Guild Hunter 02 - Angels' Flight

with me for decades, if not centuries.” Calm, tempered words sliced with anger. “Midnight is near impossible to acquire, even for angels— which means the one who betrayed me is working in the service of someone who holds considerable power.”
     
    Noel felt a spark within him, one he’d thought had been extinguished in that blood- soaked room where his abductors had brutalized him for no reason except that it gave them a twisted kind of pleasure. They might have justified the act by calling it a political ploy, but he’d heard their laughter, felt the black that stained their souls. “Why are you telling me this?”
     
    An arch look over her shoulder. “I do not need a slave, Noel”—his name carried a slight French emphasis that turnedit into something exotic—“but I do need someone whose loyalty is beyond question. Raphael says you are that man.”
     
    He had not been cast aside after all.
     
    It was a shock to the system, a jolt that brought him to life when he’d been the walking dead for so long. “You’re certain it’s one of your people?” he asked, his blood pumping in hard pulses through his veins.
     
    Her answer was oblique and it held a quiet, thrumming anger. “There were no strangers in my home the day the Midnight was used.” Her wings flared out, blocking the light as she continued to focus beyond the windows. “They are mine, but one has been tainted.”
     
    “You’re six hundred years old,” Noel said, knowing she saw nothing of the gardens at that instant. “You can force them to speak the truth.”
     
    “I cannot bend wills,” she said, surprising him with the straight answer. “That has never been one of my gifts— and torturing my entire court to unearth one traitor seems a trifle extreme.”
     
    He thought he heard a dark amusement beneath the anger, but with her face turned to the window, her profile shadowed by the tumble of those blue- black curls, he couldn’t tell for sure. “Do they know why I’m here?”
     
    Shaking her head, Nimra turned to him once more, her expression betraying nothing, the flawless mask of an immortal. “It is probable they believe the very thing you did— that Raphael has sent you to me because you are broken and I need a toy.” A lifted eyebrow.
     
    He felt as if he’d been called to the carpet. “My apologies, Lady Nimra.”
     
    “Do attempt to sound a fraction more sincere”—a cool order—“or this deception will fail miserably.”
     
    “I’m afraid I’ll never be able to pull off being a poodle.”
     
    To his shock, she laughed, the sound a husky feminine stroke across his senses. “Very well,” she said, eyes glittering with gemstone brightness in the sunlight. “You may be a wolf on a long leash.”
     
    Noel was startled to feel a different kind of heat withinhim, a slow- burning ember, dark and potent. Since waking in the Medica, his body destroyed, he’d felt no desire, had thought that part of him dead. But Nimra’s laugh made his body stir enough that he noticed. It was tempting to follow that flicker of heat, to hold the ember up to the light of day, but he didn’t allow her laugh or the exquisite caress of her femininity to wipe the truth from his mind— that the angel with the jewel- dusted wings was deadly. And that while she might be in the right in this particular game, she was no innocent.
     
    H e heard screams that night. The nightmare always sur prised him, though he’d been having it since he opened his eyes in the Medica after the assault. Because the fact was, he’d lost the ability to scream several hours into the torture, remaining conscious only because his attackers had made it a point to never cross that fine line. Broken bones, torn flesh, excruciating burns— vampires could take a lot of damage without the escape of the cold dark of unconsciousness.
    He didn’t remember screaming even at the start, determined not to give in, but he must have— for the echo of it haunted his dreams. Or perhaps the screams rang inside his mind because that was the sole place he’d had that had been his own, his strength, his dignity stripped from him with malicious force.
     
    Throwing off the sweat- soaked sheets as he shoved away the memories, he got out of bed and walked to the window he’d left open to the honeysuckle- scented air. The heavy warmth of it stroked over his cheeks, fingered its way through his hair, but did nothing to cool his overheated flesh. Still, he lingered,