21

“I always knew he’d do something foolish,” Miuxu said to Elena after the two of them decided to land and take a leisurely walk around the sinkhole fence.

“Eric Acosta or Simon Blakely?” she asked the tall angel who wore intricate and heavily embroidered gowns as a matter of course—and kept her black hair in a short, spiky cut dusted with gold dye.

“Simon.”

The victim on the bed. The Don Juan.

“I’m hearing he had a weakness for women.”

Miuxu threw up hands gifted at the piano, the dark eyes she’d lined with black kohl flashing. “He was a handsome man and he knew it.” A shake of her head. “But handsome men are plentiful among immortals. You flew here with one of the prettiest of them all.”

“Simon Blakely thought himself beautiful enough to surpass others?”

“It wasn’t so much that.” Miuxu tightened pale brown wings threaded with delicate filaments of shimmering bronze. “I’m not one of those angels who believes in breaking down a vampire in order to shape him. I prefer to treat them as adults and give them choices.”

The angel sighed. “I’ve had brilliant successes, but I’ve also had more than one spectacular failure. Including with Simon.” She spread out her wings before folding them back in, her coloring unusual in that her left wing had a band of black primary feathers while her right didn’t. “He was intelligent, and he was vain, and he was a gifted enough lover that he was never short of bedmates.”

Eyebrows rising to her hairline, Elena glanced at the strong angel as handy with a war hammer as she was at the piano. “You?”

Miuxu angled her head closer to Elena’s, her contralto voice low as she said, “I was tempted, it’s true, but I knew the instant I entered into bedsport with him, he’d think he could breach his Contract with impunity. That was the thing with dear, imprudent Simon; he thought he could manipulate everyone with his body.”

Elena listened . . . and kept a furtive eye on her wings to make sure they weren’t dragging. In the good news department, her temple was no longer throbbing and, having eaten three energy bars on the flight over, she had her hunger under control.

“Simon’s sensuality could’ve held him in good stead in the immortal world.” Miuxu’s voice was contemplative. “I made sure he could support himself in a legitimate profession at the end of his Contract, but I thought it far more likely he’d find himself a wealthy mortal or immortal. You know how such things are.”

“Yes.” Plenty of the genetically blessed made their living as arm candy. Elena saw nothing wrong with that when it was an honest exchange and when both parties were adults in full control of their faculties. “How did he end up in a bad part of the Quarter? My friends working the case tell me he was sharing an apartment that was one step above a dump.”

“Simon didn’t seem to understand that once you make an agreement with an immortal, you stay loyal.” Miuxu’s gaze looked out beyond the blackness of the night. “He quickly gained a reputation for being untrustworthy and liable to cheat.” Another shake of her head. “Angels and vampires old enough to support lovers to the lifestyle to which Simon aspired are not forgiving. He was lucky that he escaped with his life.”

The hairs on Elena’s nape prickled. “Is it possible one of the people he cheated on decided to punish him with death?”

“It has been some years since he was active in the immortal world in that way.” Clasping her hands behind her back, Miuxu took a moment to consider her next words. “I would say he was punished with the most painful cut of all—he has been forgotten,” she said at last. “But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was a woman involved somewhere.”

A glance at Elena, Miuxu’s eyes a light brown with an unusual yellowish cast that reminded her of a tiger’s penetrating gaze. “He was firm in his tastes. Always women. Young, yes—but adults, you understand? He had no liking for children when it came to pleasures of the flesh, and I would not have him accused of that perversion.”

“I understand.”

“Nubile and lovely were also prerequisites—and many vampires as well as mortals fall into that group.”

“Do you know anything about the other vampire who was murdered? Eric Acosta.”

“No.” Miuxu nodded politely to an old vampire strolling in the opposite direction, before picking up the thread of their conversation. “I believe in giving my vampires true freedom when they’ve finished their Contract. I don’t keep them on any kind of a leash—but I am proud to say many of mine stay in touch. Even black sheep like Simon swing back into my orbit now and then.”

A sad smile. “He never told me of his cheating ways—I got that from the wronged angels who knew he had been one of mine. From Simon, I got grand plans and even grander promises of what he would one day become.”

“You’ve given me a far clearer picture of him.” Elena’d work with Ashwini and Janvier to see if they could dig up more about Simon’s love life, any jealousies or spurned lovers capable of ruthless, brutal payback.

The problem was that motive left too many gaping holes unfilled. Acosta she could explain away as collateral damage for having been there at the time, but Harrison had been stalked. Also, Simon had only liked women, but the possible killer Elena had seen was male. Jealous husband, boyfriend, maybe?

A wash of wind, tendrils of her hair flying back in it, before Illium landed in front of her and Miuxu. Bowing with old-world grace, his wings flaring out in a showy display, he said, “My lovely Miuxu, it has been too long since I’ve heard you weave fever dreams with your fingers.”

Husky laughter from Miuxu. “You are as playful and as wicked as ever, I see.”

Elena caught the glances shared between the two and wondered . . . If so, Illium had excellent taste. Yet when Illium joined her and Miuxu, the two spoke only as intimate friends who had a cherished history between them, but no present entanglement.

Stopping at one of the large glass windows that allowed the curious to peer in, Elena watched the lava bubble and spike, forming and reforming into strange unearthly patterns. In front of her eyes formed the molten image of an owl. “It’s alive,” she murmured, scratching at that spot on her chest again.

Child of mortals.

Elena froze at the ethereal feminine voice in her head. You’re awake again.

A whispering sigh that held such exquisite tiredness. Child of mortals, the voice repeated. I will not awaken in time to see you. You are destined to fall.

Screw that. Elena glared at the lava. I’ll write my own destiny.

This is not destiny. This is a birth. You must end for the other to live.

Cold in her blood now. Raphael? A stiff whisper. Do I need to die to save Raphael? She’d do that without thought, without hesitation.

No answer, no sense of a presence, the sounds of Miuxu and Illium’s conversation filtering in past senses that had been locked in silence while she spoke to the being who wasn’t there. Except it was. Feminine. Old. So achingly old. Barely awake.

That was the imprint in Elena’s head.

An imprint that forespoke her death.

You must end for the other to live.

What the hell was she supposed to do with that? How the hell was she supposed to process it?

Illium gave her a discreet boost into the air when it was time for them to head homeward. He made it seem that they were just playing a game, that Elena was being tugged along for fun. She wondered that he wasn’t anchored down by the weight of the stone in her abdomen, her blood like lead.

They’d barely reached Manhattan when she felt the crash of the wind in her mind, the whisper of the sea. Hbeebti, I see you have been playing with your Bluebell in my absence.

Elena’s clenched heart slammed into thudding joy as she searched for her archangel. Where are you?

A sweep of air, Raphael soaring down from the night sky far above. Spotting Raphael, Illium lifted a hand in a wave before zooming off in another direction. Now look, Elena said with a mock scowl, you’ve scared him off.

Your Bluebell is made of sterner stuff. I’ve asked him to check a border line. Winging down then up, Raphael grabbed her by the waist.

Elena folded her wings instinctively to her back and locked her arms around his neck. You remember.

Old memories on his face, of a love between a young angel and a mortal woman, of an archangel forced to make a cruel decision. It is a hard thing to hurt a boy you’ve watched grow to manhood.

Elena couldn’t imagine the horror of that day, Raphael and Illium both caught by angelic law and left with no way out. If Illium’s lover hadn’t spoken . . . But she had, and in so doing, sealed both her and Illium’s fate. Did you keep him busy most of the day on purpose? Illium had run down his packed schedule for her as they tried to stave off boredom while watching the security footage.

It is the one gift I can give him on this day. Holding her with one arm around her waist, he cupped her jaw and cheek with the other. Dmitri intended to set him another task when he saw the two of you together in Vivek’s domain.

“I’m glad he didn’t interrupt. We ended up having fun.” Perhaps enough to take the edge off the painful anniversary. “Do we have to brace for a volcano?”

“Not just now. I have left a team behind to monitor the geothermal activity—it should not exist, but it is mild in the scheme of things.” The pad of his thumb brushing over her cheekbone. “Your face speaks of exhaustion and yet you fly in the darkest hours before dawn. Why are you not in bed asleep?”

Unable to hold her need back any longer, Elena turned to kiss his palm. “You’ve been gone so many hours.”

Raphael bent his head toward her own. “Did you miss me, Elena-mine?”

Like the air from my lungs, like the blood in my veins. No shields between her and her archangel, no secrets. “Will you dance with me?” she whispered with her lips against his, the second cut on her forearm a dull pulsation in the background that she ignored with ferocious focus. “I missed you so much today.”

“Hbeebti.” Flame-blue eyes burning with archangelic power, each obsidian eyelash defined against the crystalline clarity. “What darkness holds you in thrall? Are your wings causing you pain?”

“Later.” The rest could wait—inside her was a hunger to feel real, feel strong, feel Elena. “I need you.”

In answer, he rocketed them up into the sky with violent power. She screamed out her delight, knowing that no one could hear them, no one could see them. Raphael had wrapped her in glamour, that skin of invisibility that only the archangels could produce—and not even all of them.

“To the river or the sea?” Raphael murmured the question in her ear, his breath hot, his arms strong, and his body a powerful haven.

Elena knew he’d never let her fall.

From the moment he’d become hers, Raphael had been there for her in a way no one else had been her entire life. Not even her mother.

Marguerite’s betrayal had been the most hurtful of them all.

“The sea,” she said. “I’m too angry for the city today.”

“You are thinking of your mother again,” Raphael said as he took them high across Manhattan.

“I love her till it hurts, and I’m so angry with her.” In that strange, sad dream, she’d told Marguerite she wasn’t afraid, but what she hadn’t spoken of was the other emotion that was a scalding heat in her psyche. “Sometimes I think I’ve forgiven her, then I remember the loneliness and the fear and how I found her. I saw my mother’s body hanging from the ceiling! How could she do that to me, Raphael?”

His answer held a knowledge that not many people would ever possess. “Caliane asks herself the same question and she cannot divine an answer. It is a thing of madness that causes a mother to forget her child.”

“That’s exactly what makes me want to find her and shake her and shake her.” Elena’s voice was crushed stones and coarse sand. “Mama was so lost in her grief over Belle and Ari that she forgot me and Beth. She forgot Jeffrey.” Marguerite had been no trophy wife. She hadn’t even been the “right kind” of wife for a man of Jeffrey’s wealth and standing.

No, she’d been a beloved wife.

“I can almost understand what he’s become,” Elena said. “The way he is now.” She ran her fingers through Raphael’s hair as the two of them flew on into the night. “It’d be as if you chose to leave me. I’d spend the rest of my life wondering why you couldn’t come to me, why you couldn’t trust me with your hurt and sorrow.”

I would never leave you, Elena. A lethal edge in every word. Such a thing is an impossibility.

“I know you’d never leave me, not by choice.” The Cascade shoving him full of power, other forces in the immortal world, sought to steal him from her, but Raphael would never make the choice Marguerite had made. “I was just using it as an example.”

Find another example.

Laughter burst through the anger, shattering it into icy shards that melted in the heat between them. Sinking into the force of his love and commitment, she used her most penitent voice to say, “I apologize for even using it as a hypothetical example.”

He gave her a stern look, before nodding downward. “See there.”

Following his gaze, she spotted a jetboat scything through the water. It was a sleek black thing with what might’ve been flames licking up the sides. It was hard to see in the darkness, the only light coming from the boat itself. “Fancy.”

“Look closer.”

She squinted as he dropped lower, but it was a wisp of scent that floated into the air—chocolate and fur and champagne—that gave her the identity of the man at the helm. “Dmitri? I didn’t know he had a boat.”

“That’s the Honor, Dmitri’s new personal launch.” A pause before he said, “Shall I name something after you?”

Elena pretended to think about it. “Maybe the next time you buy a jet,” she said solemnly.

“I will call it the Hunter Angel.”

Elena threatened to punch him. He laughed until his eyes were pure light and white fire danced over his primaries and it felt like intoxication. His kiss was food to her parched soul, the angel dust that coated her lips without warning luscious and erotic, delicious and addictive.

The special blend he created only for her.

“Raphael.” She licked her tongue against his, a molten quickening at her core.