“Consort,” Naasir said, in that smooth voice she had the sense could become a lethal growl without warning, “there’s something the Sire has asked me to show you.”
She couldn’t read him. At all. It truly was like talking to a big, predatory beast that hadn’t yet decided whether to eat her. Palm itching, she gave in and drew a knife, playing it desultorily through her fingers like a damn security blanket. “What is it?”
“This way.” He waved to a narrower pathway to the left.
Raphael, I’m going off to parts unknown with this vampire who isn’t a vampire.
He has promised not to bite without warning.
Imagining the fiendish revenge she was going to take on Raphael for teasing her so mercilessly, she followed the silver-eyed male who continued to make her senses itch and her primal hindbrain crouch in readiness for flight. “Can I ask a question?”
No response, no reaction.
Deciding that didn’t mean no, she plowed on ahead. “Who Made you?” Venom, with his reptilian speed and the eyes of a viper, had been Made by the Queen of Snakes and Poisons; it could be that Naasir, too, carried the mark of the one who’d Made him . . . if he had been Made and wasn’t a wholly unknown creature.
“A long-dead angel who thought to own me,” was his enigmatic answer, the silver in his eyes almost liquid. “I tore out his throat. After that, I ate his liver and his heart. The remaining internal organs weren’t as tasty so I gave them to his other creatures.”
Elena’s hand tightened on the handle of the knife, conscious Naasir carried gleaming blades of his own in the sheaths strapped to his arms. “I wouldn’t think a vampire who killed an angel would be permitted to live.”
A slow, feral smile. “I didn’t say I killed him.”
Every single hair in her body stood up, the same instinct that had probably saved her ancestors from saber-toothed tigers telling her to run the fuck away! Fast!
Except they’d reached an old temple that hadn’t yet been repaired, parts of it tumbled and covered with creeping vines sprinkled with tiny star-shaped flowers of blue and white. The eerie vampire-maybe-not-vampire led her up the steps. His next words were pragmatic and so civilized, she could barely believe it was the same man who’d spoken about eating an angel’s liver and heart.
“I made this discovery several hours ago,” he said. “As it’s on the edge of the city, easy to police, I decided to wait to act until the Sire’s arrival.”
An angel whispered out of the shadows on the heels of his words, her wings white with a kiss of delicate green at the primaries, from what Elena could see, and her clothing similar to Elena’s own—except this woman’s pants were of some kind of strong brown fabric instead of leather, and her white top a flowing thing rather than the more fitted styles Elena preferred. She wasn’t yet expert enough at fighting with wings to risk tangling herself or her weapons up in froufrou clothes.
“Consort,” the other woman said. “I am Isabel.”
Naasir’s partner, Elena realized, situated here to give the vampire winged backup. “Elena,” she said and held out her hand, the other woman having been away from Amanat during Elena’s previous visits.
Isabel shook it with a smile, her eyes an extraordinary dark brown, her black hair pulled back in an elegant knot at the nape of her neck, and her skin a tawny gold that reminded Elena of paintings she’d seen of Egyptian goddesses. “I’ve made certain nothing was disturbed,” Isabel told her. “Those who ventured this way took little persuading to seek other pleasures.”
A slight shift in the winds that traveled through the temple, Isabel’s blouse shaped to her body for a fleeting second as Elena’s senses jacked into high gear. The scent of decay, putrefaction . . . and below it, of disease.
Not needing Isabel or Naasir to show her the way, Elena walked into the damaged building, the roof a filigree that created delicate patterns of light and shadow beneath her feet. At any other time, she would’ve lingered, taken photographs of the effect to share with Eve, her youngest half sister utterly fascinated by the lost city come to life in a land far from its original homeland.
Today, however, she followed the scent trail in a near-straight line to halfway across the temple. The woman was sitting with her back against one of the intricately carved columns, one hand cradled in a basket of dead flowers, the basket positioned in a way that made Elena think the victim had set it down herself, her body too tired to go any farther. She wore a dress of deep red silk that flattered her femininity without being sexual, the fabric vibrant against the rich cream of her ravaged skin.