll probably try to bite me.”

That just made her want to scream. “Get him to untie me. I can hardly make a daring escape with you up and around.”

She was about to tell him exactly what she thought of that when the door opened to admit the vampire in question. He looked like he’d been up all night, his shirt rumpled, his previously neat hair messy. It only made him look lusciously sexy. “Do vampires sleep?”

He gave her a startled look. “You’re a vampire hunter. Don’t you know?”

“I mean I know you sleep, but do you really need it?” She stayed very still as he went behind her. “Dmitri?”

Cool fingers brushing her hair out of the way to bare her nape. Knuckles running along skin. “We can go without sleep for longer than humans, but yes, we need it.”

“Stop that,” she muttered when he continued to stroke her with his knuckles. “I’m not in the mood.”

“That sounds promising.” His breath whispered against her nape, a dangerous place for a vampire with cool hands. It meant he hadn’t fed. “What can I do to get you in the mood?”

“Untie me and let me use the bathroom.”

He chuckled and then she felt a tug on her wrists. The bonds fell magically away. “How the hell?”