Archangel's Consort (7 page)

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Authors: Nalini Singh

BOOK: Archangel's Consort
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If, one day in the future, Celia’s parents demanded to know what had been done to gain justice for their little girl, there would be some answers for them. Nothing that would lessen the hurt, nothing that would bring their daughter’s laughter back into their lives, but answers all the same.
Just like Elena had had a file to read after she grew old enough to request it.
Shoving aside the jagged edge of memory, she looked around the room, her eyes skimming over the blue-overalled forms of the two techs. She knew one of them, but the other was a stranger. Both had nearly swallowed their tongues when she walked in, but Wesley had lightened the mood by saying, “Can I take a photo of you?” A flash of white teeth against night-dark skin. “Then I can sell it to the reporters as an exclusive and make enough money to pay my as yet nonexistent kids’ college tuitions.”
“Hate to dash your hopes, but I’m probably already on the air by now. The students,” she’d said in explanation when confusion colored those pale brown eyes.
“Aw, shit.”
That had been the extent of their conversation. Wesley and his colleague, Dee, went about their business with an efficiency that told her they’d been working as a team long enough to have developed a rhythm, while Elena stood in the center of the room, drowning in the echoes of violence. One of the bunk beds had sheets drenched with red turning to a dull brown that failed to mute the evil that had been done here, while more blood—arterial from the pattern of the spray—splattered the wall to its right, closest to the door.
Wesley was standing there staring at that wall. “Ellie, do you see?”
“Yes.” She turned in a circle, found the blood drips on the floor and wall near the window, felt her hand clench. “Dee, could you do me a favor for a second?”
The petite blonde rose to her feet, fingerprint brush in hand. “Sure, what do you need?”
“If you’d stand by the door.” Elena waited until she’d done so. “Bend down a little. That’s it.” Heading over, she looked at the spray. “That’s how tall Celia would’ve been while standing.”
Straightening, the tech looked behind her, her bones sharp against skin that hadn’t yet thrown off the pallor of winter. “Bastard took her out here, sprayed the wall.”
“Then who bled out on the bed?” Having moved to the bunk, Wesley lifted up the mattress with careful hands. “It’s soaked through. No way the girl had enough in her after splattering the wall that bad.”
Damn it.
“Call your people, tell them the pond needs to be searched.” A vampire of Ignatius’s age—he’d appeared sixty at least—could’ve carried the slight weight of two young girls without a problem. Or ... he’d discarded one in the woods where the angels hadn’t spotted it from above, and Elena had bypassed because she’d been focused on the murderer.
Wesley was already taking out his cell phone. “You going to check the trail?”
“Yes, but someone needs to talk to the principal, find out—” A new scent curved into the room, erotic and luscious and flavored with sensual decadence. It was a lure, that scent, a trap that caught only the hunter-born in its jaws, and Dmitri knew how to use it to its greatest advantage.
5
 
Instinct had her stepping out to meet the leader of Rapha
el’s Seven in the corridor. The vampire with his chocolate-dark eyes and black hair was dressed in what looked like a ten-thousand-dollar suit from some fancy store like Zegna’s, the ensemble black on black with an amber-colored tie that threw the tanned color of his skin into sharp relief. Except as she knew all too well, that color wasn’t a tan.
“I heard,” he said when she reached him, and for once, his voice carried no hint of the double-edged blade of sex. He sounded as she’d once imagined him—a battle-hardened warrior with scimitar in hand, ancient runes carved onto the weapon’s very surface. His scent, too, she realized, was being held in fierce check.
He spoke again before she could say a word. “You need to return to the Tower.”
Elena scowled—the day she let Dmitri give her orders was the day ice-skating became a regular activity in hell. Part of it was simple contrariness because he’d made it crystal clear he considered her a weakness in Raphael’s armor, but part of it was self-preservation. Because the instant Dmitri decided she wasn’t only a weakness, but actually
weak
, he’d stop fencing with her and come at her full tilt.
Raphael would kill him for it, but as Dmitri had once said to her, she’d still be dead. So she folded her arms, braced her legs. “The second body could—”
He sliced out a hand, cutting off her words. “Raphael isn’t acting right.”
Their eyes met in dangerous understanding. “Has he gone Quiet?” The terrifying emotionless state that had once turned Raphael into a monster, driven her to shoot him in violent self-defense, scared Elena even now.
“No.” A single precise word. “But he is not acting himself.”
“No,” Elena agreed. Raphael was an archangel, could be merciless in his punishments, but he was also piercingly intelligent. He shouldn’t have needed her to remind him that they needed to know why Ignatius had done what he had. That was something the Raphael she knew would’ve considered long before it got to the point of execution—but today, it was as if he’d been driven by untrammeled rage. “Have you seen him like this before?”
“No. And I have known him near to a thousand years.”
Elena sucked in a breath. In spite of the fact that he was almost impossibly good at hiding the sheer
power
within him, she’d known Dmitri was old, but even then, she hadn’t come close to guessing the depth of his age. “Does this place have a balcony I can use as a launch point?” She’d pursue the mystery of Dmitri later. Right now, she had to go to her archangel.
“A small one upstairs. If you stand on the railing, you should have just enough lift to rise.” He pointed to a staircase she hadn’t seen till that moment. “I’ll organize a search for the second body,” he said as she took the first step up, “ensure the medical examiner knows you’ll need to look at the remains.”
Elena’s hand clenched on the balustrade. The lives of two innocent families were about to be smashed to splinters that would never again form a complete whole. “My sisters?” she asked, fighting her mind’s attempt to shove her back into the horror-filled past of another family, one that had broken forever in a small suburban kitchen almost two decades in the past. “The other girls?”
“Being sent home. Your father dispatched a car to pick up your sisters—they left fifteen minutes ago.” Still no sarcasm, no attempt to unsettle her with that scent of his.
Dmitri’s restraint worried her more than anything he could’ve said.
Leaving him the task of locating the second body, she made her way to what proved to be some kind of an art studio surrounded by huge windows designed to catch endless sunlight. But there was no luxuriant warmth, no shimmering gold today. The world outside was a sullen gray, the atmosphere suffocating in its heaviness.
Shaking off the thought that nothing could fly in such leaden air, she made her way onto the attached balcony. Dmitri had told the unadulterated truth when he’d termed it small. It took all of her balancing skills to get herself onto the tiny railing, and even then, the ground looked far too close.
Sucking in a breath, she flared out her wings ... and dove.
The ground rushed up at blazing speed as she beat her wings hard and fast, muscles straining to painful levels. In the end, she could’ve skimmed her fingers over the grass, but she got airborne, pulling herself up until she was high enough to ride the air currents. Her shoulders ached from the unaccustomed amount and type of flying she’d done today, but not enough to make her worry about falling out of the sky.
Having caught her breath on a fast current, she stroked her way even higher—so that no one looking up would immediately recognize the unusual colors of her wings. The wind whipped her hair off her face, threatened to lay frost on her skin. The cold distracted her enough that she almost ignored the fleeting glimpse of black high above.
Jason.
Watching over her.
It would’ve annoyed her on a normal day, but today, she was too concerned about Raphael to bother. Instead, she made a mental note to ask the other angel to teach her some tricks about blending into the sky—she loved her wings with mad passion, but unlike Illium’s distinctive silver-edged blue, they didn’t blend into daylight skies. As with Jason, her wings were fashioned for the rich black of night, and perhaps most of all, for the hue of twilight.
Finding a thermal, she surfed it like a young fledgling, giving her muscles a break in the process. The thought conjured up images of Sam, the child angel who’d been caught in the middle of a narcissistic adult’s attempt to grab at power. Elena couldn’t think about how she’d found him—his small body curled in on itself, his wings broken—without feeling a chaotic mix of rage and pain. The only thing that made it bearable was that he was well on the way to being healed.
A rush of wind had her blinking furiously. When it passed, she saw Archangel Tower rising out of Manhattan, a proud, uncompromising structure that dwarfed the tallest of skyscrapers. Even on a day like this, with the sky a menacing slate gray blanket, it pierced the skyline, a gleaming column of light. She arrowed her way toward it using the last vestiges of her strength, certain Raphael would have headed to what was effectively the place from which he ruled his territory.
The wide landing space of the Tower roof appeared moments later, seeming to float above the clouds. It was a stunning sight, but she didn’t have time to appreciate it—because she’d miscalculated the speed of her descent, and it was too late to rein it back. “No pain, no glory,” she muttered under her breath and, teeth bared in what her fellow hunter and sometimes-friend Ransom called her “kamikaze smile,” angled in for landing.
She remembered to flare out her wings in short, sharp beats as her feet touched the ground, having learned from excruciating experience that kamikaze ways or not, she did not like crashing to her knees. Even with her increased healing abilities, it still hurt like a bitch. The end result was that she ended up racing across the roof even after landing.
Think parachute, Ellie.
Recalling Illium’s words of advice, she cupped her primaries inward, no longer riding the air but gathering it. Her body slowed. Slowed further ... until she was finally able to snap her wings to her back. “Well,” she said to the transparent wall half an inch from her nose, “that went well.” She’d ended up almost plastering herself against the glass cage that housed the elevator.
Adrenaline continuing to pump through her veins, she pulled open the door and pushed the button to bring up the elevator. Of course, she could’ve attempted to land directly on the balcony outside Raphael’s office and suite, but she’d probably have broken more than a few bones in the process, given the limited landing area. And she’d had quite enough broken bones in the past year and a half, thank you very much.
The elevator whisked her to Raphael’s private level in a split second. Getting out, she looked up and down the gleaming white corridor decorated with accents of gold—tiny, almost microscopic flecks in the paint, gold threads in the deep white pile of the carpet. It was the coldest elegance—her feathers sleeked against the tinge of ice in the air, a chill that was already neutralizing the adrenaline as it burned through to her very bones.
Shaking off the frigid sensation, she walked into the large study that flowed through to the bedroom suite. Clouds caressed the glass that was the back wall, blocking out the rest of the world—and making her feel cocooned in nothingness. It was a disorienting sensation. “Raphael?”
Silence.
Absolute.
Endless.
No scent of the wind and the rain on the periphery of her senses. No whisper of wings. No hint of power in the air. Nothing whatsoever to tell her that Raphael was in the vicinity. Yet she knew he was.
Taking a deep breath, she reached out with her mind.
Raphael?
She couldn’t control her thoughts like he could, couldn’t sense whether she’d reached him until he answered.
This time, her only answer was more silence.
Uneasy, she crossed the plush carpet of the study to enter the attached suite—rooms she’d glimpsed briefly when they’d first arrived. The suite occupied just under half the floor—the other half being set up with rooms for the Seven—and functioned as another home for Raphael. Stepping into the huge living area, she called out his name, but it echoed hollowly against the emptiness of a space that bore the masculine stamp of her archangel.
There was no over-the-top decorating, nothing ornate. The furniture was an elegant black, strong and with sleek, simple lines that suited Raphael. However, it wasn’t a soulless place. In contrast to the relatively modern furniture, a tapestry depicting the rich hues of some ancient court adorned the living room, while when she pushed open the door to the sprawling bedroom, she glimpsed a painting on the wall to the left and—
She whipped her head around.
The painting was a full-length portrait of her, knives in hand, wings spread, and feet planted in a combat-ready stance as her hair flew off her face in a playful wind. The artist had captured her with her head tilted slightly to the side, a smile of mingled challenge and desire on her face, laughter in her eyes. Behind her lay the mountainous beauty of the Refuge, and in front of her ... That wasn’t in the portrait but she knew. It could only have been Raphael in front of her. She looked at no other that way.

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