“Glad to have you back, Archangel.” Another soft, suckling kiss of his lips, warm and alive, the rain turning to steam where they touched.
His forehead dropped to her own, his breath harsh and chest heaving. “I want no power that makes me cause you harm.” One hand rising between them, he rubbed it over her bruised heart, the curls of heat telling her he was fixing the damage.
“All good,” she murmured when he dropped his hand, her skin prickling with the need to reinitiate their bond in a more primal way.
“I also,” he said, his body pushing hard and ready against her abdomen, “do not want any power that turns my cock to ice.”
Oh yeah, he was back, she thought with a grin. “You have no idea how fervently I second that.” And though they hung in the midst of icy winter rain, she took the time to press her mouth to his, to indulge in a kiss so sexual, he might as well have been inside her body. No ice, no distance, only a molten heat between male and female, between an archangel and his consort.
• • •
Landing at the Tower, Raphael discovered from Aodhan that people were scared, believing he’d made the sky rain blood.
That, Raphael thought, could work to their advantage.
When he said as much to Elena while they dried themselves off in their Tower suite, she paused with the towel over her breasts, a gleam in her eye. “You should make sure Charisemnon and Lijuan hear about your new ‘power.’”
“I’m certain they’ve already heard.” Dry, he took the towel and bade her turn so he could pat the last of the moisture off her wings, her feathers designed to sleek off wet. “Dmitri says recordings of the event are already trending on media sites worldwide.”
“Right, what was I thinking?” Elena threw up her hands. “That New Yorkers would actually, I don’t know, hide or something else sane when the sky was raining freaking blood?”
“Our people are not so timid.” Dropping the towel, he drew her close and touched his lips to the side of her throat.
She shivered, leaned back into him, and they simply stood skin to skin for a stolen moment.
The memory of her warmth was still with him when he met with Nazarach minutes later. The dangerous midlevel angel with wings of burnished amber and skin of gleaming black had bad news. “I’ve had a confirmed report that reborn have been spotted on the outskirts of Atlanta. It’s believed the initial group was brought in on a long-haul truck, possibly after being smuggled in through shipping containers.”
Raphael hadn’t expected such sneak tactics from Lijuan on the eve of true battle. He’d believed she’d unleash her reborn during the actual battle, to go up against his ground soldiers. No doubt this was Charisemnon’s influence. “Take your squadron and go stamp out the menace before it spreads.” He couldn’t leave the task to younger, weaker angels, not given the danger.
“If New York falls—”
“We can’t afford for the reborn to infect any part of the territory. They’re too virulent.” Holding the Tower remained critical, but that didn’t mean he’d permit the rest of his territory to fall into ruin.
Nazarach left with a promise to return as soon as possible. When Nimra came to Raphael with the same reports about her territory a few minutes later, followed by Andreas, Raphael had had enough. Anger simmering under his skin, he put through a call to Lijuan’s second. The old archangel eschewed modern conveniences, but her people had recently convinced her to upgrade.
Xi, with his black eyes and striking wings of red-streaked gray, answered within moments. “Archangel.” A polite incline of his head. “How may I be of service?”
“I have a message for your mistress,” Raphael said, too furious to temper his words. “Tell her I did not expect such cowardice from her.” He ended the call as anger flushed red across Xi’s sharp cheekbones, and was unsurprised when Lijuan’s face appeared in the glass wall of his office moments later, in a show of her power.
“You dare call me a coward?” Unhidden rage, her face skeletal as her physical form faded in and out.
Raphael held her gaze, his own rage as potent. “What is it if not cowardice to release your reborn on the edges of my territory, forcing me to scatter my forces?” He gave away nothing by admitting that, since news of the fighting against the reborn would soon spread across the world. “You must believe your forces weak indeed that you use such contemptible tactics.”
Curling black in her irises. “You should take care in making such accusations.”
“Ask Xi to turn on a television set. I’m sure the pictures will be available within minutes.” Continuing to face that inhuman visage with its gaping eye sockets and mouth full of silent screams, he said, “Perhaps you should choose your allies more wisely,” certain Lijuan had put Charisemnon in charge of her reborn forces.
No response, her face disappearing from view . . . but there were no more reports of new infestations in the hours that followed. That still left them dealing with the creatures already loose in the territory—and that proved no easy task for his people, even though Jason’s warning meant they were prepared for Lijuan’s “improved” design.These new reborn didn’t shuffle; they ran in a fast crablike walk. And they weren’t sad or broken at being trapped in their dead bodies; they were mindless creatures that wanted only to feed on living flesh.
Then they discovered Charisemnon hadn’t forgotten the port city of New York.
• • •
“Jesus Christ,” Elena said, watching the reborn scrambling down the sides of the cruise ship that had apparently berthed early evening, soon after the steady rain had tapered off at last. Under guard because it had stopped in Charisemnon’s territory some weeks earlier, before the start of hostilities, it had been scheduled to be searched and processed in the next half hour.
Then one of the dockside workers noticed the blood-soaked “guests” on deck.
“How the hell did people not know they had those creatures on board?” She shot a crossbow bolt at one particularly fast one that had made it onto the pier, taking out its heart and immobilizing it for the moment.
At least the pier blazed with floodlights, making the task easier.
Beside her, Illium unsheathed Lightning, the sword a gleaming piece of death. “No one to ask, but if I had to guess, I’d say Charisemnon’s staff booked out an entire deck for their party and either bribed or threatened someone into permitting them to board at night, before the other passengers. These reborn don’t look human enough to pass otherwise.”
He used Lightning to point out another snarling creature about to hit the pier, so she could shoot it. “The initial group of reborn was most probably a small, manageable number, kept alive and sated with the flesh of living victims brought on board at the same time.”
“With the plan to unleash them on the other passengers once they’d docked in New York,” Elena completed, seeing the gruesome logic of what he was saying. “Each person they feed off, but leave relatively whole, then rises to become another weapon.”
Illium nodded. “I assume their handler was alive until an hour ago, since he kept them from rampaging till the ship docked, but either he’s dead now or he didn’t get the order not to attack.”
Down!
Dropping at Raphael’s order, Elena covered her ears as he blasted the cruise ship with a bolt of power from above. The massive piece of machinery simply disintegrated, taking the majority of those inside with it—Elena knew the friends and relatives who’d come to meet the ship were distraught, believing their loved ones might somehow have survived the monsters, but Elena knew that was a false hope.
The reborn scrambling off the ship had had mouths rimmed with blood.
No way would they seek to abandon a buffet of trapped humans unless that buffet was now empty. Especially given the report that had come in from Nimra’s territory stating the creatures could scent living prey from meters away and would gang up to break through any impediment to that prey, their focus so absolute, it could be utilized to set up an ambush.
Today, however, it wasn’t about drawing the creatures to a certain point but making sure none left the pier alive.
“Go! Go! Go!” she yelled to the ground fighters around her as the dust cleared to show some of the reborn had managed to jump free of the ship before it blew and were now swimming to shore.
Raphael dropped down to join her, unsheathing dual swords rather than expending more power on creatures that could be killed by being beheaded. And so began the grim task of cleaning up the mess Charisemnon had dumped on their doorstep. The absolute worst moment of the entire operation came when Elena found herself face-to-face with a twelve-year-old girl in a drenched sundress, her exposed skin bearing vicious scratches . . . and her teeth stained with blood.
Claws out, the girl screamed and ran at Elena, feral hunger in her face.
37
Hot blood splashing against Elena’s combat gear, that small, blonde head rolling off into the water, Raphael’s hand cupping the side of her jaw. “Elena.” It was a snapped command.
“I’m okay, I’m okay.” She’d just frozen there for a second, unable to raise her hand against a child. “I forgot there must’ve been kids on board.”
Ten minutes later and the mobile reborn were all dead. “How many in the water?” she asked Illium, who’d been talking to the teams of vampires in watercraft on the river, their spotlights sweeping the water.
“Two or three dozen at most. The Sire’s strike incinerated the majority, but we need to make certain none of the drowned are given the chance to rise.” Wiping the back of his hand over his mouth, he walked over to the drowned bodies laid out on the pier and began to behead them one after the other.
He hesitated at the tiny body of another child, this one a boy of barely four or five.
“Illium?” she asked when he went down on one knee beside the body, not knowing what answer would be worse—evidence that the child had been alive when Raphael blew up the ship or that he’d joined the monsters.