He wasn’t holding back.
It was an aphrodisiac beyond compare.
Had anyone been able to see through the glamour, they would’ve witnessed the ocean explode with a hidden sun.
The next day, Elena took her knives and walked into a small practice ring low down in the Tower—she didn’t need the massive space of the main ring. Not today. It was time she got back to strength training—and figured out her current body. She could compensate for weak muscles and shaky arms, but she had to see if her hand-eye coordination had survived the chrysalis.
She was only ten minutes into it when Dmitri walked in dressed in black cargo pants and a black T-shirt decorated with the faded logo of a metal band. “Space is taken,” she said with a scowl. “I booked it last night.”
“Came to see if you needed any help.” A smirk. “I’m feeling sorry for you since you’re so skinny and pathetic right now.”
Elena gave him her most fake smile. “Want to act as my target? I’m sure it’ll improve my accuracy one hundred percent.”
Dmitri raised both eyebrows, then smiled, slow and sensual. “Why not?”
And so began the craziest throwing session of Elena’s life. Dmitri was a deadly fast vampire and her muscles remained wobbly, but it turned out that her hand-eye coordination was just fine. So was her ability to think on her feet. Ten minutes. Twenty. Thirty.
She threw a second blade on the heels of the first, after he’d already committed to his avoidance strategy.
It slammed home in Dmitri’s shoulder. The hilt quivered from the impact.
They both froze for a taut, silent second. Until the wet patch on his T-shirt began to spread. “Fuck! Get that out right now! Honor will goddamn murder me.” She’d never expected to score such a solid hit—Dmitri was too fast, too experienced. “I’m getting you some blood.”
Elena ran to the fridge just outside the training ring, grabbed a bottle. Powerful as he was, the infusion of blood should cause the wound to heal in a matter of minutes. Well before Honor laid eyes on it. Because it was one thing to threaten her friend’s bastard of a husband, quite another to wound him badly.
Hilts didn’t quiver that way unless the blade had hit bone.
Dmitri had finished pulling out the knife by then. Flipping it around, he lobbed it back to her. “It’s just a scratch. Like being bitten by a mosquito.”
“Shut up and drink this.” She thrust the bottle into his hand.
“Such solicitude. I’m touched.”
Tendrils of fur and champagne wrapped around her, decadent chocolate sinking into her taste buds at the same time. Gritting her teeth, she backed off. “Scent games? You want me to stab you again?”
Having finished half the bottle, he lowered it and shrugged. “I’m the one bleeding.” He touched the wet patch—which had stopped its terrifying spread at last. “No more mollycoddling you, sweet Elieanora.”
“You’re an asshole,” she said past the avalanche of drugging scent, though her lips wanted to kick up. The asshole happened to be the most powerful vampire in Raphael’s territory, brutal and deadly—and he’d just told her that he was taking off the kid gloves.
As a compliment, it was a damn fine one.
Shit, she owed him now. He’d been nice to her. It was an utterly horrifying thought. But not enough to stifle her grin. Her hands closed on the hilts of her blades. “Ready for round two, or does bubby-wubby need another bottle?”
Dark eyes gleamed, champagne spun in her head, and Dmitri moved.
Her blades flew like silver fire, streaking through the air with lethal accuracy.
23
One month after the ridiculously fun session with Dmitri—not that either one of them would admit that even on pain of hideous torture—and Elena wasn’t yet as muscled as she would’ve liked. Her weight was only up to eighty-five percent of her normal, so she still felt a bit too insubstantial, but she no longer had any appearance of illness.
The sex mojo had returned twice more in the week after the knife session. Her body had stopped glitching after the second boost. After that, anything she’d achieved, she’d done so through teeth-clenched hard work.
When she applied to the Guild to return to active duty, Sara said, “You have to pass the post-injury physical.”
Elena would’ve been insulted at any other response. Guild medics gave her a clean bill of health, though lightning fissures did still break out over her body at times—as if a bite of Raphael’s power had woven itself into her bones, the heart in her chest strong enough to manage archangelic energies.
Her status on the taxonomic tree however, continued to give everyone fits. She was immortal, of that there was no doubt. Not an almost-immortal like a vampire, not a baby immortal as she’d been before the chrysalis, but equivalent to an adult angel of around three hundred.
Except she wasn’t an angel. Her DNA was distinctly odd and the only wings she had were phantom ones that tormented her with how real they felt. At times, she had to check in a mirror, confirm there was nothing on her back, no graceful arches, no feathers of midnight and dawn.
Elena struggled with that until Naasir, of all people, decided to pay her a visit. “I am the only one of my kind,” he said to her as they sat on the edge of a balcony, their feet hanging over it and the metallic silver of his hair choppy and striking against the rich dark of his skin, the undertone of gold reminiscent of a leopard’s coat.
Elena pinned him with a narrow-eyed gaze. “Do tell me more about your unique kind. I’m all ears.”
Naasir threw back his head and laughed, a beautiful wild creature who delighted in playing this game with her. She’d forbidden Raphael from answering the question, from telling her of Naasir’s origins or where he fit in a world of angels and vampires and mortals; this was a mystery she’d solve herself.
Naasir leaned in close, the metallic silver of his eyes in no way human, and whispered, “I have the pelt of a tiger sometimes.” He held out his arm and, as she watched, his skin turned striped.
Gasping, she grabbed his arm without thinking. She and Naasir weren’t close as she was with Illium, but he didn’t reject her touch. Rather, he sat with the patience—and smirk—of a smug feline.
“I came here because Jessamy told me that you are now a one-being, too.” A penetrating glance, his head cocked in a way that wasn’t human, wasn’t angel, wasn’t vampire. “Before, I was lonely. Then I found my family.”
She knew he was talking about Dmitri and Raphael and all the others of the Seven.
“Then I found Andi.” Pure delight at the thought of his mate. “I am a one-being, but I am not alone. You are not alone.”
No, she wasn’t alone. And she was deeply, fiercely loved. “Thank you,” she said to the wild creature who’d come such a long way because he’d known she needed him. “Will you stay?”
“Only today.” A smile that was all teeth. “I will go home via the India-China border. The current quiet makes my fur stand up the wrong way—I smell the darkness building. I’ll spy for Jason.”
“Yeah, I have that itchy feeling, too.” As if a volcano was getting ready to blow—but none of the archangels or their spymasters had found anything of note. Even the unexplained disappearances in China had stopped. So had the ice storms, geothermal disturbances, flooding, and swarms of wasps.
The world was at peace.
But as Caliane had pointed out: “The eye of the storm is always dead calm.”
Everyone was waiting for storm winds to hit again.