For the first time in her life, Elena hoped she was wrong, that Sam wasn’t in that trunk. But the Cadre had hired her because she was the best—she didn’t make mistakes. “Oh God!” Instinct had her reaching inside, but she hesitated an inch away from that tiny curled-up body. “I’ll hurt him.” He was so bloody, so very broken.
“We must take him to the healers.”
Nodding, she brought out that crumpled body in her arms. Sam’s wings had been crushed, the fine bones likely shattered. The majority of the blood had come from what looked like a head wound, as well as a cut on his chest. A chest that wasn’t moving. God, please. “Is he alive?”
Raphael, his face a stone mask, touched the boy’s cheek, and it was only then that Elena saw the sekhem branded into that delicate skin.
“Yes, he lives.”
Rage a hurricane inside of her, she held Sam as close as she dared and went to walk past Michaela, but the archangel was staring at Sam, such a stricken expression on her face that Elena felt her throat lock, her feet root to the floor.
“He’s alive?” the archangel asked, as if she hadn’t heard a single word that had passed ’til then.
“Yes,” Raphael answered. “He lives.”
“I can’t heal him,” Michaela said, looking at her hands as if they belonged to a stranger. “Raphael, I can’t heal him.”
Raphael walked forward to place one hand on the female archangel’s shoulder. “He’ll be fine, Michaela. Now we must go.”
Elena, already at the door with Illium, waited only until Raphael was in the hallway before handing over her precious burden. “You’re faster. Go.”
Raphael left without further words. Elena was about to follow when she heard Michaela say, “I didn’t do this.” It was a broken sound.
Shaken, she looked back to glimpse Riker kneeling beside his mistress, her glorious wings dragging on the floor as she collapsed to the ground. “I didn’t do this,” she repeated.
Riker stroked Michaela’s hair back from her face, the devotion in his eyes a brilliant, blinding thing. “You did not do this,” he said, as if in reassurance. “You could not.”
“Elena”—Illium’s lips brushing her ear—“we must go.”
Snapping her head back around, she followed his lead, not speaking until they were out in the ice-cold air. “I had her all figured out,” Elena said in a low whisper, conscious of the large number of vampires who surrounded the house. “She was the Bitch Queen and that was that.”
“A big part of her is exactly that.”
“But what we saw today . . . where did that come from?”
She felt Illium hesitate. His words when they came, were quiet. “Angels don’t have many young. It is our worst pain to lose a child.”
Michaela had lost a child.
The realization shook her, skewing her view of Michaela in a wholly unexpected direction. “Then this bastard wasn’t out to hurt Sam, not really.” That somehow made it worse. “He was out to hurt Michaela.”
“Or,” Illium said, “his aims were higher. Titus and Charisemnon are already warring over a girl-child Charisemnon swears he didn’t take, and Titus swears he did. Whether this angel had anything to do with that, or simply took inspiration from it, they’re locked in their own world, indifferent to outside concerns.”
The pieces fell into place. “He failed to pit Elijah against Raphael, but if you hadn’t grabbed me when you did, if Riker had managed to touch me—”
“Raphael would’ve gone for blood.”
“Sam was bait?” Her stomach roiled.
“If the trap had been successful, it would’ve taken two more archangels out of the equation.”
Weakening the Cadre, leaving room for a power play that would turn a sociopath into an archangel. “I need to check the grounds,” she said, forcing herself to think past the abhorrent nature of this act, to ignore the gut-wrenching sight of Sam’s blood on her hands, her clothes. “There’s a chance the vampire left here on foot.”
Illium pulled out his sword. “Go.”
Michaela’s vampires smelled like many things—cloves and eucalyptus, burgundy and agar, with base notes as far apart as sandalwood and the darkest cherry-flavored kiss. But there wasn’t even a hint of citrus, of oranges dipped in chocolate. “Nothing,” she said more than thirty minutes later, having checked in an almost hundred foot radius around the house, vividly conscious of their silent audience.
A few vamps had moved out into the open, their eyes gleaming as they trailed her. One had even smiled. It made her beyond glad that she was armed to the teeth.