Guild Hunter 01 - Angels' Blood by authors_sort Page A

her?”
    “No.” Raphael wondered if he’d have to warn Elena about this new threat. Michaela didn’t like competition and she’d been Uram’s lover for almost half a century, an incredible commitment for someone of her mercurial nature. “I chose her because she can scent what no one else can.”
    “Why, then, must we wait?” Titus asked, his soft tone at odds with the gleaming, muscular bulk of his body. He appeared a man carved from jet, as roughly hewn as the mountain stronghold he called home.
    “Because,” Raphael answered, “Uram has not crossed the final line.”
    A hush.
    “You’re certain?” Favashi asked, her words gentle. She was the youngest of them all, the most mortal in her thinking. Her heart and soul remained unscathed by the inexorable passage of time. “If he hasn’t yet—”
    “You hope too easily,” Astaad interrupted in that harsh way of his. “He killed every one of his servants and retainers the night he left Europe.”
    “Why then did he not cross the line, do . . . what we must never do?” Favashi asked, unwilling to back down. That was why, despite her gentleness, she was the archangel who held sway over Persia. She bent, but Favashi did not break. Ever. “Surely he can be reclaimed?”
    “No,” Neha responded, as cool as Favashi was warm. In her homeland of India, snakes were worshipped as gods and Neha was worshipped as the Queen of Snakes. “I’ve made discreet inquiries with our doctors. It is too late. His blood is poison.”
    “Could they be mistaken?” Michaela asked, and perhaps there was a touch of caring in her tone.
    “No.” Neha’s eyes shifted across the room. “I sent a sample to Elijah, too.”
    “I had Hannah look at it,” Elijah said. “Neha is right. It’s too late for Uram.”
    “He is an archangel—the hunter will not be able to kill him even if she finds him,” Lijuan said, her shimmering white hair waving in a breeze that wasn’t there. With age came powers so extraordinary that seeming “human” in any sense became close to impossible. Lijuan’s eyes, too, were a strange pearl gray that existed nowhere on this earth. “One of us will have to see to that duty.”
    “You just want him dead because he threatened your power!” Michaela snapped.
    Lijuan ignored her, as Raphael might a human. Lijuan had seen archangels come and go. Only she remained. Uram had been her closest contemporary. “Raphael?”
    “The hunter is tasked with tracking Uram,” he answered, recalling the terror in Elena’s eyes when he’d told her of that task. “I’ll execute him. Do I have the Cadre’s agreement?”
    One by one, they all said, “Aye.” Even Michaela. She valued her life more than she valued Uram’s. For they all knew that Uram was in New York because of Michaela. If he crossed the final line, it was his former lover who’d become his most desired target.
    So it was done.
    Raphael stayed in the room as the Cadre took their leave one by one. It was rare for the membership to gather in one place. They were powerful beyond measure, but it was better not to tempt the young ones. Some aspired to take their place through death. It was always the young who embraced such delusions. The older ones had gained the wisdom to know that to be an archangel was to surrender part of your soul.
    Soon, only Elijah remained in the room, on the other side of the semicircle from Raphael. “Will you not go home to Hannah?”
    Elijah’s pure white wings shifted slightly as he stretched out his legs and leaned back in his chair. “She’s with me wherever I go.”
    Raphael didn’t know whether the other angel meant that literally. Some long-mated angelic pairs were rumored to share an effortless mental link, untrammeled by time or distance, but if they did, none ever talked about it. “Then you are indeed blessed.”
    “Yes.” Elijah leaned forward, balancing his elbows on his knees. “How could this have happened with Uram? Why did no one