“So if you can do all that, what’s this other guy capable of?” She turned away from the erotic seduction of his face and toward the ducks. “I’ll be mincemeat before I get within a hundred feet.”
“You’ll be protected.”
“I work alone.”
“Not this time.” His tone was pure steel. “Uram has a penchant for pain. The Marquis de Sade was a student of his.”
Elena wasn’t about to show him exactly how much that freaked her out. “So he’s into kinky sex.”
“That’s one way to look at it.” Somehow, he put blood and pain and horror into that single comment. The emotions wormed their way through her pores and wrapped around her throat, choking, cloying.
“Stop it,” she snapped, eyes locked with his once more.
“Apologies.” A slight curve of his lips. “You’re more sensitive than I expected.”
She didn’t believe that for an instant. “Uram? Tell me about him.” She didn’t know much about the other archangel beyond the fact that he ruled a chunk of Europe.
“He’s your prey.” His face closed over, midnight eyes going near black, expression shifting to that of a Greek statue. Distant. Inscrutable. “That’s all you need to know.”
“I can’t work like that.” She stood but kept her distance. “I’m good because I get inside the target’s head, predict where he’ll be, what he’ll do, who he’ll contact.”
“Rely on your inborn gift.”
“Even if I could scent archangels”—which she couldn’t—“it’s not magic,” she pointed out, frustrated. “I need a starting point. If you haven’t got anything, I’ll have to work it out from his personality, his patterns of behavior.”
He walked toward her, closing the distance she wanted to keep. “Uram’s movements can’t be predicted. Not yet. We must wait.”
“For what?”
“Blood.”
The single word chilled her from the inside out. “What did he do?”
Raphael lifted a finger, tracing it over her cheekbone. She flinched. Not because he was hurting her. The opposite. The places he touched . . . it was as if he had a direct line to the hottest, most feminine part of her. A single stroke and she was embarrassingly damp. But she refused to pull away, refused to give in.
“What,” she repeated, “did he do?”
That finger passed over her jaw and whispered along the line of her neck, giving excruciating, unwanted pleasure. “Nothing you need to know. Nothing that will help you track him.”
Raising her hand with effort, she pushed his off, knowing her success was very much a case of him indulging her. And that chafed. “Finished playing your sex games?” she asked point-blank.
His smile was less a shadow this time, those changeable eyes sliding from black to something closer to cobalt. Alive. Electric. “I wasn’t doing anything to your mind, Elena. Not that time.”
Oh, shit.
He’ d lied. Obviously, he’d lied. Elena let out a sigh of relief and collapsed onto her sofa. She wasn’t idiotic enough to be attracted to an archangel. That left door number two—that Raphael had been playing with her mind and telling her otherwise was simply some sort of a twisted way for him to mess with her.
The annoying little voice inside her head kept whispering that that kind of manipulation didn’t mesh with what she knew of Raphael. On the roof, he’d made no secret of the fact that he’d been in her mind. Lying seemed beneath him. “Hah!” she said to the voice. “What I know about him isn’t enough to fill a thimble—he’s manipulated mortals for centuries. He’s good at it.” Not good. Expert.
And she was now in his hands.
Unless he’d changed his mind in the hours since she’d hauled ass from the duck pond. Her mood brightened. Reaching over to open up the laptop on the coffee table, she booted it up and used her wireless Internet connection to look up her Guild account. The transaction history showed one recent deposit.
“Too many zeros.” She took a deep breath. Counted again. “Still too many.”
So many that it made Mr. Ebose’s substantial payment look like chump change.
Hands sweat-damp, she swallowed and scrolled down. The payment had come from “Archangel Tower: Manhattan.” She’d known that. Obviously, she’d known that. But seeing it in black and white was a jolt to the system. The deal was done. She was now officially working for Raphael. And only Raphael.
Her Guild status had been changed from “Active” to “Contracted: Indefinite Period.”
Closing the laptop, she stared out at the Tower. She couldn’t believe she’d stood on top of that cloud-piercing building only that morning, couldn’t believe she’d dared disagree with an archangel, but most of all, she couldn’t believe what Raphael wanted her to do. Thousands of tiny little creatures skittered about in her stomach, inciting nausea, panic . . . and a strange, vibrant excitement. This was the kind of job that made legends out of hunters. Of course, to be a legend, you generally had to be dead.
The phone rang, blessedly ending that particular line of thought. “What?”
“Good day to you, too, sunshine,” came Sara’s cheerful voice.
Elena wasn’t fooled. Her friend hadn’t made it to the position of Guild Director by being Ms. Congeniality. Nerves of steel and a will like a bull terrier more like it. “I can’t tell you anything,” she said bluntly. “Don’t even ask.”
“Come on, Ellie. You know I can keep a secret.”
“No. If I tell you, you die.” Raphael had made that very clear before he’d let her leave Central Park.
Tell anyone—man, woman, or child—and we’ll eliminate them. No exceptions.
Sara snorted. “Don’t be melodramatic. I’m—”
“He knew you’d ask,” she said, remembering what else the Archangel of New York had said to her in that deceptively easy tone. A naked blade sheathed in velvet, that was Raphael’s voice.
“Oh?”
“If I tell you, he won’t only take you and Deacon out, he’ll do the same to Zoe.”
The fury that crackled through the line was pure maternal protectiveness. “Bastard.”
“Totally agree.”
Sara seemed to be fuming too hard to speak for several long seconds. “The fact that he made that threat means this is big.”
“You saw the deposit?”
“Hell, did I see the deposit! I thought the accountant had screwed up and deposited the whole thing into our account instead of just the Guild percentage.” She blew out a breath. “Baby girl, that’s some kind of cash.”
“I 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?”