“Oh, I didn’t want to hear that,” Hannah murmured. “Such talent is rare.”
Gian shrugged and Elena expected him to say something along the usual lines about how mortals were born and they died, only for more to be born. Instead, he said, “Great beauty and great talent lie within mortals. I believe they burn hotter with it for their shorter lifetimes.”
The silvery sound of a bell broke the strange tension in the air.
“It is time for dinner,” Gian said, waving his hand forward. “Please. I will follow.”
Elena went ahead with Hannah, and the entire time she had Gian at her back, she was dead certain he was staring at her. She hoped he saw not her bare back but the knife she wore along her spine.
* * *
Raphael’s hunter said nothing until their escort left them at the door to their suite after the dinner. Then, she said, “I want to fly.”
“I was about to say the same.” Raphael needed clean, fresh air untainted by politics or secrets. “Aodhan, do you wish to join us?”
“Yes.”
The simple answer said all too much about Aodhan’s need for freedom.
“Give me two minutes to change.” Elena pushed into the suite. “I’ve got zero desire to flash my underwear at the Luminata.”
Raphael’s lips curved. No other consort or archangelic lover would ever say those words. Only his Elena. Would you like a shield of glamour?
No, I think the bathroom is safe—it doesn’t set off any of my instincts. What do you think?
I think even if the Luminata are watching us in some fashion, to spy on the bathing chamber would go against rules of behavior so ingrained that it simply could not be justified by angels this old.
Good.
Deciding to wait for her where he was, in the hallway outside the open door to their suite, he locked eyes with Aodhan, the angel just over a foot away, and spoke in a voice that would carry only between the two of them. “Are the walls impacting you?” He’d learned to be blunt with Aodhan—the angel was too good at deflecting otherwise.
Aodhan spread, then resettled, his wings. The filaments glittered even in the relatively dim light of the hallway. “Yes,” he answered after a long pause, his voice almost inaudible. “But I remain able to carry out my task.”
“If I thought you incapable, you wouldn’t be here.” Even before the issue with Remus had come up, Raphael had taken a calculated risk in assigning Aodhan as Elena’s backup—the angel had problems being shut inside for too long, but of all the Seven aside from Jason, he was the best at detecting the undercurrents in any given situation. Because even prior to arriving at Lumia, Raphael had worked out that any danger here would be a thing of stealth.
When Aodhan glanced away to the left, his shoulders stiff, Raphael realized he needed to be even blunter. “I wouldn’t have made you Elena’s backup if I didn’t trust you to hold the line to the death if need be. You know what she is to me.” Everything.
The other angel faced him once more, his spine no longer so stiff. “Sire,” he said, a world of unspoken things in that single word.
After glancing down the hallway, as if to ensure they remained alone, Aodhan stayed with vocal speech. Raphael knew he’d already checked the hallway and the suites for any false walls or hidden passageways where someone might hide. The suites on either side of theirs were empty.
Elena had looked for technological devices before her bath earlier today, made the call that the Luminata had only accepted so much modernization, then halted. Electric lights and hot water, yes. Any kind of satellite or antenna, no. Neither did they appear to have phones of any variety. So any spying they did would be of the low-tech variety using their superior knowledge of Lumia.
“I am disturbed by how interested the Luminata are in Ellie.”
“Explain.” Though he’d been aware of Elena’s position in the room every second, Raphael had been forced to keep the majority of his attention on the other archangels rather than the Luminata, the politics of the Cadre currently a perilous sea.
“The brothers watch her when they think there is little or no chance that their interest will be detected. Not all of them, but all those who were at the event tonight—and they are all senior members of the sect, at least five hundred years in the fold.”
Raphael’s blood iced over, not in fear but in a determination as ruthless as it was dangerous. “Is there a threat in their gaze?”
“No, but it’s not simple curiosity in an angel-Made. There is something more.”
Raphael considered all the options. “It’s possible the Luminata are no longer as neutral as they have always previously been. She may be a target.”
“I will continue to watch and to listen,” Aodhan said. “If there is a threat, given the way the Luminata move and the secrecy that clings to them, it will be an assassin’s blade in the dark rather than open battle.”
Such an attack couldn’t hurt Raphael, but Elena was vulnerable. In many ways, she was weaker than even a comparatively young vampire. “I’ll warn her.” He couldn’t stop his hunter from being who she was, wouldn’t clip her wings, but he could give her the weapons she needed to survive.
She appeared in the doorway on that thought, striding out dressed in black jeans and a simple T-shirt in dark gray, the wing slits closed with small buttons at the bottom. She’d pulled her hair back in a ponytail, and though her makeup remained, she was once more the hunter for whom he’d first fallen, her “dress” blade replaced by forearm gauntlets that held her throwing knives, and her crossbow and gun worn openly on either thigh. On her back was the closed sheath that held a full quiver of bolts.