by Nalini Singh
The bedroom proved empty, but she was in no doubt that Illium was nearby. Heading out onto the wide space of the balcony, she began to go through a stretching routine she’d been taught at Guild Academy. Most of the moves still worked, though she had to get creative with a few, given that she now had wings to consider. She tripped a couple of times—until she forced herself to remember to keep the trailing edges raised. It had the same effect as if she’d been trying to keep her arms straight while typing—the ache was a slow burn that got progressively more painful.
Stubborn determination made her want to push through it, but remembering the state she’d been in this afternoon, she took a break. Dragging herself back into the bedroom and out to the large living area, she found some juice and threw it back. The taste was fresh and tart on her tongue, an indication that this medieval-looking city of mountain and rock had an orange grove hidden somewhere deep within.
“You have a phone call.”
Turning on her heel, she found Illium holding up a sleek silver portable handset. So much for the medieval imagery. “I didn’t hear it ring.”
“I turned off the ringer while you were napping.” Passing it over, he took an apple from the fruit bowl. “It’s Ransom.”
Surprised at Illium’s familiar tone, she lifted the receiver to her ear. “Hey, handsome.”
She could hear the smile in the other hunter’s voice when he replied. “You flying yet?”
“Soon.”
“You sure are keeping some interesting company lately.”
Glancing at Illium as the blue-winged angel walked out onto the separate balcony that flowed off this room, she said, “Where did you meet Illium?”
“Erotique.”
“You know some of the dancers?” Ransom had grown up on the streets, retained most of his contacts even now.
“A couple. I get a lot of good intel there—even the most powerful of vamps gets talky when a woman’s got her mouth near his cock.”
Elena wasn’t surprised—vampires had once been human after all. It took a long time for the echoes to fade completely. “So what did they blab?”
A crackle through the lines. “. . . want to know.”
“What?” She pressed the receiver closer.
“Word’s out that you’re alive. Everyone thinks you’re a bloodsucker—far as I can tell, none of the ones in the know have let the truth slip.”
“Good.” She needed time to get her own head around her new reality before explaining it to anyone else. “Was that what you wanted to tell me?”
“No. One of the dancers heard the vamps are placing bets on you surviving a year.”
“What’re the odds?”
“Ninety-nine to one.”
Elena didn’t have to ask which was the winning side. “What do they know that I don’t?”
“Rumor is, Lijuan has a habit of feeding her guests to her pets.”
6
Raphael watched Michaela lift the crystal wineglass to her lips with the effortless grace of a woman who’d had centuries to perfect her elegant facade. Impartially speaking, she was beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful woman in the world, her skin a flawless shade akin to the most exotic coffee swirled with cream, her eyes a green that put gemstones to shame, her hair a tumble of black threaded with bronze, brown, a hundred shades in between.
Stunning—and she used her looks as effectively and as unemotionally as others might a gun. If men, mortal and immortal, had died because they’d fallen prey to that beauty, that was their mistake.
“So,” she now purred, venom coated in honey, “your hunter survived.” When he didn’t say anything, she made a moue of disappointment. “Why keep it a secret?”
“I didn’t think you were that interested in Elena’s survival.” Only her death.
To her credit, Michaela didn’t pretend not to understand. “Touché.” Raising her wineglass in a toast, she took a small sip of the golden liquid. “Will you be very angry if I kill her?”
Raphael met those poisonous eyes of vibrant green, wondering if Uram had ever seen through to the vicious heart of the woman he’d called his consort. “You seem to have a fascination with my hunter.” It was a deliberate statement. Elena was his, and he would protect her.
Michaela waved off the words. “She made interesting prey, but now that she’s lost her abilities, the sport will be far too easy. I suppose I should just let her be.”
It was a very smooth, very calculated offer. “I think,” he said, not correcting her erroneous assumption, “Elena is more than capable of looking after herself.”
Michaela’s cheekbones cut sharply against skin men had died to touch. “Surely you don’t think her my equal?”
“No.” He waited, watched her face suffuse with pleasure, with satisfaction. “She’s something utterly unique.”
For a single icy instant the mask slipped. “Be careful, Raphael.” A predator looked back at him, one who’d clean blood off her fingers with chilly fastidiousness, even as she watched her victim writhe in agony at her feet. “I won’t sheathe my claws because she’s your pet.”
“Then I’ll ask Elena not to sheathe hers.” Taking a sip of his own wine, he leaned back in his chair. “Will you be at the ball?”
A blink and the mask returned, pristine and perfect. “Of course.” She ran a hand through her hair, the move pushing her breasts against the olive-colored fabric of a dress that bared just enough to tempt most men to madness. “Have you ever been to Lijuan’s fortress?”
“No.” The oldest of the archangels lived in a mountain stronghold secreted within China’s extensive borders. “I don’t think any of the Cadre have.” Though Raphael had managed to get several of his men inside over the centuries. At present, that task was Jason’s, and each time he returned, Raphael’s spymaster brought more and more disturbing news of Lijuan’s court.
Michaela swirled the liquid in her glass. “Uram was invited there once when he was much younger,” she told him. “Lijuan took a shine to him.”
“I’m not sure whether Uram should’ve been flattered or not.”
A soft, intimate laugh. “She is rather . . . inhuman, isn’t she?” This, coming from a member of the Cadre, spoke to the extent of Lijuan’s “evolution.”
“What did Uram tell you of her stronghold?”
“That it was impenetrable and filled with countless treasures.” Her eyes sparkled, whether in contemplation of those treasures or from the memory of her lover, Raphael couldn’t say. “He said he’d never seen such artwork, such tapestries and jewels. I don’t know that I believed him—have you ever seen Lijuan wearing even a diamond?”
“She has no need to.” With hair of purest white and eyes of a strange pearlescent gray that he’d seen nowhere else on this earth, Lijuan was unforgettable without ornamentation. And these days, Raphael thought, the other archangel’s attention was fixed on a world the rest of them couldn’t even begin to fathom. She hadn’t left her stronghold at all this past half year, not even to meet with her fellow archangels. Which made the ball all the more extraordinary. “Has she invited the entire Cadre?”
“Chari has received an invitation,” Michaela said of another of her former lovers, “and he says Neha has as well, so I assume she’s invited the others. You should ask Favashi to accompany you. I think our Persian princess would like you for a consort.”
Raphael met Michaela’s gaze. “If you could kill every single beautiful woman in the world, would you?”
Her smile never faded. “In an instant.”
Elena hung up the phone with a frown and stepped out onto the balcony. “Illium, do you know anything about Lijuan’s pets?”
The other angel shot her a wide-eyed glance. “Ransom has very good sources.”
Yes, Elena thought, he did. But even he hadn’t been able to discover the identity of these creatures that had the vampires so certain of her death. “What are they?” Her spine locked as her mind offered an explanation. “Not vampires who�
�ve given in to bloodlust?” Locked in a constant loop of violence, feeding and hunger, those vampires made the most sociopathic of killers.
“Come here, little hunter. Taste.”
Illium shook his head as she slammed the door on a memory that refused to stay buried, his hair tumbled by the stiff breeze coming off the mountains. He was a jewel against the night, his beauty so intense that it forced the eye to him rather than the stars. She took the lifeline, hung onto the present. “Why hasn’t Michaela killed you yet?”
“I’m male. She’d rather fuck me.”
The blunt answer threw her off balance for a second. “Have you?”
“Do I look like I want to be eaten alive after sex?”
Startled into a grin, she turned her face into the wind, enjoying the biting freshness. “So, Lijuan’s pets?”
“Ask Raphael.”
Her smile disappeared at the thought of where Raphael was at that moment. Searching for a distraction, she nodded at the lights she could see dotting the sides of the gorge that fell away beneath them, a massive split in the earth’s crust. “Don’t tell me people live down there?” Water ran far, far below the lights, but even so, she could feel the raging thunder of its passage.
“Why not? The caves make the most perfect of aeries.” His grin was a slash of white across his face. “I have one. When you can fly, you can come see it.”
“At the rate I’m going, I’ll be eighty by the time I can actually fly.”
“It’ll only take once,” Illium said softly, his face lifted up to the moonlight. The beams played over him as if entranced, turning his skin translucent, his hair a thousand strands of liquid ebony dipped in sapphires. “That first flight is something you never forget—the rush of air as your wings spread, the intoxicating freedom, the sheer joy that dances in the soul from being all that you’re meant to be.”
Caught by the unexpected poetry of his words, she almost didn’t see Raphael sweeping in to land. Almost. Because nothing and no one else could ever hold her attention when her archangel was in the vicinity. Barely aware of Illium going quiet beside her, she watched the devastating grace of Raphael’s descent. Illium was as beautiful as a gleaming blade, but Raphael . . . Raphael was magnificent.
“Time for me to go, I think.”
She felt Illium leave, but it was a distant knowledge, her eyes drawn inextricably to the archangel who’d landed before her. “How was dinner?” she asked, staring into those cobalt eyes full of secrets it would take her an eternity to unravel.
“I survived.”
It should’ve made her smile, but all she felt was a violent possessiveness—honed to the most lethal of edges by the knowledge that right now, the green-eyed female archangel could kill her without even a modicum of effort. “Did Michaela mark you?”
“Why don’t you check?” He flared out his wings.
Feeling stupidly vulnerable all of a sudden, she turned to grip the balcony railing. “It’s none of my business if you choose to spend time with a woman who’d eat your heart and dance gleefully on your grave if it would mean she gained power.”
“Oh, but I disagree, Elena.” Strong arms on either side of hers, big hands closing over the railing. “Tighten your wings.”
It took her a minute to figure out how to do that neat tucking into the body thing she’d seen other angels do with their wings. “That’s harder than it looks.”
“Takes muscle control.” Words spoken against her neck as he pressed closer, her wings trapped between them.
It hurt . . . with a pain that made her skin shimmer in hunger, in need. Every shift of his body, every brush of his lips, it went straight to her core. But she’d been fighting her attraction to Raphael since the moment she met him—it had never made her an easy target. “What do you disagree about?” she asked, her gaze drawn to the wings she could see sweeping through the lush black of the night, heading for those isolated aeries.
Angels going home.
A strange thought, a strange sensation, to stand here in their most secret place when they’d always been shadows in the darkness to her.
“I consider it very much your business if I choose to spend time with Michaela.”
She heard a dangerous undertone in his words, one that curled her toes even as it pricked at her hunter instincts. “Do you?”
“As I consider it very much my business that your wings are dusted with blue.”
Eyes widening, she pushed away from the railing. Or tried to. “Raphael, let me go so I can see.”
“No.”
She blew out a breath. “Stop it. Illium didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Angel dust is not an instinctive act . . . unless one is in the throes of sex.” His fingers plucked at the tight peak of her nipple, a shockingly sensual reminder that the Archangel of New York had once lost control in bed. “It’s very much premeditated.”
“If he wasn’t down there,” she said, fighting to speak through the slamming rush of need, “I’d smack him. He’s jerking your chain.”
Lips on her ear, his hand moving to cup her breast with devastating intimacy. “Illium has always had a wild disregard for his life.”
She couldn’t help it. She curved her neck to give him better access. “And yet he’s one of your Seven.”
“I think in this case, he knows he’s your favorite.” Kisses along her neck, hot and sexual in a way that told her he had only one thing in mind.
Giving a laugh husky with need, she reached back to run the fingers of one hand over his cheek. “Do I have that much influence over you?”
The graze of teeth. “If your Bluebell is alive tomorrow, you’ll have your answer.” His body pressed into her, hot, hard, and demanding, as his hands slid under her clothing to close over her bare breasts.
“Raphael.”
Finally allowing her to turn, he crowded her against the railing. Instinct drove her to spread her wings over the metal that was all that kept her from falling to the rocks below. No, she thought, on the heels of that thought. Raphael would never let her fall. And if she fell, he’d fall with her. “Kiss me, Archangel.”
“As you wish, Guild Hunter.” His lips met hers, harshly masculine and earthy in a way that paid lie to any myths about angels being too “evolved” to indulge in such physical pleasures.
Moaning in the back of her throat, she wrapped her arms around his neck, rising on tiptoe to meet him kiss for tangled kiss. When his hand brushed the side of her breast, she shivered from the pleasure of it. Biting at his lower lip, she opened her eyes. “Now.”
“No.” Another hotly sexual kiss.
Breaking it, she ran her hand down the muscled plane of his chest, lower. He gripped it before she could close her fingers over the rigid length of him. “I’m not that weak,” she protested.
“You’re not that strong either.” Power ringed his irises. “Not for what I want.”
She stilled. “And what is that?”
Everything. The sea and the wind. Clean and wild . . . and inside her mind.
“I’ll give you my hunger, my heart,” she said, fighting to retain her independence, and more—to build a foundation for their relationship that would last an eternity. “But my mind is my own. Accept that.”
“Or?” The cool question of a being used to getting exactly what he wanted.
“I guess you’ll have to wait and see.” Leaning back against the balcony, her body aching, unfulfilled, she simply looked at him, at the exquisite balance of beauty and cruelty, perfection and darkness. His own hunger had turned his face acetic, that flawless bone structure dramatic against his skin. But he made no move to kiss her again.
“I’ll break you.”
The words he’d spoken earlier came back to her, an invisible wall between them. Knowing he was right, she blew out a breath. “I have a question.”
He waited without impatience—as if he had forever and she was the only woman in the universe. It threatened to take her breath away. How had she, El
ena Deveraux, a common hunter according to her father, ended up with the right to ask questions of an archangel?
“What do you know about Lijuan’s pets?”
A slow blink was all the indication he gave that she’d surprised him. “Dare I inquire how you knew to ask that question?”
She smiled.
His expression changed, holding an intensity that seared her through and through. “As I said”—eyes turning to chrome—“you’ll make eternity far more interesting.”
That was when she noticed the light coming off his wings. Bright, lethal, just enough to make him seem precisely what he was—an immortal who held enough power in his body to level a city. Instinct had her muscles tensing in preparation for flight, the adrenaline rush so strong, it was difficult to form words. “You’re glowing.”
“Am I?” Fingers undoing her hair, threading through the strands. “Lijuan’s pets are the reborn.”
Startled at getting a straight answer, she sucked in air through lungs that protested the effort—struggling past the pressure of Raphael’s presence, his power. She didn’t call him on it, intensely conscious that he wasn’t doing it to intimidate her. He was simply being. And if she planned to dance with an archangel, she had to learn to deal. “Something to do with vampires?”
“No. As archangels age,” he said, the glow beginning to fade, though his eyes stayed that metallic shade no human would ever possess, “we gain power.”
“Like your mental abilities,” she murmured, her heart still racing. “And the glamour.” Paranoia would run rampant if it got out that some archangels could walk among the populace unknown, unseen.
“Yes. Lijuan is the oldest among us, and as such, has the greatest store of abilities.”
“So these reborn are something only she can create?”
A nod that sent the coal black strands of his hair sliding over his forehead.
Reaching up to push them back, she lingered, playing with the heavy silk. “What are they?”