by Nalini Singh
Elena’s gasp was soft. “Archangel.”
His head too heavy to lift, he brought the wing over her . . . and saw that it was pure white fire. A cauldron of white fire. An inferno without end.
“That explains why you set your hair on fire—you’re going to be hell on the furniture.” She raised a hand without fear, this warrior consort of his. The fire clung to her when she retracted her hand, but it didn’t burn.
No part of him would ever harm her.
She laughed, playing the fire over her palm like a small pet. For a moment, she’d forgotten her own loss. “Those wings are seriously badass.” After returning the flame to his wing, as if returning a feather, she pushed against the arch of it. “I can feel muscle and tendon and bone. Do you think you’ll be able to turn the understructure to fire, too, when you want to? So there’s nothing physical to attack?”
“We will find out.” He brushed her hair off her face. “Do you remember the dream?”
“Yes. I remember everything.” She pressed a hand over her heart. “That was a weird-ass thing to do, Archangel.”
Pressing his forehead to her own, he smiled. “What other woman can say her lover actually gave her his heart?”
Her lips twitched, but the bleakness remained. “Do it,” she whispered. “Rip off the Band-Aid fast.”
He lifted himself up slightly, then moved his hand off her cheek to run it down her spine. And froze. “I can feel something.” Shifting so he could look at her back, he was aware of her holding her breath. So was he.
What he saw was unlike anything he knew. “It’s a slightly raised tattoo of wings.” Perfect in every intricate detail, down to the filaments on each feather. “With all your colors.” Rich black shading outward to indigo, deepest blue, and dawn, with primaries of a shimmering white gold.
Elena’s breath hit his skin in a hot, jagged exhale. “Baby wings?” Hope was a song in her voice. “Like with Aodhan’s nephew?”
Angelic babies were born more with an impression of where wings would grow than actual wings. “This isn’t the same,” he told her. “Those wings are transparent and clearly show folds where the wing will eventually spread out over the back as the baby develops. On a baby, you can’t see the full wing shape.”
“I remember now. Like an origami puzzle, with multiple folded layers.”
“Yes.” Elena’s by contrast . . . “The tattoo is of your full wings, just in a size proportional to the canvas of your back.”
A small silence before Elena said, “Was it like this the first time? When I was Made?”
And he realized that in all their time together, that was the one question she’d never asked him. Because her wings were a wonder she accepted with no need of further knowledge. “No,” he answered. “Your wings grew as an adult angel’s would after an amputation. Naked wings covered only by a fluff of baby feathers emerged slowly out of your back. Once the whole wing was there, the adult feathers began to grow outward from your back.” He ran his fingers over the graceful arch of one wing.
A shudder rolled through her. “I can feel your touch and it’s almost like you’re stroking that sensitive part of my wing. Why, if my entire wing structure is gone?” It was a rough, angry whisper. “Why do I want to open and close them if they’re forever static? Tattooed wings can’t fly, can’t open, can’t shiver under your touch.”
Lowering himself back down so he was facing her, he put his hand on her cheek again. “Wings with no substance can fit inside a chrysalis that is too small.” His fierce hunter had fought to regain all of herself. “You made the only choice you could.”
She put her hand over his wrist, her grip unexpectedly strong. “Well, it sucks and I want to kick something, but right now, I’d probably break my foot trying.” The next sound from her throat was one of wordless rage.
He couldn’t fix this for her, couldn’t explain a tattoo disparate from any he’d ever seen. Instead, he enfolded her taut-with-anger form in his arms, his warrior consort who had come back to him from the edge of the abyss—and who didn’t know the meaning of surrender. “We survived the Cascade’s attempts to part us,” he reminded her. “We’ll survive this, too.”
Elena held on to her archangel as he held her, her hold ferocious in its possessiveness. No tears, she vowed on a wave of red-hot fury. The Cascade would get no more pain out of her. She might’ve lost the glorious wings of midnight and dawn that had been her own, but she’d come back to her archangel as herself—and he was whole, too, with no physical damage from the massive power release.
Though, with an archangel, it wasn’t that simple.
She tightened her grip.
How long they held one another, she didn’t know. His wing was heavy on her despite its fiery appearance, and his chest warm, his smell him. Just Raphael. She inhaled it in like it was air and it settled into her cells. When she finally straightened out her body again, anchored by him, by who they were together, her eye fell on the Legion mark on his temple.
The sight made her glance down, below her left breast, for the dark mirror. It was gone, her skin unmarked. She pushed at the glowing translucence of it and thin “cracks” of light spread out under her skin. It was oddly lovely. “Yep, not normal.”
Raphael’s laugh was deep, a sound she felt in her bones. And his eyes . . . the color was a blue so pure it hurt—and in that blue was a love that marked her. “I believe that is an understatement, hbeebti.”
At last, they shifted to their backs, with Elena lying on Raphael’s wing as she’d done so many times since they’d found one another. Flickers of white fire danced over her skin like fireflies and it made her smile. Her archangel had come out with his wings intact. Her own, she could bear losing—it hurt like a bitch, but she’d deal. For Raphael to lose his? No, it was an impossibility she refused to countenance.
Above them swirled golden light shot with lightning. “That looks like your new Cascade-born power. It feels like it, too.” Portentous and cold and violent in a way that was without motive. Just power so strong it sought to take total control, reshape the holder in its image.
“Why is it just hanging around?”
Her archangel didn’t seem very interested in that particular oddness. He’d turned onto his side again and was playing with her hair; as she watched, he examined the tiny feathers on the ends of the strands with intense fascination. Her lips curved. She didn’t rush him and time moved slowly in their cocoon of energy.
When Raphael did look up at last, he said, “I sent it into the earth. It must’ve been too—”
“Raphael.” She slammed her palm against the dirt wall next to her. A wall that glowed with golden power, complete with hidden bolts of lightning. “Our people.” Her heart thundered—that huge heart that had somehow managed to fit inside her and felt fairly normal . . . except for the odd beat that was too big, too loud.
Eyes of crushed sapphires met hers and she could almost see time unfolding as he returned to that pivotal moment. “I got out a warning right before I earthed the power. I sent the warning out to the limit of my range.”
Jaw hard, he said, “But the time between the warning and the earthing may not have been enough—I have no way to judge the passage of time between where we were and here.” Lines marked his forehead. “I heard the faded echo of Illium’s voice acknowledging the order, but whether that was real or my mind filling in the gaps, we will not know until we emerge.”
Elena swallowed. No angel, vampire, mortal could’ve survived the kind of power in Raphael’s veins. The power he’d released. The power that enclosed them in an eerily lovely lightning fire.
Gripping her fear for their friends, their family, in a tight fist, she focused on the strangeness around them and, lifting her hand, brushed her fingers through the power.
Flickers of golden lightning dropped from above to cling to her skin, as it had before everyth
ing went to hell. There was nothing inherently wrong with the power—it had scared her because of how strong it was and how distantly immortal it made Raphael, but the power itself wasn’t malevolent. It could be shaped and remade to be what he needed. In its raw form, however, it was a violent storm.
“In our shared dream I told you to release it.” Guilt gnawed at her. “If people die—”
Raphael shifted onto his elbow and placed his other wing over her again, cocooning her in himself. “We made the decision together.” His gaze refused to allow her to look away. “We’ll deal with the consequences together.”
Elena lay a hand over his wing and nodded. That was their promise: Together. Always. “How weak are you?” His lack of power could be a death sentence. The Cadre respected only the most brutal strength—because an archangel without power couldn’t control the vampires in his territory. And now, with the Cascade in play, power had become an even more visceral weapon.
“Your heart exploded during the power release,” he said. “It’s in my bloodstream now.” He sounded not the least worried about having bits of a mortal heart floating around in his body.
She still couldn’t believe he’d done that: given her a piece of his archangelic heart, then put her dying one in the cavity created when he’d torn out his own.
“My new heart is regenerating slower than it should and my limbs feel heavy,” he added, “but I have felt this way before, a long time ago after a battle where I fought to the last drop of strength in my body. A little time for my energies to recover, and I will be in flight.”
He frowned. “That my wings are afire . . . I cannot explain it except to theorize the white fire is now part of my flesh and bone. Integral to me—like an arm or a leg. Even now, I feel my body drawing on that strength to build my heart.”
Elena saw the white fire begin to flicker and splutter as he spoke. Shifting her gaze, she held those eyes of Prussian blue that seared her soul. “It won’t be enough.” She couldn’t allow him to shield her from the truth. “Not with all the craziness going on with the Cascade. All the other archangels have new powers.” He’d be vulnerable, considered weak. Easy prey.
Raphael went to reply when Elena felt a sudden bright jolt hit her bloodstream. She gasped. Both of them stared at the part of her hand where a tendril of golden energy had been dancing. “Did that just . . .”
“The energy went into you.” Raphael raised an eyebrow. “Elena-mine, it appears you are to inherit my Cascade abilities.”
6
If I am to be consort to the first archangel-Made,” Raphael continued, while she was still gaping at the idea of all that deadly power in her body, “I will undertake my duties with utmost solemnity. I’ll throw great balls and invite—”
She poked her highly amused archangel in the shoulder. “Don’t you dare even joke about that.” No matter if a fine tendril had sunk into her, this power wasn’t hers. It tasted of Raphael, a piece of him that had become detached from his body.
The jolt from the single tendril shivered through her bloodstream, seemed to make her blood glow at a higher intensity. Her skin felt electrified. “Is my hair standing up like Einstein’s?”
“It is my eternal regret that I could not talk that mortal into becoming a vampire.”
“You knew Einstein? Wait, no, stop distracting me.” She gasped again.
A second tendril of power had just dropped from the storm above to punch into her bloodstream.
Raphael’s eyebrows drew together. “Your eyes were liquid silver when you first opened them. They’ve now faded to a more mortal shade near the pupil, but there’s a deep glow to them.”
“A glow-in-the-dark hunter with equally high-viz eyes and probably radioactive blood. Just what I always dreamed of being.”
Ignoring her muttered diatribe, Raphael angled his head closer. “You also appear to have gained a hint of a particular blue around the pupils. It’s extremely faint, like a stain on the edge of the black.”
“Well, you had to go give me a piece of your heart.” Her mouth dried up at the renewed memory of how he’d literally torn out his heart for her. She slapped her hands on his chest. “You ever do anything like that again and I’ll use you for target practice.”
His smile creased his cheeks, lit up those extraordinary eyes with an inner light that outshone the golden lightning that swirled ever faster above them, a hurricane in the making. “I will buy the knives for you.”
Lips twitching, she attempted a scowl, failed. “I guess being a glowing toothpick isn’t so bad,” she said with a grin of her own. “I bet I can make good money on the talk show circuit.”
His smile deepened. “You are very certainly my Elena.”
Yes, she was. “Lemme look at your eyes, see the damage.” She’d seen nothing concerning so far, but she worried what else he’d lost. The world was a lethal place for an archangel without power. But she saw what she’d always seen: a blue so deep it was eternity.
Her breath came easier. “Your eyes are as unearthly as ever.”
“I am an archangel.” It wasn’t a boast, just a statement of fact.
The donation of a piece of his heart had fundamentally changed her then barely immortal body. His own body, she realized, was too powerful to be impacted by a small human heart. “Why did you keep it?”
He didn’t ask her what she meant. “To stay a little mortal for you.”
Her eyes burned. Moving even closer under the warm heaviness of his wings, she brushed strands of hair off his face, the color darker than the night. The Legion mark on his right temple was dull, flat. Even as her stomach twisted at this further indication of all he’d lost to save her, a third tendril of Cascade-born power dropped onto the back of her hand . . . punched inside.
“Does it hurt?” Raphael was no longer smiling. “You’re gritting your teeth.”
“I get pins and needles all over my body when it goes in.” Flexing the hand that had taken the latest hit, she lifted it deliberately to the power that was an increasingly turbulent storm over them. It slipped into her in fiery droplets. “Ten,” she said at the end, having counted each tendril as it sank into her.
Then it stopped.
The power danced over her skin, twined around her wrist, wove itself into her hair, but didn’t penetrate her skin. She watched the storm, felt understanding whisper on the edge of her mind, just out of earshot. “I feel ‘full’—there’s nowhere for the power to go now.”
Raphael’s voice was granite when he said, “Before we interrupted the process, the Cascade was attempting to turn you into a power reservoir.”
“So I’m a partial reservoir?” Thinking about that, she shrugged. “I always held a drop or two of wildfire for you.” She placed one hand beside her shoulder, palm-up in a silent invitation; Raphael closed his own over it. “I don’t mind holding a little more power in reserve.” It’d give Raphael a small advantage in battle—though ten droplets wasn’t exactly a game changer when he’d given up all his power.
Although . . . Her throat dried up, her pulse a booming bass. “Raphael.”
Golden lightning was suddenly electric over Raphael’s skin, his hair, his wings. Prussian blue turned to gold as the energy played across his irises. Without warning, the power slammed into him with a force so violent that his body went rigid, his spine an iron rod. She went to try to fight it—with what she didn’t know—but he squeezed her hand and held it to the earth.
Panic a trapped butterfly in her skull, she closed her free hand over his and held on to her archangel while the power howled around him, into him. His hair blew back in the gale-force winds that existed inside the storm. His skin cracked with veins of gold that healed in a heartbeat, only for it to happen again and again. His hair turned gold with the sheer amount of energy pouring into him. His eyes were molten gold shattered with lightning.
When she tried to co
nnect her mind with his, all she heard in return was roaring static, as if he stood in the middle of a wind tunnel, his words stolen before they ever reached her. Her own hair blowing back from her face and lightning strikes hitting her skin only to bounce off, she came as close as she could with their clasped hands between them. Never would she let him go.
A blinding blaze that forced her eyes to shut, a final roar of sound in her ears, followed by a “pop” as the pressure equalized . . . and it was over. She blinked open her eyes to utter calm. The earth around them continued to glow—but it was pulsing red now. As if so much heat had been released into it that things that shouldn’t burn had begun to burn. The golden Cascade-born energy no longer swirled above and around them.
It was inside Raphael.
Motionless, she stared.
The crashing sea in her mind, salt-laced and familiar . . . but infinitely colder. Until her veins were ice and her breath was particles of frost.
So? asked her archangel.
She gave a slightly hysterical giggle. “Talk about glow-in-the-dark.” His skin was lit from within, his eyes a vivid living gold, his hair tipped with flames. When she batted at it, the damn energy just hopped over to her hand and danced over her skin. “I guess the Cascade isn’t keen for you to be without power.” Her stomach was one big knot.
“It seeks only chaos. There is no chaos in one power.” Raphael shaped the Primary’s words with intricate concentration, as if doing something as mundane as forming words was far beneath him now. As if he’d ascended beyond being an archangel.
Fuck that.
Elena smashed a fist through the ice, kicked the stomach-knotting fear to the curb. She hadn’t survived being consumed by a goddamn chrysalis, then come back to life with an archangelic heart inside her chest, and a torturously sensitive tattoo instead of wings, to lose Raphael to a power that wanted to shape him into a being monstrous enough to fight Lijuan.