Blood of Angels (6 page)

“It felt shit,” she said truthfully. Béla’s lips stretched, and then he was gone.

Angyalka enjoyed the peace of the “graveyard shift” as much as she enjoyed the noise and excitement of the early evening. For decades, there had been no need of a bodyguard during the predawn spell: not only was Angyalka known in the vampire community to be fast and fierce, but to be barred from the club had become distinctly uncool for any vampire. So György’s chief function was checking for humans outside while Angyalka hung over the bar reading, eavesdropping, or even talking with other vampires. If any came in.

A few did, the loners plus one or two of the more sociable variety who’d been here earlier, mingling with the humans. Judging by the rosy appearance of the latter, they’d used their “holy hour” to drink from their human conquests. Angyalka poured the odd drink while she thought about the vampire hunter upstairs in her bed and wondered if she’d be kept here until dawn.

Many vampires were at Maximilian’s, of course, although surely the party would have packed in by now. Angyalka suspected Mihaela had deliberately chosen a midweek night so that the humans would leave early, and so limit the hours of contact between them and her vampire guests.

She felt another of those twinges of regret. She would have liked to see Mihaela in her own territory, her own home, to see Maximilian there, and their adopted child, Robbie, whom they’d brought here to the Angel once to warn the vampire community that he was untouchable. Apparently, being telepathic, Robbie had a penchant for vampire company and was used to taking off in pursuit of it without a word to anyone. Not all vampires considered children off the menu, and very few would look a gift horse in the mouth. Maximilian had his work cut out.

Oddly, he seemed to thrive on it and on his unexpected relationship with the prickly hunter. Angyalka couldn’t grudge him his few years of happiness before Mihaela and Robbie inevitably died.

Abruptly, she sprang upright, her mouth opening in a silent cry of loss.

György, her employee of decades, was dead. True dead. His passing penetrated her reverie as nothing else had, not even the presence outside, already fading, of hunter.

Not István, she thought as she bolted for the club door and the stairs. He was asleep upstairs, and besides, it hadn’t
felt
like István. The other vampires in the club were staring at her. They too had felt György’s death.

A vampire was gliding up the stairs. Ignoring him, she simply jumped down the stairwell. Her legs were already pumping for the door as soon as she landed. For the second time that night, she wrenched open a door to outside and felt the cool, fresh air on her face. But this time, there was no one to fight. No hunter, no human presence at all. Not even a vampire. Just a sharp wooden stick lying in the gutter where György had fallen.

She reached out, imagined she felt György’s dust slipping between her fingers.

“Good-bye, my friend,” she whispered and let the door fall back on the outside world.

More slowly, she turned and began to climb the stairs. Something was wrong, very wrong. Two hunters here, separately, in one night, and one dead vampire employee. That couldn’t be coincidence.

Unexpectedly, a vampire whooshed by her, running. The same unknown vampire who’d passed her going the other way. He was young, terrified, excited, and his mind leaked like a sieve.

Jesus!

She began to run, yelling telepathically as she went to all the vampires in her bar.
Get out of there! Now!

She wrenched open the club door, flying inside just as an explosion tore her ears and her bar.

Vampires, furniture, glasses, and bottles flew outward. Angyalka threw up her arms and began to chant, drawing all the power of the Angel about her and forcing it around the walls of her world that should have been so safe and untouchable.

Screaming silence filled her ears. She couldn’t move.

Then Saloman spoke in her mind. “Angyalka. What the hell just happened?”

She said, “Someone blew up the Angel.”

Chapter Five

A vampire bolted out of the Angel doorway and ran down the street as if all the fiends in hell were after him. Except that he laughed.

Jacob, Basilio, and Gabby watched him go.

“So many vampires,” Jacob murmured, still awed by the presence of so many undead in one city. They’d been all over it tonight, looking for Saloman or news of him. They hadn’t learned much. When this was done, Jacob reckoned he’d be better off back in New York where there wasn’t so much competition for human blood. He said, “Surely one of them must be
him
?”

“Saloman,” Basilio murmured, lifting his nose to the night air. “I can feel him, almost as if he’s hovering over the city. Which, of course, he isn’t. He’s making his presence in the city known while still masking his precise location. Clever. And difficult. His power is—awesome.”

“Greater than yours?” Jacob asked innocently.

Basilio wasn’t fooled. “Considerably,” he snapped. “That’s why we’re here.”

To find a way of shaking off Saloman’s restrictive rule, especially in America. Jacob rather suspected Basilio also wanted to eject Travis and dominate America himself. After all, he’d waited years for Travis and Severin to take each other out so he could pick up the pieces. Lazy bastard. Only Travis’s turnaround and unexpected acceptance of Saloman as overlord had roused Basilio to contemplate direct intervention, and even then only because Jacob had come to him with a vague plan of ousting Saloman by stealth. Head-on obviously didn’t work, as Saloman’s squashing of all those vampire revolts last year had proved.

“Do you think he’s in there?” Jacob asked, nodding at the neglected, uninspiring building in front of them. There was an art shop at the far end, but the hum of vampire presence seemed to come from above, along with the echo of humans, which was pretty bizarre.

“No,” Basilio said uncompromisingly. “But it might well be the place to learn something. Some sort of social gathering. I can’t smell many humans there at the moment—maybe one—but they’ve certainly been here earlier tonight.”

“Like Travis’s gambling den in New York?” Jacob asked with deliberate provocation.

“Let’s go and see,” Gabby urged, already reaching for the grubby door through which vampires had passed very recently. A featureless angel was carved into the stone above. For some reason, it caught Jacob’s attention, and he was staring at it when an almighty explosion ripped the door from Gabby’s hands and slammed it in their faces.

The force knocked all three of them off their feet and into the middle of the road. From his prone position there, Jacob found he was still staring at the stone angel which seemed to glow in the darkness like a light bulb. It looked beautiful now, shining, fine, perfect lines and the most expressive, enigmatic face…

The whole building shook, almost bulged outward, and Jacob was sure they were about to be buried under the rubble. He shook his head to clear it, to force himself to rise and escape. Then, amazingly, the world steadied. And the angel wasn’t glowing at all. That, presumably, had been his own blasted head.

“What the fuck?” Jacob hauled himself to his feet.

“Somebody just blew the building up,” Basilio said dryly.

“It’s still standing,” Jacob pointed out.

“Somebody contained the explosion.”

“That
must
have been Saloman,” Jacob said, excited.

“No, but there’s another damned strong vampire in there.”

“Shall we go in?” Gabby asked, brushing down her jeans and top.

“Let’s wait and see what happens for a bit,” Basilio said, striding down the road toward the art shop.

Jacob and Gabby trailed after him. It was a bit of a tight squeeze, all three of them in the narrow doorway.

“Not exactly discreet,” Jacob murmured after a while when nothing happened.

Basilio regarded him with contempt. “Discreet enough. I’m masking us all too. Don’t you have any knowledge of your own people, your own power?”

“I know I have a knack of separating fools from their money.”

“Humans can do that,” Basilio snapped.

“Not with my flair,” Jacob insisted, unabashed by the older vampire’s derision.

But the others had become distracted by the sound of a car driven at breakneck speed from the direction of the river. An instant later, something large and black whizzed around the corner, screamed to a halt outside the Angel door and emptied itself of a man and a woman.

Correction, a vampire and a woman, only…

Jacob shivered. Only what? For an instant, something overwhelmed him. Power. From the vampire, who was in too big a hurry to mask anymore. Or perhaps he was really too powerful to care. He was tall, with long, black hair streaming out behind him as he leapt in the doorway.

“Saloman,” Basilio whispered.

The human companion glanced back over her shoulder. Red-blonde hair and pale, perfect skin, deceptively delicate bones. Jacob had seen her kill. He knew she’d slain the powerful vampire Severin in New York a year ago. Miss Not-Quite-a-Hunter.

“And Elizabeth Silk,” Jacob said softly. “The Awakener.” So it was true. She really was Saloman’s companion. He supposed it explained a lot.

****

István woke with one of those jarring, fall-off-a-cliff moments, only in his dream it was a sound, a loud bang that shook him like an explosion, and he woke with a jolt, his heart hammering.

Angyalka’s soft, sexy body was no longer beside him. He couldn’t help being disappointed in that, though he supposed it was as well for many reasons. Not least of which, the dreams of falling he’d had since Luk threw him off the book stacks in the hunters’ library.

Explosions were new to his nightmares, though. He listened intently. The building was absolutely silent and still. And yet something felt—off. Remembering the lamp by the bed, he reached out and switched it on. His clothes sat illuminated in a neat pile on a white wooden chair, so he stretched farther and dragged the chair nearer to him until he could grab up his jacket and rummage in the pocket.

The instruments were still there. Risky to have left them while he slept. He paused, staring at the environmental reader. The temperature was rising, the air was hot, and thick with dust particles. And it was getting worse.

From instinct, he sprang out of bed and grabbed his jeans. Warning pain shot up his back, and he staggered as he climbed into his jeans, stuffed the stake in his pocket, and grabbed up his instruments before bolting barefoot and bare-chested through Angyalka’s flat to the lift. But of course, it wouldn’t come when he called it—he didn’t have her code.

He wrenched open the door with his fingers and peered down into the darkness. From the flat light, he could make out the roof of the lift. He could smell it now, the stench of wreckage and explosive and charred flesh. His blood ran cold in his veins, but he had no time to speculate. He shot the bungee reel into the roof of the elevator shaft, tied the rope around himself, and lowered himself down to the lift roof. From there, it was easy to climb through the trapdoor into the elevator and wrench open the doors.

The smell was worse here, but the staff-area light was on, and apart from the doorway, there seemed to be little damage. He stepped over a broken chair into the bar—and carnage.

Most of the club lights had broken, but enough flickered and zinged around the room to illuminate the scene. There was broken glass everywhere. A chunk of the bar counter had disappeared amid the wreckage of broken tables and chairs and unidentifiable pieces of wood. In the midst of it, the slight, chic figure of Angyalka was hefting rubble off a groaning man.

István moved through the nightmare toward her, pausing only feet away to lift something—the missing chunk of bar—off someone whose eyes glared at him from below it. A vampire.

“What the hell happened?” István demanded, crouching to brush off the rest of the debris from the injured vampire.

Angyalka swung on him. Her eyes blazed liked burning coals, and her fangs were showing. “You tell me, hunter,” she hissed.

István shrugged and shoved a table off the vampire’s foot.

“I mean it,” Angyalka said, and suddenly she was right beside him, jerking him to his feet. “Tell me.” Her grip on his wrist was like steel. There was no teasing in her eyes now, only fury and something very like grief. She shook with it.

István didn’t pull away. “You think
I
did this? From up there?”

Maybe something about his carefully calm, reasonable voice got through to her, for the certainty in her eyes dulled to confusion. Her stare dropped and dropped farther, and then, as if suddenly aware of his bare chest and the intimacy of their position, she threw off his wrist like a poisonous insect.

Rubble crunched underfoot, and they both swung around to face the club entrance. The door, although still on its hinges, was wedged open by debris. Saloman and Elizabeth walked in and paused to take in their surroundings.

István looked with them. A vampire had been impaled by a large piece of wood very close to his heart, and he seemed to be wasting away. Several others, including the vampire at István’s feet, in obvious and acute pain, appeared to be slowly healing from horrific injuries.

Elizabeth took one look at István and Angyalka amid the wreckage, then went straight to the dying vampire. Her triage was obviously becoming quicker and more efficient.

Saloman picked his way across the floor to István and Angyalka and stood looking from one to the other. “What happened?”

“Someone killed György outside the front door,” Angyalka said in a small, tight voice, almost like the humans who survived vampire attacks and strove to hold things together, to push back the insanity.

Who the hell was György? One of her staff?

She said, “I felt his death and ran downstairs. A vampire passed me—I barely noticed him at the time, only as I came back in, he was fleeing. I caught a glimpse of his mind, knew he’d done something terrible in here. I tried to warn the others, but before they could get out, the place blew up.”

She spoke carefully, without expression. As if, somewhere, she still retained enough pride to hide that she’d never felt so lost in her entire existence. István’s throat closed up as he realized she was falling apart, held together only by the cold, terrible rage focused for some reason on him. Although she’d just said a vampire had done this.

Saloman said, “Your magic lit up most of Budapest. You contained the explosion very cleverly.”

István stared at her. Her gaze flickered to him and back to Saloman as she shrugged and muttered, “It was instinct.”

“And strength.” His eyes were intense, impressed as István had never seen them, not since the day Elizabeth had enchanted the entrances to their safe house in Turkey. “Even I have underestimated you, Angyalka. No fire, no death. Thanks to you.”

Interesting… Yet she suffered.

“György is dead,” she whispered. “Igor is dying.”

Saloman placed his hands on her shoulders. “We grieve for György. Elizabeth will save Igor.”

“Can she do that?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said quietly, rising and going to the next injured vampire. She wasted no more words, but it seemed to be enough for Angyalka.

She swallowed. “There’s more,” she said harshly. “I think a hunter killed György. I sensed his presence outside at the moment of death and then he—or she—fled.”

A hunter? Her fury with him was at least more understandable, only…she had to be mistaken.

Even Saloman frowned his displeasure at the accusation. “Your vampire who planted the bomb could have killed György to get in.”

“Why should he? György would have
let
him in.”

“Not if he was leaking his intention to bomb the place.”

“Then why was the hunter here?” Angyalka demanded.

“Why is there a hunter
still
here?” Saloman asked.

Good question. Bare-chested and barefooted, he must surely be indicating the wrong answer. “Long story,” he said. “Involving human thugs.”

Angyalka looked István in the eye with contempt while she answered Saloman. “So I can ask him the question I just asked you.”

“
István
was the hunter you sensed outside?” Saloman’s incredulity was obvious.

“No. He was the decoy.”

“Decoy?” István repeated, startled. “If you remember, I was already trying to leave when your disgruntled customers turned up.”

She waved that away impatiently. “But you
were
here. Why?”

István closed his mouth, aware of Elizabeth’s suddenly interested gaze, as well as Saloman’s and Angyalka’s. He sighed. “I wanted to talk to you about angels.”

Elizabeth’s lips twitched as she brushed past them to the vampire at István’s feet. He shuffled out of her way while she knelt and smoothed the injured vampire’s brow. She closed her eyes, slid her hand down over his ribs. The vampire’s lips twisted, then straightened, and the strain in his eyes began to vanish. He even smiled at Elizabeth who, however, was beginning to look as ill as those she’d just helped.

“You should take Elizabeth home,” István said abruptly.

Elizabeth rose. “Hey. All grown up. I remember the way.”

“I have a better idea,” Saloman said smoothly. “
You
take Elizabeth home, while Angyalka and I make arrangements.”

Elizabeth opened her mouth as if she would object, though in the end, she said nothing. Perhaps she realized István too needed her healing—she must have seen his new cuts and bruises from tonight’s fight—although he wouldn’t let her, not after what she’d just done here. She glanced at Saloman, then at Angyalka, and held her hand out to the vampiress.

Angyalka looked vaguely surprised, although, perhaps from leftover human instinct, she clasped it. For an instant, the two women’s eyes met. Angyalka’s widened perceptibly. Something tugged at her lips. She didn’t speak, but her lips formed a silent
thank you
. Perhaps she said the word in Elizabeth’s mind.

Whatever, she didn’t look at István at all as Saloman threw him his own jacket and he turned to leave with Elizabeth. For many years it had been István’s pleasure as well as his job to piss off vampires, but for some reason, this didn’t feel good. He supposed he wasn’t used to kissing vampires either and advised himself derisively to get over it.