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on them without sliding and falling to your death. “No, thank you,” she muttered, feeling the wind whip her hair off her face as she waited with the door partly open. “Raphael!”
    Maybe, she thought, the architect hadn’t been avant-garde at all. Maybe he’d simply hated angels. That sounded good to her about then. She might admire their wings, but she had no misapprehensions about their inner goodness. “Inner goodness. Hah!” She snorted and suddenly he was landing in front of her, his wings flooding her vision.
    She backed up a step without meaning to and by the time she recovered, he was inside and closing the door. Damn it, she hated that he could make her react like a green recruit tracking her first vamp. If it went on like this much longer, she’d lose all respect for herself. “What?” she asked, folding her arms.
    “Is this how you welcome all your guests?” His mouth held no hint of a smile, yet it was sensuality personified, lush and ultimately seductive.
    She took another step backward. “Stop it.”
    “What?” A hint of genuine confusion in those blue, blue eyes.
    “Nothing.” Get a grip, Elena. “Why are you here?”
    He stared at her for several long seconds. “I’d like to talk to you about the hunt.”
    “So talk.”
    He looked around the confines of the landing no one ever used. The metal stairs were rusted, the single lightbulb yellow and on the verge of going out. Flicker. Flicker. A two-second stretch. Then flicker, flicker. The pattern kept repeating, driving her half crazy. Raphael was obviously not impressed either. “Not here, Elena. Show me to your rooms.”
    She scowled at the order. “No. This is work—we’ll go to Guild headquarters and use a meeting room.”
    “It matters little to me.” A shrug that drew her attention to the breadth of his shoulders, the powerful arch of his wings. “I can fly there within minutes. It’ll take you at least half an hour, perhaps longer—there has been an accident on the road leading to your Guild.”
    “An accident?” Her mind flooded with the gruesome details of the “accident” she’d just been reading about. “Sure you didn’t arrange it?”
    He gave her an amused look. “If I wished to, I could force you to do anything I wanted. Why would I go to the trouble of such maneuverings?”
    The bald way he pointed out his power, and her lack of it, made her fingers itch for a blade.
    “You shouldn’t look at me in that fashion, Elena.”
    “Why?” she asked, prodded by some heretofore unknown suicidal streak. “Scared?”
    He leaned a fraction closer. “My lovers have always been warrior women. Strength intrigues me.”
    She refused to let him play with her like this, even if her body disagreed. Vehemently. “Do knives intrigue you, too? Because touch me and I will cut you up. I don’t care if you throw me off the nearest balcony.”
    He seemed to pause, as if thinking. “That is not how I would choose to punish you. It’d end far too quickly.”
    And she remembered that this was no human male she was parrying with. This was Raphael, the archangel who’d broken every single bone in a vampire’s body to prove a point. “I won’t let you into my home, Raphael.” Into her haven.
    A silence weighted with the crushing pressure of a hidden threat. She remained still, sensing she’d pushed him far enough tonight. And while she knew her worth, she also knew that to an archangel, she was, in the end, expendable.
    His blue eyes filled with flames as power crackled through the air. She was an inch away from taking her chances and trying to outrun him in the narrow confines of the stairwell, when he spoke. “Then we’ll go to your Guild.”
    She blinked in wary disbelief. “I’ll follow you by car.” Her ride was a Guild vehicle—like most hunters, she was out of the country so much that keeping her own wasn’t worth the hassle.
    “No.” His hand closed over her wrist. “I don’t wish to wait. We’ll