That done, the angel left to walk in her creepy rose garden. “Change is disruptive,” she said when Elena arched her eyebrows. “But such dark beauty will not long survive the ice. Not even an immortal can stop the rot of time.”
Elena stared after the angel for long moments. A shiver rippled down her spine.
Shaking it off, she called Vivek and got him to remotely hack into Damian Hale’s computer—which the vampire had left passcode-protected. Vivek discovered evidence of multiple international airline tickets all booked for the same time and day. The most interesting find, however, was that Hale had managed to gain access to the household account and siphon off a significant cushion of money.
“He’s no ordinary runner.” Elena’s blood heated, her pulse faster. “I don’t think he’ll be on the planes, either. He left this trail for us to find.”
“I’m on it.” An exhilaration in Vivek’s voice that justified her decision to call him rather than the Guild’s own tech team.
She was by the mansion’s front door with Taizaki when Vivek confirmed her hunch. Damian Hale hadn’t boarded any of the ticketed flights. “I’ve set up a notification alert across every possible system. Anything else pops up, I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks, V.” Elena secured her phone in a zippered pocket, then opened the bag that held the exemplar of Hale’s scent and took a deep breath. “The brush of aspen trees entwined with a hint of ripe peach.”
Taizaki blanched at her murmur.
Elena shrugged. “Vampiric scents often have nothing to do with the strength or dangerousness of a vampire.” She decided not to tell the snooty majordomo that he smelled of burnt sugar candy and curdled milk.
See, she was being all political and nice even though Taizaki had curled his lip the first time she’d ever met him. As if mortality was catching. Montgomery would’ve never been so tacky as to betray his personal feelings. The first time she’d met Raphael’s butler, she’d been a rough-and-tumble mortal hunter, but he’d offered her tea or coffee with utmost politeness.
But, she admitted, Montgomery was the gold standard. Every other butler—or majordomo—was going to suffer by comparison. Poor Imani would be mortified if she ever realized Taizaki’s lapse.
Handing the exemplar back to the majordomo, she turned to begin the hunt in earnest.
Roses, opulent and intoxicating and hella-creeptastic.
Elena gritted her teeth against the overwhelming perfume that stained the air and shouted omen, omen, omen! She began to walk out from the mansion in increasingly large semi-circles and finally caught Hale’s scent about fifty yards out from the front door, heading into the trees that surrounded the property.
Twenty minutes later, the scent came to an abrupt halt. When she crouched down to dig lightly through the dirty snow that had been protected from the light morning snowfall by a heavy tree canopy, she spotted a drip of oil. “Smart guy.” She rose, walked out from under the canopy.
Bunching up her wings, she went to go airborne to see if the oil leak had left a trail . . . and felt an excruciating wrenching in her muscles.
Breathless, she froze then tried again.
She got airborne, but her shoulders and inner wing muscles hurt as they hadn’t since she’d first become strong enough to pull off vertical takeoffs. The pain throbbed through her like an infected tooth.
Damn it.
She must’ve inadvertently moved the wrong way and twisted or torn a tendon or muscle. Hopefully it was small enough that her body would heal on its own. Angelkind’s healers were gifted, but while they could help the healing process, they couldn’t magic away major injuries.
As for Elena’s own capacity to heal, it was more than she’d had as a mortal but nothing in comparison to even baby angels. No one knew how long her journey from post-mortal to immortal would take. Keir, a gifted healer respected by immortals, and Jessamy, their trusted historian and librarian, had been digging for information about the previous angels-Made, but so far all they had to show for their efforts were a lot of dust sneezes and reddened eyes.
The frustration was even worse because everyone knew those once-mortals had existed. They were the flesh and blood reality behind the legend that when an archangel loved true, his body would spontaneously produce a sweet, erotic golden substance called ambrosia. Raphael had kissed her with ambrosia as she fell, her back broken and the rest of her wounded beyond repair, and now she soared in the sky.
Ambrosia was accepted as a given among immortals. Researchers had even attempted to study it. Unfortunately, they were hampered by the lack of records—or an actual sample. It wasn’t as if Raphael had been in any condition to save them a drop; he’d given it all to Elena.
You must live.
Elena’s heart stretched on the echo of memory, of the raw determination in her archangel’s voice, of the piercing love that had marked them both. But what of the other lovers true who’d come before them? Where had they gone?
The prevailing theory was that the last angel-Made had been born so very long ago that the angel-Made and all those who knew his or her name were lost to deepest Sleep. Elena wondered at times about what it would be like to meet one of her predecessors, uncertain if she wanted the opportunity or not. What if those predecessors had lost their humanity after an eon of existence? What if she recognized nothing of mortality in them?
Today, she felt mortal down to the bone, but the pain in her wing had faded from pulsating abscess to throbbing bruise, so she decided to continue the hunt and swing by the infirmary when she got back.
There were no visible oil stains on the road, anything once there long erased by the passage of other cars. This hunt would have to be more technical. But when she asked Vivek to locate Damian Hale’s phone, he told her it was back in the general area of Imani’s mansion. “He probably hid it on the grounds, hoping to send everyone on a wild goose chase.”
A flock of starlings flew off the trees right in front of Elena. Hundreds of tiny bodies and sharp beaks and unblinking dark eyes. Thousands of wings hitting her skin. Endless shrills of sound bursting against her eardrums.
She dropped on a bitten-off sound, barely managing to catch herself before she fell too far.
“Ellie!”
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she muttered into the phone while the birds flew in a spiral around her before scattering to the winds. “Have there been any other seismic events since I left?”
“No, all calm.” Vivek’s voice was sharp. “You’re really okay?”
“Yes.” The Cascade might be stretching awake again after this latest bout of dormancy, but Elena wasn’t planning to dance to its tune. No one knew how long the power surge and accompanying chaos would last. It could be decades for all they knew. None of them could stop living their lives.
Today, Elena’s life included finding Damian Hale. “How about his car?”
“Guy’s got no vehicle registered to him,” Vivek replied without pause. “I called and talked to Imani’s majordomo vamp—he confirms none of their vehicles are missing.” A sudden pause. “Hold on. Our clever rabbit might’ve forgotten something.”
Elena stayed aloft while Vivek worked, her eyes sweeping the ground.
“A lot of the angelic homes have surveillance directed out to the road,” Vivek said in her ear, “and the Tower’s got access to those eyes in case of enemy threats. I picked up your runner’s face in a red sedan, and I’m tracking him using various cameras and toll points. Hacked those years ago, so it doesn’t even count.”
“Point me in the right direction, partner,” she said, her skin going burning hot then searingly cold. Every hair on her head felt electrified. “V,” she said before he could answer. “Is there a lightning storm on the horizon?”