by Nalini Singh
Lighting flashed in vicious spikes in front of her as savage winds began to pound the house with unremitting fury, the hail turning to torrential rain between one blink and the next. “I’ve never seen it come in this hard, this fast.”
Raphael walked to stand beside her, his naked upper body patterned with the image of the raindrops against the window. She looked up when he didn’t say anything, saw the shadows that had turned his gaze turbulent in an unexpected reflection of the storm. “What is it? What am I not seeing?” Because that look in his eyes ...
“What do you know of recent weather patterns across the world?”
Elena traced a raindrop with her gaze as it tunneled across the glass. “I caught a weather update while we were at the Tower. The reporter said a tsunami had just hit the east coast of New Zealand, and that the floods in China are getting worse.” Sri Lanka and the Maldives had apparently already been evacuated, but they were starting to run out of places to put people.
“Earthquakes have been rocking Elijah’s territory,” Raphael told her, speaking of the South American archangel, “and he fears that at least one major volcano is about to erupt. That is not all. Michaela tells me most of Europe is shuddering in the grip of an unseasonable ice storm so vicious, it threatens to kill thousands.”
Elena’s shoulder muscles went stiff at the mention of the most beautiful—and most venomous—of archangels. “The Middle East, at least,” she said, forcing herself to relax, “seems to have escaped major catastrophe from what I saw on the news.”
“Yes. Favashi is helping Neha deal with the disasters in her region.”
The Archangel of Persia and the Archangel of India, Elena knew, had worked together on previous occasions. And now, when Neha hated almost everyone else in the Cadre, she seemed to be able to tolerate Favashi—perhaps because the other archangel was so much younger. “It means something, doesn’t it?” she said, turning to place her hand on the wild heat of Raphael’s chest, the shadowy raindrops whispering over her skin. “All this extreme weather.”
“There is a legend,” Raphael murmured, his wings flaring out as he tugged her into the curve of his body—as if he would protect her. “That mountains will shake and rivers overflow, while ice creeps across the world and fields drown in rain.” He looked down her at, his eyes that impossible, inhuman chrome blue. “All this will come to pass ... when an Ancient awakens.”
The chill in his tone raised every hair on her body.
2
Shaking off the bone-deep cold, she said, “The ones who Sleep?” Raphael had told her about those of his race who were so old they grew weary of immortality. So they lay down and closed their eyes, falling into a deep slumber that would break only when something compelled them to consciousness.
“Yes.” A single word that held a thousand unsaid things.
She leaned deeper into him, sliding her arms around his waist. The backs of her hands brushed against the raw silk of his feathers, and it was a quiet, stunning intimacy between an archangel and a hunter. “This kind of a disruption can’t happen every time. There must be a few who Sleep?”
“Yes.” His voice grew distant in a way that was the mask of an immortal who’d lived centuries beyond a millennium. “What we may be witnessing is the rebirth of an archangel.”
She sucked in a breath, understanding flickering at the corners of her mind. “How many archangels Sleep?”
“No one knows, but there have been disappearances throughout our history. Antonicus, Qin, Zanaya. And . . .”
“Caliane,” she completed for him, shifting so that she could see his face without craning her neck. He was so good at hiding his emotions, her archangel, but she was learning to read the minute shifts in those eyes that had seen more dawns than she could ever imagine, witnessed the birth and fall of civilizations.
Now, her back against the glassy cold of the window, she didn’t protest as he leaned in to place one hand palm-down beside her head. Instead, she ran her fingers down the muscled planes of his chest to rest at his hips, anchoring him to the present, to her as she asked him about a nightmare. “Will you know if your mother wakes?”
“When I was a child”—skin touched with heat, but his eyes, they remained that inhuman metallic shade—“we had a mental bond. But it burned away as I grew, and as she fell into madness.” His gaze looked past her, to the pitch-black of the night.
Elena was used to fighting for what she needed, what she wanted. She’d had to become that way to survive. It had toughened her. But what she felt for this male, this archangel, it was a stronger, more powerful need, one that gave her an insight the hunter alone would’ve never had. “Stop it.”
A silent glance rimmed with a thin frost made up of the myriad dark echoes that lingered in an archangel’s memories.
“If you let the memory of her spoil this,” she said, refusing to back down, “spoil us, then it doesn’t matter if she is the Sleeper. The damage will have been done—by you.”
A long, still instant, but his attention was very much on her now. “You,” he said, his wings spreading out to block the rest of the room from her view, “manipulate me.”
“I take care of you,” she corrected. “Just like you took care of me by not letting me answer my father’s call earlier today.” At the time, she’d gotten snippy—because she’d been afraid. And she hated being afraid. Especially of the hurt that Jeffrey Deveraux meted out with such cruel ease. “That’s the deal, so learn to handle it.”
Raphael brushed his thumb across her cheekbone. “If I do not?” A cool question.
“Stop trying to pick a fight with me.” She knew what haunted him—that his parents’ madnesses would one day manifest in his own mind, turning him monstrous. Except Elena would never allow that to happen. “We fall, we fall together.” A soft reminder, a solemn promise.
Elena. One hand going down to curve around her ribs, just below her breasts, as he moved his other thumb over her lips, shaping and stroking her.
“If your mother does wake,” she murmured, her top suddenly abrasive against her nipples, “what will happen to her?”
“Some say a long Sleep cures the madness of age, so she could once more become Cadre.” Yet Raphael’s voice said that he didn’t believe such a thing possible.
“Will the others on the Cadre try to locate her, kill her beforehand?”
“Those who Sleep are sacrosanct,” Raphael told her. “To harm a Sleeper is to break a law so ancient, it is part of our racial memory. But there is no law that bars a search.”
She knew without asking that he’d be undertaking such a search, could only hope what he discovered wasn’t a nightmare made flesh.
“I’ll speak to Jason,” he added, “see if he has heard any rumblings on this subject that I have not.”
“Is he healed?” Raphael’s spymaster had been injured in the same violent explosion of power that had leveled a city and smashed Elena to the earth. “Is Aodhan?” Both angels had refused to leave her and fly to safety, though they were far stronger and faster. Even as they fell to the unforgiving earth, the two males had attempted to shield her body with their own.
“If you are,” Raphael said, stroking his hand down to rest at her waist, “then of course they walk without injury.”
Because she was an immortal new-Made, while Jason was hundreds of years old. Aodhan, she wasn’t sure about—he was so very other, it was hard to judge—but the fact that he was one of Raphael’s Seven spoke for itself. “Beijing . . . are there any signs of recovery?” The city had ceased to exist in anything but memory after the events of that bloody night, so many dead that Elena couldn’t think about it without a sense of crushing weight on her chest, heavy and black and flavored with the taste of old death.
“No.” An absolute statement. “It may take centuries for life to take root there once more.”
The punishing might of power implied by that observation was staggering. It made her viscerally aware of the strength of the man who
held her in an embrace she’d never be able to break if he decided to keep her prisoner. It should’ve scared her. But if there was one thing she knew, it was that with Raphael, any fight would be no-holds-barred. There would be no stilettos in the dark, no hurtful blades hidden behind a civilized facade ... unlike the cutting words of another man who’d once claimed to love her.
Her soul pinched in hurt. “I can’t avoid my father forever,” she said, leaning back against the window again, the cold of the glass almost painful against her wings. “What do you think he’ll say when he sees me?” As far as Jeffrey knew, Raphael had saved her broken and dying body by Making her a vampire.
Raphael gripped his hunter’s jaw with one hand, placing the other beside her head. “He will see you as an opportunity.” Honest words, for he would not lie to her. “A way to gain entry into the corridors of angelic power.” If Raphael had his way, Jeffrey Deveraux would even now be rotting in a forgotten grave, but Elena loved her father in spite of his cruelty.
Now, she wrapped her arms around herself, and her words, when they came, were jagged pieces of pain. “I knew that before I asked . . . but part of me can’t help hoping that maybe this time, he’ll love me.”
“As I can’t help hoping that my mother will rise, and will once again be the woman who sang me such lullabies that the world stood still.” Pulling her into a crushing embrace, he pressed his lips to her temple. “We are both fools.”
Thunder crashed at that moment, lightning flashing brilliant in the dark gloom of the world beyond the windowpane. It turned Elena’s hair to glittering silver, her eyes to mercury. Those eyes, he thought as he lowered his head, as he took her lips, would change over the centuries, until they might very well become what they appeared under storm-light. Come, Guild Hunter. It is late.
“Raphael.” An intimate murmur against his lips. “I’m so cold.”
He kissed her again, moving one hand down to close over her breast. Then he took them into the heart of a tempest far more demanding in its wrenching hunger than the winds that raged outside.
The nightmare came again that night. She should’ve expected it, but it pulled her into the bloody ruins of what had once been her family home with such speed that she had no chance to fight.
“No, no, no.” She closed her eyes in childlike defiance.
But the dream forced them open. What she saw made her freeze, her pulse pounding beat after panicked beat at the back of her throat.
There were no broken bodies on the floor slicked by a dark, dark red. Blood. Everywhere she looked, there was blood. More blood than she’d ever seen.
That was when she realized she wasn’t in the kitchen where Ari and Belle had been murdered after all. She was in the kitchen of the Big House, the house her father had bought after her sisters . . . After. Gleaming pots hung on hooks above a long stone bench, while a massive fridge stood humming quietly in the corner. The stove was a shiny steel edifice that had always terrified her into keeping her distance.
Tonight, however, that steel was dulled with a rust-red coating that made her gorge rise, made her stumble to look away. At the knives. They lay everywhere. On the floor, on the counters, in the walls. All dripping thick, heavy gobs of deepest red . . . and other, fleshier things. “No, no, no.” Clutching her arms around herself, her thin, fragile body that of a child, she skittered her gaze across the nightmare room in search of a safe harbor.
The blood, the knives had vanished.
The kitchen lay pristine once more. And cold. So cold. Always so cold in the Big House, no matter how much she cranked up the heat.
A shift in the dream—she’d been wrong, she thought. This cold place wasn’t pristine after all. There was a single high-heeled shoe on the dazzling white of the tile.
Then she saw the shadow on the wall, swinging to and fro.
“No!”
“Elena.” Hands gripping her upper arms tight, the clean bright scent of the sea in her mind. “Guild Hunter.”
The snapped words cut through the remnants of the dream, wrenching her back into the present. “I’m okay. I’m okay.” The words came out jerky, disconnected. “I’m okay.”
He pulled her into his arms when she would’ve jumped out of bed. To do what, she didn’t know, but sleep never came easy after the memories hit her with such brutal force. “I need to—”
He shifted until she was half under him, his wings rising to encase them in lush, dark privacy. “Hush, hbeebti.” His body, heavy on her own, formed a hard shield against the softly swinging shadow that had chased her across time.
When he dropped his head and murmured more quiet, passionate words in the language that was part of her mother’s legacy, she lifted her arms and wrapped them around his neck, trying to pull him down. Trying to drown herself in him. But he squeezed her thigh and raised himself up on one arm so he could look down at her. “Tell me.”
Elena had always made sure to hug Beth after the day their family shattered, to ensure her younger sister didn’t ever feel the chill, but she’d never had anyone to hold her in turn, never had anyone to smash apart the block of ice that encased her organs for hours after a nightmare. So, the words took time to come, but he was an immortal. Patience was a lesson he’d learned long ago.
“It didn’t make sense,” she said at last, her voice raw—as if she’d been screaming. “None of it made sense.” Her mother hadn’t done what she had in the kitchen. No, Marguerite Deveraux had very carefully tied the rope to the strong railing that went around the mezzanine. Her pretty, shiny high heel had dropped onto the gleaming checkerboard tile of the hallway that was the grand entrance to the Big House.
A glossy cherry red, that shoe had made Elena’s heart fill with hope for a fractured second. She’d thought her mother had finally come back to them, finally stopped crying ... finally stopped screaming. Then she’d looked up. Seen something that could never be erased from the wall of her mind. “It was all just a big jumble.”
Raphael said nothing, but she had not a single doubt that she was the complete and total center of his attention.
“I thought,” she said, clenching her hands on his shoulders, “that the nightmares would stop after I killed Slater. He’ll never again hurt anyone I love. Why won’t they stop?” It came out shaky, not with fear, but with a tight, helpless rage.
“Our memories make us, Elena,” Raphael answered, in an echo of something she’d once said to him. “Even the darkest of them all.”
Hand splayed out on his chest, she listened to the beat of his heart, strong, steady, always. “I won’t ever forget,” she whispered. “But I wish they’d stop haunting me.” It made her feel like a traitor to say those words, to dare to wish for such a thing when Ari and Belle had lived the nightmare. When her mother had been unable to escape it.
“They will.” Knowledge in his tone. “I promise you.”
And because he’d never broken a promise to her, she let him hold her through what remained of the night. Dawn was pushing its way into the room on slender fingers of gold and pink when the sweet nothingness of sleep took her under.
But the peace only lasted for what felt like a mere blink of time.
Elena. A wave crashing into her head, a fresh bite of storm.
Groggy with sleep, she blinked open her eyes to see that she was alone in the sun-kissed bed, the rain having cleared away to leave the sky beyond the windows a startling azure. “Raphael.” A glance at the bedside clock showed her it was midmorning. Rubbing at her eyes, she sat up. “What is it?”
Something has occurred that requires your skill.
Her senses stretched awake in anticipation, her mental muscles seeming to pop with the same pleasure-pain as her physical ones when she lifted her arms and arched her body. Where do you need me?
A school upstate. It is named the Eleanor Vand—
She dropped her arms, abdomen heavy with dread. I know what it’s called. My sisters go there.
3
Ten-year-old Evelyn
saw Elena first. Evelyn’s eyes went wide as Elena said good-bye to the angel who’d escorted her to the location via the quickest route, and flared out her wings to come to a steady landing in the front yard of the tony prep school, the velvet green perfection marred only by a number of errant leaves. Miniature twisters of spring green and crisp brown, small dervishes full of irritation, rose up in the wind created by her descent.
Folding away her wings, Elena gave her youngest half sister a nod of acknowledgment. Evelyn went to raise a hand in a tentative hello, but Amethyst, three years older than her sister, grabbed that hand to pull Evelyn to her side. Her dark blue eyes, so like her mother, Gwendolyn’s, warned Elena to keep her distance.
Elena understood the reaction.
Jeffrey and Elena hadn’t spoken for a decade after he threw her out—until just before the violent events that had led to her waking with wings of midnight and dawn. And prior to being disowned, Elena had been banished to boarding school for some time. As a result, she’d had no real contact with either of her half siblings. She knew of them, as they knew of her, but beyond that, they might as well have been strangers.
There wasn’t even a surface resemblance to compel the recognition of familial ties—unlike Elena’s pale, near-white hair and skin touched with the sunset of Morocco, not to mention her height, the girls had their mother’s exquisite raven hair and petite build, their skin a rich cream that wouldn’t have looked out of place on an English rose. Evelyn still carried a layer of baby fat, but her bones were Gwendolyn’s, delicate and aristocratic.
Both of Jeffrey’s wives had left their marks on his children.
Looking away from the two small faces that watched her with a combination of wariness and a tight, cool accusation, she took in the rest of the people on the porch. Several other girls clustered together just beyond Evelyn and Amethyst, all dressed in the maroon and white of the school, along with a number of adults who had to be teachers. Nowhere did Elena see any sign of Raphael, which meant he was either inside the heavy building of cream-colored brick or behind its ivy-covered walls in the large inner courtyard where the girls ate lunch, sat on the grass, played games.