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 killer’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 kill an archangel—the vampire’s body didn’t even survive a full 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.
But Raphael wasn’t simply an archangel. He was hers.
She stood her ground as he stepped closer, bent to speak with his mouth brushing her ear. “Someone whispered to him that I was dead”—cool tone, quiet words that made her nerves skitter—“that there was no longer any need for him to leash his desires.” Moving back a step, he lifted a finger to tuck a flyaway strand of her hair behind her ear.
The gentleness of the act didn’t reassure her—not when his anger kissed a knife blade against her throat. “That doesn’t make sense.” It took effort to keep her voice steady—yes, he was hers, but she’d only scratched the surface of him. “Even if he did think that, why come here, to this place?” She wasn’t egotistical enough to think it had anything to do with her. No, Raphael was the target, but she was the weak point in his defenses. “It’s too far out of the city to be anything but a specific location.”
Raphael’s eyes shone with that dangerous metallic tinge, a look to him she couldn’t read. He’d been alive for over a thousand years and had so many facets to his personality that she knew it would take an eternity to see them all. Right now, it was obvious that reasoning with him would be akin to banging her head against thousands of rapier-sharp blades.
It would only make her bleed.
Taking a deep breath, she gestured back to where she’d seen Jason. “I need to examine the body, make sure there wasn’t anything weird about the kill.” It appeared to have been a simple feeding gone feral, but after the past year and a half, she wasn’t much on taking things at face value.
Raphael flared out his wings, their glow painful in the dull, cloudy light. “You can report back to me later today. Dmitri is almost here—he’ll deal with the school.”
He was gone in a sweep of wind an instant later, leaving her staring up at him. She didn’t mind the order—he was her lover, but at this moment, she was acting as a hunter and he’d treated her as one. Since she had no intention of giving up her position with the Guild, that worked for her.
What worried her was the distance he’d put between them, a distance that had returned her to the rooftop where they’d first met, when Raphael hadn’t been a man who wore her claim of amber, but only an immortal who could crush her with a single thought. An immortal who’d made her close her hand over the cutting edge of steel, until her blood spilled dark and wet onto the tiles.