Read Guild Hunter 03 - Archangel's Consort for Free Online Page A

being a considerable distance off the ground. “How did he get up?” Most vamps wouldn’t have been able to jump that high. However ... She pressed her nose to the wall, drew in a breath.
    Crushed glass, oak leaves.
    Then she saw the streak of red by where she’d placed her right hand, palm-down.
    Dropping it, she looked around her feet as she spoke. “He climbed up and down like a fucking spider.” There was only a subset of vampires who could pull off that particular trick. “Should help narrow down his identity.”
    “His name is Ignatius,” Raphael said to her surprise—just as she glimpsed droplets of dark liquid on the grass. “I felt his mind turn bloodred when I touched it.”
    Elena wasn’t sure of Raphael’s range, but if he’d touched Ignatius’s mind, then there was something wrong here. “You weren’t able to execute him.” She followed the trail across the manicured green of the inner lawn, through the heavy archway carved out in the middle of the long school building at the other end, and into the woods that normally provided a serene backdrop—but today seemed an ominous mass, the leaves dull beneath a sky that had shifted from azure to dirty gray in the minutes she’d been inside.
    Not answering her implied question, Raphael rose into the air as she tracked Ignatius through the woods, her wings catching on branches and thorny bushes. Wincing at the uncomfortable sensations, she tucked them even tighter to her body but didn’t slow her progress through the trees. She hesitated at one point, certain she felt the tug of something to her right, but the trail of oak and glass was vivid straight ahead.
    Shaking off the impulse to turn, explore, she continued the track. Jason’s black-winged form appeared out of the looming dark of the woods less than five minutes later—he stood unmoving as stone, guarding a body that lay beside the placid waters of a small pond.
    The girl was still wearing her school uniform, her entire frame soaked. Her blouse should’ve been white. It was a nauseating salmon pink, and shredded as Elena knew her flesh would’ve been shredded. Strangling the pity that threatened to derail her, Elena didn’t move toward the body—her priority was to track the killer, to make certain no other girl would end up a broken doll beside a pond that should’ve been a place of play, not a macabre bath flavored with death and horror.
    You were right , she sent to Raphael, he washed in the pond, cut off the scent trail . But he would have had to get out at some point. So, leaving Jason to continue his silent vigil, she began walking across the moss-laden stones that rimmed the water gone murky with churned up silt ... and other, darker things.
    It only took a minute to find him again. The scent trail was weaker, drenched in water until the oak alone remained, but that was all she needed. Drawing the crisp forest air into her lungs, she began to run, determined to hunt the vampire to ground. He was fast, she realized almost at once, glimpsing the tracks he’d left behind in the damp patches of earth caused by last night’s storm. In contrast, she was no longer as quick and agile as she’d once been, unused to running with wings.
    But it wasn’t a disadvantage, not today. The vampire had slowed down maybe five hundred yards into his escape, probably figuring the water had erased his scent. It would have if he’d taken a bit more care. Then again, Raphael had said the girl’s body had been in the water, too. Her murderer had likely dragged her in there with him because he couldn’t stop feeding.
    The end result was that given the small size of the pond, the blood and death had polluted it, destroying its ability to wash the vampire clean of his sickening acts of violence. Good girl , she thought, speaking to the child who lay so motionless under wings of midnight black. You marked the bastard even in death. Elena would hunt him down using that mark.
    Half an hour into the