Archangel's Shadows (Guild Hunter 7)

“Never had I felt such lust,” he said, stroking his hand down her arm to lace his fingers with her own. “I could’ve devoured you, even had I to pay for it in crossbow wounds.” He chuckled. “Imagine if you’d permitted me to seduce you then, cher.”

No movement, her skin temperature clammy enough to make a ball of fear lodge in his gut. “Don’t go.” It was a harsh plea, his heart and soul laid at her feet. “Please don’t go. It’s not our time. Not yet. Not so soon.”

34

Dmitri was briefing Raphael about the second victim when Elena appeared in the doorway to Raphael’s Tower office.

Hello, hbeebti.

Hello, Archangel.

She leaned against the doorjamb and he watched as she and his second acknowledged each other with a glance. The two had come to an understanding that they both had the best interests of the city—and its archangel—at heart. Not that it stopped either one from sharpening their knives on each other.

Today, however, Dmitri had more critical matters on his plate. “A distraction won’t work this time,” the vampire said. “Too many people saw the victim, even with how quickly Illium picked her up, and while the media knows not to push the Tower, the talking heads are speculating on every channel.”

“Shut it down.” Raphael would permit no one to seed fear in his city. Not the enemy and not its own citizens.

“It won’t cure the problem,” Dmitri responded, proving why he was Raphael’s second. Where many would’ve snapped to his command, Dmitri had the confidence and the intelligence to dispute Raphael’s decisions when necessary. “The rumors will continue to circulate beneath the surface, doing worse damage.”

“Suggestions?”

“Ahem.”

“You have an idea, Consort?” Raphael asked the hunter who stood with her arms crossed and her wings held off the floor as per Galen’s training—of course, Elena would say his weapons-master had beaten the habit into her, but the end result was that she had the posture of a warrior.

Her lips twitched at his formal address. “I was about to suggest we tell the truth.”

Dmitri’s expression was distinctly sardonic. “The Tower does not share its concerns.”

Rolling her eyes, Elena sauntered into the room to stand with her hands on her hips at Raphael’s side. “I wasn’t suggesting we start doing a daily Tower broadcast. But what’s the harm in pointing out that our enemies are attempting to use underhanded techniques to disrupt the city?”

Raphael had changed with the times. Unlike many of the older angels, he didn’t look down his nose at the modern world, believing the old to be better. His Tower was fully integrated with current technology, with Illium in charge of ensuring that continued uninterrupted. The blue-winged angel was fascinated with both mortal and immortal ingenuity and had the kind of agile mind that could quickly process new concepts.

So Raphael wasn’t stuck in the “stone age,” as Illium had been heard to mutter about certain other vampires and angels. He had, however, long believed that mortals were safer in their ignorance of the bloody details of the immortal world. The irony of the fact that he was standing in the same room as two former mortals, one his heart, the other his closest friend, wasn’t lost on him.

Neither was the cold truth that mortals could not play in their world.

Dmitri’s friendship with Raphael had cost him his cherished family, the vampire spending a thousand years in purgatory. Elena had broken her back when Raphael had hauled her into an immortal problem, her body a bleeding, shattered doll in his arms. Without the kiss of immortality, his hunter’s light would’ve been extinguished that violent day above Manhattan when he fought Uram. “Humans,” he said, “cannot become used to demanding an answer from the Tower and getting it.”

Elena’s eyes, the gray ringed by a luminous rim of silver that whispered of her growing immortality, were open, without shadows, when they met his. “I know.”

The two of them had been negotiating their viewpoints—her mortal heart against his immortal mind—since the day they met, but it was no longer a pitched battle. “Then why suggest a response?” he asked, conscious his consort’s ability to understand the people of this city was oftentimes better than his own.

“Because it can work if we do it right.” She tapped her foot, her forehead creased in a frown. “I say Dmitri calls a couple of the reporters who stuck around during the battle, the ones who risked their lives to cover it—and who, incidentally, made the Tower look damn good.”

Dmitri nodded slowly. “I’ll have a quiet conversation with them, bring them into the inner circle, shape the story as we wish.”

“I don’t know that manipulation is necessary,” Elena countered. “The city is on our side. Give them a sign that the Tower knows that, that’s all—people just want to feel included, to feel as if they have a part to play.”

“Try it,” Raphael said to Dmitri. “The Cascade will bring many more such decisions our way, so we must begin to establish what works.”

An hour later, news hit the networks that the tortured woman reported to have run out of Central Park had been the victim of a cowardly attempt by their enemies to disrupt the city’s recovery. While no one from the Tower appeared to confirm the reports, the Legion made an impressive flyover across the city that night, accompanied by two full squadrons led by Illium.

A half hour after that, Raphael’s second told him the mood in the media had altered from fear to proud outrage. “‘No one has the guts to hit us head-on,’” Dmitri said, reading out a comment on an article. “That encapsulates the direction of the conversation.” Sliding away his phone, he came to stand beside Raphael on the edge of a high Tower balcony. “Elena was right.”

“There, Dmitri, you did not melt at admitting that.”

His second laughed and the sound was one that was becoming familiar again after a thousand years of silence. It wasn’t only his city that was healing, Raphael thought, his eyes catching the refracted light that betrayed Aodhan’s presence in the sky; his people were, too. And it had all begun with a single, vulnerable mortal who did not accept that to be an archangel was to be always right.

35

Janvier didn’t sleep for the ten hours that Ash was out, motionless and so deep in her mind that the life of her was a muted shadow. She finally stirred as the city was awakening, the high-rises wreathed in mist and coated with a light layer of snow he’d watched fall an hour before through the sliding doors off her bedroom.