"Wouldn't surprise me though." Lijuan was old, so old. And an ancient being of power could amass a great deal of wealth over a lifetime.
Funny, but though she thought of Raphael as powerful, she'd never thought of him as ancient. There was a sense of life about Raphael that denied that. A sense of . . .
humanity?No. Raphael wasn't human, wasn't anything close to human.
But he wasn't like Lijuan.
Her eyes went to the card again.
I invite you to the Forbidden City, Raphael. Come, let us welcome this human you have embraced. Let us see the beauty of this connection between immortal and what was once mortal. I find myself fascinated for the first time in millennia.
~ Zhou Lijuan
Elena didn't want to fascinate Lijuan. In fact, she wanted nowhere near the rest of the Cadre of Ten. She was pretty sure most of the time that Raphael wouldn't kill her. But as for the others . . . "Oh, hell."
My little pet.
My weakness.
She might despise the words, but that made them no less accurate. If the Archangel of New York really did love her, then she might as well be wearing a target on her back.
Again she saw him, face bloodied and torn, wings shredded, an archangel choosing death over eternal life. It was a truth she'd never forget, a truth that anchored her even as everything else in her world shifted and changed.
"Not everything," she murmured, reaching for the phone. Because while this place might look as if it existed in some long-ago age of chivalry and grace, the amenities were cutting-edge. Unsurprising when you thought about it - angels didn't survive eons by clinging to the past. New York's Archangel Tower, with its cloud-piercing form, was the perfect example.
As the phone rang on the other end, she found herself staring out through the balcony doors, searching for the magnificent being who ruled that Tower, the one she dared call her lover.
The ringing stopped. "Hello, Ellie." A raspy voice, followed by an audible yawn.
"Crap, I woke you." She'd forgotten the time difference between wherever the hell she was and New York.
"It's okay - we crashed early. Hold on." Rustling sounds, a click, and then Sara was back on the line. "I've never seen Deacon go back to sleep that fast - though he did mutter something that sounded vaguely like 'Hi, Ellie.' I think our baby girl wore him out today."
Elena smiled at the thought of Sara's "scary son-of-a-bitch" of a husband being run ragged by little Zoe. "Did I wake her?"
"Nah, she's wiped out, too." A whisper. "I just peeked. Going into the living room."
Elena could easily visualize Sara's surroundings, from the elegant sofas in a caramel shade that brought warmth inside, to the large black-and-white portrait of Zoe on the wall, her giggling face covered with bath foam. The gorgeous brown-stone was more home to Elena than any other place except her own apartment. "Sara, my apartment?"
She hadn't thought to ask during Sara's visit to the Refuge two days ago, her mind too full of the chaos of dying . . . and waking up with wings of midnight and dawn.
"Sorry, babe." Sara's voice held the painful echoes of memory. "After . . . everything, Dmitri blocked off access. I was more interested in finding out where they'd put you, so I didn't push too hard."
The last time Elena had seen her apartment, it had had a huge hole torn out of one wall, blood and water everywhere. "I don't blame you," she said, burying the hurt that stabbed into her at the thought of her haven being shut up, her treasures broken and lost. "Hell, you probably had more than enough on your plate." New York had gone pitch-dark during the archangel-to-archangel battle, power lines destroyed and pylons overloading as Uram and Raphael both pulled power from the city below.
It hadn't only been the electrical grid that had become collateral damage in the cataclysmic battle between two immortals. Her mind showed her a snapshot of crumbled buildings, crushed cars, and the twisted blades that meant at least one heliport had suffered severe damage.
"It was bad," Sara admitted, "but the majority of the damage has been repaired.
Raphael's people organized it all. We even had angels doing construction work - that's not a sight you see every day."
"Guess they didn't need the cranes."
"Nope. I never knew how strong angels were until I saw them lift up some of those blocks." A pause filled with an unspoken depth of emotion that gripped Elena by the throat. "I'll go by your apartment tomorrow morning," Sara finally said, her voice rigidly controlled, "let you know what's what."
Elena swallowed, wishing Sara was here again so she could reach out and hug her best friend. "Thanks, I'll tell Dmitri to make sure his hench-people know you're coming." In spite of her attempt to not let it matter, she couldn't help but wonder if any of her keepsakes, the little things she'd collected on her trips as a hunter, had survived.
"Hah! I can take on hench-people with one hand tied behind my back." A thready laugh.
"God, Ellie, I get this wave of relief every time I hear your voice."
"You'll be hearing it for a lot longer now - I'm immortal," she joked, not yet able to truly comprehend the enormity of the change in her life. Hunters in the field died young.
They didn't live forever.
"Yeah. You'll be around to watch over my baby and her babies long after I'm gone."
"I don't want to talk about that." It made her heart ache to imagine a future without Sara, without Ransom, without Deacon.
"Silly girl. I think it's wonderful - a gift."
"I'm not so sure." She told Sara what she'd been thinking in regard to her value as a hostage. "Am I being paranoid?"
"No." Now, the other woman sounded like the hard-assed Guild Director she was.
"That's why I packed Vivek's special gun in the bag of weapons on its way to you."
Elena's fingers curled into her palm.
The last time she'd used that weapon, Raphael had bled endless red on her carpet, and Dmitri had almost slit her throat. But none of that, she thought, uncurling her fingers one by one, diminished the value of a weapon meant to disable wings, not when - her gaze went to the skies beyond the window - she was surrounded by immortals in a place that whispered of things no human was supposed to know. "Thanks. Even if you did get me into this in the first place."
"Hey, I made you filthy rich, too."
Elena blinked, tried to find her voice.
"You forgot didn't you?" Sara laughed.
"I was too busy being in a coma," Elena managed to choke out. "Raphael paid me?"
"Every last penny."
It took her a second to realize what that meant. "Wow." The deposit had been more money than she could've hoped to make in a lifetime. And it had been a mere twenty-five percent of the total. "I think 'filthy rich' might be an understatement."
"Yeah. But you did complete the job he hired you to do, which I'm guessing had something to do with that fight with Uram?"
Elena bit her lip. Raphael had been explicit in his warning about all information connected to the sadistic monster who'd killed and tortured so many - any mortal she told would die. No exceptions. Perhaps that had changed now, but she wasn't going to chance her best friend's life on the faith of a relationship she barely understood. "I can't tell you, Sara."
"You'll tell me all these other secrets but not this one?" Sara didn't sound pissed, she sounded intrigued. "Interesting."
"Don't go digging that way." Elena's stomach pitched as her mind put on a nausea-inducing slideshow of the horror that had been Uram. That last room . . . the stench of rotting flesh, the gleam of blood-soaked bone, the slimy pulp of the eyes he'd dug out of a dying vampire's skull.
Steeling her spine against the bile burning the back of her throat, she tried to imbue her voice with the depth of her worry. "It's bad news."
"I don't have a death wis - ah, Zoe's awake." Maternal love filled every syllable. "And look at that, so is Deacon. Zoe's daddy wakes to her slightest cry, doesn't he, sweetie pie?"
Elena drew in a cleansing breath, the loving images created by Sara's words banishing those of Uram's depravity. "I think you guys are getting more sickening with each day."
"My baby's almost one and a half now, Ellie," Sara whispered. "I want you to see her."
"I will." It was a promise. "I'm going to learn to use these wings if it kills me." Her eye fell on Lijuan's invitation as the words left her mouth, death closing a skeletal hand around her throat.
Chapter 3
However, a week after her conversation with Sara, Elena found herself thinking not of death but of vengeance. "I knew you were into pain, but I didn't know you were a sadist,"
she said to Dmitri's back, her bones melting into the luscious heat of the isolated hot spring the damn vampire had all but carried her to - after pounding her ass to dust in a training session meant to toughen her muscles.
Turning, he focused the full power of those dark eyes on her, eyes that could tempt an innocent into sin, a sinner into hell itself. "When," he murmured in a voice that spoke of closed doors and broken taboos, "have I ever given you reason to doubt me?"
Fur stroked over her lips, between her legs, along her back.
Her skin tightened in response to the potency of his scent, a scent that was an aphrodisiac to one of the hunter-born, but she didn't back down, well aware he was enjoying having her at such a complete disadvantage. "Why are you here? Shouldn't you be in New York?" He was the leader of Raphael's Seven, a tight-knit group of vampires and angels who protected Raphael - even against threats he might not yet see.
Elena was deathly certain that Dmitri would execute her with ice-cold precision should he come to consider her too big a chink in Raphael's armor. Raphael might kill the vampire for it, but as Dmitri had once said to her - she'd still be dead. "Surely some little groupie's crying her heart out over you." She couldn't help but think of that night in the vampire wing of the Tower - Dmitri's head bending over the supple neck of a ripely curved blonde whose pleasure had scented the air in a sensual perfume.