Nalini Singh - Archangel's Consort

It all happened so fast that she was still staring at the place where the vampire had been when Raphael turned to her, a slight glow to his wings that augured nothing good. The primal part of her brain, more animal than human in its determination to survive, fired a surge of fear-laced adrenaline through her system. Run , it said, run ! Because when an archangel glowed, people died.

But Raphael wasn’t simply an archangel. He was hers.

She stood her ground as he stepped closer, bent to speak with his mouth brushing her ear. “Someone whispered to him that I was dead”—cool tone, quiet words that made her nerves skitter—“that there was no longer any need for him to leash his desires.” Moving back a step, he lifted a finger to tuck a flyaway strand of her hair behind her ear.

The gentleness of the act didn’t reassure her—not when his anger kissed a knife blade against her throat. “That doesn’t make sense.” It took effort to keep her voice steady—yes, he was hers, but she’d only scratched the surface of him. “Even if he did think that, why come here, to this place?” She wasn’t egotistical enough to think it had anything to do with her. No, Raphael was the target, but she was the weak point in his defenses. “It’s too far out of the city to be anything but a specific location.”

Raphael’s eyes shone with that dangerous metallic tinge, a look to him she couldn’t read. He’d been alive for over a thousand years and had so many facets to his personality that she knew it would take an eternity to see them all. Right now, it was obvious that reasoning with him would be akin to banging her head against thousands of rapier-sharp blades.

It would only make her bleed.

Taking a deep breath, she gestured back to where she’d seen Jason. “I need to examine the body, make sure there wasn’t anything weird about the kill.” It appeared to have been a simple feeding gone feral, but after the past year and a half, she wasn’t much on taking things at face value.

Raphael flared out his wings, their glow painful in the dull, cloudy light. “You can report back to me later today. Dmitri is almost here—he’ll deal with the school.”

He was gone in a sweep of wind an instant later, leaving her staring up at him. She didn’t mind the order—he was her lover, but at this moment, she was acting as a hunter and he’d treated her as one. Since she had no intention of giving up her position with the Guild, that worked for her.

What worried her was the distance he’d put between them, a distance that had returned her to the rooftop where they’d first met, when Raphael hadn’t been a man who wore her claim of amber, but only an immortal who could crush her with a single thought. An immortal who’d made her close her hand over the cutting edge of steel, until her blood spilled dark and wet onto the tiles.

“We’re not going back to that, Archangel,” she murmured, hand clenching in sensory memory. “If you think we are, you’re going to get one hell of a surprise.”

Turning on her heel, she made her way back to Jason through the leaf-littered ground, the wooded area eerie in its silence. It was as if the birds themselves were mourning the loss of a young, vibrant life. Anger was a fist in her throat by the time she reached the body—it didn’t matter that the monster who’d stolen Celia’s young life had been executed, justice done. She was still dead, her dreams forever ended.

Jason stood in the same position where she’d last seen him, a stone guardian, and now that Elena knew to look for it, she was able to make out the pommel of the black sword he wore strapped to his back, hidden against the sooty black of his wings. “I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said, trying to distance herself from what she had to do next.

Jason stepped back to allow her closer to the body. The move threw the tribal tattoo on the left-hand side of his face momentarily into the light before he angled his head toward the shadows he wore like a cloak once more, until even though his hair was pulled off his face in a neat queue, she could only just glean his eyes. “I was meeting with the Sire when the message came through.”

Kneeling beside Celia’s body, her wings pressed against pine needles and innumerable crushed leaves that scented the air in a green perfume soaked with last night’s rain, Elena frowned. “Why did it come to the Tower? It should’ve been directed to the Guild.”

“The Guild Director herself called Raphael when she realized your sisters might be involved.” Jason’s tone was calm, so calm she’d have thought him unaffected if she hadn’t seen the black flames in his eyes before he used the shadows to his advantage. “We were able to get here faster than any of the hunters who might’ve been called.”

Thank you, Sara. With that, Elena put everything else aside. Celia deserved her full attention. “You pulled her out of the water?”

“Yes. I thought I glimpsed a sign of life.”

But the young girl was gone, her face holding the horror of her last moments on this earth. Her skin might’ve been a vibrant caramel shade in life, but in death, it was a dull gray brown, the blood that pumped through her veins having spilled out of the ripped and torn flesh of her neck, her chest.

“Has the M.E. been called?” Since hunters were often the first people to find a vampire’s victim or victims, they were trained in basic crime-scene protocols during their years at Guild Academy and authorized to inspect bodies—but it was always a good political measure for the Guild to keep the authorities in the loop.

“The Guild Director stated she would take care of it.”

Leaning in, she examined the neck, trying to see only the pieces, not the whole. Not Celia, the girl who had been, but simply the brutalized flesh of a neck. And lower down, the ground meat of a chest that was still as flat as a boy’s. “He was feeding in a frenzy,” she murmured, “tore through her skin, ripped it up badly enough that he exposed bone.” Nothing unusual there, except that Ignatius hadn’t been in bloodlust. “Do you know why he’d feed like this if he was lucid?”

“Most vampires are neat.” Jason’s wings rustled slightly as he resettled them, and the sound was a welcome reminder that the painful silence of these woods wasn’t the only reality. “It’s a matter of pride—tearing up a body not only denotes lack of control, it means a vampire loses his or her willing partners very fast. Pain isn’t why most humans take a vampiric lover.”

A flash of memory, Dmitri’s dark head bending over the arched neck of a woman who’d been all but purring for his blood kiss. And later, in the Refuge, Naasir with his eyes of silver and scent of a tiger on the hunt, a woman’s shuddering moan. “Yeah.” She sat up on her haunches, her wings spread out on the forest floor. “Can you help me turn her?”

Jason did so in silence.

The girl’s back was unmarked from what Elena could see. “That’s fine for now. I’ll attend the autopsy, make sure I didn’t miss anything.”

Noises came from within the woods as they turned Celia gently onto her back once again—the murmur of voices, footsteps. It didn’t surprise her when Jason melted into the shadows until she could only see him because she knew he was there—unlike Illium, Raphael’s spymaster didn’t like the spotlight. Even tight-mouthed Galen had friends, a woman he appeared to love, but Elena had never seen Jason with anyone when it didn’t involve his duties.

“I heard a rumor you were back”—a familiar male voice—“didn’t believe it.”

Elena looked up to see death-scene investigator Luca Aczél doing a pretty good job of keeping his surprise at her wings to himself. With his silver-touched black hair, patrician features, and long pianist’s fingers, she’d always thought Luca would look more at home in a boardroom than surrounded by violence, but there was no question that he was brilliant at what he did. Celia would be in good hands.