Not answering her implied question, Raphael rose into the air as she tracked Ignatius through the woods, her wings catching on branches and thorny bushes. Wincing at the uncomfortable sensations, she tucked them even tighter to her body but didn’t slow her progress through the trees. She hesitated at one point, certain she felt the tug of something to her right, but the trail of oak and glass was vivid straight ahead.
Shaking off the impulse to turn, explore, she continued the track. Jason’s black-winged form appeared out of the looming dark of the woods less than five minutes later—he stood unmoving as stone, guarding a body that lay beside the placid waters of a smal pond.
The girl was stil wearing her school uniform, her entire frame soaked. Her blouse should’ve been white. It was a nauseating salmon pink, and shredded as Elena knew her flesh would’ve been shredded. Strangling the pity that threatened to derail her, Elena didn’t move toward the body—her priority was to track the kil er, to make certain no other girl would end up a broken dol beside a pond that should’ve been a place of play, not a macabre bath flavored with death and horror.
You were right, she sent to Raphael, he washed in the pond, cut off the scent trail. But he would have had to get out at some point. So, leaving Jason to continue his silent vigil, she began walking across the moss-laden stones that rimmed the water gone murky with churned up silt ... and other, darker things.
It only took a minute to find him again. The scent trail was weaker, drenched in water until the oak alone remained, but that was al she needed. Drawing the crisp forest air into her lungs, she began to run, determined to hunt the vampire to ground. He was fast, she realized almost at once, glimpsing the tracks he’d left behind in the damp patches of earth caused by last night’s storm. In contrast, she was no longer as quick and agile as she’d once been, unused to running with wings.
But it wasn’t a disadvantage, not today. The vampire had slowed down maybe five hundred yards into his escape, probably figuring the water had erased his scent. It would have if he’d taken a bit more care. Then again, Raphael had said the girl’s body had been in the water, too. Her murderer had likely dragged her in there with him because he couldn’t stop feeding.
The end result was that given the smal size of the pond, the blood and death had pol uted it, destroying its ability to wash the vampire clean of his sickening acts of violence. Good girl, she thought, speaking to the child who lay so motionless under wings of midnight black. You marked the bastard even in death. Elena would hunt him down using that mark.
Half an hour into the run—through twisting paths that tried to muddy the trail and confirmed the vampire was rational—the sun weak and sluggish overhead, she began to feel a stitch in her side. “Damn it.” She didn’t need Raphael’s sadist of a weapons-master, Galen, to pound at her to know she wasn’t in ful hunting shape.
Breathing past the stabbing pain, she snapped up her head as the shadow of wings swept along the ground in front of her—to see Raphael flying to a location just beyond the rise, his speed breathtaking.
Archangel, what do you see?
4
There was no answer, only the painful bite of ice in her veins.
Rage.
Pure and violent and cold, so cold.
“Shit.” She pushed up her pace, cursing the fact that she couldn’t do a vertical takeoff for the bil ionth time. It could take years to master, she’d been told
—perhaps longer seeing as she hadn’t had wings since childhood. Wel , fuck it, she thought. If she had to ask Galen to come to New York to torture her again every single day for the next year, she was going to learn.
Raphael dived in front of her and by the time she crested the rise, her chest heaving, he had his hand clamped around the neck of a vampire whose clothing remained damp enough to stick to his skin. The Archangel of New York was holding the panicked creature at least two feet off the ground with no visible effort. The vampire’s eyes bulged, blood vessels popping as he scrabbled at the hand around his throat, his legs kicking at the air in a futile attempt to escape.
“You are not in bloodlust,” she heard Raphael say in a voice so clear, it was a blade, slicing and brutalizing without mercy.
Instinct, paired with what she’d learned of Raphael in the time they’d been together, had a very bad feeling forming in the pit of her stomach. Scrambling down the rise without caring about the mud that streaked her jeans and wings both, she looked into the vampire’s face. The male’s reddened eyes were lucid . . . but for the terror in their depths. His mouth was another matter. Rimmed with dried blood that had survived his impromptu bath, it turned his face into a grotesque mask.
“Why?” Elena asked, knives in hand though she had no memory of drawing them from the sheaths strapped to her forearms. “Why did you do it?” The image of the girl’s ravaged body played over and over on the screen of her mind. That could’ve been Evelyn, could’ve been Amethyst. Her sisters. Again.
The thought echoed until it was almost al she could hear.