Nalini Singh: Angels' Blood

Startled by the unexpected act, she closed her hand to help slow the bleeding. “Why not?”

“I want you to do this,” he responded, as if that was reason enough. And for an archangel, it was.

“What’s the job? Retrieval?”

“Yes.”

Relief began to wash through her like the rain she could feel so close. But no, it was his scent, that fresh bite of water. “All I need to start with is something the vampire wore recently. If you have a general location, even better. If not, I’ll get the Guild’s computer geniuses on tracking public transport and bank records, et cetera, while I hunt on the ground.” Her mind was already at work, considering and discarding options.

“You mistake me, Elena. It’s not a vampire I want you to find.”

That halted her in her tracks. “You’re looking for a human? Well, I can do it but I really don’t have any advantage over a good private investigator.”

“Try again.”

Not vampire. Not human. That left . . . “An angel?” she whispered. “No.”

“No,” he agreed and, once again, she felt the cool brush of relief. It lasted until he said, “An archangel.”

Elena stared at him. “You’re joking.”

His cheekbones stood out starkly against the sun-kissed smoothness of his skin. “No. The Cadre of Ten does not joke.”

Her stomach curdled at the reference to the Cadre—if Raphael was any example of their lethal power, she never wanted to meet that august body. “Why are you tracking an archangel?”

“That, you do not need to know.” His tone was final. “What you do need to know is that if you succeed in finding him, you’ll be rewarded with more money than you can hope to spend in your lifetime.”

Elena glanced at the bloodstained napkin. “And if I fail?”

“Don’t fail, Elena.” His eyes were mild but his smile, it spoke of things better not said aloud. “You intrigue me—I’d hate to have to punish you.”

Her mind flashed to the image of that vampire in Times Square, that broken mess that had once been a person . . . Raphael’s definition of punishment.

Elena sat in Central Park, staring at the ducks swimmingaround in a pond. She’d come here to try to get her head on straight but it didn’t seem to be working. All she could think about was whether ducks had dreams.

She figured not. What would a duck dream about? Fresh bread, a nice flight to wherever the hell it was ducks went. Flight. Her breath caught in her throat as her mind flashed with snapshots of memory—beautiful gold-streaked wings, eyes full of power, the shine of angel dust. She rubbed the heels of her hands over her eyes in an effort to erase the images. It didn’t work.

It was as though Raphael had implanted a damn subliminal suggestion in her head that kept spewing out pictures of the very things she didn’t want to think about. She wouldn’t put it past him but he hadn’t had time to mess with her that deep. She’d taken off less than a minute after he’d told her not to fail. Oddly enough, he’d let her go.

The ducks were fighting now, quacking at each other and diving with their beaks. Jeez, even the ducks couldn’t stay peaceful. How the hell was she supposed to think with all that racket? Sighing, she leaned back on the park bench and looked up at the clear spread of sky. It reminded her of Raphael’s eyes.

She snorted.

The color was about as close to the agonizingly vivid hue of his eyes as a cubic zirconia was to a diamond. A pale imitation. Still, it was pretty. Maybe if she stared hard enough, she’d forget about the wings that haunted her vision. Like now. They spread over her line of sight, turning blue into white-gold.

Frowning, she tried to see past the illusion.

Perfect gold-tipped filaments came into focus. Her heart was a hunted rabbit in her chest, but she didn’t have the energy to be startled. “You followed me.”

“You seemed to need time alone.”

“Could you put down the wing?” she asked politely. “You’re blocking the view.”

The wing folded away with a soft susurration she knew she’d never associate with anything other than wings. Raphael’s wings. “Will you not look at me, Elena?”

“No.” She continued to stare upward. “I look at you and things get confused.”

A male chuckle, low, husky . . . and inside her mind. “Avoiding my gaze gains you nothing.”

“Didn’t think so,” she said softly, anger a dark ember in her gut. “Is that how you get your kicks—forcing women to worship at your feet?”

Silence. Then the sound of wings unfurling and snapping shut. “You are using up your lives.”

She chanced a look at him. He was standing at the water’s edge, but his body was turned toward her, those eyes of impossible blue having shaded to midnight. “Hey, I’m going to die anyway.” It tended to make a person cavalier. “You said so yourself—you can fuck me over with your mind anytime you please. I’m guessing that’s the least of your little bag of tricks. Right?”

He gave a regal nod, strikingly beautiful in an opportune ray of sunlight. A dark god. And she knew that thought was her own. Because the very thing that repelled her about Raphael also attracted her. Power. This was a man she couldn’t take on and hope to win. A hotly feminine part of her appreciated that kind of strength, even as it infuriated her.

“So if you can do all that, what’s this other guy capable of?” She turned away from the erotic seduction of his face and toward the ducks. “I’ll be mincemeat before I get within a hundred feet.”

“You’ll be protected.”

“I work alone.”

“Not this time.” His tone was pure steel. “Uram has a penchant for pain. The Marquis de Sade was a student of his.”

Elena wasn’t about to show him exactly how much that freaked her out. “So he’s into kinky sex.”

“That’s one way to look at it.” Somehow, he put blood and pain and horror into that single comment. The emotions wormed their way through her pores and wrapped around her throat, choking, cloying.

“Stop it,” she snapped, eyes locked with his once more.

“Apologies.” A slight curve of his lips. “You’re more sensitive than I expected.”

She didn’t believe that for an instant. “Uram? Tell me about him.” She didn’t know much about the other archangel beyond the fact that he ruled a chunk of Europe.

“He’s your prey.” His face closed over, midnight eyes going near black, expression shifting to that of a Greek statue. Distant. Inscrutable. “That’s all you need to know.”

“I can’t work like that.” She stood but kept her distance. “I’m good because I get inside the target’s head, predict where he’ll be, what he’ll do, who he’ll contact.”

“Rely on your inborn gift.”

“Even if I could scent archangels”—which she couldn’t—“it’s not magic,” she pointed out, frustrated. “I need a starting point. If you haven’t got anything, I’ll have to work it out from his personality, his patterns of behavior.”

He walked toward her, closing the distance she wanted to keep. “Uram’s movements can’t be predicted. Not yet. We must wait.”

“For what?”

“Blood.”

The single word chilled her from the inside out. “What did he do?”

Raphael lifted a finger, tracing it over her cheekbone. She flinched. Not because he was hurting her. The opposite. The places he touched . . . it was as if he had a direct line to the hottest, most feminine part of her. A single stroke and she was embarrassingly damp. But she refused to pull away, refused to give in.

“What,” she repeated, “did he do?”

That finger passed over her jaw and whispered along the line of her neck, giving excruciating, unwanted pleasure. “Nothing you need to know. Nothing that will help you track him.”