Archangel's Consort (Guild Hunter #3)(69)

“Elena! Talk to me!”

Heart thudding triple-time, she reached out and managed to just graze the vampire’s forehead with her fingertips. Plasticky, frigid from the air. Except...

“Oh God.” She’d definitely seen it this time—the flicker of an eyelid, as if he was struggling to raise it. “He’s alive! Get Rescue down here now!”

“Shit! I’m on it.”

Santiago was efficient but she knew it would take time. If this vampire—Jesus, maybe all the vamps—were in any way conscious, then what they were suffering right now had to be torture. Dropping and sweeping out from under the bridge, she rose into the air, twisting her head in every direction.

“Looking for someone, Ellie?”

Startled, she fel several feet before getting her momentum under control. Illium came to hover beside her when she rose back up and caught the edge of the bridge once again, holding herself in place so she could talk to him. “At least one of them is alive. Can you get them down?” He was the single angel she knew who might have a hope of maneuvering in the cramped conditions.

He held out a hand. “Dagger.”

Glad he no longer looked as tormented as he had the previous evening, she slapped one of her knives in his hand and watched as he flew in, somehow executing the tightest of turns before reaching over and cutting the rope. The vampire dropped. But Illium was faster. He scooped the male up before the vampire’s dead weight of a body could touch the water. Elena followed him up onto the bridge itself—which the cops had cordoned off at both ends, making themselves real popular with commuters—and landed.

Soon as Illium placed the male on the road and dove off to get the rest of the victims, she took out another knife and began to cut through the vampire’s shirt, pulling away the matted fabric and wincing at the chunks of skin that came with it. But she had to see the damage. Santiago, having come down on his haunches beside her, watched in silence as she succeeded in revealing the ruin of the vampire’s chest.

It sure as hell looked like he’d suffered major damage to the region around his heart, but there was so much dried blood tangled up in thick curls of black chest hair that she couldn’t tell for sure. Unhooking the wireless device over her ear, she gave it to Santiago before reaching into one of the pockets of the fleece-lined vest she’d put on as protection against the wind, and pulling out a pair of latex gloves.

Santiago took the chance to lean forward and hold the screen of his cel phone a scant inch from the vampire’s mouth. “Shit,” he muttered when the screen began to mist with steam. “For a minute, I thought you’d lost it down there. But shit.” He glanced over her shoulder to where Illium was landing a second time.

Elena was ninety-nine-percent certain she might actual y have lost it if she hadn’t been so f*cking shocked out of her mind. “I need something with which to wash off the blood.” The irony of the fact that the East River churned below wasn’t lost on her.

“Wait.” Santiago returned moments later with two water bottles as well as a pack of tissues. “From the squad cars. Medics are on their way.”

Vampires didn’t need medics to heal, but during the regeneration process, their bodies hurt the same as a mortal’s. The paramedics could at least give them drugs, knock them out for a while. “Good.” Dampening a wad of tissue, she cleaned the male’s chest with quick, careful motions as Santiago went to check the other bodies.

Great gouges marked the vampire’s flesh beneath the clotted black of his blood, as if someone had tried to dig through his skin.

A flash of memory, Raphael’s hand punching through a vampire’s sternum to remove his still-beating heart.

“But that,” she muttered, trying to keep things practical, logical, “was a single strike.” Quick, brutal, efficient. This, by contrast, had been done by someone who didn’t have Raphael’s strength—because while the male’s chest looked as if it had been through the shredder, his heart beat safe behind his rib cage.

“They’re all alive.” Santiago sounded shaken. “Christ, it’s like someone f*cking clawed this guy.”

That was what Elena was thinking. “The question is, who?”

A strange silence.

Following the detective’s gaze as he came down on his haunches again, the wind flipping his tie over his shoulder, she watched as he put a gloved hand under the victim’s. The vampire’s fingers and nails were encrusted with blood and what might well have been bits of flesh. “He did it to himself.” A cold far deeper than the winds that buffeted the bridge slid through her veins.

Santiago glanced at the row of bodies Illium had laid out. “They all did.”

Elena knew from her lessons at the Refuge that very, very few angels had the power to compel a man to savage himself. To kil , yes. But to mutilate and torture? No, that power was reserved for the Cadre ... and the Sleepers who had once been Cadre.





Chapter 24





Having been away from the city when he received Elena’s cal , Raphael now landed beside the Central Park pond where she stood watching the ducks. “We have been here before.” She’d been mortal then, a hunter he intended to bend to his will .

No smile on that expressive face; the rustle of the leaves were secret whispers in the air. “I wondered if you’d remember.”