"Are you sure?"
"Yes." He'd made it a point to find out . . . because he'd known Elena would want to know.
"Aw, shit." She rubbed a hand over her face. "He's a moron but he loves her."
"He loves immortality more," Raphael said with centuries of experience. "Did he not, he would've waited until she, too, was accepted."
Elena looked at him, an inscrutable expression on her face. "Do you believe in anything good anymore?"
"If we're able to kill Uram, then perhaps I'll believe that evil does not always win." Perhaps. He'd seen too much malice done to believe in the fairy tales that comforted humans through their firefly life spans.
Shaking her head, Elena began walking toward Michaela's home. "I'm starving."
"You ran a long distance." He sent a message to Montgomery to prepare food fit for a hunter.
"What happens if you don't eat?"
Another question no one had thought to ask him for over a thousand years. "I fade."
"Get weak?" She crouched, touched the earth, and brought her fingers up to her nose. "I thought I scented something but it's gone."
He waited until she was up again before answering. "No, I literally fade, become a ghost. Food anchors our physical form."
"Then why don't other angels starve themselves-you know, to get the invisibility thing happening?"
"Fading doesn't incur invisibility, just washes us out. Since lack of food also leaches power, being faded is not a good thing."
"So if I want to make an angel vulnerable, I should starve him?"
"Only if you plan to contain him for the next fifty years." He watched shock, then consternation fill her face. "Starvation is a relative concept. Unlike a vampire, an angel will not easily fade."
"Vamps don't fade, they shrivel," she muttered, and he had the sense that she was remembering something. "The older they are, the more they shrivel." She stopped at the edge of Michaela's lawn and looked up at the archangel's window. "Same concept, though, I guess."
"Yes." Following her gaze, he remembered how she'd looked up from that very spot yesterday. "Do you scent him?"
"Yes." She bit her lower lip and glanced back the way they'd come, before returning her attention to the window. "Something's wrong."
"It's too quiet. Where are the guards?" He scanned the area, looking for Uram's distinctive wings. "He can't have reached here much ahead of us. Geraldine's memories have him dumping her when he sensed pursuit."
She shot him a narrow-eyed look. "What was he planning to do-make her into art, shock the people who found her?"
"Yes."
"Figures. Can you do a flyover?"
He gathered his wings, gave an upward push, and was airborne. It was a freedom he'd always taken for granted . . . until he saw the hunger for flight in a hunter's eyes. No overt signs, he told her, the mental link effortless by now.
"I'm going in."
That was unusual, how very easily she spoke to him. He knew Elena thought she was only speaking out loud, that he was taking the words from her mind, but that wasn't quite true-she instinctively knew how to arrow her thoughts so they didn't get lost in the jumble of an active mind. She could also block him when she wanted. It hurt her, but she could do it. The arrogance in him wasn't exactly pleased by that, but the archangel found it intriguing.
Catching a downward draft, he winged down to land behind her. "You will not go in alone." No mortal could hope to win against Uram.
She didn't argue, the look in her eyes-focused, hunter-born-saying that at this moment, she saw him only as another tool. With a sharp nod, she closed the distance to the house, but, rather than going around the front, she jimmied open the sliding doors on one side. "I'm drowning in his scent," she whispered. "He's here."
Raphael put a hand on her back. "I'll go first."
"This is no time to pull macho crap."
"It could be a trap. You're mortal." Stepping through the doorway, he scanned the room-the library. "Come."
She followed on quiet feet. "Scent's deeper inside."
He opened the doors to the library and stepped out. Riker was staked to the wall in front of him, a wooden chair leg embedded in his throat. The vampire was still alive but unconscious-likely from the blow to his head that dripped blood down his temples.
"Jesus," Elena whispered. "He's having a very bad week. Do we leave him?"
"He won't heal until the stake's removed."
"Then let's go. I can only deal with one psychopath at a time." She nodded left.
He began walking that way, not particularly surprised when he found another one of the guards impaled on a savagely compelling sculpture from Michaela's years with Charisemnon. The vampire's head hung at the wrong angle for life. "He's dead."
"Broken neck?"
"Decapitation"-he showed her how the head was barely attached by a few tendons-"coupled with removal of the heart. It wasn't planned, though. This was just to get him out of the way." He put a foot on the stair.
"No." Elena pointed in the other direction. "Deeper inside."
A scream shattered the air.
He stopped her from running. "That's what Uram wants." Pushing her behind him, he headed toward the sound. Uram was a master of strategy-he'd obviously figured out that Elena was the linchpin. Take her out and he could evade the Cadre for years-there were other hunter-born, but none as gifted as Elena. And if Uram wasn't executed within half a century of his devolution, he might gain enough power to rule. And the world would drown in blood.
Elena tugged on his wing. He glanced over his shoulder, about to warn her not to distract him. It could prove fatal, even for an immortal. She was pointing up. He nodded. I know. Michaela's home had high ceilings, as was the case with the homes of most angels. Her living room, like his, was basically the central core of the house, the upper floors arranged around the edges. Uram wouldn't be waiting below, he'd be waiting above.
That left Raphael at a disadvantage. This house had been remodeled from a human dwelling, rather than being designed for angelic inhabitants. There were no high windows he could use to fly straight through to the living area. He'd have to walk in the door. Elena tugged again, until he bent his ear to her lips.
"Let me go in, distract him. You come in straight after-he won't have time to kill me."
Had anyone outlined this scenario to him before he met Elena, his answer would've been instant. Yes, send in the hunter, distract the bloodborn. And if the hunter died, it was a small price to pay to win this war. But now he knew her, now he'd taken her, now she belonged to him.