by Nalini Singh
The rain and the wind in her mind, a drenching storm that shoved away all other impressions. My apologies, Elena. He took control, overwhelming her will with his own as he twisted her body in a way she would’ve never done herself, allowing her to spread out her wings and find stability moments before she would’ve hit the water.
Her mind was her own again a split second afterward.
The whole thing had happened so fast she hadn’t had time to feel much beyond the adrenaline pumping through her body, but now, as she winged herself to a balanced position, she blew out a breath. Once, when they’d first met, Raphael had said something to her.
I could make you crawl, Elena. Do you really want me to force you onto your hands and knees?
“I thought you couldn’t do that anymore,” she whispered out loud, knowing he remained connected to her. “I thought I had shields now.”
You do, but you must focus to hold them. Panic throws you wide open.
“Hell.” She knew he was right. She had panicked. Flight was still new to her—and the terror of falling was one so visceral, it was hard to hold on to logical thought in the face of it.
Dropping down to join her at the lower altitude she was just managing to maintain, her muscles taut with shock, Raphael flew by her side as she pushed herself home. It felt like it took forever, but she came to a staggering stop on the grounds below their bedroom at last. Raphael swept down in front of her an instant later, catching her shaky form with a hold on her upper arms.
“Thanks,” she said, bracing herself with her palms on her thighs when he released her. “Not just for now.” She looked up. “For before.”
His eyes pulsed with surprise. “I expected your anger.”
“I’m not stupid. Stubborn, but not stupid.” Rising to her full height, she blew out a breath. “I don’t like the fact that I’m still so vulnerable to you, but fact is, that isn’t going to change overnight.” She’d taken an archangel as a lover knowing the disparity of strength between them.
“You know I’d fight you to my last breath if you attempted to coerce me in a normal situation. What happened over the water”—her heart raced in remembered shock—“was in no way a normal situation.” A blast of wind crashed into them right then, ripping the last words from her lips, clawing at her wings as if it would tear them off.
Raphael tugged her into the protection of his body, spreading his wings over them as the wind punched again and again. Do you sense it?
She went motionless at his question. The wind ... it carried a scent. Faint. So, so faint. And so unusual that she couldn’t pinpoint it—except she knew it was the same thing she’d scented the instant her wings crumpled. What is that?
A rare black orchid found in a rain forest deep in the Amazon.
She shivered. “It truly is her?”
So it would seem.
When the rage of wind finally died away with a last cutting whip, she looked up and brushed midnight strands of hair off Raphael’s face, revealing the incredible masculine beauty that had the power to make mortals weep. “She isn’t that strong yet.” The entire thing had only lasted a minute at most.
“No.” But it appears she has noticed my consort.
“God, I’m slow today.” That blast of wind on the Hudson hadn’t been a chance gust. It had been an arrow meant to shatter her bones when she hit the water at high velocity. “So she’s conscious?”
Raphael shook his head. “I’ve had Jessamy doing some research,” he said, mentioning the woman who was the repository of angelic knowledge, the keeper of their histories . . . and one of the kindest angels Elena had ever met. “Come, we will speak of it inside.”
They walked into the house, turning in the direction of the library, a room that sang to the curious heart of her nature. The first time she’d entered it, she’d noticed only the books arranged on the wall-to-wall shelves on the ground level, the fireplace to the left, the gorgeous wooden table and chairs set below the window.
But like all angelic rooms, this one had a soaring ceiling—and that ceiling was a work of art, the wooden beams carved with painstaking attention to detail and inlaid with darker pieces that were perfectly contoured to fit. “Aodhan?”
“No,” Raphael said, following her gaze. “That was done by a human, a master at his craft.”
“Amazing.” She wondered at the pride the man must’ve felt to build such a room for an archangel.
Raphael stroked his hand down her hair, his touch oddly tender.
“Archangel?”
“I’m far more powerful than when Caliane disappeared.” His words held a haunting sense of pain, of memory. “But I am still her son, Elena. Thousands upon thousands of years younger.”
Elena shook her head. “You were younger than Uram, too. Yet you won.”
“My mother is beyond Uram, beyond Lijuan.” Raphael’s words sent a chill down Elena’s spine. “She lived as an archangel for tens of thousands of years. There is no knowing what she has become.”
Thinking of what Lijuan had done to Beijing, the stench of smoke and death that was said to linger over the empty crater than had once been a vibrant, living city, Elena felt fear attempt to take a clawhold on her heart. She refused to allow it, her love for this archangel far stronger than any imagined foe. “She doesn’t know what you’ve become either, Raphael.”
Her archangel’s expression didn’t change, but she knew he’d heard her. “Jessamy,” he said, “tells me that Caliane is likely in a half-dream state at present. She has some semblance of consciousness but may have no real knowledge of the acts she’s committing.”
“She could think this is all a dream?”
Closing his hand around the back of her neck, he tugged her closer. “Yes.” His kiss was more than a little dangerous. But we did not come here to talk about Caliane.
She pressed her lips to the hard angle of his jaw, anticipation burning away the last vestiges of the fear she’d felt as she fell. “Let’s get sweaty.”
15
An hour later, Elena was a hell of a lot more than sweaty. Raphael had given her the no-holds-barred combat she’d asked for—and more. “You know what makes me really mad?” she said, hands on her knees on the other side of the rough practice circle they’d set out on the lawn.
Raphael, shirtless chest gleaming with the lightest film of perspiration, pushed back his hair. “Enough talking,” he ordered. “Up.”
She bared her teeth at him. “It’s the fact that you’re not even breathing hard while I feel like I got done over by a pack of vamps.” But she rose to her full height, because if she could learn to hold her own against Raphael for so much as a second, she’d be unbeatable against most vampires and humans.
He came at her without warning, a blur of speed. She wrenched out of the way and went down hard. Galen’s earlier training kept her from landing awkwardly on her wings, but they got crushed into the grass nonetheless as Raphael swept down to pin her. “Galen didn’t teach me that,” she said, chest heaving underneath him as he pinioned her hands above her head.
“What?” Heat blazed off him, his eyes glittering in a way she usually only ever saw in bed.
She couldn’t help it. Arching up, she kissed him, flicking out her tongue to taste the aggressive maleness pumping through his body. “The thing you do with your wings.” Instead of answering, he kicked her legs wider and suddenly the position was a hell of a lot more intimate. “Raphael”—a husky censure—“Montgomery is probably keeping an eye on us.”
“He would never be so ill-bred.” A hot wet kiss against her neck. “The wings?”
She forced her brain into gear. “You use them. Galen taught me to keep them out of the way, so I wouldn’t nick them with knives or the short sword, but you use your wings for balance, and you even go slightly airborne to avoid blows.” She’d never seen anyone move with that kind of lethal grace. Galen was a different kind of a fighter—more brutal, harsher in his movements.
Another kiss, the feel
of teeth. She hissed, went to hook her leg over him when he rose off her, extending a hand to help her up. “Galen taught you what was necessary for survival,” he said once she was back on her feet. “He had to focus on tactics he knew you could master in the timeframe we had before Lijuan’s ball.”
Reaching up to redo her ponytail, Elena nodded. “I figured. I’m guessing using wings like you do will take me considerably longer to learn.”
“At this stage,” Raphael said, walking over to pick up two short swords from where she’d left them on the edge of the practice circle, “your wings are more of a liability in combat.”
She caught the swords by the hilts and watched him pick up a set of much smaller knives. “Giving me the advantage?”
A smile with more than a hint of arrogance. “You are but a babe in arms yet, Elena.” Knives held to either side, gaze focused on her. “It would hardly be fair to take you down again so soon.”
She settled into a crouch, wings pinned tightly to her back. “Come on then, angel boy.” She kept her eyes on the muscles in his shoulders, saw the instant one tensed.
A split second later, they were moving in a wicked, dangerous dance of steel and bodies. She’d never really had a chance to spar with Raphael like this, and damn if it wasn’t the most fun she’d ever had. The archangel was good. Better than good. Not that that should’ve come as a surprise, she thought, blocking his blades and striking out with her own as she spun away. None of the Seven would have given their allegiance over to an archangel they didn’t respect on the battlefield.
A lick of iron in the air.
“Stop.”
“Damn it.” She dropped her hands, glancing at the fine hairline scratch on her left arm. “Would that have cost me my arm in real combat?”
Raphael saw the disgusted look on Elena’s face and had to bite back a smile of pride. Hair pulled off her face with warrior-like practicality and sweat sheening her body, her musculature fluid and graceful, this was his consort. “That was a tactical error,” he said, knowing she had the ability to become unbeatable with those blades. All she needed was a little more time to grow into her immortality—and further skilled instruction.
“You took a chance,” he pointed out, “and dropped your guard on the left because you thought I couldn’t turn that fast, but don’t ever judge another angel’s—or even an older vampire’s—agility by your own.” She’d only been angel-Made for less than half a year. The fact that she was already blindingly good, her hunter instincts coming to the fore, was no reason to go easy on her. If anything, she needed to be pushed harder.
She raised her blades. “Once more through.”
“Go.”
The clash of steel, the sweaty, slippery slide of bodies, the wild life of it all exhilarated Raphael. He sparred with his Seven once in a while, but it had always been a practical exercise to keep his physical skills sharp. Elena fought like it was part of her very self, and her joy in it infected him until it was a pulse beneath his skin.
Then she will kill you. She will make you mortal.
Lijuan knew nothing, he thought as he dodged the blade of one short sword and flicked his knife under the strap of Elena’s tank top, cutting it in a single swipe. He might heal slower, might injure easier, but he was alive in a way Lijuan had never been and never would be—because she had killed the human who had once, long ago, threatened to make her mortal.
Ignoring the strap he’d cut, Elena swung back and . . . threw both blades. Taken by surprise, he bent backward, crushing his wings into the grass—one blade passed a bare inch from his face. The other nicked his cheek as it thunked into the earth behind him.
“Goddamn it, Raphael!” Elena was cupping his face in her hands before he could remind her it was never a good idea to throw away her weapons. “You’re not supposed to get injured. That’s the only reason we’re using real blades.”
For the first time in forever, he was stunned to silence. Not by her words, but by the tenderness in her hands, the worry in her eyes. He was an archangel. He’d been wounded far, far worse and shrugged it off. But then, there had been no woman with skin kissed by the sunset and eyes of storm gray to tear into him for daring to get himself hurt.
“Are you listening to me? I could’ve hurt you!” Again.
He shook off his stunned bemusement to answer her assertion, hearing the unspoken word. “I could’ve deflected the blades using my power. But that would not make this in any way a fair fight.” It is nothing similar to when you shot me, Elena. I was dangerous to you that night.
In answer, she angled his face to the light, stood on tip-toe to examine the cut. “It’s much deeper than the insect bites you’ve given me when I make a mistake.”
Moving his knives to one hand, he cupped her cheek. “This is less than an insect bite to me. Do not worry that you will have to seek another consort.”
“Don’t even joke about that.” But she relaxed, her hands falling to rest on her hips. “So how did I do?”
“You threw away your weapons. Galen taught you better than that.”
“You were about to get me. It was meant to distract you so I could go for my knives—or in a real fight, for my gun.” Her gaze dipped to his left wing, making it clear she was referring to the weapon designed to disable angelic wings.
Raphael didn’t like the fact that he’d forced her to defend herself with such violence that night, but he did not regret the starburst pattern of golden feathers that was the scar he wore on his wing. As far as he was concerned, it was as much a mark of Elena’s claim on him as the amber ring he wore on his finger. “It may be a good strategy in certain situations,” he said, looking at things from her point of view. “We’ll work on it.”
When she moved as if to pick up the swords, he shook his head. “Not today. You’re starting to lag.”
She made a face. “You’re right. I’ll cool down, shower, then I have an errand to run.” The slightest pause that he only caught because he was looking right at her. “I might ask Illium for some low-key flying lessons later—the vertical takeoff thing is kicking my ass, but I’m not giving up.”
He said nothing until they’d stowed their weapons and were stripping for the shower. “What is this errand that puts such sorrow in your eyes, Elena?”
Her naked back tensed, then shuddered. “I haven’t told you something,” she said in a rush of words as he curved his fingers around her nape, stroking his thumb gently across her skin. “Remember the first time you sent Illium to watch over me?”
“Yes. It was after a meeting with your father—you went to a bank.”
“There was a safety deposit box there for me. Jeffrey ... I don’t know why, but he kept . . .” It was hard to speak, to think about her father’s baffling actions. He’d thrown her out of his home, called her an abomination, and couldn’t speak to her without bitter anger flowing between them like so much spilled wine. But . . .
“My mother’s things,” she whispered, turning to face Raphael. “He kept my mother’s things. They’re in a storage unit out in Brooklyn.” She’d flown over the facility early that morning but hadn’t been able to make herself land. “I’m so scared to go there. Because when I do ... I have to admit all over again that she left me, that she didn’t love me enough to stay.”
Tears burned at the backs of her eyes, but she refused to let them fall—she’d cried so much for her mom, but then she’d gotten angry. “Sometimes, I hate her.” That was her biggest secret and biggest sin.
Raphael leaned across to touch his forehead to hers. What I feel for Caliane is beyond hate at times—for what she did, the atrocities she committed. And yet ...
“Yes.” She buried her face in his neck. “And yet . . .”
As it turned out, she didn’t have to tear the scab off that particular wound that day. Her cell phone was beeping with a message when she came out of the shower. Grabbing it, she frowned. “It’s from the Guild.” Guilty relief curled down her spine when she called back and w
as told to suit up for a hunt. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Raphael finished buttoning his shirt, the slots for his wings flowing with smooth perfection over his back. “What does the Guild need from you?”
She began to dress. “There’s a bloodlust-ridden vampire in Boston.”
“The senior angel in that territory should have sent me a report.” Walking over, he picked up his own cell phone, found a message. “Two people are already dead.”
Boots on, Elena began strapping on her weapons, including Deacon’s gift to her. She had no control-chip-embedded weapons, but since Ransom—already close to Boston—would’ve been issued one, that wasn’t a problem. The control chips effectively knocked out a vampire’s will for a short period, giving a hunter the chance to restrain the target—because under normal circumstances, the Guild’s people did not kill.
Execution was an angel’s job.
However, since bloodlust was involved in this case, they’d been given the go-ahead to execute if retrieval proved too dangerous. “Ransom’s almost there but he’s got no backup.” She called the other hunter her “almost friend” because they had a tendency to irritate each other as often as they made one another laugh, but she’d spill blood for him in a heartbeat. As he would for her.
“I see.”
Elena set her jaw at that cool statement and finished strapping the miniature flamethrower to her other thigh. “I let it go before, but I can’t anymore.” Walking to the vanity, she began to plait her damp hair with practiced quickness so that it would stay out of her way. The fine, silky stuff had a tendency to escape even the tightest braid, but the damp should help keep it contained. “You took a hunter as your consort, Raphael.”
“That is no longer the only factor.” An answer made in the tone of an immortal used to getting what he wanted. “More than one archangel would like your head as a trophy.”
“Is it life if you live it in a cage?” A taut question as, braid done, she began to strap on her knife sheaths over her forearms. “I won’t live like that.”