Archangel's Consort by Nalini Singh Read Free Book Online Page A

more, until even though his hair was pulled off his face in a neat queue, she could only just glean his eyes. “I was meeting with the Sire when the message came through.”
    Kneeling beside Celia’s body, her wings pressed against pine needles and innumerable crushed leaves that scented the air in a green perfume soaked with last night’s rain, Elena frowned. “Why did it come to the Tower? It should’ve been directed to the Guild.”
    “The Guild Director herself called Raphael when she realized your sisters might be involved.” Jason’s tone was calm, so calm she’d have thought him unaffected if she hadn’t seen the black flames in his eyes before he used the shadows to his advantage. “We were able to get here faster than any of the hunters who might’ve been called.”
    Thank you, Sara. With that, Elena put everything else aside. Celia deserved her full attention. “You pulled her out of the water?”
    “Yes. I thought I glimpsed a sign of life.”
    But the young girl was gone, her face holding the horror of her last moments on this earth. Her skin might’ve been a vibrant caramel shade in life, but in death, it was a dull gray brown, the blood that pumped through her veins having spilled out of the ripped and torn flesh of her neck, her chest.
    “Has the M.E. been called?” Since hunters were often the first people to find a vampire’s victim or victims, they were trained in basic crime-scene protocols during their years at Guild Academy and authorized to inspect bodies—but it was always a good political measure for the Guild to keep the authorities in the loop.
    “The Guild Director stated she would take care of it.”
    Leaning in, she examined the neck, trying to see only the pieces, not the whole. Not Celia, the girl who had been, but simply the brutalized flesh of a neck. And lower down, the ground meat of a chest that was still as flat as a boy’s. “He was feeding in a frenzy,” she murmured, “tore through her skin, ripped it up badly enough that he exposed bone.” Nothing unusual there, except that Ignatius hadn’t been in bloodlust. “Do you know why he’d feed like this if he was lucid?”
    “Most vampires are neat.” Jason’s wings rustled slightly as he resettled them, and the sound was a welcome reminder that the painful silence of these woods wasn’t the only reality. “It’s a matter of pride—tearing up a body not only denotes lack of control, it means a vampire loses his or her willing partners very fast. Pain isn’t why most humans take a vampiric lover.”
    A flash of memory, Dmitri’s dark head bending over the arched neck of a woman who’d been all but purring for his blood kiss. And later, in the Refuge, Naasir with his eyes of silver and scent of a tiger on the hunt, a woman’s shuddering moan. “Yeah.” She sat up on her haunches, her wings spread out on the forest floor. “Can you help me turn her?”
    Jason did so in silence.
    The girl’s back was unmarked from what Elena could see. “That’s fine for now. I’ll attend the autopsy, make sure I didn’t miss anything.”
    Noises came from within the woods as they turned Celia gently onto her back once again—the murmur of voices, footsteps. It didn’t surprise her when Jason melted into the shadows until she could only see him because she knew he was there—unlike Illium, Raphael’s spymaster didn’t like the spotlight. Even tight-mouthed Galen had friends, a woman he appeared to love, but Elena had never seen Jason with anyone when it didn’t involve his duties.
    “I heard a rumor you were back”—a familiar male voice—“didn’t believe it.”
    Elena looked up to see death-scene investigator Luca Aczél doing a pretty good job of keeping his surprise at her wings to himself. With his silver-touched black hair, patrician features, and long pianist’s fingers, she’d always thought Luca would look more at home in a boardroom than surrounded by violence, but there was no question that