Angels' Blood (Guild Hunter #1)(74)

No, thanks.

Ten minutes later, the scent was an ache in her throat, a layer of fur on her tongue. She looked around and found herself in one of the moneyed areas of the city, somewhere east of Central Park. Very, very moneyed, she realized, looking at the elegant size of the buildings. No huge apartment complexes here. A moment's pause and she had it-the locus. Leaving it to Raphael to smooth things over if anyone spotted her, she climbed over the locked wrought-iron gate to land in front of a freestanding town house. Seeing a very narrow pathway to the right-hand side, she walked down and around to the back.

"A private park." Amazing. She hadn't known anything like this existed in Manhattan. The rectangular patch of lush green was bordered on every side by similar town houses, all vaguely European in design. Frowning, she touched the wall nearest her and felt no sense of age or time. Fake, she thought, disappointed. Some developer had bought up an undoubtedly pricey piece of land, created an English-type garden complex, and probably made megabucks.

Angels had money to burn.

And the scent, it was so powerful here . . . but not fresh. "He was here, but he's gone."

"Are you sure?"

She jumped, knife hand raised, and found Raphael standing behind her. "Where the hell-glamour?"

He didn't answer her question. "Where was he?"

"In the house, I think," she answered, trying to quieten her racing heartbeat. Also trying not to stab Raphael through the heart for doing that to her. "I thought you didn't show off in public."

"No one's watching." His eyes went to her hair. "They're too busy admiring Illium's acrobatics."

She ignored the possessive darkness crawling to life in his eyes. "We need to get inside the house." Walking around him, she was about to head up to the back door when his hand clenched on her upper arm.

She stilled, ready to throw him off, when she realized he was only interested in removing the blue feather from her hair. "Oh, for God's sake," she muttered. "Happy now?"

He crushed the feather in his fist. "No, Elena. I'm not." His hand opened and glittering blue dust floated to earth.

She decided not to ask him how he'd done that. "You mind a little breaking and entering?"

"Venom tells me there are no heartbeats inside."

Her stomach curled. "Death? Does he smell death?"

"Yes." Releasing her arm, he took the lead.

Elena looked around the side of the house and to the street, spying Venom standing unmoving on this side of the closed-but likely no longer locked-gate. He looked like a bodyguard-cum-driver. Normal for a ritzy neighborhood like this. Satisfied he'd keep them from being interrupted, she followed Raphael to the door. "Wait," she said when he put a hand on the doorknob. "We might set off an alarm, attract attention."

"It's been taken care of."

She thought of how fast some vampires could move. "Venom?"

A slight nod. "He's adept at such things."

"Why am I not surprised?" she muttered, swallowing her gorge at the scent that whispered out from the house. "Oh, God."

Raphael pushed the door fully open. "Come, Elena." He held out his hand.

She stared at it. "I'm a hunter." But she curled her fingers around his. Some nightmares were too vicious to face alone.

They stepped over the threshold together, Raphael's wings fitting easily through the door. "Built for an angel," she said, staring out at the open-plan design. There were no dividing walls in the entire first floor. The carpet in the living area was a Rorschach painting in red on white.

It should have been a violent explosion of color, but instead it was an odd sort of formless gray, the curtains drawn, the inside of the apartment dull with a heavy kind of shade that seemed to muffle sound . . . amplify everything else.

Decay. Acid. Sex.

The tastes mingled on her tongue, threatening to turn her stomach. "He had sex with them."

Raphael looked at the bodies strung up from the rafters, his eyes blue flame. "Are you certain?"

"I can smell it." While vampires were the only ones she could track by scent, her sense of smell was far better than that of a normal human's. And, it appeared, even an archangel's.

"No blood."

She stared at the stains on the carpet. "What do you call that?" She wouldn't look up again, she told herself, wouldn't reinforce the pieces of horror burned into her mind from a single fleeting glimpse.

Hanging limbs waving in the air-conditioned breeze, faces frozen in a rictus of terror. Pale skin torn open, lips colored blue, hair used as a noose.

Raphael's hand tightened on hers, pulling her back from the edge of the beckoning abyss. "He didn't take their blood. The wounds are brutal but there are no signs of feeding."

She already knew there would be no medical examiner to verify the findings. If they were to have any chance of finding and stopping Uram, she had to look, had to make sure. It was her job. "Cut them down." Her voice was hoarse. "I need to see the wounds up close."

He released her hand. "Your knife."

She put it flat in the palm of his hand, watched him walk to the vermilion explosion of the living room, his wings held out and slightly flared so they didn't trail on the floor. Then he pushed off with a single powerful beat of his wings. It generated wind.