Elena wondered if that meant he’d one day become an archangel. “Have you been wearing a sword the entire time I’ve known you?”
A shrug. “A sword, a gun, occasionally a scimitar. It’s excellent for beheadings.”
Elena shook her head at the bloodthirsty recital, then froze when that head began to spin. “Go wash off the blood, Bluebell.”
“After Raphael returns.”
Elena took a few steps around the pavilion after pushing at Illium to move. “I can walk home.” She could feel the bruises blooming, but it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been—especially when it came to her heart. She rubbed the heel of her hand over it. A little sore, but otherwise okay. “And since I’m not suicidal, you can escort me there.”
“The sire asked you to stay.”
Actually, Elena thought, it had been more of an order—with no expectation that she’d choose to do anything else. “Illium, you should know something about me if this friendship’s going to have a hope in hell of working. I’m unlikely to obey Raphael’s every order.”
Illium’s face filled with censure. “He’s right, Ellie. You’re not safe here.”
“I’m hunter-born,” she told him, the words husky. “I’ve never been safe.”
“Oh, my little hunter, my sweet, sweet hunter.”
Jerking off the memory like an unwanted coat, but knowing it would return to claim her again and again and again, she began to walk. Illium tried to get in her way, but she had the advantage—she knew he wouldn’t lay a finger on her.
She’d forgotten about the angels he’d left in the gardens.
They looked like broken birds, their blood staining the ground, turning the field of flowers into an abattoir.
12
Blood and pain scented the air in a rich perfume that seeped into her very pores. Suddenly, she missed her apartment, the bathroom she’d turned into a personal haven, with a strength that made her tremble inside, her stomach tight enough to hurt.
“How long will they lie there?” she forced herself to ask.
“Until they can move themselves,” Illium said, each word a razor. “Or until Michaela sends someone to retrieve them.”
That, Elena knew, would never happen. Turning away from the mass of bodies, severed wings, and crushed flowers, she walked slowly up the path. “Wait. My book.”
“I’ll retrieve it for you after Raphael returns.”
Elena hesitated, but knew she didn’t have it in her to turn back and walk past the bodies again. “Thank you.” She’d only taken a few more steps when the scent of rain, of the wind, infiltrated her every sense.
Illium melted away in silence, and it was Raphael who walked beside her. She expected a reprimand for deviating from his orders, but he said nothing until they were inside the walls of their private wing. Even then, he simply watched her strip off her clothes and enter the shower.
He was waiting with a huge towel when she stepped out, and as he wrapped it around her, the tenderness of the gesture threatened to break her. She looked up, met his eyes as he pushed damp strands of hair off her face. His words were quiet as he said, “The violence of our life shocks you.”
Under her palm, his heart beat strong and sure. It was such a human sound, so honest, so real. “It’s not the violence.” She’d killed her own mentor when he went mad, butchering young boys like they were so much meat. “It’s the inhumanity of it all.”
Raphael stroked his hand over her hair, his wings unfolding to surround her. “Michaela came after you for a very human motive—she’s jealous. You’re now the center of attention, and she cannot stand it.”
“But the cruelty in her eyes.” Elena shivered at the memory. “She enjoyed hurting me, enjoyed it in a way that reminded me of Uram.” The bloodborn angel had kicked at her broken ankle, sent her screaming. And then he’d smiled.
“They were mates for a reason.” Another stroke, his heart so warm and vibrant under the cheek she’d pressed to his chest. But he was also the man who’d punished a vampire with such icy practicality that New Yorkers avoided that once bloodstained patch of Times Square even now.
“What did you do to Michaela?” she asked, her skin going cold with the realization that humiliation alone would have never been enough for Raphael. He didn’t act capriciously, but when he did act, the world shivered.
A midnight breeze in her mind. I told you once, Elena. Never feel sorry for Michaela. She’ll use that to rip out your heart while it is still beating.
The heart he’d referred to gave a panicked beat of memory, the muscle bruised, painful. “How was she able to do that, reach inside me that way?”
“It seems Michaela has been hiding a new power.” His voice dropped. “It’s no coincidence that she gained it so soon after coming close to death with Uram.”
“He had her alone for long enough,” Elena said, remembering the raw fear in Michaela’s eyes when they’d rescued her. It had been the first time she’d seen an archangel afraid, and it had rocked her. “Do you think he changed her somehow?”
“His blood changed the woman, Holly Chang. She’s neither vampire nor mortal now. It remains to be seen what becomes of Michaela.”
Elena was ashamed to realize she’d forgotten about the only surviving victim of Uram’s attacks. “Holly? How is she?” The last glimpse Elena had had of her, she’d been naked, her skin caked with blood, her mind half broken.
“Alive.”
“Her mind?”
“Dmitri tells me she’ll never again be who she was, but she isn’t lost to madness.”
It was far more than Elena had expected, but she caught the things he didn’t say. “Dmitri’s still got people watching her, hasn’t he?”
“Uram’s poison altered her on a fundamental level—we must know what she’s become.”
And, Elena understood without asking, if Holly proved too much Uram’s creature, Dmitri would slit her throat without hesitation. Instinct warred with harsh reality—Uram’s evil could not be allowed to spread. “You never answered my question,” she said, hoping Holly Chang would spit in her attacker’s face, that she’d save herself. “What did you do to Michaela?”
“I left her in a public place with your dagger in her eye. The eye had already healed around it.”
“What does that mean?”
“Pain for Michaela when she pulls it back out, when she reheals.” There was no mercy in him. “It’s why Noel’s attackers drove shards of glass into his flesh.”
She knew he’d linked the vicious beating and his own actions on purpose. Another reminder of who he was, what he was capable of. Did he expect her to run? If he did, he had a lot to learn about his hunter. “You did something else.”
You think you know me so well, Guild Hunter.
At that moment, he sounded like the archangel she’d first met, the one who’d made her close her hand over a knife blade, his eyes devoid of mercy. “I know you well enough to figure out you’d never let an insult pass unanswered.” She’d seen that in his relentless search for Noel’s attackers—his resolute determination likely the reason the angel behind it had gone to ground.
“In your travels around the Refuge, did you ever see a rock that reaches toward the sky on the other side of the gorge?”
“I think so. It’s very thin, sharp . . .” Her mind made the connection with sickening ease. “You dropped her on that rock, didn’t you?”
She would’ve ripped out your heart. I simply returned the favor.
Goose bumps crawled over her skin at the ice in his tone. Crushing the fabric of his shirt under her hand, she took a deep breath. “What would you do to me if I ever did something to make you that angry?”
“The only thing you could do to make me that angry would be to lie with another man.” A quiet statement against her ear. “And you would not do that to me, Elena.”