Archangel's Legion(64)
“Good.” She drew in long breaths of the cold winter air, the mountainous forests of this part of Kagoshima spread out below them. “I always forget how untamed it is here,” she said, her wings a dramatic splash of color against the dark green when she dropped beneath the cloud layer.
Flying nearer to the forest giants, she skimmed the treetops with a grace that would’ve been unexpected in one so young in angelic terms had she not been a hunter, her body and mind used to tough physicality. Her flight startled a herd of wild horses, who went galloping off into the mists that hung over the forests from a recent rainstorm. Did you see?
Sweeping down to join her, he said, When I was a babe growing up in Amanat, my friends and I would race the horses kept in the city at that time.
Laughter in the air, her hair afire in the mountain sunlight. Did you always win?
No, that’s why it was so much fun. It was the first time in an eon that he’d recalled that memory, buried as it had been under centuries of power and politics.
Look at the treetops, he told Elena, glimpsing movement. Our curious friends are back.
Careful to maintain her height, Elena peered downward. He knew the instant she spotted the monkeys that always emerged somewhere along their flight path to Amanat—her delight unhidden, she appeared the girl she’d never had the chance to be, anointed in the blood of her sisters at an age when she should’ve been making a pest of herself to those same sisters.
There’re some more to the left, she said, her mental voice a whisper. They’re pointing at us.
Staying at his current altitude as she dared go a little closer, her white-gold primaries catching the light, he kept an eye out for threats. A day before the ball, there were apt to be any number of very dangerous people already in and around the city. And they all knew Elena was Raphael’s heart.
• • •
The strange shield of energy that usually protected Amanat not in evidence today, they flew straight through to land at the edge of it. Settling her wings, Elena followed the wild blue of her archangel’s eyes to a vampire running along the defensive wall that surrounded the ancient city.
Elena’s credentials from the Guild had always borne the legend Licensed to Hunt Vampires & Assorted Others. The historical licenses framed in the Guild library, yellowed and crumbling, all noted the same—but the funny thing was, aside from Elena’s blue-moon hunt of Uram, the men and women of the Guild didn’t hunt anything except vampires.
She’d always figured the “Assorted Others” tag was to cover them in case they had to go after a human in the course of a Guild case, had been satisfied with that understanding.
Today, however, as she watched Naasir loping atop the wall with a strange, liquid grace that made him appear boneless, she had the feeling she didn’t know as much as she thought. “What,” she said to Raphael, “is he?” Regardless of having visited Amanat more than once by now, she’d had very little direct contact with Naasir.
Raphael gave her a distinctly amused look. “Naasir is one of my Seven.”
“Raphael.”
“What do you think he is?”
“A tiger on the hunt, that’s how I categorized his scent the first time I met him, and I haven’t changed my mind,” she said, as Naasir came down the wall with an ease that made it seem he walked on a flat surface. “His voice might be cultured, but there’s something intensely feral about him. It’s different from what I feel with Venom . . . or deeper, I don’t know.”
“I think,” Raphael said at her frustrated growl, “I will leave Naasir a mystery for you to solve. I wouldn’t want immortality to become boring for my consort.”
Elena let out a snarl, but she was intrigued by the challenge.
The vampire reached them the next instant, inclining his head in a slight bow. “Sire.” Eyes of pure metallic silver set against skin of a rich, strokable brown met Elena’s. “Consort.” The greeting was by-the-book formal, but as always, she had the feeling that in any other situation, he’d see her as prey.
Nodding in return and resisting the urge to go for a weapon, she realized the vampire had cut his hair. It had reached the bottom of his nape the last time she’d seen him. It now just brushed it, the jagged waves around his face still as choppy and as vividly silver.
It was hard to describe that silver—it wasn’t anything like the gray of age. No, it was true silver, glittering and metallic, until she was certain that if you took strands of Naasir’s hair and wove it into a bracelet, it would appear as if it was made of the precious metal. Yet when the wind lifted his hair away from the exotic lines of his face, she saw it was soft, each strand exquisitely fine. Then they settled back into place, and so did the metallic effect.