“Why, then, must we wait?” Titus asked, his soft tone at odds with the gleaming, muscular bulk of his body. He appeared a man carved from jet, as roughly hewn as the mountain stronghold he called home.

“Because,” Raphael answered, “Uram has not crossed the final line.”

A hush.

“You’re certain?” Favashi asked, her words gentle. She was the youngest of them all, the most mortal in her thinking. Her heart and soul remained unscathed by the inexorable passage of time. “If he hasn’t yet—”

“You hope too easily,” Astaad interrupted in that harsh way of his. “He killed every one of his servants and retainers the night he left Europe.”

“Why then did he not cross the line, do . . . what we must never do?” Favashi asked, unwilling to back down. That was why, despite her gentleness, she was the archangel who held sway over Persia. She bent, but Favashi did not break. Ever. “Surely he can be reclaimed?”

“No,” Neha responded, as cool as Favashi was warm. In her homeland of India, snakes were worshipped as gods and Neha was worshipped as the Queen of Snakes. “I’ve made discreet inquiries with our doctors. It is too late. His blood is poison.”

“Could they be mistaken?” Michaela asked, and perhaps there was a touch of caring in her tone.

“No.” Neha’s eyes shifted across the room. “I sent a sample to Elijah, too.”

“I had Hannah look at it,” Elijah said. “Neha is right. It’s too late for Uram.”

“He is an archangel—the hunter will not be able to kill him even if she finds him,” Lijuan said, her shimmering white hair waving in a breeze that wasn’t there. With age came powers so extraordinary that seeming “human” in any sense became close to impossible. Lijuan’s eyes, too, were a strange pearl gray that existed nowhere on this earth. “One of us will have to see to that duty.”