Archangel's War

30

Their first flight the next day was over a large city. Things appear as they should.

I’m not getting any vibes, Elena said from where she flew to his left.

Lijuan, however, wasn’t the only threat. When he spotted a huddle of vampires in a small cobblestoned courtyard, their eyes glinting red and their fangs flashing as their bodies shivered, he knew he had only one option.

Because that shivering, it wasn’t cold.

It was a primitive and overpowering lust for blood.

The kiss began to disperse the instant they felt the shadow of his wings, running and crouching and scrambling in a way that confirmed their degeneration from thinking beings into creatures driven only by an insatiable need to feed. No finesse, no care. Jugulars torn out and bodies disemboweled.

He began to pick them off with surgical precision.

His consort took down three with her crossbow.

Her eyes were determined when they met his in the aftermath. “They were too far gone to help.” She nodded down at the skinny vampire she’d pinned to a wall with a crossbow bolt through his heart. “Even though he knew you were hunting, he couldn’t resist temptation. He was about an inch away from ripping out a passing girl’s stomach and burying his face in the cavity.”

She reloaded her crossbow with grim efficiency, her eyes hunter-focused. “I don’t know why they do that. So many of them go for the stomach.”

Raphael finished off the vampires she’d hit; a single touch of his power and their bodies burned in a flash that left only scorch marks on the wall and in the street. A silent warning to those who would follow the same violent path. “Yet you feel sadness at ending them.” He’d caught the regret beneath the focus. “What am I to do with you, hbeebti?”

“Too late to back off now, Archangel. You’re in this for eternity.” She strapped her crossbow back on. “I don’t actually feel sorry for them. Vampirism is a choice and it comes with consequences. It’s the entire messed-up situation. It’s getting to me.”

“At least our sojourn here is temporary.”

“Thank the fuck.”

They located three more nests of bloodlust-ridden vamps in short order, cleaned them out as quickly. “It’s like you can sense them,” Elena said after the final execution.

“My instincts tend to take me in the correct direction—it is a gift that comes with ascension.” He didn’t often have cause to use that ability—such vampires fell under Dmitri’s purview and he was efficient at organizing their capture and execution.

Their next stop was the city citadel. I expect no problems here. The city is under the stewardship of one of Favashi’s senior courtiers.

Actual working courtier, not a pretty ornament?

Exactly so.

The citadel lay behind a wall and was a palace of lush adornment and bronze-streaked fawn marble; Favashi had converted the structure into a barracks for her soldiers and the Cadre used it for their combined forces.

Every single vampire, angel, and mortal in the vicinity appeared to gasp when Raphael landed in the citadel courtyard, but he felt no concern. He and Elena had run a test at dawn to confirm his immunity to the poison that had taken Favashi; they’d landed in a ghost village and Raphael had deliberately cut himself so the ash could get in.

Wildfire had erupted at once around the wound. His body would not allow the infection to get in, and if Elena didn’t have enough wildfire to fight anything that managed to cling to her, he could give her what she needed.

Striding through the courtyard with his hunter by his side, he was met halfway by one of his own people, a senior angel Dmitri had seconded to China as part of Raphael’s contribution to the Cadre’s combined forces. “Sire.” Gadriel went down on one knee in front of Raphael, his head bowed. The sword on his back had a weathered and old hilt, but Raphael had no doubts the blade was razor-sharp.

“Gadriel,” he said. “Tell me what is happening here.”

The angel rose to his feet, and inclined his head at Elena before he spoke. His eyes were a haunting gray mixed with green, his height an inch below Elena’s, his skin pale with an edge of pink, and his body tautly muscled. “Riva has become erratic over the past week. He was doing an excellent job of managing the city before then.”

“You’ve sent through a report to Jason?”

Lines flared out from the corners of the angel’s eyes. “No, sire. I thought to give Riva a little leeway—he mourns Favashi’s disappearance yet. He was not simply a courtier but one of her closest lieutenants.”

“I would’ve made the same choice.” Raphael clasped Gadriel on the shoulder. “He is nine thousand years old and not apt to fall down in his duties. Still, these are strange times. Tell me of his actions just prior to the alteration in his behavior.”

“He rode out on his motorcycle to do a routine sweep of the city, but came back hours later than he’d indicated.” Gadriel’s wings were a deep brown with hints of bronze woven into the filaments and they glimmered under the late afternoon sunlight. “At the time, I thought nothing of it. All of us need time alone to shrug off the cobwebs. Especially here, with the constant screaming tension under the surface.”

The steel and wildfire of Elena in his mind. You think something got to him?

The dead captain in the ghost village preys upon me. We do not know how many operatives Lijuan has in the world and what she can do with them.

Aloud, he instructed Gadriel to lead them to Riva.

“Sire.”

Elena had met Gadriel once before—in the Refuge. Though he was named after a legendary angelic painter renowned for the sumptuous sensuality of his works, the gray-eyed angel with chestnut hair was a bit stuffy and set in his ways. More importantly, however, he was deeply loyal to Raphael. Now, she took in everything around them as he walked on ahead, his comment about the “constant screaming tension” resonating.

Lijuan might be gone, but the echo of her presence lingered in the air. It was stares on the back of Elena’s neck from people in the courtyard, dust in the air that tasted of distant death, electric sensations beneath her boots—as if tiny insects were attempting to penetrate the soles and enter her bloodstream.

Favashi, she thought, had come into a tough situation even before the infection.

Shadows passed overhead right before they left the courtyard and entered the citadel, a wing of angels coming in to land. It was cool and dark inside, the stone walls smoothed by time. Elena felt the age of the building in her bones and when she put her hand against the wall, history itself spoke to her.

Nothing in New York was this old, this woven in time.

Gadriel led them to stone stairs far narrower than in modern angelic buildings, but still with enough span to accommodate wings. All the spaces in the citadel, she came to see, were built for angels. But it wasn’t an angel who sat in the center of the large chamber into which Gadriel showed them.

The vampire, his scent cardamom crushed with ice and rippled with a thick treacly sweetness, sat with his head in his hands. His skin was ebony, his hair kinky curls darker than his skin. He wore battered leather pants, along with a black jacket and tee of faded brown, and when he lifted his head, his red-rimmed eyes proved to have irises of a stunning indigo.

Elena barely stopped herself from going for the long blade worn against her spine. Old, this one was old. Nine thousand years, Raphael had said, but this wasn’t just age. This was the kind of power Dmitri would hold in another millennia or two. As for those eyes, she’d bet her new set of throwing knives that they hadn’t begun that way. It was vampirism that had taken what might’ve been more ordinary blue or gray eyes and altered them to this startling and unearthly hue.

Why wasn’t he Favashi’s second?

Power alone does not a second make, but I think he was her third.

“Archangel.” Riva rose to his feet in a clatter of limbs. His chair toppled behind him onto the thick Turkish rug.

Flushing, he bent to pick it up.

Gadriel whispered away at the same time.

“It has been an age, Riva.” Raphael held out his arm. “I think two hundred years at least.”

The vampire clasped his forearm, but the two didn’t embrace as Raphael would’ve done with Dmitri. “Not so very long when one has lived nine thousand years.” Riva’s voice was melodious and deep, but his fingers trembled before he broke contact.

“Tell me what has happened.” Cold and dark with power, Raphael’s words weren’t a request. “There is no use in lying. I can see it.”

Shuddering, the vampire seemed to pull himself together with a conscious effort of will. He wasn’t fully successful—his face quivered before he clenched his jaw, and though Elena couldn’t see his hands because he’d put his arms behind his back, she could tell from the strain in his muscles that he was gripping the wrist of one with vicious force.

“I lost time.” The column of his throat moved. “At least five hours. I have no memory of where I was or what I did during that time, but when I woke . . .” His voice broke.

“At this time,” Raphael said, “I am your liege. Speak.”

His entire body trembling, Riva began to shrug off his jacket.

Raphael, Elena murmured mind-to-mind. Should I step out? This wasn’t about humiliating the guy after all; no one this powerful would want to be seen as weak, much less by the consort to an archangel.

Raphael spoke directly to Riva. “My consort asks if you would prefer that she step out.”

The vampire’s eyes flared before he inclined his head in a deep bow. “No,” he said. “I thank you for your consideration, Consort, but I am too old to be shy in such matters.” Words spoken with a courtly grace and innate confidence that showed her a glimpse of who he was when not under such strain.

Jacket off, Riva reached down to pull off his T-shirt, revealing a ridged abdomen hard with muscle. Nothing unusual about that in a warrior vampire his age—what was unusual were the lines of black that snaked under his skin from the right side of his abdomen, so dark and oddly liquid that they were striking even against the rich hue of his skin.

Elena sucked in a breath. “Are they moving?” Tiny, incremental pieces of motion.

Face twisted and hands fisted at his sides, Riva’s words were shards of glass. “I kept telling myself that I was imagining it, but it’s a lie I can no longer swallow. At first, they were nothing but scratches. I thought I must’ve fallen from my bike and hurt myself. I believed I had hit my head, and that was why I couldn’t recall the lost hours.”

Riva’s words tumbled out atop of one another; Elena could almost hear how he’d convinced himself that it had been nothing, just a stupid accident.

“Where in the city did you come to consciousness?” Raphael asked, while Elena continued to watch the viscous black lines, her fingers itching to cut them out. She couldn’t get it out of her head that the fucking things were eating Riva from the inside out.

“Not in the city—two hours outside of it, with my bike fallen on the ground beside me.” His shoulders slumped. “I knew even then that it was all wrong; that area was nowhere in my plans for the day.”

Pain in eyes too bright to be real, eerie in a way that meant he’d never be mistaken for human. “It’s clear I’m no longer fit for my duties.” Words spoken directly to Raphael. “You must replace me. Gadriel is more than competent enough to take over. I . . . I . . . Sire, I do not know what to do, where to go.”

Raphael raised a hand flickering with wildfire. “There is a risk this will kill you.” A deadly remoteness to him, ice in his tone. “Wildfire is not meant for vampires. It may, however, be the only thing that can kill what is inside you.”

Riva shivered but gave a crisp nod. “I am ready.”

“Sit.”

A snap of the vampire’s spine. “I cannot sit in your presence.”

“If you manage to remain conscious through this, I will be very surprised. Sit.”

Riva still looked uncomfortable, but obeyed. Elena, meanwhile, put her hand on Raphael’s arm. His skin was cold. Tone it down—that’s angel-level wildfire.

Raphael didn’t reply, but the wildfire faded until only the tips of his fingers burned. He touched those fingers to the living infection. Riva’s entire body arched, his hands clamping on the chair arms and his muscles straining as he gritted his teeth against a scream. Wildfire crackled over his skin, burning him alive.

The scent of cooked flesh hit Elena’s nostrils. Her gorge rose.