Elena sat in Central Park, staring at the ducks swimming around in a pond. She'd come here to try to get her head on straight but it didn't seem to be working. All she could think about was whether ducks had dreams.
She figured not. What would a duck dream about? Fresh bread, a nice flight to wherever the hell it was ducks went. Flight. Her breath caught in her throat as her mind flashed with snapshots of memory-beautiful gold-streaked wings, eyes full of power, the shine of angel dust. She rubbed the heels of her hands over her eyes in an effort to erase the images. It didn't work.
It was as though Raphael had implanted a damn subliminal suggestion in her head that kept spewing out pictures of the very things she didn't want to think about. She wouldn't put it past him but he hadn't had time to mess with her that deep. She'd taken off less than a minute after he'd told her not to fail. Oddly enough, he'd let her go.
The ducks were fighting now, quacking at each other and diving with their beaks. Jeez, even the ducks couldn't stay peaceful. How the hell was she supposed to think with all that racket? Sighing, she leaned back on the park bench and looked up at the clear spread of sky. It reminded her of Raphael's eyes.
She snorted.
The color was about as close to the agonizingly vivid hue of his eyes as a cubic zirconia was to a diamond. A pale imitation. Still, it was pretty. Maybe if she stared hard enough, she'd forget about the wings that haunted her vision. Like now. They spread over her line of sight, turning blue into white-gold.
Frowning, she tried to see past the illusion.
Perfect gold-tipped filaments came into focus. Her heart was a hunted rabbit in her chest, but she didn't have the energy to be startled. "You followed me."
"You seemed to need time alone."
"Could you put down the wing?" she asked politely. "You're blocking the view."
The wing folded away with a soft susurration she knew she'd never associate with anything other than wings. Raphael's wings. "Will you not look at me, Elena?"
"No." She continued to stare upward. "I look at you and things get confused."
A male chuckle, low, husky . . . and inside her mind. "Avoiding my gaze gains you nothing."
"Didn't think so," she said softly, anger a dark ember in her gut. "Is that how you get your kicks-forcing women to worship at your feet?"
Silence. Then the sound of wings unfurling and snapping shut. "You are using up your lives."
She chanced a look at him. He was standing at the water's edge, but his body was turned toward her, those eyes of impossible blue having shaded to midnight. "Hey, I'm going to die anyway." It tended to make a person cavalier. "You said so yourself-you can fuck me over with your mind anytime you please. I'm guessing that's the least of your little bag of tricks. Right?"
He gave a regal nod, strikingly beautiful in an opportune ray of sunlight. A dark god. And she knew that thought was her own. Because the very thing that repelled her about Raphael also attracted her. Power. This was a man she couldn't take on and hope to win. A hotly feminine part of her appreciated that kind of strength, even as it infuriated her.
"So if you can do all that, what's this other guy capable of?" She turned away from the erotic seduction of his face and toward the ducks. "I'll be mincemeat before I get within a hundred feet."
"You'll be protected."
"I work alone."
"Not this time." His tone was pure steel. "Uram has a penchant for pain. The Marquis de Sade was a student of his."
Elena wasn't about to show him exactly how much that freaked her out. "So he's into kinky sex."
"That's one way to look at it." Somehow, he put blood and pain and horror into that single comment. The emotions wormed their way through her pores and wrapped around her throat, choking, cloying.
"Stop it," she snapped, eyes locked with his once more.
"Apologies." A slight curve of his lips. "You're more sensitive than I expected."
She didn't believe that for an instant. "Uram? Tell me about him." She didn't know much about the other archangel beyond the fact that he ruled a chunk of Europe.
"He's your prey." His face closed over, midnight eyes going near black, expression shifting to that of a Greek statue. Distant. Inscrutable. "That's all you need to know."
"I can't work like that." She stood but kept her distance. "I'm good because I get inside the target's head, predict where he'll be, what he'll do, who he'll contact."
"Rely on your inborn gift."
"Even if I could scent archangels"-which she couldn't-"it's not magic," she pointed out, frustrated. "I need a starting point. If you haven't got anything, I'll have to work it out from his personality, his patterns of behavior."
He walked toward her, closing the distance she wanted to keep. "Uram's movements can't be predicted. Not yet. We must wait."
"For what?"
"Blood."
The single word chilled her from the inside out. "What did he do?"
Raphael lifted a finger, tracing it over her cheekbone. She flinched. Not because he was hurting her. The opposite. The places he touched . . . it was as if he had a direct line to the hottest, most feminine part of her. A single stroke and she was embarrassingly damp. But she refused to pull away, refused to give in.
"What," she repeated, "did he do?"
That finger passed over her jaw and whispered along the line of her neck, giving excruciating, unwanted pleasure. "Nothing you need to know. Nothing that will help you track him."
Raising her hand with effort, she pushed his off, knowing her success was very much a case of him indulging her. And that chafed. "Finished playing your sex games?" she asked point-blank.
His smile was less a shadow this time, those changeable eyes sliding from black to something closer to cobalt. Alive. Electric. "I wasn't doing anything to your mind, Elena. Not that time."
Oh, shit.
He' d lied. Obviously, he'd lied. Elena let out a sigh of relief and collapsed onto her sofa. She wasn't idiotic enough to be attracted to an archangel. That left door number two-that Raphael had been playing with her mind and telling her otherwise was simply some sort of a twisted way for him to mess with her.
The annoying little voice inside her head kept whispering that that kind of manipulation didn't mesh with what she knew of Raphael. On the roof, he'd made no secret of the fact that he'd been in her mind. Lying seemed beneath him. "Hah!" she said to the voice. "What I know about him isn't enough to fill a thimble-he's manipulated mortals for centuries. He's good at it." Not good. Expert.
And she was now in his hands.
Unless he'd changed his mind in the hours since she'd hauled ass from the duck pond. Her mood brightened. Reaching over to open up the laptop on the coffee table, she booted it up and used her wireless Internet connection to look up her Guild account. The transaction history showed one recent deposit.
"Too many zeros." She took a deep breath. Counted again. "Still too many."
So many that it made Mr. Ebose's substantial payment look like chump change.
Hands sweat-damp, she swallowed and scrolled down. The payment had come from "Archangel Tower: Manhattan." She'd known that. Obviously, she'd known that. But seeing it in black and white was a jolt to the system. The deal was done. She was now officially working for Raphael. And only Raphael.
Her Guild status had been changed from "Active" to "Contracted: Indefinite Period."
Closing the laptop, she stared out at the Tower. She couldn't believe she'd stood on top of that cloud-piercing building only that morning, couldn't believe she'd dared disagree with an archangel, but most of all, she couldn't believe what Raphael wanted her to do. Thousands of tiny little creatures skittered about in her stomach, inciting nausea, panic . . . and a strange, vibrant excitement. This was the kind of job that made legends out of hunters. Of course, to be a legend, you generally had to be dead.
The phone rang, blessedly ending that particular line of thought. "What?"
"Good day to you, too, sunshine," came Sara's cheerful voice.
Elena wasn't fooled. Her friend hadn't made it to the position of Guild Director by being Ms. Congeniality. Nerves of steel and a will like a bull terrier more like it. "I can't tell you anything," she said bluntly. "Don't even ask."
"Come on, Ellie. You know I can keep a secret."
"No. If I tell you, you die." Raphael had made that very clear before he'd let her leave Central Park.
Tell anyone-man, woman, or child-and we'll eliminate them. No exceptions.
Sara snorted. "Don't be melodramatic. I'm-"
"He knew you'd ask," she said, remembering what else the Archangel of New York had said to her in that deceptively easy tone. A naked blade sheathed in velvet, that was Raphael's voice.
"Oh?"
"If I tell you, he won't only take you and Deacon out, he'll do the same to Zoe."
The fury that crackled through the line was pure maternal protectiveness. "Bastard."
"Totally agree."
Sara seemed to be fuming too hard to speak for several long seconds. "The fact that he made that threat means this is big."
"You saw the deposit?"
"Hell, did I see the deposit! I thought the accountant had screwed up and deposited the whole thing into our account instead of just the Guild percentage." She blew out a breath. "Baby girl, that's some kind of cash."
"I don't want it." She was choking on the need to share the sheer incomprehensibility of the task with Sara, with that idiot Ransom, but she couldn't. "He's already cut me off from my best friends." Her hand fisted.
"Let him try," Sara said. "So you can't tell me the details. Big deal. I'll figure it out soon enough. I have some idea."
Excitement danced up Elena's spine. "You do?"
"Killer vampire?" She paused. "Okay, you can't answer but seriously, what else could it be?"
Elena slumped again.
"Remember that one that went rogue?"
"There's been more than one," she said lightly, even as her blood ran cold.
"About twenty years ago. We studied him in our Guild classes."
Not twenty, Elena thought, eighteen. "Slater Patalis." The name fell from her lips like a piece of nightmare, one she'd never shared with anyone, not even the best friend she trusted with everything else. "How many did he end up killing?" she asked-forced herself to ask-before Sara's antennae could start to twang.
"Official body count was fifty-two in the space of a month," came the grim response. "Unofficially, we think there were more." Something creaked and Elena could almost see Sara leaning back in that big leather executive chair she adored like a second child. "Now that I'm director, I have access to all sorts of supersecret stuff."
"Want to share?" She held on to the here and now, ignoring the screaming echoes of a past nothing could change.
"Hmmm, why not-you are my second in command in all but name."
"Ech." Elena stuck out her tongue. "No desk job for me, thank you."
Sara laughed softly. "You'll learn. Anyway, the official line on Slater was that he'd had a psych illness before he was Made, an illness he somehow managed to hide."
"Some kind of severe antisocial personality disorder." Until Sara's comment, Elena had thought she knew every disturbing detail of the life and crimes of the most infamous killer vampire in recent history. "Evidence of childhood abuse and mistreatment of animals. Classic serial killer profile."
"Too classic," Sara pointed out. "It's a load of crock. The Guild made it up after pressure from the Cadre of Ten."
For a second, Elena had the horrifying suspicion that Slater Patalis wasn't really dead, that the Cadre had saved him for some perverse reason of their own. But an instant later, sanity reasserted itself-not only had she seen the autopsy video, she'd snuck into the storage room and picked up the vial of Slater's preserved blood. Her senses had reacted.
Vampire, the blood had whispered, vampire. And when she'd uncorked the bottle, it had murmured to her in Slater's distinctive, hypnotic voice.
Come here, little hunter. Taste.
She bit down hard on her lower lip, drawing her own blood and banishing the memory of his. At least until the hour of nightmares. "You going to tell me the truth?" she asked Sara.
"Slater was normal when he went in as a Candidate," Sara said. "You know how fanatical the angels are about checking the short-listed applicants. He was scanned, analyzed, damn near split open with all the tests they did. The man was squeaky clean and healthy, in body and in mind."
"The rumors," Elena whispered, eyes wide, "we always thought they were urban legends but if what you're saying is true-"
"-it means there's one very bad side effect to being Made. A tiny, tiny, tiny minority of the Candidates have their brains scrambled beyond recovery. What comes out of the mess isn't always human."
It should've felt odd to call vampires human in any sense but Elena knew what Sara was talking about. Humanity, as a whole, included vampires. As Elena knew from her own family, vampires could mate with, and even reproduce with, humans. Conception was very difficult but not impossible, and though the children-all mortal-sometimes suffered from anemia and related disorders, they were otherwise normal. First rule of biology-if it can mate, it's probably the same species.
That rule couldn't be applied to those of Raphael's kind. Angels attracted groupies by the truckload-mostly vampires, though the occasional stunning human was allowed into the mix. But debauchery aside, Elena had never heard of a child coming from a mating between human and angel, or even vampire and angel. Perhaps, she thought, angels simply didn't sire children. Maybe they considered the vampires their children.
Blood instead of milk, immortality instead of love.
A mockery of a childhood. But then again, what did Elena know of childhood? "Sara-I'm going to need full access to the Guild's computers and files."
"No one but the director has full access." Sara's tone held a thread of the famous Haziz steel. "You promise me you'll think about the assistant director position and I'll give you access."
"That would be lying," Elena said. "I'd go crazy behind a desk."
"I thought that once upon a time, and I'm as happy as a clam."
"What do clams have to do with anything?" Elena muttered.
"Beats me. Say you'll consider it."
"There's a crucial difference between me and you, Ms. Director." She let her tone speak for her. "Choose an A.D. out of one of the other married hunters. Don't waste it on me."
A sigh. "The fact that you're single doesn't mean I want you out there in the line of fire. You're my best friend, my sister in all but blood."
Tears pricked at her eyes. "Ditto." After Elena's own family had disowned her, it had been Sara who'd picked up the pieces. Their bond was close to unbreakable. "You know as well as I do that I'm not made for safety. I was born to be what I am." A hunter. A tracker. A loner.
"Why do I bother arguing with you?" A shake of her head that Elena could almost see. "I'm coding you in now."
That was what Elena loved about the Guild. There was no messy paperwork-hunters chose their director, then trusted her to make the decisions. No meetings, no board. No fucking around.
"Thanks."
"Uh-huh." The sound of rapid typing. "A hint of warning-I have a feeling certain high-security files are discreetly monitored for access."
"By who?" But she knew the answer. "On what authority?"
"The same one that lets them hire out my people without telling me what the hell is going on," Sara spat out. "I became director so I could help keep hunters safe. Raphael is going to learn that-"
"Don't!" Elena cried. "Please, Sara, don't approach him. The only reason, the only reason I'm still alive is that he needs me to do a job. Otherwise, you'd probably have spent a lovely afternoon identifying my body"-or what remained of it-"at the morgue."
"Jesus, Ellie. I took an oath to protect my hunters and I'm not going to back off just because Raphael's one scary m-"
"Then do it for Zoe," Elena interrupted. "Do you want her to grow up without a mom?"
"Bitch." Sara's tone was close to a growl. "If I didn't love you so much, I'd have to come beat you up. Damn emotional blackmail."
"Promise me, Sara." Her hand tightened painfully on the receiver. "This hunt is going to be the hardest thing I've ever done-don't make me worry about you, too. Promise."
A long, long pause. "I promise I won't approach Raphael . . . unless I think you're in lethal danger. That's all you're going to get."
"That'll do." She'd just have to make sure Sara never discovered that the hunt itself equaled near-certain death. One misstep and it would be bye-bye, Elena P. Deveraux.
Something beeped. "Got another call-probably Ash," Sara said.
Last Elena had heard, Ashwini a.k.a. Ash a.k.a. Ashblade, was in bayou country on the hunt for a smooth-talking Cajun vamp who had a habit of making enemies out of angels . . . then playing cat and mouse with Ash. "She still down Louisiana way?"
"No. The Cajun decided to 'tour' Europe." Sara snorted inelegantly. "You know, one of these days, he's going to make her really mad and find himself staked naked in public, honey-glazed and with a Bite Me sign around his neck."
"I want tickets." Hanging up to Sara's laughter, Elena rubbed her hands over her face and decided it was time to get to work. This hunt was going to go down no matter what-she might as well try to come out of it in one piece.
Untucking the white shirt, she changed her black pants for jeans and tied her hair up into a haphazard ponytail, then flipped open her computer a second time. Since she didn't like the idea of the Cadre looking over her shoulder-even if they were her employers-she pulled up an Internet browser and clicked through to a popular search engine rather than logging into the Guild's databases.
Then she typed in her query: Uram.
