Guild Hunter 01 - Angels' Blood

much.
    It was Raphael who’d threatened to harm little Zoe, no one else.
    “Bastard,” she muttered, repeating Sara’s imprecation. That threat put him in the same league as Uram. The European archangel had reportedly once destroyed an entire school full of five-to-ten-year-olds after the villagers asked him to remove his pet vampire from their midst.
    Elena would have frowned on such a request had the vamp not been taking blood forcibly. He’d violated several of the village females, left them broken. The villagers had turned to Uram for help. He’d replied by killing their children and stealing their women. That had been over three decades ago and none of those women had ever been seen again. The village no longer existed.
    He was, without a doubt, a very bad man. And she was—
    Something tapped on the plate-glass window.
    Hand sliding down to retrieve the knife hidden under the coffee table, she glanced up. Her eyes locked with those of an archangel. Silhouetted against the glittering Manhattan skyline, he should’ve appeared diminished, but he was even more beautiful than in daylight. It was a measure of his control that he barely had to move his wings to maintain position—the sheer power of him buffeted her even through the glass.
    She swallowed and stood. “That window doesn’t open,” she said, wondering if he could hear her.
    He pointed upward. She felt her eyes widen. “The roof isn’t—” But he was already gone.
    “Damn it!” Angry at him for catching her unawares, for inciting this assuredly fatal edge of attraction, she slid the knife back, closed the laptop, and left the apartment.
    It took her several minutes to get to the roof and push open the door. “I’m not coming out there!” she called out when she didn’t see him. The top of her building had been designed by some avant-garde architect who believed in form over function—a series of uneven, jagged peaks spread out in front of her. It was impossible to walk on them without sliding and falling to your death. “No, thank you,” she muttered, feeling the wind whip her hair off her face as she waited with the door partly open. “Raphael!”
    Maybe, she thought, the architect hadn’t been avant-garde at all. Maybe he’d simply hated angels. That sounded good to her about then. She might admire their wings, but she had no misapprehensions about their inner goodness. “Inner goodness. Hah!” She snorted and suddenly he was landing in front of her, his wings flooding her vision.
    She backed up a step without meaning to and by the time she recovered, he was inside and closing the door. Damn it, she hated that he could make her react like a green recruit tracking her first vamp. If it went on like this much longer, she’d lose all respect for herself. “What?” she asked, folding her arms.
    “Is this how you welcome all your guests?” His mouth held no hint of a smile, yet it was sensuality personified, lush and ultimately seductive.
    She took another step backward. “Stop it.”
    “What?” A hint of genuine confusion in those blue, blue eyes.
    “Nothing.” Get a grip, Elena. “Why are you here?”
    He stared at her for several long seconds. “I’d like to talk to you about the hunt.”
    “So talk.”
    He looked around the confines of the landing no one ever used. The metal stairs were rusted, the single lightbulb yellow and on the verge of going out. Flicker. Flicker. A two-second stretch. Then flicker, flicker. The pattern kept repeating, driving her half crazy. Raphael was obviously not impressed either. “Not here, Elena. Show me to your rooms.”
    She scowled at the order. “No. This is work—we’ll go to Guild headquarters and use a meeting room.”
    “It matters little to me.” A shrug that drew her attention to the breadth of his shoulders, the powerful arch of his wings. “I can fly there within minutes. It’ll take you at least half an hour, perhaps longer—there has been an accident on the road leading to your Guild.”
    “An accident?” Her mind flooded with the gruesome details of the “accident” she’d just been reading about. “Sure you didn’t arrange it?”
    He gave her an amused look. “If I wished to, I could force you to do anything I wanted. Why would I go to the trouble of such maneuverings?”
    The bald way he pointed out his power, and her lack of it, made her fingers itch for a blade.
    “You shouldn’t look at me in that fashion, Elena.”
    “Why?” she asked,