Ilona Andrews: Angels of Darkness

A slight incline of her head, a regal acknowledgment. “I had the tea tested without alerting anyone in this court, discovered it held Midnight.” Smooth honey brown skin stretched tight over the line of her jaw. “If the assassin had succeeded, I would have been insensible for hours—and those who knew of my incapacitated state could have come in and ensured full death.”

Angels were as close to immortal as was possible in this world. The only beings more powerful were the Cadre of Ten, the archangels who ruled the world. Unless they pissed off one of the Cadre, death wasn’t something angels had to worry about except in very limited circumstances—depending on the years they’d lived and their inherent power.

Noel didn’t know Nimra’s level of power but he knew that if someone were to decapitate a strong angel, remove his or her organs, including the brain, then burn everything, it was unlikely the angel would survive. Unlikely but not impossible. Noel had no way of knowing the truth of it, but it was said angels of a certain age and strength could regenerate from the ashes of a normal fire.

“Or worse,” he added softly, because while death might be the ultimate goal, many of the oldest immortals lived only for the pain and suffering of others, as if their capacity for gentler emotions had been corroded away long ago. He could well imagine what someone like Nazarach would do to Nimra if he had her alone and vulnerable.

“Yes.” She turned to the windows beyond that little writing desk—formed with a daintiness that would crumble under one of Noel’s fists—her gaze on the wild beauty of the gardens below. “Only those who are trusted enough to be in my inner court, and carefully vetted servants, are ever anywhere near my food.

“Because of this act of treachery, I can no longer trust men and women who have been with me for decades, if not centuries.” Calm, tempered words sliced with anger. “Midnight is near impossible to acquire, even for angels—which means the one who betrayed me is working in the service of someone who holds considerable power.”

Noel felt a spark within him, one he’d thought had been extinguished in that blood-soaked room where his abductors had brutalized him for no reason except that it gave them a twisted kind of pleasure. They might have justified the act by calling it a political ploy, but he’d heard their laughter, felt the black that stained their souls. “Why are you telling me this?”

An arch look over her shoulder. “I do not need a slave, Noel”—his name carried a slight French emphasis that turned it into something exotic—“but I do need someone whose loyalty is beyond question. Raphael says you are that man.”

He had not been cast aside after all.

It was a shock to the system, a jolt that brought him to life when he’d been the walking dead for so long. “You’re certain it’s one of your people?” he asked, his blood pumping in hard pulses through his veins.

Her answer was oblique and it held a quiet, thrumming anger. “There were no strangers in my home the day the Midnight was used.” Her wings flared out, blocking the light as she continued to focus beyond the windows. “They are mine, but one has been tainted.”

“You’re six hundred years old,” Noel said, knowing she saw nothing of the gardens at that instant. “You can force them to speak the truth.”

“I cannot bend wills,” she said, surprising him with the straight answer. “That has never been one of my gifts—and torturing my entire court to unearth one traitor seems a trifle extreme.”

He thought he heard a dark amusement beneath the anger, but with her face turned to the window, her profile shadowed by the tumble of those blue-black curls, he couldn’t tell for sure. “Do they know why I’m here?”

Shaking her head, Nimra turned to him once more, her expression betraying nothing, the flawless mask of an immortal. “It is probable they believe the very thing you did—that Raphael has sent you to me because you are broken and I need a toy.” A lifted eyebrow.

He felt as if he’d been called to the carpet. “My apologies, Lady Nimra.”

“Do attempt to sound a fraction more sincere”—a cool order—“or this deception will fail miserably.”

“I’m afraid I’ll never be able to pull off being a poodle.”

To his shock, she laughed, the sound a husky feminine stroke across his senses. “Very well,” she said, eyes glittering with gemstone brightness in the sunlight. “You may be a wolf on a long leash.”

Noel was startled to feel a different kind of heat within him, a slow-burning ember, dark and potent. Since waking in the Medica, his body destroyed, he’d felt no desire, had thought that part of him dead. But Nimra’s laugh made his body stir enough that he noticed. It was tempting to follow that flicker of heat, to hold the ember up to the light of day, but he didn’t allow her laugh or the exquisite caress of her femininity to wipe the truth from his mind—that the angel with the jewel-dusted wings was deadly. And that while she might be in the right in this particular game, she was no innocent.

He heard screams that night. The nightmare always surprised him, though he’d been having it since he opened his eyes in the Medica after the assault. Because the fact was, he’d lost the ability to scream several hours into the torture, remaining conscious only because his attackers had made it a point to never cross that fine line. Broken bones, torn flesh, excruciating burns—vampires could take a lot of damage without the escape of the cold dark of unconsciousness.

He didn’t remember screaming even at the start, determined not to give in, but he must have—for the echo of it haunted his dreams. Or perhaps the screams rang inside his mind because that was the sole place he’d had that had been his own, his strength, his dignity stripped from him with malicious force.

Throwing off the sweat-soaked sheets as he shoved away the memories, he got out of bed and walked to the window he’d left open to the honeysuckle-scented air. The heavy warmth of it stroked over his cheeks, fingered its way through his hair, but did nothing to cool his overheated flesh. Still, he lingered, staring out into the inky dark of the night and the slumbering silhouettes of the gardens and trees that sprawled out in every direction.

It was perhaps twenty minutes later, right when he was about to turn away, that he glimpsed wings. They weren’t Nimra’s. Frowning, he angled himself so as to be invisible from the ground and watched. The angel appeared out of the shadows a minute later and stopped, his face lifted up toward Nimra’s window—a long, motionless moment—before he carried on.

Interesting.

Pushing away from the window when there was no further movement, Noel walked into the shower, realizing he’d glimpsed the tall male in the audience chamber earlier. The angel had stood on Nimra’s right as she dealt with a number of important petitions, so there was no doubting the fact that he was one of her inner circle. Noel intended to find out everything else about him later today.

It was still dark when he walked out of the shower, but he knew there was no point in attempting to sleep now—and as a vampire, he could go without sleep for long periods. Part of him didn’t know why he even tried to find such rest. Even on the nights when he didn’t hear the screams, he heard the laughter.

Nimra walked out into the gardens the next morning to find that Noel had beaten her to the dawn. He sat on a wrought-iron bench beneath the branches of an old cypress, his eyes on the clear waters of the stream that snaked through her lands before joining a wider tributary that led into the bayou. He was so motionless, he appeared carved from the same stone as the silken moss-covered rocks that guarded the waterway.