Archangel's Shadows (Guild Hunter series Book 7)

And for that, she’d needed her mouth.

Even an archangel couldn’t regenerate the mouth without first regenerating the brain and all the systems of the body that kept that brain alive. Lijuan wasn’t dead, of that he was in no doubt, but neither was she a goddess. It would take her considerable time to repair her physical form, especially taking into account that he’d obliterated her using a combination of wildfire and angelfire.

The former was a new, Cascade-born gift, and it had proven to have a debilitating effect on Lijuan. Raphael hadn’t mentioned it to anyone but Elena and Dmitri, but he believed the wildfire had caused damage it would take Lijuan much longer than usual to rectify.

“You’re right about her not sharing this ability,” he said to Janvier. “She’s both too used to controlling her people through the leash of doling out power, and too greedy. You say this victim wasn’t an empty husk as you witnessed in battle?”

“No, she still had a sense of humanity and of flesh about her, enough that we could immediately identify her as female.”

Whereas Lijuan’s victims had been so shriveled into themselves, determining gender had been impossible from a visual scan of the high-resolution photographs Janvier’s hunter had taken. The shadow team had all three reported being unable to make the determination at the scene, either—except, of course, for those they’d personally witnessed being consumed.

“Fang marks?” A vampire could conceivably drain a victim of all her blood, given a long enough time frame.

“Yes, but not at the site of the fatal throat wound. There was too much damage to determine what caused that injury—similarly to the dog, she appeared gnawed on.”

That didn’t exclude vampires; it could be one of the Made who’d given in to bloodlust, torn and ripped and chewed at the flesh in his feeding. “Can the situation be contained?” Raphael had to be ruthless; a mortal had lost her life and deserved justice, but that justice could not happen on a public stage. Not this time.

“I’m confident Ash and I can deal with this quietly, with help from the Guild and Tower as necessary. The two witnesses, responding officers, and crime scene techs can be trusted to keep their silence.”

Before Elena, Raphael would’ve made a hundred percent sure of that by wiping the memories of the people involved, but now he’d seen mortals through her eyes, understood that these people were her friends and colleagues and she would protect them—because memories were what made a person.

I would rather die as Elena than live as a shadow.

The echo of what she’d said to him soon after they first met, paired with her passionate words before the battle, made him no less ruthless when it came to his city, but he did consider other options before taking this particular measure.

“I’ll have Dmitri put a watch on all their communications as a contingency.” Greed could sink its hooks into the most unexpected of people, and this information had value to the media. “Do you expect to uncover any further information tonight?”

“Non. The late hour means we’ll have to explore other avenues come morning.” The languid rhythm of Janvier’s voice belied the hard edge in his eyes. “Even the victim’s fingerprints can’t be used to search for her identity until the pathologist rehydrates her fingertips.”

“Take care of her, Janvier,” Raphael said. “I will not have the mortals in my territory become hunted.” Human lives might be a fleeting firefly flicker in comparison to the endless span of an angel’s, but Raphael now knew their light could burn so bright, it had the strength to vanquish the ice of eternity itself.

“Sire.”

Walking to a small cherrywood table on which sat a faceted crystal decanter and six tumblers, Raphael poured out two measures of the carefully aged amber liquid in the decanter. He handed one of the tumblers to Janvier and said, “Your blades are from Neha’s land.” The Cajun, as all called Janvier, was now one of his trusted people, but they didn’t have between them the relationship Raphael had with his Seven.

That was to be expected. Janvier wasn’t yet past his third century—even Venom, the youngest of the Seven, had over a hundred years on the vampire with the bayou in his voice. However, Raphael saw in Janvier the same thing he’d seen in Venom, in Aodhan, in Illium, and in the others of his Seven: the Cajun had honor so deeply woven into his bones that it would take a cataclysm to shatter it.

Dmitri hadn’t lost it even during the worst years of his existence.