by Nalini Singh
Elena stared after the angel for long moments. A shiver rippled down her spine.
Shaking it off, she called Vivek and got him to remotely hack into Damian Hale’s computer—which the vampire had left passcode-protected. Vivek discovered evidence of multiple international airline tickets all booked for the same time and day. The most interesting find, however, was that Hale had managed to gain access to the household account and siphon off a significant cushion of money.
“He’s no ordinary runner.” Elena’s blood heated, her pulse faster. “I don’t think he’ll be on the planes, either. He left this trail for us to find.”
“I’m on it.” An exhilaration in Vivek’s voice that justified her decision to call him rather than the Guild’s own tech team.
She was by the mansion’s front door with Taizaki when Vivek confirmed her hunch. Damian Hale hadn’t boarded any of the ticketed flights. “I’ve set up a notification alert across every possible system. Anything else pops up, I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks, V.” Elena secured her phone in a zippered pocket, then opened the bag that held the exemplar of Hale’s scent and took a deep breath. “The brush of aspen trees entwined with a hint of ripe peach.”
Taizaki blanched at her murmur.
Elena shrugged. “Vampiric scents often have nothing to do with the strength or dangerousness of a vampire.” She decided not to tell the snooty majordomo that he smelled of burnt sugar candy and curdled milk.
See, she was being all political and nice even though Taizaki had curled his lip the first time she’d ever met him. As if mortality was catching. Montgomery would’ve never been so tacky as to betray his personal feelings. The first time she’d met Raphael’s butler, she’d been a rough-and-tumble mortal hunter, but he’d offered her tea or coffee with utmost politeness.
But, she admitted, Montgomery was the gold standard. Every other butler—or majordomo—was going to suffer by comparison. Poor Imani would be mortified if she ever realized Taizaki’s lapse.
Handing the exemplar back to the majordomo, she turned to begin the hunt in earnest.
Roses, opulent and intoxicating and hella-creeptastic.
Elena gritted her teeth against the overwhelming perfume that stained the air and shouted omen, omen, omen! She began to walk out from the mansion in increasingly large semicircles and finally caught Hale’s scent about fifty yards out from the front door, heading into the trees that surrounded the property.
Twenty minutes later, the scent came to an abrupt halt. When she crouched down to dig lightly through the dirty snow that had been protected from the light morning snowfall by a heavy tree canopy, she spotted a drip of oil. “Smart guy.” She rose, walked out from under the canopy.
Bunching up her wings, she went to go airborne to see if the oil leak had left a trail . . . and felt an excruciating wrenching in her muscles.
Breathless, she froze then tried again.
She got airborne, but her shoulders and inner wing muscles hurt as they hadn’t since she’d first become strong enough to pull off vertical takeoffs. The pain throbbed through her like an infected tooth.
Damn it.
She must’ve inadvertently moved the wrong way and twisted or torn a tendon or muscle. Hopefully it was small enough that her body would heal on its own. Angelkind’s healers were gifted, but while they could help the healing process, they couldn’t magic away major injuries.
As for Elena’s own capacity to heal, it was more than she’d had as a mortal but nothing in comparison to even baby angels. No one knew how long her journey from post-mortal to immortal would take. Keir, a gifted healer respected by immortals, and Jessamy, their trusted historian and librarian, had been digging for information about the previous angels-Made, but so far all they had to show for their efforts were a lot of dust sneezes and reddened eyes.
The frustration was even worse because everyone knew those once-mortals had existed. They were the flesh and blood reality behind the legend that when an archangel loved true, his body would spontaneously produce a sweet, erotic golden substance called ambrosia. Raphael had kissed her with ambrosia as she fell, her back broken and the rest of her wounded beyond repair, and now she soared in the sky.
Ambrosia was accepted as a given among immortals. Researchers had even attempted to study it. Unfortunately, they were hampered by the lack of records—or an actual sample. It wasn’t as if Raphael had been in any condition to save them a drop; he’d given it all to Elena.
You must live.
Elena’s heart stretched on the echo of memory—of the raw determination in her archangel’s voice, of the piercing love that had marked them both. But what of the other lovers true who’d come before them? Where had they gone?
The prevailing theory was that the last angel-Made had been born so very long ago that the angel-Made and all those who knew his or her name were lost to deepest Sleep. Elena wondered at times about what it would be like to meet one of her predecessors, uncertain if she wanted the opportunity or not. What if those predecessors had lost their humanity after an eon of existence? What if she recognized nothing of mortality in them?
Today, she felt mortal down to the bone, but the pain in her wing had faded from pulsating abscess to throbbing bruise, so she decided to continue the hunt and swing by the infirmary when she got back.
There were no visible oil stains on the road, anything once there long erased by the passage of other cars. This hunt would have to be more technical. But when she asked Vivek to locate Damian Hale’s phone, he told her it was back in the general area of Imani’s mansion. “He probably hid it on the grounds, hoping to send everyone on a wild- goose chase.”
A flock of starlings flew off the trees right in front of Elena. Hundreds of tiny bodies and sharp beaks and unblinking dark eyes. Thousands of wings hitting her skin. Endless shrills of sound bursting against her eardrums.
She dropped on a bitten-off imprecation, barely managing to catch herself before she fell too far.
“Ellie!”
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she muttered into the phone while the birds flew in a spiral around her before scattering to the winds. “Have there been any other seismic events since I left?”
“No, all calm.” Vivek’s voice was sharp. “You’re really okay?”
“Yes.” The Cascade might be stretching awake again after this latest bout of dormancy, but Elena wasn’t planning to dance to its tune. No one knew how long the power surge and accompanying chaos would last. It could be decades for all they knew. None of them could stop living their lives.
Today, Elena’s life included finding Damian Hale. “How about his car?”
“Guy’s got no vehicle registered to him,” Vivek replied without pause. “I called and talked to Imani’s majordomo vamp—he confirms none of their vehicles are missing.” A sudden pause. “Hold on. Our clever rabbit might’ve forgotten something.”
Elena stayed aloft while Vivek worked, her eyes sweeping the ground.
“A lot of the angelic homes have surveillance directed out to the road,” Vivek said in her ear, “and the Tower’s got access to those eyes in case of enemy threats. I picked up your runner’s face in a red sedan, and I’m tracking him using various cameras and toll points. Hacked those years ago, so it doesn’t even count.”
“Point me in the right direction, partner,” she said, her skin going burning hot then searingly cold. Every hair on her head felt electrified. “V,” she said before he could answer. “Is there a lightning storm on the horizon?”
“No, weather report says clear skies with limited chance of weirdness.” Shifting focus, he began to give her directions; he stayed with her all the way to a small cabin-style hotel at the foot of the Catskills. She ate three energy bars in the air as lunch, drank water from the slim water packet she kept in a lower pants pocket.
“I’ve got nothing beyond
the cabi—” A quiet exhale on the other end of the line. “You know that small chance of weirdness?”
“Yeah?”
“Seismic report came from a sensor located near those cabins.”
“Of course it did,” Elena muttered even as her skin tingled as if a current were arcing through her cells. “I’m about to land. Call you after I have something.”
It took her two tries to zip up her phone in her pocket again, the sensation of electricity was so distracting and disorienting on her fingertips. Her cheeks felt burned with ice, the tips of her ears red-hot.
“Normal thoughts,” she ordered herself. “Normal thoughts.”
When the starlings surrounded her as she looked for the best spot to land, she ignored them . . . even when she could swear the birds were whispering to her. She couldn’t hear the words, the shape of them just out of hearing range, but the tone was a warning.
The birds flew up higher now and then to dance in intricate patterns that kept her airbound as she looked on in fascination, but they never went far from her side. A strange, murmuring escort.
That winged escort stayed in the sky when she did finally land—in the large area in front of the hotel that was probably full of wild grasses and flowers in summer; today, it was a sheet of white barely marked by life. A single draw of the bitingly cold air and vampiric scents touched her nose, each line clean and unentangled with others.
There, a brush of aspen and the juicy extravagance of ripe peaches.
Strong. Rich. Not just a residue. Damian Hale was here.
Taking another breath while trying not to notice the electric prickling on her face, Elena triangulated the source of the scent to a particular cabin. She’d just stepped foot in that direction when the electricity vanished. The birds stopped singing. The air froze.
And the earth trembled under her feet.
She came to a halt. An unknown sound made her look up. The starlings were circling in a constant wheel as they whispered their frantic and incomprehensible warning inside her skull.
The earth jolted violently.
Bunching her wings and gritting her teeth against the renewed pulse of pain, she rose up off the shaking ground. Cabin doors flew open below her, people spilling out like disoriented ants to run in the direction of the lawn.
The ground under the cabins began to crumble.
Elena swept down to grab a young woman who was a frightening half step ahead of the disappearing earth. Elena wasn’t strong enough to carry a full-grown adult any real distance, but she managed to haul the woman to where the other guests could grab her, then yelled at everyone to go farther.
A scream split the air.
Elena twisted back . . . to see Damian Hale, his arms and legs flailing, disappear into nothingness. The ground had opened up under his feet in a rushing crash of dirt and rock. She flew toward him as fast as she could, but it was a futile effort.
Even as she reached the spot where he’d disappeared into the stygian maw of the earth, the sprawling and chillingly deep hole began to fill with a golden-red flow of magma. There was no sign of Damian, no sign of any of the cabins. Not even a smear of flesh or a splinter of wood.
The ground stopped shaking.
The earth stopped crumbling.
The birds danced.
Below Elena glowed a wound in the earth that pulsed with scalding heat.
The drinker of blood was meant to die. That was his destiny. To be the first mark in time.
Elena rubbed her hands over her upper arms as the words appeared full-fledged in her mind. As if she’d thought them up. Except she hadn’t. That had been someone else’s thought, and it had been inside her head.
She raised her eyes to the whispering starlings, wondering if they were the source of the words. But the small birds began to disperse under her gaze, moving to sit in the trees or to land around the lava sinkhole. A few flew close to the heat in movements that felt like a dance, only to sweep back up just when she worried they’d fly too close and be burned.
All at once, there were no more starlings in the sunlit winter sky. Only screaming, sobbing people on the snow-heavy ground safely distant from a lava pit that shouldn’t exist . . . and Elena’s left wing was beginning to drag. It was only when sweat dripped down her temple that she realized she was hovering directly above the lava. Far too close to the core.
She looked down at the viscous cauldron of it . . . and an invisible hand pushed her with murderous force.
4
Elena’s instincts screamed.
Her first and most overwhelming reaction was to fight—then she realized her wing was dragging even more heavily, and the unknown force was pushing her out of the danger zone. After landing safely not far from the sobbing or preternaturally silent clumps of survivors, she turned to walk to the very edge of the tear in the fabric of the earth.
Thick liquid moved ponderously below, the color a glowing orange-red. Despite the movement, it seemed quiescent now, the land on which Elena stood stable. The heat that emanated from the sinkhole to hit her face, however, was a scorching burn that made it clear nothing and no one would survive contact with the molten magma.
Liquid bones, skin turned into crackling, burst eyeballs . . . Damian Hale hadn’t deserved such a fate for the crime of arrogance and conceit. “Rest in peace, Damian,” she murmured as she crouched down to examine the edges of the sinkhole, deeply conscious that Imani would mourn his loss. As Raphael had said, the angel might be a stuffy old stick, but she wasn’t unkind.
Elena. Salt and the sea, a crashing wave of violent power as familiar to her as her own breath. The ocean is turbulent and rising as a result of the recent earth tremor. Get away from the coast if you’re near it.
So, the quake hadn’t been localized to this region. I’m at the foot of the Catskills—and there’s a sinkhole filled with lovely bubbling lava in front of me.
The minutest pause. Guild Hunter, we must discuss your penchant for finding danger. I am on my way.
Any damage in the city? It was full of people she loved.
Wait. Thirty seconds later. Dmitri says no damage reported. The tremor was widespread but minor except by the mountains near where you stand.
The tightness in her chest easing, Elena rose from her crouch and had to fight back a wince—damn, she must’ve hurt her wing more than she’d realized. She took care to make sure she was holding it in the right position before she walked over to the survivors.
No point exacerbating the injury with messy muscle control.
Among the huddle of mortals and young vampires on vacation was a sandy-haired vamp with a laptop under his arm; he wore a brown polo shirt with a graphic logo on one side that looked vaguely like a set of cabins against a mountain backdrop. “You’re staff?” Elena asked the man who smelled like torn paper and crushed mint.
“Manager,” he said, the whites of his eyes yet showing and his glazed attention on the spot where the cabins had once taken center stage. His freckles stood out like islands against the bloodless hue of his tanned skin.
“I don’t suppose you have the guest list on that laptop?”
He stared blankly at her for a long second before blinking and jerking his head up and down like a broken marionette. But the action seemed to jolt him out of his shock, and he opened up the laptop without further nudging on her part. While he did a roll call, she responded to Vivek’s message asking if she was all right, then returned her attention to the roll call.
The only person who didn’t reply to their name was “John Smith.” Not rocket science to figure that had been Damian Hale, but Elena got a description out of the manager to be certain. It didn’t take much prompting—Hale had only recently checked in, and the manager even remembered the small scar on his eyebrow that Elena had noticed in the images she’d been sent of her target.
The marker in time.
Shaking off a shiver that threatened to crawl over her at the memory of that otherworldly voice in her head, Elena spread then tightened her wings to her back. It was an automatic action, one she often did when on the ground for long periods. It felt good to stretch out her wings.
Not today.
Stabbing twinges through her back. Razors shaped into long needles.
She sucked in a breath, breathed past the pain. At least she had no trouble keeping the survivors away from the lava sinkhole. No one wanted to end up with their flesh melted from their bones, the aural stain of Damian Hale’s chilling screams too recent to be ignored. When the manager offered to organize a bus to take his guests to temporary lodgings in the city, no one hesitated in agreeing.
Raphael arrived before the transport.
Elena heard a whimper from the knot of survivors as the magnificent spread of his wings came into view. Sunlight sparked off the white-gold filaments within his feathers, the midnight of his hair blowing back in the wind generated by his landing to reveal the clean lines of a face brutal in its masculine beauty.
“Archangel.” A soft whisper, an equally soft hand slipping into Elena’s.
Startled, she looked down to find a boy of maybe five standing there with a rapturous smile on his face. His coppery brown skin glowed, the wide and high cheekbones beneath the baby fat of his face reminding her of a photo Ransom had shown her of his Cherokee great-grandfather. Of course it would be a child who wasn’t afraid; children never were of Raphael. You have an admirer, Archangel.
Raphael closed his wings to his back with warrior efficiency before turning to nod in greeting at the child. His eyes were a blue so pure that it nearly hurt to look at him, his skin sun-golden. He wore leathers today, a beaten-down brown that bore the nicks of past battles and sparring sessions. The tunic left his arms bare, revealing the sculptured muscle of his biceps. He had been a warrior before he became an archangel and a warrior he’d always stay.
