Guild Hunter 01 - Angels' Blood

don’t want it.” She was choking on the need to share the sheer incomprehensibility of the task with Sara, with that idiot Ransom, but she couldn’t. “He’s already cut me off from my best friends.” Her hand fisted.
    “Let him try,” Sara said. “So you can’t tell me the details. Big deal. I’ll figure it out soon enough. I have some idea.”
    Excitement danced up Elena’s spine. “You do?”
    “Killer vampire?” She paused. “Okay, you can’t answer but seriously, what else could it be?”
    Elena slumped again.
    “Remember that one that went rogue?”
    “There’s been more than one,” she said lightly, even as her blood ran cold.
    “About twenty years ago. We studied him in our Guild classes.”
    Not twenty, Elena thought, eighteen. “Slater Patalis.” The name fell from her lips like a piece of nightmare, one she’d never shared with anyone, not even the best friend she trusted with everything else. “How many did he end up killing?” she asked—forced herself to ask—before Sara’s antennae could start to twang.
    “Official body count was fifty-two in the space of a month,” came the grim response. “Unofficially, we think there were more.” Something creaked and Elena could almost see Sara leaning back in that big leather executive chair she adored like a second child. “Now that I’m director, I have access to all sorts of supersecret stuff.”
    “Want to share?” She held on to the here and now, ignoring the screaming echoes of a past nothing could change.
    “Hmmm, why not—you are my second in command in all but name.”
    “Ech.” Elena stuck out her tongue. “No desk job for me, thank you.”
    Sara laughed softly. “You’ll learn. Anyway, the official line on Slater was that he’d had a psych illness before he was Made, an illness he somehow managed to hide.”
    “Some kind of severe antisocial personality disorder.” Until Sara’s comment, Elena had thought she knew every disturbing detail of the life and crimes of the most infamous killer vampire in recent history. “Evidence of childhood abuse and mistreatment of animals. Classic serial killer profile.”
    “Too classic,” Sara pointed out. “It’s a load of crock. The Guild made it up after pressure from the Cadre of Ten.”
    For a second, Elena had the horrifying suspicion that Slater Patalis wasn’t really dead, that the Cadre had saved him for some perverse reason of their own. But an instant later, sanity reasserted itself—not only had she seen the autopsy video, she’d snuck into the storage room and picked up the vial of Slater’s preserved blood. Her senses had reacted.
    Vampire, the blood had whispered, vampire. And when she’d uncorked the bottle, it had murmured to her in Slater’s distinctive, hypnotic voice.
    Come here, little hunter. Taste.
    She bit down hard on her lower lip, drawing her own blood and banishing the memory of his. At least until the hour of nightmares. “You going to tell me the truth?” she asked Sara.
    “Slater was normal when he went in as a Candidate,” Sara said. “You know how fanatical the angels are about checking the short-listed applicants. He was scanned, analyzed, damn near split open with all the tests they did. The man was squeaky clean and healthy, in body and in mind.”
    “The rumors,” Elena whispered, eyes wide, “we always thought they were urban legends but if what you’re saying is true—”
    “—it means there’s one very bad side effect to being Made. A tiny, tiny, tiny minority of the Candidates have their brains scrambled beyond recovery. What comes out of the mess isn’t always human.”
    It should’ve felt odd to call vampires human in any sense but Elena knew what Sara was talking about. Humanity, as a whole, included vampires. As Elena knew from her own family, vampires could mate with, and even reproduce with, humans. Conception was very difficult but not impossible, and though the children—all mortal—sometimes suffered from anemia and related disorders, they were otherwise normal. First rule of biology—if it can mate, it’s probably the same species.
    That rule couldn’t be applied to those of Raphael’s kind. Angels attracted groupies by the truckload—mostly vampires, though the occasional stunning human was allowed into the mix. But debauchery aside, Elena had never heard of a child coming from a mating between human and angel, or even vampire and angel. Perhaps, she thought, angels simply didn’t sire