Archangel's Kiss

15

“Sam.” It was less than a whisper as she began running, far more interested in that gentle scent than the one that had drawn her here. The hallway ended at a door, a heavily carved slab that had been varnished until it glowed darkest amber.

Her palms slammed up against it as she came to a halt. “He’s behind here.”

“No, he’s not.” Michaela’s voice lashed the air as she appeared from their left, her face and body pristine once more. A silent testament to the power of an archangel. “I shall enjoy delivering your punishment for violating my home without cause.”

“There’ll be no punishment,” Raphael said. “She falls under my protection.”

Michaela smiled, small, satisfied, vicious. “But she doesn’t accept you as her master. You cannot stand as her shield.”

And Elena knew Michaela was really, really looking forward to making her scream. It didn’t matter. “Open this door.”

Michaela waved a languid hand at Riker. “Do as the hunter says.”

Elena shifted away to avoid physical contact with the vampire as he moved to do his mistress’s bidding. The door swung inward to reveal a room swathed in shadow, but for the faint snow-reflected silver of the moon. Elena didn’t need light to find her target. Walking inside, she headed unerringly to what proved to be a large chest when Riker threw on the wall-mounted lights, their glow a muted honey.

“Can a baby immortal survive without air?” she whispered desperately as she struggled to lift the heavy lid.

“For a time,” was the chilling answer as Raphael took over the task, while Illium stood watch.

For the first time in her life, Elena hoped she was wrong, that Sam wasn’t in that trunk. But the Cadre had hired her because she was the best—she didn’t make mistakes. “Oh God!” Instinct had her reaching inside, but she hesitated an inch away from that tiny curled-up body. “I’ll hurt him.” He was so bloody, so very broken.

“We must take him to the healers.”

Nodding, she brought out that crumpled body in her arms. Sam’s wings had been crushed, the fine bones likely shattered. The majority of the blood had come from what looked like a head wound, as well as a cut on his chest. A chest that wasn’t moving. God, please. “Is he alive?”

Raphael, his face a stone mask, touched the boy’s cheek, and it was only then that Elena saw the sekhem branded into that delicate skin.

“Yes, he lives.”

Rage a hurricane inside of her, she held Sam as close as she dared and went to walk past Michaela, but the archangel was staring at Sam, such a stricken expression on her face that Elena felt her throat lock, her feet root to the floor.

“He’s alive?” the archangel asked, as if she hadn’t heard a single word that had passed ’til then.

“Yes,” Raphael answered. “He lives.”

“I can’t heal him,” Michaela said, looking at her hands as if they belonged to a stranger. “Raphael, I can’t heal him.”

Raphael walked forward to place one hand on the female archangel’s shoulder. “He’ll be fine, Michaela. Now we must go.”

Elena, already at the door with Illium, waited only until Raphael was in the hallway before handing over her precious burden. “You’re faster. Go.”

Raphael left without further words. Elena was about to follow when she heard Michaela say, “I didn’t do this.” It was a broken sound.

Shaken, she looked back to glimpse Riker kneeling beside his mistress, her glorious wings dragging on the floor as she collapsed to the ground. “I didn’t do this,” she repeated.

Riker stroked Michaela’s hair back from her face, the devotion in his eyes a brilliant, blinding thing. “You did not do this,” he said, as if in reassurance. “You could not.”

“Elena”—Illium’s lips brushing her ear—“we must go.”

Snapping her head back around, she followed his lead, not speaking until they were out in the ice-cold air. “I had her all figured out,” Elena said in a low whisper, conscious of the large number of vampires who surrounded the house. “She was the Bitch Queen and that was that.”

“A big part of her is exactly that.”

“But what we saw today . . . where did that come from?”

She felt Illium hesitate. His words when they came, were quiet. “Angels don’t have many young. It is our worst pain to lose a child.”

Michaela had lost a child.

The realization shook her, skewing her view of Michaela in a wholly unexpected direction. “Then this bastard wasn’t out to hurt Sam, not really.” That somehow made it worse. “He was out to hurt Michaela.”

“Or,” Illium said, “his aims were higher. Titus and Charisemnon are already warring over a girl-child Charisemnon swears he didn’t take, and Titus swears he did. Whether this angel had anything to do with that, or simply took inspiration from it, they’re locked in their own world, indifferent to outside concerns.”

The pieces fell into place. “He failed to pit Elijah against Raphael, but if you hadn’t grabbed me when you did, if Riker had managed to touch me—”

“Raphael would’ve gone for blood.”

“Sam was bait?” Her stomach roiled.

“If the trap had been successful, it would’ve taken two more archangels out of the equation.”

Weakening the Cadre, leaving room for a power play that would turn a sociopath into an archangel. “I need to check the grounds,” she said, forcing herself to think past the abhorrent nature of this act, to ignore the gut-wrenching sight of Sam’s blood on her hands, her clothes. “There’s a chance the vampire left here on foot.”

Illium pulled out his sword. “Go.”

Michaela’s vampires smelled like many things—cloves and eucalyptus, burgundy and agar, with base notes as far apart as sandalwood and the darkest cherry-flavored kiss. But there wasn’t even a hint of citrus, of oranges dipped in chocolate. “Nothing,” she said more than thirty minutes later, having checked in an almost hundred foot radius around the house, vividly conscious of their silent audience.

A few vamps had moved out into the open, their eyes gleaming as they trailed her. One had even smiled. It made her beyond glad that she was armed to the teeth.

“Do you want to do a sweep from the air?”

“Yeah.” But she wasn’t hopeful, not given how much time had passed.

Illium flew her over the estate several times, but she had to shake her head in the end. “No.” They didn’t speak again until he brought them to an easy landing in front of a low white building that blended harmoniously into the fine coating of snow. “Hospital?”

A small nod. “This is the Medica.”

She strode inside . . . and almost stepped off a ledge and into thin air. Illium caught her as she backpedaled. “Damn it,” she muttered, her heart racing. “I will remember this!”

“It’ll become second nature after a while.”

Rubbing her face, she looked down. Wings filled her vision, a hundred different shades, a thousand unique patterns. And still she couldn’t see to the bottom of the cavernous space—which meant the building was more than three-quarters underground. “Is this the waiting room?”

“They’re here because of Sam,” Illium said, sliding his arms—muscular, familiar now—around her in a caress of warmth. “Come, I’ll take you to him.”

That won’t be necessary. Elena found herself being plucked off the ledge by an archangel, her palms pressed against his chest as he took them down through the cascade of wings and to the wide open space at the very bottom. “Were you able to track the vampire any further from Michaela’s?”

“No. Looks like his angelic accomplice brought him in, took him out.” She kept her mind on the mechanics, not sure she could handle thinking about the assault on Sam. The poor baby had to have been so afraid. “The question is—how did they get into the house in the first place? Her security is impressive.”

“But are her men loyal?” Words potent with the coldest of rages as they entered an area of pristine quiet. Riker might be her creature, but she hasn’t yet broken them all. “Come, you must meet Keir.”

She went to reply, but the words stuck in her throat. “Sam.” The glass enclosure in front of her was drenched in soft white light. Sam’s fragile body lay unconscious on a large bed in the middle, his wings attached to some kind of thin metal frame that spread them out on the sheets. His mother sat beside him, leaning into the embrace of a shaggy-haired male angel with solid shoulders. Sam was badly injured, but he looked better than when she’d first taken him into her arms. “Am I imagining it?”

“No.” The taste of the wind, of the sea, clean and fresh, an unspoken assurance. “He recovered a little of his spirit during the flight to the Medica.”

Slipping her hand into his, she squeezed it in silent relief just as an angel rounded the corner from the opposite end. The male was maybe five feet six and as slender as an eighteen-year-old boy, his uptilted eyes a warm brown, his black hair framing a dusky face that was pretty in an almost feminine way, his jaw pointed, his mouth lush. What saved him was the confidence with which he carried himself, the sense of male-ness that was just there.

“I feel as if I know you,” Elena murmured, staring at that face that defied categorization. He could’ve been born in Egypt, in Indonesia, in a hundred different places.

Raphael’s hand released hers to curve around her neck. “Keir watched over you as you slept.”

“And sometimes”—a smile on that perfect mouth—“I sang to you, though Illium begged me to stop.”

Light words, but that smile . . . old, so old. Elena’s bones sighed with the knowledge that notwithstanding the fact that he looked like a teenage boy on the cusp of adulthood, Keir had seen more dawns than she could imagine.

“Are you keeping Sam asleep?” Elena asked.

“Yes. He’s too young to remember not to move his wings, so we won’t bring him back to full consciousness until the bones have knit back together.”

Raphael’s fingers tightened on her skin. “Are any of his injuries likely to cause long-term harm?”

Elena stared through the glass in dismay. “Angels can be hurt that way?”

“When we are very young,” Keir said, “yes. Some injuries take centuries to heal fully.” Brown eyes lingered on Raphael’s face. “It takes a ruthless kind of will to survive that much pain, but Sam won’t need it. He has no hurts that won’t heal within the next month.”

Elena pressed her palm to the glass. “I can’t understand the malice that could lead someone to do this.”

Fingers brushing the pulse in her neck, her archangel’s rage so fiercely contained, she wondered what it cost him. “You’ve seen innocents drown in blood, and yet you ask?”

“Bill,” she said, naming the hunter who’d butchered a string of young boys before Elena had ended his life, “did what he did because of a mental illness that eroded the soul of the man he was. But this was a calculated act.” The brand on Sam’s cheek, the ugliest of abuses, had been covered by a bandage. “Will that fade before he wakes?”

“I’ll make certain of it.” Keir’s tone turned so cold it was as if he was another man, a man who’d never known a healer’s mercy and never would. “This is a deed that threatens to taint the Refuge forever.”

Raphael stared through the glass. “His mind?”

“He’s young.” A long glance up at Raphael. “The young are resilient.”

“But scars remain.”

“Sometimes, the scars are what make us who we are.”

Elena wondered at the scars that marked the son of two archangels, whether he’d one day share them with her. She wouldn’t push, knew exactly how bad old wounds could hurt. A year. A century. It had little bearing when it came to the heart. The scars formed in that suburban kitchen when she’d been barely ten had indelibly marked her. They’d marked her father, too, but in a different way. Jeffrey Deveraux had chosen to deal with it by wiping his first wife and two eldest daughters from his memory.

Her nails dug into the palm of her hand. “I’m going to go see if I can find any trace of the vampire.” The city was huge, but she might get lucky—and it was better than doing nothing.

“I’ll return with you,” Raphael said. “Keep well, Keir.”

The other angel lifted his hand in a small wave as they left.

“Do your healers have special abilities?” Elena asked.

“Some do. Some are more akin to human physicians.”

“They’d have seen things go from leeches to transfusions to organ transplants.” Arriving at the waiting area, she wrapped her arms around Raphael and let him take her up to the ledge.

Illium’s wings were shadowed blue against the snow when they walked out, his face turned up to the flakes falling soundlessly from the night sky “The water, Ellie,” he said, “it’ll wipe away the scents.”

“Damn.” Water was the one thing that ended any hope of a scent trail. Melting a few flakes in the palm of her hand, she tried to think positive. “Sometimes, snow isn’t so bad—I once successfully tracked a vamp because the snow trapped his scent instead of washing it away.”

“Then you need to hurry.” Raphael spanned her waist with his hands. “Illium, Naasir thinks he may have found something in the north quadrant.”

Illium’s eyes almost glowed against the clean lines of his face. “I’ll go and help him check it out.”

Pressing her lips to Raphael’s ear as they rose into the air, Elena asked a question that had been simmering at the back of her mind. “Is Illium getting stronger?”

He was badly injured by Uram, went into a deep healing sleep known as anshara. It was the first time he’d done so—sometimes, there’s a change in a man after anshara.

“How strong will he get?”

Unpredictable. He swept down, the wind frigid across her cheeks. We’re in the area around Sam’s home.

“Nothing in the air. Put me down—I’ll see if I can track him through the snow.”

But that, too, proved futile. “It’s not a total loss.” She blinked away a flake caught on her lashes. “It’s so cold, the snow won’t melt anytime soon. That gives me time to search across the Refuge.”

“How far through snow can you pick up a scent?”

“A couple of feet at most.”

Raphael looked up. “The skies will open tonight.”

“Then I guess we’ll be staying up.” Elena met the midnight storm of his eyes, felt compelled to reach up, cup his cheek. “We’ll find the bastards.”

He didn’t soften under her touch, didn’t become any less distant. “The fact that they dared take a child, it speaks of a deep rot, a rot that must be excised before it infects our entire race.”

“Nazarach and the others?”

“They were all in open sight.”

“Of course they were.”

“It doesn’t matter if the angel driving this didn’t participate in the physical act—their corruption is the root. What was done to Noel merited death. What was done to Sam . . . death would be a mercy.”

Light edged her fingertips where they touched Raphael’s skin. She feared his power, would’ve been a fool not to. But she couldn’t let him cross that line, couldn’t let the hunt drag him into the abyss. “Raphael.”

“There is,” Raphael murmured, his eyelids lowering to hood the ice of his gaze, “a dark music in the screams of your enemies.”

“Don’t,” she whispered, trying to reach him. Cruelty, as he’d once told her, seemed to be a symptom of age and power. But she refused to surrender to that, to let him be consumed by the violence of his own strength. “Don’t.”

But he wasn’t listening. “Would you not like to stroke a stiletto across his throat, Elena?” His own hand closed around her neck, sensual, gentle, lethal. “Would you not like to watch him beg for his life?”