Raphael raised an eyebrow. “Il ium is a performer.” While Aodhan, like Jason, preferred the shadows.
As he watched, Aodhan pul ed out a perfect, glittering feather and walked inside to place it beside the heavenly blue that was Il ium’s. Raphael inclined his head when the angel returned. “After this task is done, you wil move here.” Manhattan was stil reeling from Elena’s return—Aodhan’s presence might just bring the city to a standstil . But that was a problem for another day. “If you and Naasir are able to narrow the search area to a specific locality, cal and wait for me. Do not approach.”
“If it is her . . . you believe she wil kil .”
“My mother is the specter in the dark, Aodhan, the nightmare that whispers in the hindbrain.” And he was her son ... the son of two archangels gone insane.
11
It was after Zoe had been put to bed, and the adults had finished dinner that Elena opened the box Deacon had brought down and saw the weapon he’d created for a hunter with wings.
“Ooooh.” Delirious with pleasure, she picked up what seemed to be a modified crossbow, so smal and light that—“It’s meant to be strapped to my leg?”
“Yeah.” Deacon grabbed the harness and got her to stand so he could buckle it around her thigh. “I decided it would be problematic on the shoulder—
your wings would be too close, too easy to damage.”
Nodding in agreement, Elena checked the weapon. “Balance shouldn’t be an issue in flight, given its weight. But what the heck is this?” She pul ed out a smal , circular blade, its serrated edges razor-sharp and felt her eyes widen. “It shoots these things? Like the weapon you’ve got?” The weapon she’d lusted after since the day she’d first seen it, in the middle of a junkyard crawling with vampires.
“Yep. It’s also designed so you can use it one-handed if required.” He tightened the harness. “Slot it in.”
Flipping the safety, Elena did so, then took a few steps. “Light, portable.”
“He tested it on me,” Sara said from where she was curled up on the couch, bowl of strawberry ice cream in hand. “Since I’m shorter and not as strong, I thought you’d have no problem.”
Elena stroked the weapon, felt her hunter instincts sigh. “It’s perfect. Deacon, come here.”
When he stepped close, she reached up and smacked a kiss on his beautiful lips. “You’re wonderful.”
“Hey,” Sara said from the couch, waving a spoon in the air. “Mine.”
Grinning, Elena shifted the harness a fraction higher as Deacon went to sit beside Sara and steal her ice cream. The moment was so normal that for an instant, she could almost believe she’d never left New York, never fal en into the arms of an archangel.
Then her cel phone rang.
Having followed Illium to the location, Deacon’s gift strapped to her thigh, Elena took extreme care as she angled in to land—tired, she was liable to make mistakes, and this was not the time for a broken arm or leg. Below her, the green heart of Manhattan lay swathed in darkness but for the old-fashioned lamps along the pathways that meandered through the park.
“Oof.” Coming down hard, with a power that made her knees ache, she closed the distance to where another one of Raphael’s Seven stood beside an indistinct lump on the ground.
Poison, the pungent stink of bowels evacuated, viscera ... and below it, the whisper of violets dipped in ice.
Gorge rising, she nonetheless made herself look at the body. The male—a vampire from his scent—had been beheaded, but that had been done last if she was any judge, after his organs had been ripped out then thrust back into his body in the wrong places. As far as brutality went, it wasn’t as bad as anything Uram had done, but the bloodborn archangel had made a vicious art form out of murder.
“Who is he?” she asked Venom.
The male had been at death’s door not long ago, but you couldn’t tel that from his current appearance. Dressed in his usual black on black suit, his reptilian eyes shaded by wrap-around sunglasses even in the darkness, he looked like he’d stepped out of the pages of some exclusive magazine. “The accountant Raphael sentenced to go to ground.”
Elena didn’t need him to spel out the fact that someone was playing games here. “Where’s Raphael?”
Venom continued to give her straight answers for once. “At the site where this man was supposed to be buried tonight. Since this murder is unlikely to be a chance event, the kil er may have staked out the other location. But this site is your best bet of catching a scent.”