If Donael was telling the truth, he'd surprised Ibrahim's attacker. That, however, brought up another question. "How long would that hallway usually be empty at this time of night?" Raphael asked.
"Close as it is to the dinner bell, it is not a time for contemplation for most of us," Donael said slowly. "And the hallway is a crossroads for many. A 'shortcut,' the young ones call it." The angel released a quiet breath. "I wouldn't expect it to be empty for more than five minutes at most."
"I don't think this was a five-minute beating." Elena's voice was gritty. "An angel as old as Ibrahim couldn't be so badly hurt so quickly . . . unless it was more than one person."
"No," Aodhan interrupted. "Laric says it was only one."
Raphael turned to the angel, not asking how he was in communication with the silent healer. "Why?"
"He's no expert, but there doesn't seem to be enough variation in the blows."
"Then someone else, more than one someone, must've seen Ibrahim being beaten," Raphael said with grim understanding of exactly how deep the rot was in Lumia. "Given that it is a Luminata shortcut, the likelihood those bystanders were Luminata is near to a hundred percent certain. As is the fact they chose not to stop it."
Or were too scared to, Elena said mind to mind, the steel of her a gleaming blade today. There are always people who have more power than others in any given situation. Old and respected as he is, Donael has power of his own, enough that the attacker didn't want to take the risk of being seen by him.
Raphael considered it, realized she was right. The Luminata clearly give way to Gian, but as you've just pointed out, the old ones like Donael also hold considerable power--and he's not the only one of his generation here.
Elena's nod was reluctant. Yes, much as Gian creeps me out, I can't see him just losing it like this. He's always in control, the kind of angel who'd take his time, be subtle.
And what had been done to Ibrahim was in no way subtle.
"He is in anshara," Aodhan said, and this time, Raphael saw how he was speaking to the healer.
Laric was using his scarred hands to sketch fluid, shallow movements into the air. It was an old language that relied on understated motion rather than sound. Rarely spoken these days, it was used mostly by those who wished to withdraw from the world, including vampires who chose seclusion. Aodhan had never used it as far as Raphael was aware, but clearly, if he knew it so well, he'd thought about it.
Rising, the healer continued the purposeful movements.
"Ibrahim needs to be in a safe place," Aodhan translated. "Laric is happy to watch over him in his own quarters, but believes he shouldn't be moved until the dawn. His body will have knitted together a little by then and movement will not cause him further harm."
Do you trust him, Aodhan?
Yes, sire. He isn't like many of the others, is as guileless as Ibrahim.
The healer moved at that instant and a stray beam of light from the overhead lamp caught on his throat and lower face. The scarring was the worst Raphael had ever seen on an immortal. Angels simply did not scar that way.
He felt Elena go motionless beside him, knew she'd caught it, too, but neither one of them said anything, letting the healer move to Ibrahim's other side to further check his injuries and do what he could to ease them.
Looking to Donael, Raphael said, "You should inform Gian what has happened." His words were a command. "Tell him we'll speak with him after my consort and I have had a chance to get out of our wet clothing."
Inclining his head, Donael went to leave--but he paused on the doorstep. "We are not who we once were." Melancholy in his tone. "This would've never happened in the time of Reed."
Waiting until after Donael closed the door behind himself, Raphael left Aodhan on watch while he and Elena retreated to the bedroom to change. "Don't waste energy on glamour," Elena said, her eyes dangerously focused. "I'm going to check the walls, and this time, I'm not stopping until I figure out what the fuck is making my skin crawl in this room."
Raphael did the same, but it was Elena who found it almost thirty minutes later.
Hearing her mutter a harsh word under her breath, he moved to join her. Wisps of her damp hair had begun to curl around her face, her clothing stuck to her, but her concentration was a laser. "Where?" he asked.
She pointed the tip of a knife at a detail in the painting at which she was staring; it was the artist's impression of a knot of wood on a tree. The hole was a pinprick, but it was very much there. Wings glowing in blinding fury, Raphael pulled the painting off the wall and threw it on the floor, exposing the hole beyond.
Elena thrust her knife into it. "No screams. Too bad. I was hoping to stab out someone's eye."
Not satisfied with that, Raphael punched a hand into the wall with archangelic strength. It collapsed in a spiderweb of cracks about four feet in diameter. He tore out the pieces to expose the entire interior.
Elena looked inside the hole after waving away the dust. "It's a goddamn hidey space built between two rooms."
"Maybe so the spy or spies can watch both." Raphael stepped inside, saw that the hole apparently connected to nothing on either end. But there was a door in the center. "The entrance is via the other room."
Squeezing past him, Elena opened that door--which proved to be the back of a closet. "Bet you the room's empty."
It was--and there was no clue as to who'd been utilizing the hole.
"At least we frustrated the spy or spies the entire time we've been here," Elena muttered in cool satisfaction. "I hope they enjoyed watching an empty room." She secured the door by thrusting a blade through the locking mechanism so no one could open it from the other side, then the two of them stepped back fully into their room.
Staring at the wall that had concealed the hole, Raphael spoke through the ice-cold anger chilling his veins. "This will not go unpunished."
"Your wings are glowing, Archangel." Elena ran the edge of his wing through her fingers. "Don't explode just yet. Keep it in reserve for when we find out who hurt Ibrahim and which of these assholes have been terrorizing the town."
It took at least a minute for Raphael to get himself under control. Then he and Elena, in silent agreement, checked the other walls again. There were no more peepholes, but despite Elena's admonitions to save his power, he threw his glamour around himself and his consort. He would allow no one to spy on her.
As for their voices, no one would be able to hear them if they kept the volume quiet.
Elena, her own temper still shimmering a silver light in her eyes after she finally stripped off her damp clothing, pressed her naked body to his in a silent statement that they were one. Always. It calmed him enough that he could think. "We'll find the answers hidden in this place, hbeebti. Even if we have to come back a hundred times."
Rising up on tiptoe, Elena kissed him soft and tender. It was a delicate touch from his tough hunter, but he was used to such kisses now and then. Because Elena had a well-hidden core of softness that only came out with the vulnerable, and with those she loved. Stroking his hands over the sleek line of her back, down to the toned lower curves of her body, he sank into the kiss, sank into her.
It felt as if she breathed life into him, washing away the darkness that lingered so heavy on the horizon. Closing his wings around them to protect her even further, though his glamour hid them from all eyes, he kissed his lover, his warrior, was kissed in turn.
"I love you, Raphael." A whisper against his lips, eyes full of ghosts holding his. "Don't ever go."
"Elena." He pressed his forehead to hers. "You are thinking of your mother and your sisters again." The loss haunted her, made her afraid of losing the people who mattered to her as she'd once lost Marguerite, Belle, and Ari.
Shields down, her face painfully bare, Elena traced his Legion mark with a single fingertip. "My grandmother's body was never recovered after the bus crash in which she was meant to have died, did you know that?"
34
Elena hadn't
ever before spoken of how Marguerite had been orphaned. "You think she--Majda--was never on that bus, that she was taken and brought to Lumia." The "ghost" who'd attempted to make an escape on a moonlit night.
Nodding, Elena continued to trace his mark, the wildfire reacting to her as it always did. "I managed to track down newspaper reports of the accident when I was a teenager." She ran her hand down his jaw to place it flat on his chest. "It wasn't hard since it was such a big accident, doubly so because so many of the bodies were washed away by the snowmelt-fed river at the bottom of the ravine. Easy and convenient accident to arrange if you were powerful enough."
Raphael's eyebrows drew together over his eyes; there was a problem with her theory. But he needed more information before he could be sure. "How did they know your grandmother was even on the bus?"
"She told the nun with whom she left my mom exactly which bus she'd be on--she didn't want to take my mom since the long round trip would be too grueling."
Stroking her hair, her back, Raphael said, "Elena, if a powerful angel wanted to take a human woman, especially one who was alone in a large city but for a child, he--or she--would just take the woman. No need to go to the trouble of staging an accident to cover it up." The victim would just disappear.
Raphael had seen too many twisted immortals to believe such things didn't happen.
Elena stared at him. "You're right," she said in the tone of someone who'd missed the obvious. "So I guess the ghost was just someone's imagination and the Luminata overreacted because of guilt over something else."
"Jean-Baptiste's disappearance," Raphael suggested. "Majda ran because her husband was taken."
"Do you think Gian murdered him out of jealousy?"
"I wish I didn't, but the facts line up too neatly for it to be otherwise . . . and Gian watches you with eyes that are--"
"Stalker-creepy," Elena suggested, a shiver rippling through her but her voice razor-sharp. "He watches me like I'm a pretty bug he wants to put in a glass jar and keep."
Gripping his rage in a fist that anyone would dare look at his consort that way, Raphael nodded. "Just so." Gian would die as soon as they had the answers to Elena's questions.
"Majda ran to protect her child's life," Elena said. "And she never made it back home, never made it out of the river at the bottom of the ravine." She swallowed. "I'm glad. I'm glad she wasn't trapped at Lumia, far from her child."
He kissed away the tears that streaked her face. "Elena."
Hands closing over his wrists, his hunter said, "She dressed my mother up in a pretty dress and coat, left her with a bag full of snacks and toys. She loved her baby."
"Did someone keep the clothing, the shoes?"
Elena shook her head. "The nun took a photograph of my mother the day my grandmother died. She knew that once my mother went into the foster system, her history would be lost and she'd never know how much she'd been loved."
More tears, her eyes haunted. "As a child, I didn't understand how scared my mom must've been when her own mom didn't come back for her. She was so small, so vulnerable."
Kissing away her tears once more, Raphael said, "Your grandmother left her in safe hands, hands that cared for her long after others would've forgotten her."
"It doesn't seem fair, does it, Raphael?" Elena shook her head, the yet-damp strands of her hair brushing against the wings he'd curved around her. "Marguerite lost her mother, then she lost two of her daughters. No one can be expected to bear that much sorrow." Her shoulders shook, a sob catching in her throat.
Wrapping her tight in his arms, Raphael held her close as Elena cried for a woman who hadn't been able to bear that awful reality, no matter that she had two living daughters who loved her, needed her to kiss away their own shocked horror. Marguerite Deveraux had put a rope around her neck and ended her pain--and it had been Elena who'd found her. For that, Raphael would never forgive Marguerite, no matter how much pity and sadness he felt for what she'd suffered.
Elena's nails dug into his back, her wet cheek pressed to his chest. "It's like our family is cursed."
"If it was," Raphael said, "then you have broken the curse." Cupping the back of her head, he pressed his jaw to her temple. "No one will take my Elena from me. I'll destroy the world before I allow that to happen."
"You're scary, Archangel," his hunter whispered, shifting back to face him with a tear-wet face that nonetheless held a smile. "But I want to dance with you anyway."
The words were an echo of the ones she'd spoken to him as they fell in New York, Elena's broken body in his arms and his wings shredded and useless. Knhebek, hbeebti.
He took another kiss, poured power into her until her skin glowed with it, tried to kiss away the pain that lived so deep in her. He wanted to love her in the most primal way, to drive away the dark with raw pleasure, but in the next room lay a broken Luminata, and above them, the skies pounded with lightning.
"We'll dance when we are home," he said, the words a promise.
"Done." A shaky breath. "It's such a rush when you do that thing you do." Her breasts were flushed, her nipples tight.
Raphael smiled. They'd only been able to experience this little eroticism of late, as she became strong enough to bear the merest hint of power he shared with her, bonding them during intimacy. Her body couldn't hold on to that power for longer than a few seconds, but it was more than enough to ignite pleasure through both their bodies.
"Imagine how much better it'll feel as we grow together," he whispered, dropping his head to kiss one pouting nipple.
Elena shuddered. "You're lethal. And I"--a tug on his hair, a hard kiss--"am your willing victim."
*
Elena dressed in the full set of warrior leathers she'd packed just in case, complete with boots that came up to her thighs and would double her protection against knife strikes. The top was sleeveless but had a high neck, and the blades strapped to her upper arms should give pause to anyone who wanted to strike at her. Over her wrists and forearms, she wore metal reinforced leather gauntlets that had been a gift from Titus.
For Raphael's warrior, he'd written in the note that had accompanied the gift the Archangel of Southern Africa had sent her after the block party in New York.
They fit perfectly and, even better, weren't decorative but meant to be worn as protection. On the underside, there was a built-in knife sheath, which she now utilized. Then she strapped her crossbow onto her right thigh and, pulling aside her ponytail, slipped her long spine knife into its hidden sheath. The crossbow bolt sheath was easy to wear on her back, designed as it was to sit on her spine and not get in the way of her wings. "Can you pass me those knives, Archangel?"
Raphael handed over the small, sleek throwing knife set she always had on her. With the glamour still around both of them, she could be sure no one was watching as she secreted the blades all over her body.
Her lover's eyes glinted. "You're missing something."
"I am?" Elena glanced at herself. "I'm pretty sure I'm bristling with as many weapons as possible." She was pissed off at what had been done to Ibrahim as well as the brutal fate that had probably befallen her grandfather--and that had led to her grandmother's death in a land far from her home.
Raphael lifted a closed fist, opened it. On his palm lay a deadly blade star that could cut a throat if thrown just right. "Ashwini came over to give this to me the morning of our departure, while you were in the shower."
The other hunter was an expert with the stars, could probably decapitate someone with a slightly larger version, and she'd been teaching Elena how to use them effectively. Eyes wide, Elena picked up the star with utmost care, aware it could slice right through her finger if she wasn't cautious. "Why are you giving it to me only now?"
"Your strangely prescient friend told me to give it to you once we'd found the broken man."
As long as Elena had known Ash, her friend's occasionally spooky predictions still made her shiver. "Did she say anything else?"
"Only
that you'd need it." Raphael's jaw grew hard. "If you do, use it. Sever the arteries, do whatever you have to do to survive."
"I have no intention of letting anyone hurt me, Raphael." Her words were a vow. "These bastards might have terrorized my grandmother, but I'm no simple town girl. I'm a fucking hunter, and I'm the fucking consort to the Archangel of New York."
Hauling Raphael down to her after slipping the blade star carefully into a spot in her leathers built to hold the weapon, she kissed him with red-hot fury. "Now let's kick these assholes into oblivion."
Raphael bit at her lower lip. "Are you tired? From the wildfire transfer?"
"Not tired, but I feel like I'll need more sleep than usual when I crash." Another kiss. "But I'm not crashing anytime yet."
"I'll be there to catch you if you do, my damsel."
"Ha ha. Funny. Not."
Raphael's smile was a kick to the gut.
He, too, had discarded his wet clothing, now wore a set of faded brown leathers that had stood the test of time. He carried no weapons, but if he needed one or three, she had more than enough for both of them. It was good to be a consort.
The room still held only Aodhan, Ibrahim, and the healer with the terrible scarring on his neck and face. But Aodhan stepped aside from the door at Elena and Raphael's return. "Gian wishes to enter. I told him to wait."
Good call, Elena thought, as an angry-faced Gian was allowed in at last.
"What is the meaning of this?" the coldly furious Luminata leader demanded, staring down Aodhan as if he was some underling who'd crumple under pressure. "I am the head of the Luminata. On whose authority do you bar me from seeing to the welfare of one of my own?"
"Mine."
Had Elena's hair been unbound instead of in a tight ponytail, it would've been pushed back from her face at the sheer force of the power pulsing off Raphael. He was glowing again, the glow hard enough to hurt mortal eyes . . . but it didn't hurt Elena's. Not any longer.
Near the door, Gian drew up his shoulders, his hands tucked into the sleeves of his robe and his face devoid of any marks that fingered him as Ibrahim's attacker. That didn't necessarily mean anything--Gian was old enough to have healed superficial wounds by now. And while Ibrahim would've fought, he would've also been taken by surprise. It was possible he hadn't done any easily visible damage.