by Nalini Singh
The fine rim of silver around Elena’s irises glowed in the dark of their bedroom, a silent indicator of her growing immortality, though that immortality was not yet set in stone in any way. “What did he say?”
“That he knows for a fact Lijuan was in her own territory during the entire span of the Falling.” Considering the certainty in his spymaster’s tone, he added, “I have a strong suspicion Jason may have attained the impossible and tracked Lijuan to her innermost lair.”
Elena sucked in a breath, and he saw she understood the danger. Should Jason be discovered, he wouldn’t make it out alive; Lijuan knew too well how loyal the Seven were to Raphael. But, Raphael thought, his spymaster would take no unnecessary risks, not now, when Jason knew his loss would be a fatal wound on the heart of the princess who awaited his return.
“If it wasn’t Lijuan”—dark realization in her eyes—“then . . .”
“Yes. The Cascade is apparently moving ahead with the speed of a—” He paused at Aodhan’s mental touch. A problem? he asked the angel who, with Illium, was currently in charge of Tower operations.
The Archangel Caliane has informed me she wishes to speak to you, Sire.
I’ll contact her from the house. Returning his attention to Elena, he touched the curve of her wing where the midnight feathers segued into indigo. “We might be about to get some answers,” he said, telling her of Caliane’s call. As the only Ancient who was awake and in the world, his mother knew much that had otherwise been lost to the pages of history.
“I’ll stay out of view,” Elena said when they reached the screen in his study, her skin glowing against the robe of cerulean silk he’d gifted her on the anniversary of her mortal birthday.
Irritation simmered to life in his blood. “Elena, you are my consort.”
“You know how she gets,” was her unshaken response where others would’ve quivered at the edge in his tone. “She’ll be far more forthcoming if she’s not feeling insulted by my presence.” Leaning against the wall beside a framed piece of art, she blew him a kiss.
We’ll discuss this later, he said and made the call. His mother continued to abhor technology for the most part, but she’d begun to accept the usefulness of certain aspects of the modern world. He hadn’t expected otherwise; Caliane might prefer what she termed the more “civilized” mores of centuries gone, but she was an Ancient, and no one lived so long by miring herself in the dusty past.
Twin flames of blue on the screen, his mother’s hair a river of black, her face the template used to cast his own. “Mother,” he said, his heart yet unused to the fact that she breathed once more, that should he wish, he could fly to her, feel the touch of the hands that had rocked him in childhood . . . and left him broken on a bloody field far from civilization.
“Raphael, I have heard of the events in your city.” Her fingers rose to the screen in a familiar gesture of love. “Your people?”
No other archangel would he have trusted with the truth, but for all that she’d done, his mother had never once backed anyone else against her son. “We mourn,” he said quietly and saw the pain in her eyes.
It was from Caliane that he’d learned how an archangel should rule. Even when her madness distorted the truth of who she was, he’d never forgotten she was also the archangel whose people looked to her with love in their eyes. He wasn’t Caliane—he inspired fear as often as not—but, like those who were hers, his men and women knew he’d fight with unrelenting fury to protect them.
“Five began their journey home this night.” Raphael had led the flight out over the dark lick of the water until Manhattan was a silhouette far in the distance, Elena on one side and Nimra on the other. Every other angel in the city who could fly, but for the squadron needed to hold it secure, had been part of the silent cavalcade, and each had held a lantern that protected the candle within, lighting the way home.
Then they’d hovered in place as Nimra and the squadron he’d placed at her command pulled away into the starless night, the fallen carried in flower-covered biers that would reach the Refuge in twenty-four hours. It would’ve been faster to send the bodies home in a jet, but they were creatures of the wind and the sky, and so it was by the sky road that the fallen would return home.
“We mourn with you,” Caliane said, a single tear rolling down her face. “I will send a squadron to the Refuge to act as an honor guard for those who are carried home.”
“I thank you, Mother, but in this time of unrest, I believe you should keep your people near.” Caliane remained Lijuan’s most dangerous foe, and she had only two winged squadrons, having taken the people of Amanat alone into her Sleep.
Her expression altering from sorrow to one that betrayed an acute political intelligence, his mother sat back in her chair, her gown a vibrant turquoise that framed her dazzling beauty, until he could hardly believe the truth of her extraordinary age.
“I know you wish to ask me if I saw anything such as this in the previous Cascade,” she said, “but I must tell you there was no Falling in my time.” A sudden shadow across her expression, and he knew she thought of the madness she believed had touched her during that Cascade. “There were, however, other strange events.”
Raphael waited while his mother thought. He knew the delay was no power play, no arrogant posturing. Caliane was simply very, very old, her memories hidden in long-forgotten corners of her mind.
“Once,” she murmured into the silence, “an entire city of angels turned against each other for a single minute. Blows were exchanged, knives thrown—then everyone seemed to wake up and no one knew why they had acted so.” A frown. “There were some who believed the chaos must have been caused by the use of a new archangelic ability, but there was never a repeat of the incident.”
It was tempting to believe the Falling had been another such aberration, but—“I can’t be complacent, not given the changes occurring in the Cadre.”
“The one who dispenses death.” Caliane’s wings glowed a sudden, lethal, brightness. “She who styles herself an Ancient, you think she has a hand in this.”
“It doesn’t appear to be Lijuan’s handiwork.” Raphael’s mind flickered with images of another time when his mother had glowed . . . during an execution that had broken her spirit and splintered their family. “But,” he added, closing the lid on the memories of his father’s violent death, “we’ve barely begun the hunt for answers.”
“You will not permit this to keep you from my lands.” It was an order.
He infused his response with unbending steel. “I’ll make that decision when it is time.” His mother had a way of forgetting that he was an archangel with a territory of his own.
Caliane’s lips curved, the music in her voice reminding him of the songs she’d sung to him as a boy, songs that had held the Refuge in thrall. “You were always a stubborn child. The only way your father could get you to let go of anger, as an infant, was to scoop you up in his arms and take you flying. Oh, how you loved to fly with Nadiel.” Love and a haunting sadness in her every word. “You always came back laughing, your hair wild and your cheeks red, my beautiful boy.”
Raphael touched his fingers to the screen as she’d done, his heart aching for the losses that marked his mother. He didn’t know if he could ever forgive her crimes, didn’t even know if she was truly sane or if this was a fleeting lull, but he knew that he loved her. “I hope,” he said as her fingers touched the screen on her end, “you will not tell such stories when we are in company.”
Her laughter was a song, her eyes iridescent. “I promise you’ll be a babe only in my eyes, always my son.” Laughter fading into sadness once more, she said, “I am sorry, Raphael. To lose any of one’s people is a deep sorrow.”
Turning to Elena once the call had ended, he found her knuckling away a tear, his tough hunter whose shell was not so tough to those who knew her. “Hbeebti.” He took her into his arms, the silk of her robe sliding over his skin.
“She loves you so much.” Elena
’s whisper was rough, husky. “It’s there in her every breath, every word. I can’t imagine what it must do to her to know that she hurt you during her madness.”
Raphael understood that his mother hadn’t been in her right mind when she sent him plummeting to the earth, his wings shredded, but some part of him was still that broken boy who’d lain bleeding on the dew-drenched grass—as her feet danced away over the green blades speckled with viscous red. “I cannot forget.”
“I know,” Elena said, that painful understanding binding them on a level no one else would ever comprehend. “I know.” Her mother had loved her, too, but Elena’s most enduring memory of Marguerite was of her high-heeled shoe lying on its side on designer black and white tile.
Strange, how the memory of that shoe made her skin chill, her lungs struggle for air. But that was how it was. Some memories dug deeper, held on tighter.
“What happens now?”
“This city, my Tower, cannot be seen to be weak.”
“Of course.” Anything else might be taken as an invitation to conquer by certain others in the Cadre. “We have to convince them the Falling did far less damage than it actually did.” Almost half of the Tower’s defensive force was down for the foreseeable future: a staggering deficit.
“Yes.” Raphael reached between them to tug open the tie of her robe, slide his hands inside. “As part of that,” he said to her responsive shiver, “my consort must be seen to be indulging in her strange fetish for hunting vampires.”
“Ha-ha.” Undoing the buttons of the shirt he’d pulled on for the call, she pressed a kiss to the firm muscle of his chest. “I’ll tell Sara not to strike me from the roster.” Chasing delinquent vamps hardly seemed important in the wake of the tragedy that had befallen the city, but if it would help create the illusion of a Manhattan undamaged by the horror that had taken place in a few short minutes, then that was what she’d do.
She knew angelkind in general remained fascinated with her, the first angel Made in living memory and one who continued to hunt. According to what she’d heard from Illium, there were as many angels glued to news reports about her as there were humans and vampires. So why not use that notoriety to the city’s advantage?
Raphael’s hands stroked off her robe to leave her naked, her skin igniting under his touch. “You need to rest,” she argued halfheartedly, a clawing need inside her to taste life in its most primal form. “You pushed your new ability to the limit in the infirmary.”
Lips on hers, his mouth claiming everything she had. “There are,” he said, backing her against the wall, “other ways of revitalizing the self.”
Elena gasped as he lifted her, her legs locking around his waist to leave her intimately exposed.
He was hard and demanding that night, her archangel, his fury at the attack on his city a rage in his blood—but she was no fragile bird. Giving back kiss for passionate kiss, she took the pounding thrusts of his cock and demanded more, until there was no more thought, only the most beautiful firestorm of sensation.
* * *
Raphael had thought only to hold Elena close as she slept on the thick carpet in front of the study fireplace, their bodies and wings entangled, but he must have been more tired than he’d understood, because all at once, he realized he wasn’t awake. Instead, he found himself on the forgotten field where Caliane had left him more than a thousand years ago, when he’d been a boy at the dawn of his existence.
A boy who’d thought to kill his mother before she became an even bigger monster than the one who had orchestrated the death of two thriving cities, the adults drowned, the children broken in ways even Keir, their greatest healer, couldn’t repair. No immortal would go to the ancient ruins of those cities even now. There was too piercing a silence, created of the pain of thousands of souls, such silence as Raphael would never forget, the pain of it an icy wind.
Today, as he stood draped in a quiet heavy with the echo of memory, he saw blood on the grass, the crimson liquid that had dripped out of him as he lay splintered on the earth underneath a crystalline sky so blue it hurt. Yet he wasn’t on his face on the grass as he’d been then, his wings torn and heavy on his body, parts of him missing. No, he stood on his feet and he was a man, an archangel, not that scared, determined, heartbroken boy.
Flexing his hands as if in readiness for battle, he took a step forward . . . and walked into a wall of whispers. Hundreds of voices, each one raspy and somehow unused, the words interlaced and incomprehensible. They came from every side, yet when he rose up into that sky of cutting clarity, he saw nothing but the gnarled bodies of the trees that surrounded the field, sentinels of such age that they had stood through eternity.
And still the voices whispered and murmured, pushing at him in waves that ebbed and flowed, until at last, he heard a single strong voice slice through the chaos. The other whispers died away, but did not fade altogether as that one voice asked him a question. “Who are you?”
Feet touching the grass once more, the dew wet on the very tips of his wings, he felt a roaring surge of anger. “Who are you to ask questions of an archangel?”
The murmurs rose again, the volume rising to a thunderous crescendo.
Archangel. Archangel. Archangel!
4
“Archangel.” Elena gripped Raphael’s shoulder, his skin strangely cool under her fingertips. “It’s time to get up.”
He always woke at her first touch, but today she had to call him a second time before his lashes lifted, the relentless blue of his eyes shadowed by a darkness that muted their vivid hue. “It’s daylight,” was the first thing he said, his gaze taking in the lacy streamers of light coming in through the study windows.
“You were in such a deep sleep, I thought I’d give you a few extra minutes.” It was the only gift she could give; to protect an archangel was an impossibility. “It’s barely dawn.” Watching him get to his feet, this magnificent and lethal male who was her own, she rose and pulled on her robe. “You had an angry look on your face at the end. Bad dream?”
“Not bad so much as strange.” He didn’t speak again until they’d both showered and begun to dress, their bedroom drenched in dawn sunshine from the skylight and open balcony doors. “I dreamed of the field where I fought Caliane.”
Tying off her braid, she busied herself checking her crossbow, though she saw nothing of the weapon, every ounce of her being concentrated on Raphael. He spoke rarely about that agonizing day, and she hadn’t pushed him, because the whole “time heals all wounds” thing? It was a load of bullshit. “Was your mother in the dream?”
“No.” Walking to the balcony, his upper body bare, he spread his wings as if soaking in the sun’s rays, the golden filaments hidden in the white sparking with a fire so brilliant, Elena found herself brushing her fingers along the living silk.
“What do you see, Elena?”
“There’s a kind of fire in your feathers now.” She almost expected to capture a piece of piercing white flame in her hand. “It’s incredibly beautiful.”
Raphael glanced at his wing, shrugged. “So long as they work.” Folding them in, he turned to pick up one of her throwing blades and slid it into the sheath on her left arm. “The dream was not . . . what it should be,” he said, as she made a minor fix to one of the sheath straps. “Of course, yesterday was no ordinary day. It’s not inexplicable that I should dream of violence.”
“It could be that simple.” Elena held out her right forearm, sheath in place, so he could slide in the other throwing blade. “But I’ve seen way too much freaky stuff since you first summoned me to do your bidding to take anything at face value.”
“You were abysmal at doing my bidding.” It was a cool reminder. “I thought you the most fascinating creature I had ever met.”
“You did not.” She pointed a gleaming knife at him before slotting it into a thigh sheath strapped over her slimline black leather pants, her clothing designed to reduce drag in the air. “You thought I was a nuisance you mi
ght have to throw off the side of the building in order to teach me manners.” As it was, he’d made her close her hand over a blade, her blood dripping to stain the roof, a being so terrifying she’d seen nothing of humanity in him. “You were kind of a bastard, if we’re being brutally honest.”
Lips curving, he picked up the long, thin blade she wore hidden along her back in a sheath built into her long-sleeved black top, the fabric tough enough to take the demands of a hunter’s life. “You,” he said, sliding the blade into place when she turned, “are the only individual who would ever say that to my face.”
“Remind me to tell you sometime about how I decided I should get Big Idiot tattooed on my forehead.” Facing him once more, she smoothed her hands over his gorgeous shoulders. “And what does it say about me that I thought you were fascinating and sexier than sin, even after you made me cut myself?”
“That you’re a warrior who knew she’d finally met her match.”
Elena snorted. “It says I’m a dumbo who doesn’t know when to be meek and subservient and save my ass, that’s what it says.”
Smile deepening until his cheeks creased with it, Raphael curved one hand around her nape, using the fingers of his other to caress the sensitive upper arch of her wing with long, firm strokes. “Had you been meek and subservient,” he murmured as her knees threatened to melt, “I would’ve never summoned you to do my bidding.”
His kiss threatened to finish what his strokes had begun. Licking her tongue against his, her breasts crushed against the hard muscle of his chest, Elena wanted nothing more than to stay in this stolen minute, to forget the outside world, but the ugly reality that awaited couldn’t be ignored.
“I’ve been away from the Tower for over six hours,” Raphael said when they drew apart, his expression shifting in a way that reminded her he wasn’t simply her lover, wasn’t simply the man who wore her ring on his finger. No, he was an archangel, responsible for the lives of millions, mortals and immortals alike.