Angels' Blood (Guild Hunter #1)(65)

"This is my territory," he said. "Your mistress is a guest." That was all the warning he gave before he thrust his hand through Riker's clothing, flesh, and muscle to grip his panicked heart. A second later, that heart was in Raphael's hand and Riker was twitching facedown on the ground.

"Why?"

He looked up to meet Elena's horrified gaze over the continued pulse of Riker's vampire heart. "There are boundaries. It's better for mortals and immortals alike if those boundaries are not crossed."

Her grip on the knife was white-knuckled. "So you killed him?"

Raphael dropped the heart to the ground and looked at his bloody hand, wondering if Uram had taken his victims' hearts the same way. "He's not dead."

"I-" She swallowed as he approached, took a step back. "I know they can heal a hell of a lot of damage but completely removing the heart?"

"You fear me again." He hadn't seen that look on her face since that first meeting on the roof.

"You just ripped a vampire's heart out with your bare hand." Her voice echoed with shock. "So yes, I fear you."

He looked down at the blood coating his skin. "I wouldn't do this to you, Elena."

"You saying my death will be short and sweet?"

"Perhaps instead of killing you," he said, "I'll make you my slave instead."

"I hope to hell that's your twisted idea of a joke." Biting words, but she put away the knife. "We might as well head back so you can wash off the blood. I've lost the trail anyway."

"He flew?"

"I'm guessing, yes." She folded her arms, nodded toward Michaela's house. "You get the map of her movements?"

"It'll be delivered within the next hour." As they walked, he wondered why a mortal's opinion of him mattered. "Do you plan to walk those streets and see if you can sense him?"

"Yes." She strode forward with determined steps. "If he's as fixated as you guys think-and hell, he is wooing her with bloody hearts-he won't go far from her."

"No, he won't." The bloodborn always killed another angel before devolving completely. In most cases, it was the angel who had been closest to them-a macabre sacrament, as if they were cutting away everything they'd once been.

Elena nodded. "Then we might be able to beard him in his lair while he's sluggish from the amount of blood he took. Unless that's different with you lot?" She glanced at him, her eyes sliding to his bloody hand and forearm before she sucked in a breath and looked away.

"From what we know," he said, hand curling into a fist, "the bloodborn-"

"Bloodborn?" She scowled. "You have a name for whatever it is Uram's become? That means it's not an isolated incident."

"The bloodborn," he said, ignoring her implied question, "are affected as the vampires are by overindulgence. He'll be lazy, sleepy, vulnerable."

Elena's fury at his refusal to answer her question was un-hidden, but whatever it was that she might've said was lost as her cell phone rang. Pulling it out of a pocket, she flipped it open. "Yes." Her eyes turned chaotic. "What?" A pause. "I-" For the first time, he saw her look unsure. "Yes. I'll be there." She closed the phone. "I need to take off for a while. I'll be back by the time Michaela delivers her map."

"Where?" he asked, disliking the expression on her face.

A hard glance. "None of your damn business."

He should've been angry. Part of him, the part with over a thousand years of accumulated arrogance, was. But the rest of him was intrigued. "A taste of my own medicine?"

She shrugged, her mouth pinched.

"Your father."

Her shoulders tightened. "What, you can listen in to conversations now?"

"Even archangels can't do that." Not always true, but true in this case since he'd vowed not to eavesdrop on her mind. "But I did my research."

"Good for you." If words could cut, he'd have been shredded.

He looked down at his bloody fist and wondered if she saw him as a monster now. "Jeffrey Deveraux is the only human being you seem unable to handle."

"Like I said, it's none of your business." Her jaw was clenched so tight, she had to be in pain.

"Are you sure?"

Raphael's question repeated over and over in Elena's head as she strode up the steps to the tony brownstone her father maintained as his private office. There was another office high up in a tower of steel and glass, but this was where the real wheeling and dealing went on. It was also a place you entered only by invitation.

Elena had never set foot across the threshold.

Now she stopped in front of the closed door, her eye falling on the discreet metal plaque to the left.

VEVERAUX ENTERPRISES, EST. 1701

The Deveraux family could trace their roots back so many years, Elena sometimes thought they must've kept records even while crawling out of the primordial ooze. Her lips tightened. Pity the other side of her familial ledger wasn't so established. An orphaned immigrant raised in foster homes on the outskirts of Paris, Marguerite had had no family history to speak of-nothing beyond the vague memory of her mother's Moroccan origins. But she'd been beautiful, her skin gold, her hair close to pure white.