by Nalini Singh
“Elena-mine.” Raphael stroked his thumbs over her cheekbones. “I promise not to smite your friends to dust.”
“Raphael!” She slapped his chest when he burst out laughing. “This new sense of humor of yours needs serious work.” But her lips tugged up because this man was real in a way the archangel she’d first met had never been. Remote and cold and cruel, he’d lived high in his Tower above New York, distant and dangerous.
He remained as dangerous, but he now had a vein of mortality in him formed of his love for Elena. That mortality scared her at times because it made him vulnerable…but it also made him her Raphael.
“Come, hbeebti.” He stepped to the very edge of the railing-less Tower balcony on which they stood, Manhattan a tiny toy city far below. “Let us go to this party.”
Snapping out her wings, Elena swept out into the night, her beloved city sparkling around her. Raphael flew wingtip to wingtip with her, though he could outpace her a hundred times over.
She turned and smiled at him. “Hey, Angel Boy.”
A raised eyebrow. “Are you talking to me, Consort?”
She laughed at his icily archangelic tone. “I love you.” He was attempting the impossible for her, trying to give her what she needed because her heart would always be mortal.
“Knhebek, hbeebti.”
The flight to Guild HQ was a short one. They arrived to find it brightly lit up in honor of the Guild’s anniversary. Other institutions might’ve held some kind of fancy black-tie do, inviting movers and shakers.
Thankfully, all the people at the top of the Guild were former hunters. They knew the thing to do was to throw one hell of a party with a dress code that was hunter-casual. That party was the social highlight of the hunter calendar. Plus ones or twos were welcome as long as they knew the single rule of the night: fun was the priority.
Elena flew directly to the outdoor training area—it was the best place to land and it happened to be party central. The wide back doors to the Guild had been thrown open, the inside party area flowing out into the outdoor section. That section had been decorated with flaming braziers and colorful fairy lights. And pink plastic flamingos smoking cigars.
Elena saw Ransom’s hand in that particular touch, probably with Demarco’s help. Elena’s contribution was a cocktail bar staffed by two experts at the craft. While the Guild always had a full open bar at the anniversary party, elaborate cocktails were out of the hunter skill range. Weirdly—to her—Elena was filthy rich as a result of the hunt that had first brought her and Raphael together. It felt good to do something fun for her friends.
She landed first, closing her wings quickly so as not to hit anyone. Not that her fellow hunters would mind. If they were already drunk, they’d probably try to snag a feather instead.
“Ellie!” Demarco lifted her up in a bear hug. “I thought you were bringing a date?” It was a laughing comment, no one having taken her seriously when she’d RSVP’d a plus one on the electronic invite.
Elena grinned, returned the hug, then looked up.
Raphael came down in a glory of wings that glittered in the light thrown by the braziers.
“Fuck me.” Demarco’s mouth fell open.
It wasn’t the only one.
Every hunter in the vicinity, even the ones already wearing giant pink flamingo hats and drinking hard cocktails, froze in place. Elena felt her stomach dip. It had been funny for a second… but these were her friends. And Raphael was her heart. She wanted the two to meet even though she knew that was close to impossible.
“Ellie!” Ashwini’s voice, the other hunter waving her over to the high table she was sharing with her husband—who happened to be a vampire.
Her voice seemed to break the frozen silence. Someone gave a loud “Whoop!” followed by, “This is now officially the best party in New York! Suck on that fancy-pants tuxedo types!”
Feet thundered, more cries went up, and the atmosphere turned guild hunter normal. Elena’s heart eased. She knew the comfort wouldn’t last—Raphael’s sheer power would become overwhelming to even strong hunters very soon, but for now, both her worlds were in harmony and it was a brilliant New York night.
Joining her friends, Raphael beside her, Elena went to accept the cocktail Ashwini handed her. Of course the other woman had known she was about to land. Ashwini was spooky like that.
“Forget that girly umbrella drink.” Ransom thrust a glass into her hand. “This is a real cocktail.”
She took a drink…and almost passed out. “What is this?” she asked after she’d stopped coughing. “A Long Island Iced Tea on steroids?”
Ransom grinned and tapped his glass to Elena’s. “It’s my special celebratory drink. I was the only one who bet you’d turn up with Raphael.” He held out a hand to Raphael.
The two men shook before Ransom said, “You want to try my special cocktail, Raphael?”
Lifting the glass to Raphael, Elena said, “Try a sip first to see if you want your tastebuds burned off.” The alcohol was still zinging its way through her system.
Her archangel was clearly in a playful mood—and that was a word she’d never thought she’d use to describe him. He took the glass and threw back the contents like it was water. “A little weak.”
The hunters around them cracked up laughing. And for the twenty minutes that Raphael was able to stay, before his power began to pulse too hard against human senses, the man Elena loved with all her heart and soul interacted with her friends as if there was no gulf of power and strength between them, both sides setting the outside world aside and being in this moment, in this joy.
“That was the best Guild party I ever attended,” she said to Raphael later that night, while they lay skin to skin in their enormous bed, Manhattan a glittering carpet beyond the large floor-to-ceiling windows. “I’m also starting to realize that you must’ve been a wild one when you were a few hundred years old.”
Sadness filled her for a second, a sense of loss for a time she could never experience.
Then Raphael laughed and told her the story of how he and several other young angels had once thrown a party so raucous, they’d been banned from the Refuge for a year, and the sadness faded. The past had shaped them, but the future was theirs to shape…and they’d do it together.
Always.
Copyright © 2016 by Nalini Singh
Psy-Changeling Series
To read more about the Psy-Changeling series, including excerpts and behind-the-scenes material, click here.
The Cannibal Princess
Author’s Note: This is one of the first slice-of-life shorts I ever wrote!
Timewise, this story is set after Slave to Sensation and before Visions of Heat. Enjoy!
The Cannibal Princess
By Nalini Singh
“Sascha, darling!” Sascha felt her lips twitch at that childish shout. “All your fault,” she said to Lucas as he did a not very good job of hiding his grin.
“What can I say?” He spread out his arms. “Kid has good taste, not to mention excellent language skills.” Ignoring her mate as he trailed her out of Tamsyn’s huge kitchen and to the living room, she made her way to where Julian and Roman sat side by side on the sofa. “You called, your highnesses?”
The cubs giggled, then shifted apart. Julian patted the space in between and Sascha sat. They immediately snuggled up to her, small and warm and so precious. Every time she held these two, she wondered about what the future held for her and Lucas. Her eyes lifted and clashed with his as he sat down on the edge of the coffee-table in front of her. The beautiful green of his gaze held the most intense kind of promise. Her heart jerked. Impossible, her Psy mind told her. But she knew it was possible. Emotion had a strength most of the Psy had forgotten. It could hurt and it could give such joy it was beyond anything she had ever imagined possible. A small hand patted her left arm. Roman, she thought, turning to press a kiss over the top of his head. He was the quieter of the pair, but together, they were Trouble on four
legs—eight if they had shifted into their animal forms. “Missing your Mom?” she asked.
Roman nodded. On her other side, Julian asked, “Back tonight?” His voice was uncharacteristically plaintive.
“Yes, back tonight.” Tammy and Nate had had to make a quick trip out of state, leaving their cubs in Sascha and Lucas’s care.
Sascha adored the pair–it kept surprising her that the adoration seemed mutual. Now she looked at both in turn. “I’ll make sure to tell her how good you two have been.”
That earned her a smile from Julian and a kiss on the cheek from Roman. Lucas watched, teasing her with his eyes. He knew she was a sucker for the kids. She made a face back at him.
“Story, Sascha?”
Sascha froze at Julian’s question. Even after months with DarkRiver, she kept getting caught flat-footed by things she hadn’t thought to prepare for. “You want to hear a story?”
Two nods, two pairs of shiny eyes looking to her in anticipation.
Lost, she glanced at Lucas. She didn’t know how to tell stories. Her childhood had been spent squeezing emotion out of her soul.
No one had ever told her any story but ones that warned her to keep emotion locked away, where it couldn’t destroy her. Her mother had whispered to her of the rehabilitated, the nightmare creatures who were nothing more than walking vegetables, their life drained away.
Her most powerful childhood memory was of standing inside the Center, watching the rehabilitated shuffle from one end of the room to the other, their features blank, their eyes empty of any but the most faded remnants of humanity.
The darkness of memory threatened to claw into her, but then a wave of love traveled down the twisting threads of the bond inside of her, this magical thing that tied her to the panther perched on the coffee-table opposite, his long legs spread to bracket her own. “I have a story,” he said, catching the twins’ attention. “But it’s scary.”
“Really?” Julian leaned forward in excitement.
“We’re not babies,” Roman added.
Lucas made a face. “I don’t know. Your Mom might get mad.”
“Please, Uncle Lucas!”
“Please!”
“Please! Please!”
“Please!”
Lucas gave a solemn sigh and leaned forward a little, forearms braced on his thighs. “Okay, but I did warn you. If you have nightmares, don’t come complaining to me.” Looking at him right then, his face indulgent, his voice gentle, no one would have pegged him as one of the most dangerous predators in the area, a panther who could tear enemies to shreds with his bare hands.
But, Sascha thought, he was still DarkRiver’s alpha. Except this time, he was seeing to the needs of two of the pack’s youngest members. And her. He was looking after her, too, with a quiet support that let her know he was there to help her as she figured out this new life, this new world.
“Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a princess—”
“A princess!” Julian’s disgusted shout, followed by Roman’s scowling nod.
Lucas growled low in his throat, making both cubs quiet and snuggle against Sascha with fearful shivers. She knew it was all for show but she hugged them anyway.
“As I was saying, there was a princess. She lived in a tower in the middle of a forest and she had seven servants.”
“Seven?” Julian dared whisper.
“One for each day of the week,” Lucas said. “You see, each day, one servant would go out to the nearby village and—”
“And?” Roman this time.
“I don’t know.” Lucas frowned. “This is the really scary part. Are you sure you’ll be okay?”
Two very fast nods.
Nodding, Lucas leaned closer, his voice a whisper. “You see, the Princess had really big teeth, sharp as knives.”
Roman gasped but didn’t interrupt. Julian wasn’t so quiet. “Like wolves?”
Lucas’s lips curved. “Exactly like the wolves.”
She threw him a scowl. The wolves were supposed to be their allies now. Unrepentant laughter danced in his eyes as he continued the story. “The princess could cut through anything with those sharp wolf teeth–flesh and bone, wood and metal, even…little boys’ bedroom doors.”
As the cubs shivered again, Lucas looked up to catch Sascha’s wide-eyed look. She appeared as innocent as Julian and Roman at that moment, a child surrendering to the magic of story for the first time. A tearing rush of tenderness filled his heart, but with it came a steely determination. No one was ever going to hurt her again, not in his lifetime.
“Now, down in the village—the village that the servants went to every day,” he continued, spinning the story as he went, “there lived a little boy. Every night, he went to sleep after locking all the windows and doors in his house.”
“Why?” Sascha asked.
“So the princess’s servants wouldn’t get him,” he said, as if that should have been obvious.
“But why?” his analytical Psy mate persisted.
“Because,” he paused, let the tension build, then growled out the last words “the Cannibal Princess liked to eat little boys for dinner.”
His audience—all three of them—gripped each other. He almost laughed at the look of shock on Sascha’s face. She was probably wondering what he was doing telling such a bloodthirsty tale to two such small leopards. His darling kitten hadn’t yet realized that children were far more feral than grownups.
“Her favorite dish was roasted little boy with honey glazing and pineapple slices.”
“Lucas, maybe—” Sascha began
“Shh.” Two small voices, four hands clutching at her waist. “More, Uncle Lucas.”
“Well, sometimes she liked them nicely fattened up so she’d keep them in her special little pantry and feed them cake and pie and—”
“—sausage!” Roman added.
“Yes,” Lucas agreed with a solemn nod. “And that pantry—full of cake and pie and sausage, was where she put the little boy from the village. She told him to eat, eat…so she could eat him.” As he sat there and told a deliciously dark tale of how the smart little boy defeated the Cannibal Princess with his wits alone, he watched Sascha, felt her love for him, for the boys, surround them in a silken wave. She didn’t realize how extraordinary she was, how being in a room with her made people feel better about life, about hope, about everything.
And she was his.
The panther within him pleased by that thought, he smiled, bared his teeth and finished the tale with a growling grab at the twins and Sascha. All three screamed and then giggled. Julian and Roman pretended to bite him, while Sascha was a rainbow inside his mind. In front of him, her face streaked with laughter as the cubs turned, looked at each other and decided to make her their next victim.
Ten minutes of mock-wrestling later, she held up her hands in laughing surrender and declared herself “eaten.”
~
That night in bed, she turned to him and said, “Tell me a story, Lucas. No cannibals.”
He sighed, stroked a hand down her back. “I only know cannibal stories,” he teased.
“Please,” she said, in imitation of the twins. “Please, please!”
He kissed her, remembering how very restrained she’d been when they had first met. But even then, he had sensed the wildness in her. “If I can’t have cannibals, can I have deranged monkeys?”
Her eyes went wide and she nodded.
“Before I start—when are you going to tell me a story?”
She paused, thinking. “I need to do some more research.” Her hand laid against his chest. “Teach me.”
The panther purred in approval–this was a woman fit for a mate, this woman who didn’t give up, no matter what the obstacle. “How about”—he began to undo her braid—“we tell this story together.”
A slow, sweet, perfect smile warmed up her eyes. “Once upon a time,” she whispered, “there was a princess and she lived with a panther.”
&n
bsp; Two days later, Lucas got a call from Tamsyn during which he was asked to explain how her cubs now knew the meaning of the word “cannibal.”
Copyright © 2007 by Nalini Singh
Wild Night
Author's Note: This short story stands alone, so you should be able to read it without problems even if you’ve never read the Psy-Changeling series. It features the SnowDancer wolf changelings. For series readers, “Wild Night” slots in during Chapter 9 of Kiss of Snow.
Setup: The SnowDancer alpha, Hawke, has just driven down to the dance club, Wild, and ordered the young SnowDancers there to get themselves home, after they almost started a massive bar fight with other predatory changelings.
Hawke and Sienna leave in one vehicle. Tai, a young SnowDancer soldier, volunteers to drive one of the other trucks. And this is where the story begins.
I hope you enjoy!
Wild Night
By Nalini Singh
Tai helped a silent Evie into the passenger seat of the truck he’d volunteered to drive up to the den, made sure her seat belt was properly on. “You guys belted up?” he asked the two passengers in back.
“Yes.” The response was muted, Cadence and Amos conscious their pissed-off alpha was still getting into his own vehicle.
Jogging around to the driver’s side after shutting Evie’s door, he got in and, putting on his own seat belt, started up the engine. Hawke pulled out just ahead of them, his rugged all-wheel drive passing on Evie’s side.
Tai saw Sienna mouth “Traitor” at Evie. Evie giggled and mouthed something back, and then the alpha and Sienna were gone.
Cadence groaned at the same time, sounding like she was thumping the back of her head against the headrest. “We are so in trouble.”
“What do you think Riley will do?” Amos asked in his deep rumble of a voice, his dark brown eyes catching Tai’s in the rearview mirror. “Put us on patrol in the middle of nowhere?”