Ashwini could’ve circled his upper arm with her forefinger and thumb. It was as if he’d lost all body fat and muscle mass. But even his bones weren’t quite right, his jaw sticking out in an odd way and his right leg appearing to have a second knee that pushed at the thin red silk pants that hung over his emaciated form, his upper half bare to reveal a rib cage that was crushed on one side.
His eyes were a filmy blue, his teeth jagged . . . and covered with blood, the same blood that ringed his mouth and dripped down his chest.
Smiling grotesquely at them, he slid to his knees and went as if to feed again from the woman on the floor, her hair a pool of magenta and her skin a pale brown. Ashwini shot him through the head, hoping it wouldn’t blow his skull to smithereens. With a normal angel, that wouldn’t be a risk, but with this one . . .
Cornelius fell forward but his head was whole. Good. He, too, needed to face immortal justice.
Janvier pulled the enemy angel’s body off the woman, while Ashwini checked her for a pulse. She had to use the wrist—the woman’s throat was too bloody a mess.
“Come on,” she whispered, seeing only the most minor signs of long-term damage on the victim—her skin was a touch drier than it should be, the sheen of her dyed hair dulled but not absent. It gave Ashwini hope that they weren’t too late. “Come on.”
Then there it was: a pulse, thready but present.
Hearing boots slamming up the stairs, she ran to the door, saw Trace. “Get the paramedics!”
He nodded and disappeared back down the way he’d come.
The paramedics were in the room a half minute later.
• • •
Fourteen hours after that, the city dark, Ashwini leaned against the wall of a large windowless room in the center of the Tower. Janvier stood beside her, one booted foot up against the wall, his arms folded. Elena was next to Ashwini, while Dmitri flanked Janvier. Naasir had growled when told of the capture and said he’d get the report from them. The idea of being closed up with “walking rancid meat” hadn’t appealed to the vampire.
Ashwini wasn’t exactly happy about it, either, but she had to see this through no matter what. Staying strong against the vortex of Raphael’s power was actually giving her a counterbalance to the bile-inducing horror of Cornelius’s evil . . . and Janvier’s shoulder touching her own was a physical anchor.
Raphael stood in the center facing Cornelius—who’d finally healed enough to speak, but not to stand for an extended period. It shouldn’t have taken an angel of his age anywhere near that long to shake off a bullet wound, but Cornelius wasn’t exactly a normal angel anymore. He sat in a chair that was the only piece of furniture in the room, his face wreathed in a grimace of a smile.
Ashwini ground her teeth against the urge to go for a gun again. Marta, the woman they’d rescued, was alive, but the damage done to her was more than skin-deep. Her bones had aged ten years, with her internal organs showing signs of the same. According to the doctors, she’d be fine with supplements, but her life span had been permanently shortened.
All so a monster could live another day.
“Cornelius,” Raphael said, his wings glowing in a way that no one ever wanted to see, because when an archangel glowed, people died. “You are not as you were.”
“My goddess gave me a gift.”
“She fed from you because you were disposable and strong.” A pitiless rejoinder. “My spymaster has confirmed that Xi retreated with the troops, as did Alastair and Philomena. Their injuries and the deaths of Lijuan’s other generals came at the hands of my people, not from Lijuan.”