Archangel's Legion gh-6

by Nalini Singh

  Elena stood inside their home, staring out at the world through the sliding glass doors of the library. That world had gone insane. Birds continued to fall from the sky, the “cloud” created of thousands upon thousands of their tiny forms. Elena’s instincts urged her to do something, stop the terrible rain, but there was nothing she could do.

  The river had quickly emptied where the birds circled, and Elena hoped most people caught under the edge of the massive cloud that now encompassed part of Manhattan would have the good sense to duck under shelter, or into the subways to escape the bombardment.

  “Have you ever heard of anything like this?” she asked the archangel beside her.

  “No. I—” Words slicing off in midthought, he slid open the doors. “Stay here.”

  “Where are you—” Her question caught in her throat as she realized the wings above and crashing into the Hudson were suddenly far bigger than those of the dying birds.

  Angels were falling from the skies.

  Though the urge to follow Raphael as he dove off toward the water filled with broken wings was a drumbeat in her skull, Elena forced herself to use her brain. The birds were falling at speeds akin to a fastball, complete with sharp beaks that would shred wings if they hit at the wrong angle, and she wasn’t powerful enough to survive many of those hits in the air, nor agile enough in flight to avoid them. She’d only be a liability out there.

  But she could be an asset here. “Montgomery!” she cried, running out of the library.

  The butler ran out into the central core of the house just as she reached it. “Guild Hunter?” He was dressed in his usual impeccable black suit, but his eyes held the same disbelief that was ice in Elena’s blood.

  “We need to set up an infirmary,” she said. “Raphael is closer to this side of the river and likely to bring the fallen here.” She looked around the central core—it was huge by any measure, but angelic wings took up space, and they had no way of knowing the number of injured about to come in. “We’ll start here, but we might also have to rig up something in the yard. It’ll have to be strong enough to block the birds.”

  “I’ll get things under way.” The butler disappeared in a startling rush of speed that was a silent reminder that beneath his dignity and plummy British accent, Montgomery was deadlier than any vamp she’d ever hunted.

  Her cell phone rang as she was about to make her way to the cliffs—if she could help haul the injured inside, then Raphael could focus on rescue. Glancing at the screen as she ran to the doors, she saw it was her best friend. “Sara?”

  “Ellie, we have angels hitting the streets.” Stark shock, but below that was the steely strength that made Sara head of a guild formed of some of the most lethal men and women in the country. “Our people are rendering aid where they can, but I have reports of angels hanging broken off gargoyles on skyscrapers and stuck on church steeples.”

  Elena blew out a shuddering breath at the horrendous images. “Call the Tower.” She rattled off a number that’d give Sara direct access to Aodhan. “If he’s out of action”—dear God—“someone else will be there to cover.”

  Hanging up without further words, confident Sara would understand, Elena ran across a lawn scattered with bloodied birds, their eyes filmed over with the oblivion of death. However, the tiny corpses were far enough apart that it was clear both the house and the grounds were under the very edge of the affected zone. Fear a metallic taste on her tongue, she hoped the deaths had been caused by the impact, and not by the reason for the fall, because, unlike the birds, an angel could survive countless broken bones.

  “I have him!” she called out to Raphael as he came in, an angel in his arms.

  “He’s not breathing, his back is broken, and his heart has stopped.” Putting the lithely muscled angel on the clifftop, Raphael swept off, but his mind remained connected to her own. Tell Montgomery to take medical measures—the male is too young to survive otherwise.

  I will. Hauling one of the angel’s thankfully unbroken arms over her shoulders—ignoring the conventional teachings about broken backs because this wasn’t a mortal—she gritted her teeth and got to her feet. The victim’s shattered body was soaked from his fall, his wings dead weight. It was as well that as a born hunter, she’d always been stronger than most humans. Her growing immortality had only cemented that strength.

  Still, she was glad to see Montgomery race out to take the angel’s weight on the other side, neither one of them flinching as two birds hit their backs hard enough to bruise. “Medical measures,” she managed to get out as they traversed the distance to the house as fast as possible; she hadn’t known until now that there were any medical measures—at least of the ordinary kind—that could be applied to angels.

  More of the household staff, and a number of unaffected angels from other parts of the Enclave, ran or flew past them as they took the injured angel in through doors that led directly into the central core. The space that a couple of minutes earlier had been all shining wooden floors, an elegant statuette set against the wall, was now a temporary hospital.

  A young vampire Montgomery had taken on as his apprentice was throwing down large futons that must’ve come out of storage, and a slender angel—Sivya—who was normally in charge of the kitchens, was snapping open a large black leather bag that looked like an old-fashioned medical kit.

  As soon as they laid the angel on a futon, Sivya stabbed a large-bore needle directly into his heart and depressed the plunger. Elena had a thousand questions, but now wasn’t the time to ask them, Montgomery beside her as they raced back out. When she saw wings of silver-blue rising into the air after dropping off a victim, she felt an intense sense of relief . . . mingled with horror as she realized exactly how many winged bodies floated in the murky waters of the Hudson.

  Another bird hit her as they ran, the beak carving a line down her face, but she shook it off and kept going. On their second trip inside, she heard a cough, saw the first angel they’d rescued retching on his side. His left wing and legs were mangled—but at least he was alive.

  Leaving their current charge in Sivya’s hands, she ran back out with Montgomery at her side. It felt like an eternity, but she would later find out the actual hell of what came to be known as the Falling lasted five short minutes. Then the birds stopped dropping from the skies . . . and so did the angels.

  * * *

  Four hours later and they finally had some real numbers. Eight hundred and eighty-seven angels had gone down over the city in that horrific period no one would ever forget. Eight hundred and two of the fallen had been part of the two-thousand-strong defensive force stationed at the Tower, the remaining eighty-five composed of nonwarrior angels, visitors to the city, and two couriers who’d had the bad luck to come in just as things went horribly wrong.

  “All of the injured,” Aodhan told Raphael, as the three of them stood on the railingless balcony outside Raphael’s Tower office, the sky above painted in the fiery palette of an agonizingly stunning sunset, “have been retrieved.”

  Raphael, his wings and clothes streaked with blood, glanced at the angel who was made of fractured pieces of light. Each strand of Aodhan’s hair appeared coated with crushed diamonds, his wings so brilliant as to hurt mortal eyes under sunlight, his irises shattered outward from the pupil in splinters of crystalline blue and green.

  “You’re certain?”

  “Yes. I’ve checked the fallen against the master list we keep of all angels stationed at the Tower or otherwise resident in the area.” Aodhan resettled his wings, light sparking off the faceted filaments of his feathers. “Illium has accounted for all visitors—and we’ve had no reports from the Guild’s network of informants about unrecovered angels.”

  “How many did we lose?” Elena didn’t want to ask the question; her hands fisted in rejection. Angels might be immortal in the eyes of humans, but they could be killed . . . the younger they were, the easier they died. A destroyed heart, a broken spine paired with significant int
ernal injuries, decapitation: none of that would kill Raphael, but inflict the same physical insult on a newly adult angel and the outcome would be lethal.

  Raphael’s face was stripped of all emotion as he waited for Aodhan’s response.

  “Five,” the angel answered. “It was the secondary trauma that caused the deaths, not the inciting incident.”

  “Tell me,” Raphael ordered.

  Aodhan’s voice was quiet, his words violent. “An impalement on a spire where the heart and spine were both destroyed almost simultaneously—”

  “Who?”

  “Stavre. He was on his first placement. A bare hundred and fifty.”

  Jaw clenched against the injustice of it, Elena made herself listen as Aodhan completed the recitation, his tone without emotion, but she knew the words he spoke must cut like razors.

  First, he named the fallen, then said, “Two died as a result of decapitation combined with major heart damage when they fell into traffic in front of vehicles that couldn’t stop in time; another was decapitated after she hit the sharp corner of a building, her body breaking into multiple pieces on impact with the street; and we lost the last when he fell into a rooftop exhaust system.” A pause. “The humans did all they could, but the velocity of his fall into the blades meant there was no hope of survival. His body was sliced into shreds.”

  Five out of the nearly three thousand angels in and around the city at any one time. It didn’t sound so bad . . . until you realized that angels didn’t reproduce as humans did. Only a single, cherished child might be born in the space of a decade. A century might go by without any new births. The loss of five angels in the prime of their lives was an unspeakable tragedy.

  “They must have an escort home.” At that moment, Raphael was very much the Archangel of New York, a leader icily furious at the loss of his people. “Contact Nimra,” he said, naming an angel Elena knew to be a power within the territory. “She will understand what must be done.”

  And her presence, Elena realized, would be a sign of respect and honor from an archangel to his fallen soldiers.

  “Sire.” Aodhan inclined his head, the rain clouds that had begun to creep across the sunset doing nothing to dull the glittering shine of his hair.

  “The injured?” Raphael asked.

  “We’re moving them all to dedicated floors inside the Tower. The transfer will be complete by midnight.”

  Raphael, his wings glowing in a silent testament to his rage, continued to stare at a city that had gone eerily silent. No horns blew, no brakes screeched, no one fought, the events of this day so nightmarish as to erase the petty problems of life.

  “Status?” he asked after several minutes.

  “Three hundred and fourteen required emergency medical intervention as a result of life-threatening injuries,” Aodhan answered, “and will be down for months. The rest have broken bones, and most will need at least four weeks to recover.”

  Despite explanations, Elena didn’t quite understand the drug used today, except that the closest human analog was epinephrine, though the two weren’t identical. According to Montgomery, the drug was a last-ditch option, because while it could kick-start the self-healing process in a badly injured angel—when that angel’s body might otherwise simply shut down—it had one very bad side effect: it extended the normal recovery time by months.

  After seeing the stuff revive an angel who’d been all but decapitated, his head attached to his body by the gleaming wetness of his spinal column alone, and his lower body torn off to leave him a bloody stump, Elena didn’t have any argument with the drug.

  “The Tower-based healers were able to speak to a number of the injured who regained consciousness,” Aodhan added, the world turning to twilight as the clouds succeeded in hiding the last rays of the sun. “They all report a sudden sense of dizziness, followed by unconsciousness before they could land.”

  Glancing at Aodhan when Raphael didn’t respond, Elena spoke with her eyes. Unlike with Illium, her relationship with this member of Raphael’s Seven was new yet, but he was one of the most empathic angels she’d ever met. Now, he gave a small nod and disappeared inside the Tower.

  “Are you subverting another one of my men, Elena?” Raphael said into the quiet.

  She came to stand beside him, their wings touching. An instant later, the rain clouds released their store of water in an unexpected deluge. It would, Elena thought, wash away the blood on the streets and the buildings, but the trauma of this day would never be erased. “I think nothing on this earth is capable of subverting your men.” The Seven were as loyal to Raphael as hunters were to the Guild.

  “But,” she said, blinking the rain from her eyes as Raphael’s wing rose over her in a protective curve, “I do have certain rights as your consort, including the right to stand with you against this thing, whatever it is.”

  His arm sliding around her waist, Raphael brought her against his body, the midnight strands of his hair even darker with the rain.

  “I’m sorry, Raphael,” she whispered, spreading the fingers of one hand over his heart, needing to feel the life of him as a ward against the awfulness of what had taken place. “I know an archangel can’t be seen to grieve, but I know you grieve for the people you lost.” Her own throat was thick, her eyes burning.

  “They were under my protection,” he said and it was all that needed to be said.

  Elena didn’t try to comfort him with words. She simply stood with him as the rain pounded over them both, cold and harsh as the death that had come so darkly to their city. Lightning burst in the distance, the roiling clouds turning the early evening into midnight. As if in defense, warm golden light began to flood the windows of every skyscraper within sight, but there was nothing eerie or “other” about this wild black storm. It was a simple, beautiful display of nature’s power.

  “Have you ever flown in something like this?” she asked, protected from the ferocious wind by the shelter of his muscled body, his wings.

  “Yes.” Raphael looked out over the downpour, the lights in the windows refracted by the hard rain coming in from the left. “It was above an island in what is now called the Pacific, the sky a rage of thunder, the lightning a violent dance. My friends and I, we made a game of dodging the strikes.”

  She wanted to smile at the image, but the wounds of the day were too raw to permit it. “An immortal game of chicken?”

  “Perhaps.” Blinking away the rain, he stepped back. “Come, we must see to the injured.”

  They stopped in at their Tower suite only long enough to dry off and change, before heading down to the infirmary. It made no difference that she’d already seen the damage—it was as bad now as it had been the first time. An angel with wings patterned like a sparrow’s had lost most of his internal organs, his chest a gaping cavity, but at four hundred, he’d survived the damage and now slept in an induced coma that would help him heal.

  Beside him was the near-decapitation victim, his life signs flickering. Kneeling beside the young male, Raphael placed his hand over the gruesome injury. Only Elena was close enough to see the faint blue glow that was an indication of Raphael’s growing but nascent healing ability. He couldn’t fix all the damage, but he could give the hurt man more of a fighting chance.

  Two beds down lay an angel who’d lost both legs at the upper thigh and broken most of the remaining bones in his body, including those in his brutalized face. But whether through luck or through fate, his brain was still inside the cracked eggshell of his skull, his heart in his chest, his spine damaged but not fatally so—because Izak wouldn’t have survived otherwise, being far too young to heal such trauma.

  “Sorry! Sorry! I just got out of the Refuge. I—” A gulp. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you that! Please don’t tell Raphael.”

  Anger and worry combined into a knot in her throat at the memory of their first meeting. He’d been hanging upside down off the roof over the little balcony of her old apartment, all yellow curls and huge eyes as
he tried to sneak a peek at a real-live hunter. To see someone so young and innocent lying broken and silent, his body a mass of bruised and torn flesh . . .

  Elena wanted to do violence, make someone pay for this horror, but as of right now, they had no answers as to the origin of the nightmare, their enemy invisible.

  3

  It was well past the midnight hour when Raphael and his consort found their beds. He didn’t need rest as Elena did, but she slept better if he was in the bed with her. When she woke to find herself alone—and she almost always woke in the middle of the night if he wasn’t there—she came looking for him.

  The first time it had happened, he’d thought she’d been wrenched from her rest by nightmare echoes of the horror that had ended her childhood, but she’d said she just missed him. Such simple words. Such powerful words. So now he slept with her, at least for certain critical hours of the night.

  Tonight, though, neither one of them was ready to surrender to slumber. “Lijuan,” she said at last, her head against his shoulder. “Are you thinking the same?”

  “The possibility had occurred to me.” The Archangel of China was rapidly becoming the Archangel of Death, her abilities touched with the putrefaction of a final ending that was without mercy or dignity, for all that she called herself a giver of eternal life.

  Lijuan’s version of life was a horrific shambling shell fed of human flesh.

  “But?” Elena raised herself on her elbow so she could look down at him, the near-white strands of her hair brushing over his skin, a thousand fleeting caresses.

  He spread his fingers on the warmth of her lower back, stroked along the delicate arch of her spine. His tough hunter was still so vulnerable in countless ways, could well have been among the fallen today, for it was the youngest who’d borne the brunt of the damage, and Elena was the youngest angel in the city.

  “Jason,” he said, crushing the thought before it could take damaging hold, “contacted me with a report an hour ago.” His spymaster was currently on the other side of the world, but he’d spun into action within seconds of the deadly events in New York. “As always, he has ways of gathering information unavailable to the rest of us.”