by Nalini Singh
9
Montgomery had set up dinner in their suite rather than on the library table that was their usual spot. “It’s as if he reads our minds.” Elena popped four small savory tarts into her mouth one after the other as she stripped. The flight and the snow had shaken off most of the dust and dirt on her wings, but she didn’t feel fully clean.
“I’ll be quick.” Much as she wanted to wallow in the huge bath—attached to this suite—that Montgomery had already run, her stomach was threatening to gnaw on itself if she didn’t give it more substantial fuel.
Raphael’s expression as he ran his gaze over her nude form spoke of another, darker form of hunger. The Legion mark on his temple blazed. A glow limned his wings. And in his eyes, she saw a tumultuous wave of emotion that threatened to haul her under.
Her archangel was in a mood.
“Do not follow me into the bathroom,” she ordered as her skin pebbled, her nipples tight.
Hauling her against his fully clothed form in response, he sat down in a large armchair built to accommodate wings. Then he reached one hand to the table and grabbed a plate overflowing with delicious hot treats. But it was his scent that had her mouth watering, the heat and rigidly muscled strength of him inviting her to forget her plans for a shower and get even dirtier instead.
He lifted a bite of food to her mouth.
“I should feel very naked right now,” Elena said after making short work of it.
Raphael ran his free hand proprietarily over the curves of her body and up to boldly cup one breast, rubbing his thumb across her nipple. “You do not?”
“Not inside.” She pushed her own fingers through his hair, fisted gently. “Not where it matters. Because it’s you.”
It was that simple.
“Eat, hbeebti.” He fed her bite after bite, each mouthful accompanied by a firm and erotic stroke of her body, breast to thigh. His eyes were hooded, his sensual lips unsmiling—and his wings continued to glow.
Skin hot, Elena drowned in his scent while her body melted, her pulse a roar. Her musk perfumed the air, her thighs pressed tightly together, and her lips felt swollen. “You’re a demon in a mood, Raphael.” She kissed him, bit his lower lip, soothed the sensual punishment with her tongue.
“Do you need more food?” Rain fell in her mind again, a turbulent hurricane. We must fuel the changes in you.
“I need you.” Was desperate for the wildfire of what they became together to banish the echoes of an unknown future that whispered of death and separation. “I want to hold you so close that nothing will ever come between us.”
Elena. Setting the empty plate aside without watching to see if it hit the table or not, Raphael maneuvered her so she straddled his body, her hands on his shoulders. His kiss was a ferocious demand, the hand he thrust into her hair unraveling the near-white strands.
Elena kissed him back with just as much passion, just as much love, just as much need. Fear and worry and love and horror, it all entwined inside her to create a small, intimate madness.
Raphael’s hand was rough on her skin, his body unleashed power and desire. Thighs quivering and breasts plump with sensation, she pulled at his clothing until he helped her strip his top half bare. She dug her fingers into the magnificent width of his chest, rubbed herself against the hard, rippled strength of him.
Rising from the armchair on a surge of strength that had her going even wetter, his wings glittering under the light, he took her not to the bed but to the bath. The water was a kiss of heat against her skin when he sat her down into it. Sweeping her arms through the liquid silk of it, she watched him get rid of the rest of his clothing.
A shiver whispered through her.
God, but he was beautiful, all hard lines and lean muscle and hands that knew her every weakness. She returned to his lap the instant he joined her in the bath, once more straddling him as they kissed and stroked and comforted one another.
He lifted her up out of the water to suck her nipple into his mouth. Crying out, she arched her back, and he took advantage of her position to lick along the sensitive undersides of her breasts.
Sliding down until they were face-to-face, she took a breathless kiss, reaching down one of her hands to close her fingers over the iron rigidity of him. He jerked and tore away her hand, his eyes pools of unearthly blue flame. As on edge, she rubbed her passion-swollen folds against him. His response was an open-mouthed kiss without boundaries before he tightened his hands on her hips.
When he thrust into her, it was a hard claiming that made her shudder and clench convulsively around him, her arms locked around his neck and her cheek pressed to his. Raphael. A whisper from deep inside her, a shiver of pleasure and a sense of homecoming.
Nothing will take you from me. His fingers dug into her flesh. Not even the Cascade. The wind and the rain in her mind, a relentless storm she never wanted to escape. He was hers and she was his, and together they were a unit that could not be torn apart by forces either mortal or immortal.
* * *
• • •
Wrapped up in a fluffy white dressing gown while her archangel lay beside her on the bed lazily stroking his fingers up and down her thigh, Elena was inhaling another plate of food when she felt an itching over the exact spot that had been the center of the punch of debilitating pain. She was scratching at it before she realized the connection.
Raphael’s eyes zeroed in on her hand.
She shrugged. “It itches.”
Neither one of them could divine any reason for the itch when they examined the patch of skin. It was a little red from her scratching but otherwise the same as the skin around it. Raphael pressed a kiss to it, the sweet tenderness laying waste to her tough hunter armor.
Running her fingers over the blue-and-white fire of the Legion mark on his right temple when he drew back, she said, “Maybe I’ll get a stylish mark like yours.”
Raphael didn’t smile, and she wasn’t sure he slept that night. Safe in his arms, his wing a silken weight over her, she did fall into sleep . . . and into dreams.
* * *
• • •
“Mama?” Elena walked across the kitchen to brace her hands on the counter . . . and was startled to discover that she was tall enough to do that. She’d always been a child in this kitchen, never quite able to reach the very top of the counter; so many memories she had, of sitting on a breakfast stool kicking her legs back and forth while Ari and Belle and Marguerite and Jeffrey moved around the kitchen.
Beth would usually be in a high chair at the table, either their mama or papa scooping food into her mouth while making silly noises that had Beth giggling and clapping her pudgy baby hands.
Her mother looked up with a laughing smile, all hair of captured sunlight and eyes of delicate silver. “There you are, azeeztee.” Gardenias scented the air, the fragrance warmed and made deeply familiar from its contact with Marguerite’s dark gold skin. “I knew you would smell the cookies and come.”
Elena took the cookie her mother held out. It was deliciously warm from the oven, the chocolate chips not yet solid. Lifting the treat to her mouth she took a bite . . . and tasted blood.
Spitting out the bite of cookie to the floor, she wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, and it came back smeared with darkest red. The scent of iron filled her nostrils.
“Elena.” No raising of her voice, never that with Marguerite, but her disappointment was deep grooves on either side of her mouth. “That, chérie, is not how I brought you up to treat food.”
“But, mama, look”—Elena held out the cookie—“it’s bleeding.” Dark and viscous droplets splattered onto the counter, tiny Rorschach paintings in which were written the stories of their family.
Marguerite’s eyes dulled. “I was so hoping they’d turn out nice this time. You know how much your papa loves my cookies.” She took the uneaten remai
nder of the cookie from Elena and put it carefully on the baking tray.
Blood seeped out from the edge of every single cookie.
Her mother was crying.
Elena ran around the counter to take Marguerite into her arms. “It’s all right, mama,” she said, her heart twisted up inside her chest and her throat thick. “It’s only one batch. The next one will be better.”
But her mother kept on sobbing, and her slender arms, they held on to Elena so tight. “I love you, my bébé, my strong Elena with my mama’s heart,” she said between sobs. “I’m so sorry for the blood.”
That was when Elena realized the entire room was drenched in red. It dripped down from the ceiling, was smeared on the walls, and was a flood under their feet. Instead of screaming, she closed her eyes and held her mother closer. “It’s all right, mama,” she whispered again. “I’m not afraid anymore.”
10
The strange, haunting dream was still on Elena’s mind when she ran into Ashwini in the Tower lobby midmorning the next day. Tall, with long dark hair pulled back into a loose braid, and skin of dark honey, the hunter turned vampire wore a form-fitting chocolate-colored jacket zipped up to her throat, faded blue jeans, and scuffed hunting boots.
Gloves stuck out from her back pocket, and she had knives in one thigh sheath, a gun in the other. Her throwing stars weren’t visible, but that meant nothing. Ashwini always had several of the lethal spinning stars on her person. “Where you heading?” Elena asked.
“Quarter. Got two dead vamps.” Large gold hoops swung in Ash’s ears, multihued jewels dangling from the gold.
Marguerite had often worn long dangles in her ears, their tinkling music the background score to Elena’s childhood. “Fight?” she managed to say through the ache in her heart for a woman who’d never again slip on pretty earrings or wear her favorite white dress with the yellow flowers on it.
“Nah,” Ashwini said. “Not an ordinary fight, anyway—someone really lost their shit.” The other hunter turned the screen of her phone toward Elena. “Swipe through for the full effect.”
Elena whistled as she did so. The two vampires in the crime scene photos had been butchered. That their heads had been hacked off was fairly standard—most vampires could be killed by whacking off the head, and so that was the default when someone went after one of the Made. It was the rest of what had been done to the victims that was unusual.
The two looked to have been stabbed hundreds of times, until their flesh resembled ground meat. Not just that but other parts of their bodies had also been hacked off. A hand in one case and the genitals in the other. Nothing surgical about the amputations, either; it looked as if the perpetrator had done the genitals with a serrated hunting knife. As for the hand, the wrist bones were badly shattered. Broadsword, maybe.
“Slight case of overkill.”
“You’d be surprised.” Ashwini slid the phone into a zippered pocket of her jacket. “Janvier and I see a ton of weird-ass shit working the Quarter. But this one might be more standard—I’m hearing rumors the two vics might’ve been either angling to horn in on another vampire’s cattle, or poking their noses in a vampire gang’s drug turf.”
“Vics post-Contract?”
“Yep.”
Elena shook her head. “You’d think after over a hundred years of existence, people would get to be a bit smarter.” Poaching from another vampire’s harem of permanent blood donors was considered a mortal crime; and as for the drug gangs, their tendency to eviscerate anyone who encroached on their turf wasn’t exactly a state secret.
“Why do you live in hope, Ellie?”
“It’s a flaw.”
Laughter that faded quickly into a frown. “Don’t be afraid of the owls.”
Elena froze in place, her breath shards in her lungs. “No?”
“No, they’re only messengers of a messenger.” A motorcycle purred to a stop in front of the lobby doors, snagging Ashwini’s attention. “That’s my ride. Off we go to look at blood and gore—Janvier takes me on the best dates.”
Skin yet chilled, Elena watched Ashwini stride out to get onto the bike behind her husband. Janvier passed back her motorcycle helmet. A couple of seconds later the two were gone, racing off toward the sin, sex, and darkness of the Quarter.
Leaving Elena with that unsettling piece of advice about the owls. The last time Ashwini had given Elena something, it had been a blade star, and it had turned out to be the perfect weapon to take down the monstrous angel who’d brutalized Elena’s grandparents. Ignoring Ash when she came out with one of her random statements was an intensely stupid thing to do.
“So,” Elena muttered to herself, “don’t get freaked out by the owls.” That in itself wasn’t an issue; the owls had been lovely and graceful and unthreatening. No, the problem was that Ash’s words implied Elena would be seeing more of the ghost birds with the enormous golden eyes and white feathers.
Fuck.
It was the last thing she wanted to hear when she already felt out of sorts, odd. She’d woken in Raphael’s arms, a lump of sadness sitting on her chest. He’d known. He always knew.
“Did you dream?” A masculine face piercingly familiar yet beautiful enough to stun, looking down at her, strands of hair purer than midnight falling over his forehead.
“I told my mother I wasn’t afraid.” A ragged whisper. “I wasn’t, not even when the entire room filled with blood. I was just so, so sad.”
Enclosing her in his arms, her archangel had shut out the world in which her mother and two eldest sisters no longer existed, and, after a while, she’d permitted herself to cry.
For Marguerite, who would never grow any older than she’d been when she hanged herself.
For talented, mercurial, loving Belle, who’d taught Elena to play baseball and whose legs had been savagely broken.
For smart, kind, bossy Ari, who’d tried to protect Elena with her last breath.
For their small, happy family that had disintegrated into splinters.
Even for her fundamentally damaged father, who’d married a strong, intelligent woman who loved him, and yet who’d once kept a mistress who was a pale facsimile of Marguerite.
Haunted by the memories, the scent of gardenias a sensory echo that clung, Elena had spent the early-morning hours on the snowy lawn above the Hudson, pushing her body through a training routine Galen had designed to teach her to fight with wings. Raphael’s barbarian of a weapons-master could be a pitiless bastard, but he was also brilliant.
She’d taken care not to jolt her hurt wing, but she hadn’t held back otherwise.
Raphael had watched her until it was time for him to leave to join Illium’s elite squadron; they were training over the ocean again today. After all that had happened and the certainty that Lijuan would be a nightmare brimming with power when she rose again, Raphael was taking no chances with his people’s readiness.
Despite being based in the Refuge, Galen was in charge of the training schedule. He kept an eye on the reports sent in by squadron and ground-force leaders, and mixed things up so every fighter had periods of rest and recuperation—an exhausted force was a useless one—but no one on the Tower team was ever rusty in their skills. Today, Raphael would act the aggressor so Illium’s squadron could practice combat maneuvers.
Elena had intended to go up to Dmitri’s office and ask him to put her to use. She’d spoken to Sara again this morning, their conversation focused on another name Sara had added to the Slayer shortlist. “No outstanding hunts,” her friend had said at the end, when Elena asked about work. “Keiko, Hilda, and Tyrese just came back from injury leave. Have the day off, Ellie. It’s not like your life isn’t busy.”
But Elena didn’t want free time; it gave her too much room to think and worry.
At that instant, however, she decided against speaking to Raphael’s second. Dmitri would aggravat
e her, and in her current mood, she might attempt to kill him dead. Since Dmitri was more than a thousand years old and as deadly as a rabid cougar, he’d probably avoid her attempts and laugh. At which point, her eyeballs would explode and she’d give in to the compulsion to pincushion him with her throwing knives.
No, better she kept her distance from the strongest vampire in the city.
Turning on her heel, she left the Tower to walk over to the Legion building. It rose up toward the heavy gray of the winter sky, its greenery dormant under the frost, but that wasn’t what cut through her grim mood to make her chuckle.
Holly was scrambling up the side of the building, one of the ice-encrusted dormant vines her rope ladder. Elena figured the palms of her gloves must have a rough surface to provide an effective grip. As she watched, the lithe young woman vaulted onto the entrance platform and glanced at her watch. Then she did a victory dance, the bright pink of her sweater a blaze against the grayness overhanging the world, and her actions aimed at someone out of view of Elena.
It wasn’t Holly’s lover, Venom, who stepped forward to bow at Holly in graceful defeat. No, it was Trace. Elegant and assured and with a fondness for exquisite poetry. Also a vampire several hundred years older than Holly. But up on the platform, the two of them grinned at each other like children before scrambling back down to the ground.
Holly’s daisy-patterned boots hit the snowy earth at the same time as Trace’s more prosaic black.
“Were you two having a race?” Elena was highly amused that Holly had managed to talk suave Trace into it, especially today. He needed to prep for his upcoming journey to the Refuge.
“Our Hollyberry is faster than a cheetah,” Trace said in his evocative voice, the angular lines of his face put together in a way that created a sharp handsomeness rather than refined vampiric prettiness. “I should know better than to accept her challenges.”