It hurt to see him, to know what he must've suffered. Vampires didn't lose consciousness easily - and, given the savagery of the attack, she'd bet his attackers had kicked his head last. That way, he would've been conscious for almost the entirety of the ordeal. "Do you know who he is?"
"No. His brain is too bruised." Raphael slid his arms under the vampire, a carefulness to his movements that made her heart squeeze. "I need to get him to a physician."
"I'll wait and - " She froze as he shifted the body to get a better hold. "Raphael."
The air was suddenly kissed by frost. "I see it."
There was a square of jarringly unbruised skin on the vampire's breastbone, as if it had been left specifically unharmed. The cold-blooded nature of the beating made her stomach curdle. These peoplewould have attacked his brain last. "What is that?" Because while the vampire's skin wasn't bruised, it wasn't unmarked. A symbol had been burned into his flesh. An elongated rectangle, slightly flared at the bottom, sat atop an inverted curve, which in turn covered a small bowl. Holding it all up was a long, thin line.
"It's asekhem , a symbol of power from a time when archangels ruled as pharaohs and were called the scions of the gods."
Elena felt her face flush hot and cold. "Someone wants to take Uram's place."
Raphael didn't tell her not to jump to conclusions. "Do your track. Illium will watch over you until I return."
She looked up as Raphael rose but couldn't isolate Illium's blue wings even against the light show of the approaching sunset. Thankfully, her legs waited to tremble until after Raphael had left. Her archangel had finally seemed to hear her today - she had a feeling he'd think long and hard before ever again forcing her to act against her will.
But there was nothing to stop him from picking her up bodily and dumping her in bed if he realized the extent of her exhaustion. Her wings felt like hundred-pound weights on her back, her calf muscles so much jelly. Blowing out a breath, she dug up a fraction more stamina from somewhere and started circling out from the spot where they'd found the body, glad that this area, while not abandoned, appeared shut up.
As a result, there weren't a lot of scents to muddy the trail. The tree in the corner, some kind of a cedar, its branches bowed with the weight of its foliage, didn't trump the smell of pine trees in autumn, their needles littering the earth. And that scent belonged to the vampire who'd been beaten into an unrecognizable pulp. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't find a single other new scent.
There was also no evidence of activity on the ground, the paving stones clean, but for a few stray leaves and some clearly delineated spots of blood near the dark smudge where they'd discovered the body. Examining the scene with extreme care so as not to compromise any trace evidence, she confirmed the splatter was contained within a radius of about one foot.
"Dumped from a low height," she said to Raphael when he landed beside her. "And since this place is rife with wings . . ." Her body swayed.
Raphael had her in the iron of his embrace before she could even register the lapse.
"Then you can do nothing. We'll speak to the vampire when he wakes."
"The site? Needs to be processed, just in case."
"Dmitri's on the way with a team."
It went against the grain to give up without a fight, but her body was shutting down on her, her wings threatening to drag their way through the blood. "I want to know what the victim says." The words came out slurred, her last thought that anyone cold-blooded enough to brand a living being as a message was probably not going to be an improvement on Uram.
Sire.
Easing quietly from bed less than an hour after he'd placed Elena on the sheets, her wings spread out in a caress of midnight and dawn as she lay on her stomach, Raphael pulled on a pair of pants and met Dmitri in the hallway outside. The vampire's face was expressionless, but Raphael had known him for hundreds of years. "What did you discover?"
"Illium recognized him."
"How?"
"Apparently the male was wearing a ring he won from Illium in a game of poker."
Raphael had seen the vampire's fingers. Most had been shattered so badly they'd been nothing more than crushed pebbles in a sack of skin. And yet, that skin hadn't been broken. That level of brutality took both time and an emotionless kind of focus. "Who?"
"His name is Noel. He's one of ours."
Raphael felt his anger turn granite-hard. He'd allow no one to butcher his people. Before he could speak, Dmitri said, "Why didn't you tell me he'd been branded?" The words fell like mines between them, a scab hiding still raw wounds.
Chapter 5
"The burn will fade." Raphael held the vampire's gaze. "It will fade."
Dmitri said nothing for several moments before drawing in a long breath. "The healers found something stuffed in Noel's chest cavity. The ones who took him broke him open, then allowed him to heal enough to conceal it."
It was another example of the methodical nature of the beating. "What was it?"
Dmitri withdrew a dagger from his pocket. It had a small but distinctiveG on the pommel, the symbol of the Hunters Guild. A cold blade, rage unsheathed, sliced through Raphael's veins. "He plans to become Cadre by destroying what another archangel created."
The old ones saw Elena as exactly that - Raphael's creation, his possession. They didn't understand that she held his heart, held it so utterly that there was nothing he wouldn't do, no line he wouldn't cross to keep her safe. "Did you find anything at the scene that could lead to the identity of the one behind this?"