“Not in an enduring way,” Galen responded, “but it causes violent pain in most.”
“He"s dying.” Sitting back on his heels, his face white with strain, Keir nodded at Galen. “Will you carry him to the treatment room?”
Galen slid his arms beneath Venom"s broken body. Elena bit back her negative response, born of the mortal knowledge that said the victim of a spinal cord injury shouldn"t be moved. Keir surely knew a lot more about treating such injuries in vampires than she ever would. As they moved to the room, she felt the scent of the sea, the wind, fill her mind. Relief kicked her like a bucking horse. “Raphael"s here.”
But could even an archangel save a vampire so broken? What would it do to Raphael to lose one of his Seven?
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Elena was wiping the blood off her cheeks when Raphael left Venom"s room. “I have need of your gifts, Elena.”
She put down the damp towel she"d found in one of the empty treatment rooms. Her face still hurt, but not as much as it would have if she"d still been human—healing had already begun on some level. “The dead angel?”
A nod.
“Venom—is he . . . ?”
“He"s not easy to kill.”
They didn"t speak on the flight to the body. The site where it lay was a huge tumble of rocks.
Making a quick appraisal of the dangerous, uneven area, she realized landing was going to be problematic. Pride might have led her to attempt it anyway, but she was supremely conscious that right now, Raphael needed her functional, capable of doing a task only she could.A little help.
Changing position so he flew above her, Raphael ordered her to fold her wings. It was surprisingly hard to go against her newborn instincts, but she managed to snap them shut.
Raphael caught her before she could even begin to fall, taking her down to a perfect landing on the nearest stable piece of rock.
“Thanks.” Mind already on the body, she shifted closer. From above, it had appeared as if the angel had been thrown onto the rocks, his bones shattered, his limbs so damaged that not all were whole. Now, she saw that his head had been separated from his torso, his chest a gaping hole missing not just his heart, but all his internal organs.
“Someone wanted to make very sure he wouldn"t rise.” The angel"s rib cage gleamed in the mountain sunlight, his blood no longer wet but holding a hard sheen that had her leaning forward in frowning concentration. “It"s like his body"s turning to stone.” The carapace of dark red was strangely beautiful.
“It"s an illusion,” Raphael said. “His cells are trying to repair the damage.”
She jerked back. “He"s still alive?”
“No. But it takes a long time for an immortal to truly die.”
“It"s not immortality is it? If you can die?”
“Compared to a human life . . .”
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Yes.“So cut off the head, remove the organs for extra insurance.”
“His brain was also removed.”
Elena stared at the head. “It looks whole.” She reached forward, then drew back. “I really can"t catch anything?” she asked, her fingers curling into her palms as she neared blood-matted hair that might"ve once been blond.
“No.” But he was already crouching on the other side of the body, his hand lifting up what remained of the angel"s head.
The back of it was gone. An empty husk. Feeling her face heat with a wave of disbelief, she nodded at him to put it back down. “Thorough job.”
He placed it on the rock, face up. “His name was Aloysius. Four hundred and ten years old.”
It was somehow harder, when you had a name. Taking a deep breath, she began to separate the scents. There were so many. “A lot of angels have been down here.” And it looked as if her developing angel-sense was functioning just fine today.
“There was hope he might be able to be revived until his brain was discovered to be missing.”
She stared at Raphael across the body that was nothing but the emptiest of shells. He had told her, but—“The victim honestly could"ve survived the rest of it?”
“Immortality isn"t always pretty.” An answer that left no room for ambiguity. “He was most likely conscious while his organs were being removed.”
Swallowing, she shook her head. “I"m too young for that, right? If someone decides to fillet me, I"ll lose consciousness?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She wasn"t the giving up kind, but neither did she want to know what it did to a person to survive this kind of torture. “Given the blood splatter, he was dropped from a fairly impressive height.” She was trying not to think too hard about what might be sticking to the soles of her shoes—the M.E. would have had her behind bars for compromising a scene like this, but she salved her conscience with the fact that the scene was already so compromised it was worthless to anyone but a hunter-born.
“However,” she continued, “it wasn"t so high that it tore his body completely apart—do you have any way of knowing if he had his organs at that stage?” It was impossible to tell in all the gore.
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