“You’ve sent through a report to Jason?”
Lines flared out from the corners of the angel’s eyes. “No, sire. I thought to give Riva a little leeway—he mourns Favashi’s disappearance yet. He was not simply a courtier but one of her closest lieutenants.”
“I would’ve made the same choice.” Raphael clasped Gadriel on the shoulder. “He is nine thousand years old and not apt to fall down in his duties. Still, these are strange times. Tell me of his actions just prior to the alteration in his behavior.”
“He rode out on his motorcycle to do a routine sweep of the city, but came back hours later than he’d indicated.” Gadriel’s wings were a deep brown with hints of bronze woven into the filaments and they glimmered under the late afternoon sunlight. “At the time, I thought nothing of it. All of us need time alone to shrug off the cobwebs. Especially here, with the constant screaming tension under the surface.”
The steel and wildfire of Elena in his mind. You think something got to him?
The dead captain in the ghost village preys upon me. We do not know how many operatives Lijuan has in the world and what she can do with them.
Aloud, he instructed Gadriel to lead them to Riva.
“Sire.”
Elena had met Gadriel once before—in the Refuge. Though he was named after a legendary angelic painter renowned for the sumptuous sensuality of his works, the gray-eyed angel with chestnut hair was a bit stuffy and set in his ways. More importantly, however, he was deeply loyal to Raphael. Now, she took in everything around them as he walked on ahead, his comment about the “constant screaming tension” resonating.
Lijuan might be gone, but the echo of her presence lingered in the air. It was stares on the back of Elena’s neck from people in the courtyard, dust in the air that tasted of distant death, electric sensations beneath her boots—as if tiny insects were attempting to penetrate the soles and enter her bloodstream.
Favashi, she thought, had come into a tough situation even before the infection.
Shadows passed overhead right before they left the courtyard and entered the citadel, a wing of angels coming in to land. It was cool and dark inside, the stone walls smoothed by time. Elena felt the age of the building in her bones and when she put her hand against the wall, history itself spoke to her.
Nothing in New York was this old, this woven in time.
Gadriel led them to stone stairs far narrower than in modern angelic buildings, but still with enough span to accommodate wings. All the spaces in the citadel, she came to see, were built for angels. But it wasn’t an angel who sat in the center of the large chamber into which Gadriel showed them.
The vampire, his scent cardamom crushed with ice and rippled with a thick treacly sweetness, sat with his head in his hands. His skin was ebony, his hair kinky curls darker than his skin. He wore battered leather pants, along with a black jacket and tee of faded brown, and when he lifted his head, his red-rimmed eyes proved to have irises of a stunning indigo.
Elena barely stopped herself from going for the long blade worn against her spine. Old, this one was old. Nine thousand years, Raphael had said, but this wasn’t just age. This was the kind of power Dmitri would hold in another millennia or two. As for those eyes, she’d bet her new set of throwing knives that they hadn’t begun that way. It was vampirism that had taken what might’ve been more ordinary blue or gray eyes and altered them to this startling and unearthly hue.
Why wasn’t he Favashi’s second?
Power alone does not a second make, but I think he was her third.
“Archangel.” Riva rose to his feet in a clatter of limbs. His chair toppled behind him onto the thick Turkish rug.
Flushing, he bent to pick it up.
Gadriel whispered away at the same time.
“It has been an age, Riva.” Raphael held out his arm. “I think two hundred years at least.”
The vampire clasped his forearm, but the two didn’t embrace as Raphael would’ve done with Dmitri. “Not so very long when one has lived nine thousand years.” Riva’s voice was melodious and deep, but his fingers trembled before he broke contact.
“Tell me what has happened.” Cold and dark with power, Raphael’s words weren’t a request. “There is no use in lying. I can see it.”
Shuddering, the vampire seemed to pull himself together with a conscious effort of will. He wasn’t fully successful—his face quivered before he clenched his jaw, and though Elena couldn’t see his hands because he’d put his arms behind his back, she could tell from the strain in his muscles that he was gripping the wrist of one with vicious force.
“I lost time.” The column of his throat moved. “At least five hours. I have no memory of where I was or what I did during that time, but when I woke . . .” His voice broke.
“At this time,” Raphael said, “I am your liege. Speak.”
His entire body trembling, Riva began to shrug off his jacket.
Raphael, Elena murmured mind-to-mind. Should I step out? This wasn’t about humiliating the guy after all; no one this powerful would want to be seen as weak, much less by the consort to an archangel.
Raphael spoke directly to Riva. “My consort asks if you would prefer that she step out.”
The vampire’s eyes flared before he inclined his head in a deep bow. “No,” he said. “I thank you for your consideration, Consort, but I am too old to be shy in such matters.” Words spoken with a courtly grace and innate confidence that showed her a glimpse of who he was when not under such strain.
Jacket off, Riva reached down to pull off his T-shirt, revealing a ridged abdomen hard with muscle. Nothing unusual about that in a warrior vampire his age—what was unusual were the lines of black that snaked under his skin from the right side of his abdomen, so dark and oddly liquid that they were striking even against the rich hue of his skin.
Elena sucked in a breath. “Are they moving?” Tiny, incremental pieces of motion.
Face twisted and hands fisted at his sides, Riva’s words were shards of glass. “I kept telling myself that I was imagining it, but it’s a lie I can no longer swallow. At first, they were nothing but scratches. I thought I must’ve fallen from my bike and hurt myself. I believed I had hit my head, and that was why I couldn’t recall the lost hours.”
Riva’s words tumbled out atop of one another; Elena could almost hear how he’d convinced himself that it had been nothing, just a stupid accident.
“Where in the city did you come to consciousness?” Raphael asked, while Elena continued to watch the viscous black lines, her fingers itching to cut them out. She couldn’t get it out of her head that the fucking things were eating Riva from the inside out.