Raphael caught her before she could even begin to fall, taking her down to a perfect landing on the nearest stable piece of rock.
"Thanks." Mind already on the body, she shifted closer. From above, it had appeared as if the angel had been thrown onto the rocks, his bones shattered, his limbs so damaged that not all were whole. Now, she saw that his head had been separated from his torso, his chest a gaping hole missing not just his heart, but all his internal organs.
"Someone wanted to make very sure he wouldn't rise." The angel's rib cage gleamed in the mountain sunlight, his blood no longer wet but holding a hard sheen that had her leaning forward in frowning concentration. "It's like his body's turning to stone." The carapace of dark red was strangely beautiful.
"It's an illusion," Raphael said. "His cells are trying to repair the damage."
She jerked back. "He's still alive?"
"No. But it takes a long time for an immortal to truly die."
"It's not immortality is it? If you can die?"
"Compared to a human life . . ."
Yes."So cut off the head, remove the organs for extra insurance."
"His brain was also removed."
Elena stared at the head. "It looks whole." She reached forward, then drew back. "I really can't catch anything?" she asked, her fingers curling into her palms as she neared blood-matted hair that might've once been blond.
"No." But he was already crouching on the other side of the body, his hand lifting up what remained of the angel's head.
The back of it was gone. An empty husk. Feeling her face heat with a wave of disbelief, she nodded at him to put it back down. "Thorough job."
He placed it on the rock, face up. "His name was Aloysius. Four hundred and ten years old."
It was somehow harder, when you had a name. Taking a deep breath, she began to separate the scents. There were so many. "A lot of angels have been down here." And it looked as if her developing angel-sense was functioning just fine today.
"There was hope he might be able to be revived until his brain was discovered to be missing."
She stared at Raphael across the body that was nothing but the emptiest of shells. He had told her, but - "The victim honestly could've survived the rest of it?"
"Immortality isn't always pretty." An answer that left no room for ambiguity. "He was most likely conscious while his organs were being removed."
Swallowing, she shook her head. "I'm too young for that, right? If someone decides to fillet me, I'll lose consciousness?"
"Yes."
"Good." She wasn't the giving up kind, but neither did she want to know what it did to a person to survive this kind of torture. "Given the blood splatter, he was dropped from a fairly impressive height." She was trying not to think too hard about what might be sticking to the soles of her shoes - the M.E. would have had her behind bars for compromising a scene like this, but she salved her conscience with the fact that the scene was already so compromised it was worthless to anyone but a hunter-born.
"However," she continued, "it wasn't so high that it tore his body completely apart - do you have any way of knowing if he had his organs at that stage?" It was impossible to tell in all the gore.
"Yes." Raphael pointed to the open chest cavity. "Some of them left pieces behind." He reached in and picked up what appeared to be a hard pink stone, ragged at the edges. The stone gleamed a deep rose quartz in the sunlight. "A segment of his liver."
Goose bumps broke out over her skin. "Are you sure he can't feel that?"
"He's dead. What his body is doing, it's akin to a chicken running around after its head has been cut off."
"A nerve response." It made sense that it took longer for an older immortal to fade.
Returning the stone to the chest cavity, Raphael pointed at the head. "Parts of the brain were also found scattered on the rocks."
She was going to throw away these shoes the instant she got home. "That hard an impact would've turned his organs pretty much into soup," she said. "Wouldn't that make it more difficult to remove them?"
"Not if the 'surgeon' waited for him to heal enough for the organs to become viable again."
She'd been handling the gore fine, but ice filled her veins at the cold-blooded nature of the kill. "Jesus."
"Use your senses, hunter." It was a gentle reminder. "The wind is holding but it can change without warning."
Shaking off her horror, she began to filter out the scents she already knew - separating the good guys from the bad could come later. She was midway through the process when her angel-sense cut out without warning, leaving a single clean thread behind. "A vampire was here."
"Not with the rescue team," Raphael said, his expression intent.
"Means he was here before." Trying not to gag on the sickly sweet smell of the body in front of her - a body that didn't smell like death should - she arrowed her senses to that vampiric thread.
Cedar painted with ice, an unusual scent, full of elegance.
Her eyes snapped open. "Riker. Riker was here."
Raphael found Michaela hours later, high in the night sky above her home, her body clad in a catsuit that turned her into a sleek, dangerous predator. There was no hint of the insanity Elena and Galen had both seen in her, her body as clean and as lushly graceful as always.
"Raphael," she said, coming to a vertical hover beside him. "Are you here to warn me off your hunter again?"
Elena, Raphael thought, might see in Michaela's past a hurt that had turned her bitter, but Raphael had known the young angel she'd been, her ambition a pyre on which she'd sacrifice anything. "You walked into the Medica with the intent to do harm."