Archangel’s Ascension (The Guild Hunter Series)

Aodhan’s laughter filled the air. “I await your vengeance, my Blue.”

Illium’s heart burst with hope, love, happiness. To see Aodhan laughing so hard, with his head thrown back and his eyes alight, to see mischief in those eyes that had been solemn too long—for that, Illium would forgive any ignominy.

Especially now that he’d heard Aodhan’s chuckle deep in the night, against the curve of his neck. The man was lethal and Illium was so susceptible to him that it was his greatest weakness.

“As I was going to tell you before you attacked me,” he said on a huff as Aodhan’s laughter faded into a deep smile that would’ve caused heart attacks had he been on the street, “the club’s not open right now. You’re safe.”

Aodhan narrowed his eyes. “Or maybe you’re plotting something.” Then he grinned again before sweeping off the balcony, his next words in Illium’s mind. Whatever it is, bring it on. I’m ready for you.

At last, thought a long-buried part of Illium’s heart, a part that had waited with loving patience for centuries. You’ve come back to me at last. All of you. Every beautiful fragment.noveldrama

Giving a battle cry of untrammeled joy, he raced after Aodhan and the two of them flew an acrobatic path to the club—and perhaps they took the long way, because this was pure delight. They rose, they fell, they cut each other off, and they took corners at dangerous speed.

Illium grinned when he caught startled faces at high windows, and flat-out laughed when Aodhan buzzed a group of shocked pedestrians—who then screamed in delight and grabbed for their cameras at having been so close to an angel no one ever saw at ground level. One of Aodhan’s feathers floated off at the same time, and a car came to a screeching halt, doors flying open as the people inside raced to grab it.

Then the tableau was past, the two of them racing to another section of the city. They weaved through residential high-rises built with the minimum permissible gap—still wide enough for an angel to fly through, but it took skill not to veer and scrape their primaries on the walls.

It took even more skill to do that while racing up, then diving down.

You’re just showing off now.

Illium grinned at that disgruntled statement, but he could feel Aodhan shadowing him. His friend and lover had to work harder to pull off the nimble movements, but he was perfectly capable of each and every one.

They emerged into clear skies before racing back over the city.

When they landed in front of Erotique side by side, slamming down onto the ground at the last second after pulling up from a high-speed dive, it was with their chests heaving and hair tumbled. “That was fun.” Aodhan’s grin was wild and of the boy who’d joined Illium in every one of his harebrained schemes as a child.

Cheeks hurting from the force of his happiness, Illium shoved a hand through his hair just as Dulce threw open the club’s door. “Oh, thank the Havens!” Her eyes were huge, the irises an intense purple possible only in a vampire who’d started out with eyes a specific shade of blue. Their color was stunning against the raven black hair she currently wore in a shoulder-length mass of waves.

Pressing a hand to her heart, her ring finger encircled by a band of gold, she said, “When I saw the speed of your landing through my office window, I thought I was going to discover you both slammed into paste on the sidewalk.”

“You wound me, Dulce.” Illium clutched at his own heart with both hands. “Are you going to let us in? Sparkle here is attracting attention—hey!” He’d been ready to catch Aodhan’s wing at his back again, had a trick up his sleeve for that, but Adi had just doused him with a bottle of cold water. “Where did you even get that?”

Aodhan capped the bottle with a smile as Illium shoved back his wet hair. “I like to be prepared.” He turned to Dulce. “We haven’t formally met. I’m Aodhan.”

Her lips were twitching. “Dulce, and I think we’re going to be fast friends,” she said. “I’ve been trying to take Illium down a peg the entire time I’ve known him and never yet succeeded.” She held open the door. “Come on in.”

Aodhan was curious about this place that he knew Illium had frequented on a regular basis for a number of years prior to the war.

Dulce, while relatively young for a vampire, clearly had a familiar relationship with him. “Nice to see you, stranger,” she said as she threw him a clean towel from behind the bar. “I thought you’d forgotten us.”

“I’ve taken up crochet,” Illium said from under the towel he was using to dry his hair. “Swallows up all my time.”

Rolling her eyes but smiling, Dulce reached up to retrieve a glass.

“I meant to ask,” Illium said as she added two others beside it, “how did the owners lure you back? Last I heard, you were happily managing your own place.”

“Fifteen percent stake,” Dulce said with a grin. “Turned out business dived without my magic touch. I have good people managing my own club, but you know me—I keep an eagle eye on all operations.”

Illium whistled. “Next thing I know, you’ll be the club boss in the city.”

Dulce’s smile made it clear that was her goal. “I know Illium’s drink of choice,” she said with a glance at Aodhan. “What’ll you have?”

Many a senior angel would’ve been annoyed—even angered—by Dulce’s familiarity, but Aodhan liked being treated as just another angel. Even a friend. He knew it was all because of Illium. He was the one who was friends with Dulce…and perhaps had once been more. The way they teased each other, it implied a depth of connection that went beyond friendship.

But Dulce wore a ring now, and Illium was Aodhan’s.

In an immortal’s life, jealousy could be a thing corrosive. Especially jealousy with no cause. Whatever had happened between the two was long in the past, as were Aodhan’s youthful love affairs.

“Do you carry honey mead?”

“I have an artisanal batch that just came in from a new supplier. I’d be interested to hear what you think of it.”

As she poured, he looked around the club. The walls were a gleaming black, noon sunlight slanting in through the high windows. It should’ve looked dingy, a place that came alive only in the night, but the club was both scrupulously clean and elegantly styled.

The glossy black walls worked as well in daylight as they did in the night, and the polished concrete floor added a hard edge that felt deliberate. People didn’t come to Erotique for soft—but neither, from what he’d heard, was it akin to the seedier flesh clubs of the gray district.

It straddled a fine line not many establishments could manage.

He looked up to the domed ceiling. “Are those swings up there, past the central drop lights?”

“Yes, new addition—the dome, too,” Dulce said. “We got hit in the war, figured why not build better? Customers love it. Too much.” A husky laugh. “We had to hire an angelic bouncer to kick off angels who were just sitting up there people-watching and not buying drinks.

“Now it’s a VIP section with a cover charge, which works nicely. Special mood lighting for that section, too, and flying bar service from young angels who want a risqué job on their résumé.” Amused affection in her tone. “I draw the line at under a hundred and fifty, though. You winged players are just babies before then.”

Ironic that this young near-immortal understood that truth better than Vixen or her former lover.

“Never in my life,” Aodhan murmured, his attention still skyward, “would I have imagined angels on swings in a club in New York, and now I want to paint the scene.”

“Come one night,” Dulce offered. “I’ll sneak you in the back—you can see everything on the security cameras if you don’t want to be on the floor.”

“Perhaps I’ll take you up on that.” He accepted the mead she handed him, while Illium—the towel draped around his neck and his hair tumbled and damp—wandered past the neatly stacked-up tables and chairs to look at a large mural on the back wall.

“This is new, too,” he said. “Are those cavorting nymphs?”

“Keep looking.” Dulce laughed, the sound throaty and low. “We told Sujata to create it as if she was high on mushrooms.”

Aodhan hadn’t heard of the artist before, but her work was eye-catching. Walking over, he pointed out a satyr twined with a snake creature wearing a tiara.

“Are you sure she wasn’t actually high?” Illium called back.

More laughter from Dulce, who was leaning on the bar sipping on a glass of blood that might well be her first meal of the day, given the working hours demanded by the club. “Knowing Sujata, it could go either way. She was impossible as a mortal and that hasn’t changed in the time she’s been a vampire except to grow more talented.”

“I would meet her,” Aodhan said, stepping back so he could take in the whole work. “While her style is different from mine, it’s bold and intriguing.” Yet in flux, but very much its own creature.

“Oh dear, mortal ancestors.” Dulce groaned. “Woman’ll be insufferable at hearing that, but I’ll pass on the word nonetheless. The things I endure for my friends.”

Smiling, Aodhan took a sip of the mead, allowed the flavor to settle. “This is excellent,” he told Dulce as they walked back to her. “Thank you for introducing me to it.”

“My pleasure.” She shot a glance at Illium, back at Aodhan. “So, spill. I know this isn’t a pleasure jaunt.”

“No,” Aodhan admitted. When he described the angel they sought, Dulce made a face. “Yes, I know her. She comes across as polite for an angel—no offense but some of your kind, especially the older ones, are utter nightmares.”

“Trust me, we know,” Illium muttered, his scowl so dark that Aodhan knew he was thinking about his arrogant asshole of a father. “Why don’t you like her?”

“Because it’s all an act.” Dulce put down her glass. “That sugar-sweet thing folks do to hide vile hearts. Pure calculation behind the eyes. She was up in the swings three days after she first appeared in the city—that’s how fast she insinuated herself into the top echelons of the club, the people who know the floor hosts and can always get a booking.”

“Social climbing wouldn’t be enough for you to dislike her,” Aodhan guessed.

“No, hell, I’d admire her if it were that alone—I mean, you have to be smooth to talk around the warriors who come in here and she managed it,” Dulce admitted. “And I clearly have a soft spot for charmers.”

Illium grinned at her pointed look.

“But,” Dulce continued, “she hit on one of my staff—a vampire not long out of Contract—and that’s a strict no-no. Staff are off-limits. If people hook up outside the club and get something going, it’s not my business. But the club is their workplace, and they deserve to feel safe doing their jobs.

“Everyone who frequents the club knows that. I cut her some slack because it was her first visit, even went and personally explained the policy. She came off sincerely apologetic and didn’t do it again inside the club…but the staff member spotted her hovering outside his window two nights later. Creeped him the fuck out.”

“She was showing off her ability to track him.” Illium slammed his glass down on the counter. “And scaring him for daring to deny her.”

“That was my take.” Dulce’s tone was as cold as Aodhan’s anger. “No proof, though, since she wasn’t caught on any cameras. Majority owners of the club said I couldn’t ban her, especially since she had so many socially influential friends.”

A curl of her lip said Dulce didn’t plan on being the minority shareholder much longer. “But I could and did ensure he had a powerful escort home each and every night. All our bouncers are good people, stepped up. I also asked one of my Tower friends—Zia—to do regular flybys if she had the time.”

“You should’ve told me, Dulce.” Illium’s voice was tight. “I’d have handled it.”

“You were my next stop if she kept escalating—you’re the nuclear option I save for worst-case scenarios. But Zia did the flybys, even roped in a few of her squadron to join in, make it clear he was under angelic protection.

“It must’ve been enough to scare Vixen off, because she stopped paying him any attention at all—prior to that, she’d used to watch him when she thought she was unobserved. Could be she doesn’t actually understand cameras. Some of the old ones are like that. Anyway, it was eerie how totally she ignored him afterward. As if he didn’t exist.”

Either Dulce was right and the show of dangerous angelic oversight had scared Vixen off, or she’d already found and fixated on Marco by then. “Do you know if a vampire named Marco Corvino frequented this club? He was young, still under—”

“Marco?” Her face turned pale, her fingers tight on the glass she’d picked back up. “Of course I knew Marco. We were from the same neighborhood—two and a half centuries apart, but I still have descendants there, drop by now and then.

“He wouldn’t normally have been allowed into the club because the entry prerequisite for vamps is post-Contract, but I let him in during the quiet nights. Kid was so fresh and shiny, he might as well have been polished. He thought Erotique was the wildest place in the city.”

“Such innocence.” Illium’s joke was gentle, the hand he touched to Dulce’s compassionate. “I’m sorry you lost him.”

“Yeah, fucking Lij—” A pause, a sharp look at Illium. “Vixen?”

“Looking likely. Could she have met him here?”

“Yes. She’s a regular from before the war, here almost every night.” Her jaw worked. “I knew I should’ve booted her!”

“You did what you could,” Aodhan said. “She’s responsible for the rest.”

Dulce’s eyes gleamed with an edge of red, but she said, “Bitch is still in the city. Looks different than before the club shut down during the war, but she was in here two nights ago. Yellow hair, can’t recall the current contact lens shade, but I’m pretty sure I can get you her address—night she was here, she took home a vamp whose name I remember.”

Pulling out her phone without waiting for their response, she made a call, was blunt in her request. “Don’t ask me why I need Vixen’s address, and I won’t mention your tryst to your wife. And don’t you dare warn Vixen or you’ll never enter this club again.”

A pause.

“Pleasure doing business with you.” She scribbled the address down on a piece of paper after hanging up. “What a slime. I thought they deserved each other. As for his wife, she’s smarter than him by a country mile, knows he’s a serial cheater, but their relationship is their business.”

She pushed across the paper. “Get that bitch.”