Archangel's Consort (Guild Hunter #3)(10)

You were right, she sent to Raphael, he washed in the pond, cut off the scent trail. But he would have had to get out at some point. So, leaving Jason to continue his silent vigil, she began walking across the moss-laden stones that rimmed the water gone murky with churned up silt ... and other, darker things.

It only took a minute to find him again. The scent trail was weaker, drenched in water until the oak alone remained, but that was all she needed. Drawing the crisp forest air into her lungs, she began to run, determined to hunt the vampire to ground. He was fast, she realized almost at once, glimpsing the tracks he’d left behind in the damp patches of earth caused by last night’s storm. In contrast, she was no longer as quick and agile as she’d once been, unused to running with wings.

But it wasn’t a disadvantage, not today. The vampire had slowed down maybe five hundred yards into his escape, probably figuring the water had erased his scent. It would have if he’d taken a bit more care. Then again, Raphael had said the girl’s body had been in the water, too. Her murderer had likely dragged her in there with him because he couldn’t stop feeding.

The end result was that given the small size of the pond, the blood and death had pol uted it, destroying its ability to wash the vampire clean of his sickening acts of violence. Good girl, she thought, speaking to the child who lay so motionless under wings of midnight black. You marked the bastard even in death. Elena would hunt him down using that mark.

Half an hour into the run—through twisting paths that tried to muddy the trail and confirmed the vampire was rational—the sun weak and sluggish overhead, she began to feel a stitch in her side. “Damn it.” She didn’t need Raphael’s sadist of a weapons-master, Galen, to pound at her to know she wasn’t in ful hunting shape.

Breathing past the stabbing pain, she snapped up her head as the shadow of wings swept along the ground in front of her—to see Raphael flying to a location just beyond the rise, his speed breathtaking.

Archangel, what do you see?





Chapter 4





There was no answer, only the painful bite of ice in her veins.

Rage.

Pure and violent and cold, so cold.

“Shit.” She pushed up her pace, cursing the fact that she couldn’t do a vertical takeoff for the bil ionth time. It could take years to master, she’d been told

—perhaps longer seeing as she hadn’t had wings since childhood. Well , f*ck it, she thought. If she had to ask Galen to come to New York to torture her again every single day for the next year, she was going to learn.

Raphael dived in front of her and by the time she crested the rise, her chest heaving, he had his hand clamped around the neck of a vampire whose clothing remained damp enough to stick to his skin. The Archangel of New York was holding the panicked creature at least two feet off the ground with no visible effort. The vampire’s eyes bulged, blood vessels popping as he scrabbled at the hand around his throat, his legs kicking at the air in a futile attempt to escape.

“You are not in bloodlust,” she heard Raphael say in a voice so clear, it was a blade, slicing and brutalizing without mercy.

Instinct, paired with what she’d learned of Raphael in the time they’d been together, had a very bad feeling forming in the pit of her stomach. Scrambling down the rise without caring about the mud that streaked her jeans and wings both, she looked into the vampire’s face. The male’s reddened eyes were lucid . . . but for the terror in their depths. His mouth was another matter. Rimmed with dried blood that had survived his impromptu bath, it turned his face into a grotesque mask.

“Why?” Elena asked, knives in hand though she had no memory of drawing them from the sheaths strapped to her forearms. “Why did you do it?” The image of the girl’s ravaged body played over and over on the screen of her mind. That could’ve been Evelyn, could’ve been Amethyst. Her sisters. Again.

The thought echoed until it was almost all she could hear.

Raphael began to squeeze the vampire’s throat. “It matters little why.” Blood trickled from one of the vampire’s eyes, a macabre tear.

“Wait.” She put her hand on the corded strength of Raphael’s forearm. “Your vampires don’t disobey you. Not like this.” They were too aware of the brutal justice of his punishments. The fact that this Ignatius had done what he had in spite of that ...

The vampire began to claw at Raphael’s hand with the last of his strength, as if conscious that after crushing his throat, the Archangel of New York would almost certainly rip off his head and have his entire body burned. Raphael shook off the clawing hands as if they were less than flies, his expression so calm it was terrifying.

Raphael, she tried again, using their mental connection in the hope it would penetrate the ice that was his rage. We need to know why.

Raphael glanced at her. “All right.” And before her horrified eyes, the vampire began to bleed . . . everywhere, his very pores seeming to erupt under extreme pressure. She knew what Raphael had done, knew he’d shredded the kil er’s mind like so much confetti. That task complete, he tore off the vampire’s head with a single efficient wrench and burned both pieces to ash with the vivid blue of angelfire. The pulse of raw power could kil an archangel

—the vampire’s body didn’t even survive a ful second.

It all happened so fast that she was still staring at the place where the vampire had been when Raphael turned to her, a slight glow to his wings that augured nothing good. The primal part of her brain, more animal than human in its determination to survive, fired a surge of fear-laced adrenaline through her system. Run, it said, run! Because when an archangel glowed, people died.