“Agreed.”
Though they watched with unblinking focus, they could discern nothing of the man’s face.
He walked out of camera view as stealthily as he’d arrived.
Elena had already seen that there would be snow later on that night, which would have hidden all signs of his passage. No way was that a stroke of luck. The assailant was too well-organized to have left such a thing to chance. He’d checked the weather, known that more snow would fall after his visit.
“Go backward again?”
Elena nodded at Illium’s question. “Let’s run this recording down to the final second. Our intruder might’ve been by earlier.”
But that proved a false hope. Not about to give up, Elena cut ahead to the first glimpse of him, trying to glean even a minor detail. But it was Illium, leaning forward with his forearms braced on his thighs, who said, “A man—and one who moves like us. Like you. Trained.”
“You’re right.” It was there in the fluidity of his walk, in his watchfulness, in the ease with which he pulled himself up to look through a window. “Could be military, ex or present. A mercenary. Even a guild hunter.” Bill James had taught her that hunters weren’t immune from going bad.
“Could also be off-grid,” Illium pointed out. “A lot of old vampires who were once soldiers have kept up their skills, and not all work for the Tower.” A shrug. “We can’t eliminate every single Tower vampire, either.”
Elena nodded; the suspect pool was huge. “About the only thing we can be sure of is that he isn’t an angel.”
Noting down the times of the relevant sections of footage, Elena sent off an e-mail to Vivek asking him to have a look. “Maybe he can spot something or zoom in further.”
Stiff after such a long vigil, she and Illium both rose to stretch out their bodies. Tiredness lingered in her shoulders, but it didn’t feel as if she had any new damage there. As for the cuts on her arm, she made a conscious decision to ignore them.
She would look, but only when her archangel was home.
Because she was fucking terrified the second barely-there scratch was actually starting to hurt.
“What are you doing the rest of the night?” she asked Illium after surreptitiously scratching that itchy spot on the left side of her chest. It was only a half hour till midnight, but Illium needed far less sleep than she did.
“I was thinking of flying down to the clubs, watching the entertainment.”
Ordinary enough words, but Elena knew Illium. As he spoke, the last echoes of their shared laughter drained away from his face, his wings stiffer against his back. Nudging her shoulder against his, she said, “What is it?”
He linked one hand with hers, the warmth of his skin imbued with a power she felt as a prickle against her palm, a tiny lightning bolt that would’ve disconcerted if she didn’t sleep skin-to-skin with an archangel.
“Today is the anniversary of the day she forgot me.” A lopsided smile. “It seems all my loves leave me in the winter snow.”
She. Illium’s mortal lover to whom he’d spoken angelic secrets. Secrets she’d then spoken to others—it’d be easy to judge them, but there had been no malice on her part or his. They’d both just been young and a little foolish. Unfortunately, in their case it had equaled a far bigger consequence than waking up hungover with a bad tattoo, or with your wallet gone.
Caught by angelic law that left him no other recourse, Raphael had been forced to wipe the mortal woman’s mind. Illium, in turn, had been stripped of his feathers and forbidden from contacting her again. He’d watched her live out her life without ever remembering that she’d once been the cherished love of a young angel with wings of astonishing blue.
Illium hadn’t had the silver filaments then.
Those had come when his feathers regenerated.
At times, Elena thought Illium was over that long-ago heartbreak, and then there were days like today, when he’d say something and she’d be reminded all over again of how much he’d loved that unknown young woman. It would’ve been different had she died after spending her life with him. He’d still have mourned her, but he’d have also had a lifetime of memories to balance the sorrow.
Raphael had said something interesting once when they’d spoken about Illium’s past. “He mourns a dream. He was so young, and in his mind, their love was perfection. Life is rarely perfect, however.” But Illium only had the dream, the bittersweet poignancy of a first love lost in a way that had scored a permanent mark on his psyche.
“I’ll come with you.” She grabbed her jacket from where she’d hung it on the back of her chair. “There isn’t much I can do on Harrison’s case at the moment.”
“You don’t have to babysit me, Ellie.”
“In that case, you can babysit me.” Shrugging into the jacket, she met his eyes. “I’ve got a few ghosts whispering to me today, too.” Only Raphael knew the whole of her blood-soaked history, but Illium knew enough to know that she was haunted as he was haunted. “I don’t want to go home without Raphael.”
He helped her find the right strap to snap her jacket closed over the wing slits. “Let’s go paint the town red.”
First, however, she drank two glasses of Nisia’s energy supplement then stopped by to see the healer. Nisia cleared her to continue flying—with conditions. “If you experience the heavy tiredness you’ve described, you land.” No give in her voice. “Even if you’re over water. Your wings will keep you afloat after a controlled landing, but a crash into the water from a high enough height could tear you to pieces. Much like when the flying machines hit the water at speed. It may as well be concrete.”
Elena winced. “Understood.” Neither a panicked fall into suddenly unforgiving water nor a horrifying tumble into New York City traffic held any appeal.
Having waited on the balcony for her, his profile a clean line against the night sky, Illium looked over when she came out to join him. “Prognosis?”
“No new damage, but I’m going to stay at lower altitudes.” It’d make for a quicker landing if her wing began to crumple.
Frowning, Illium shook his head. “You’ll have a longer window and fewer obstacles in your path if you go high. I’m fast enough to catch you—you won’t crash.”
Raphael was the only person Elena trusted that much, but she couldn’t bruise Illium’s heart any further. Not tonight. And he was fast, the fastest angel in the city. Not only that, he was strong.
Pulse a drumbeat in her throat, she spread out her wings. “Since I have irrefutable proof that you can catch a helicopter and turn it upside down in mid-air, I suppose I’m willing to trust you with my scrawny body.”
Illium’s responding grin made the risk worth it.
Turning his back to the city, he fell back off the balcony with a “Yee-haw!”
“You’ve been watching Westerns again!” Elena called out as she glided more sedately off the edge.
The cold dug in its teeth and shook, but it was painfully beautiful to fly through the glittering color and lights of the city. Illium seemed to feel the same way, because he was in no rush to angle his wings toward the club district and Erotique, the club he frequented most often. At one point, Elena’d been sure he had something going with Dulce, one of the hostesses there, but Dulce wore a wedding ring these days and managed her own smaller club.