by Nalini Singh
“Shit,” she muttered, and when he raised an imperious eyebrow, said, “I’m sorry.” Her Guild trainers would’ve kicked her ass if she’d dared do something this lamebrained as a cadet. “I can’t believe I almost fucked things up so badly a second time.”
“Will there be a third?” The question snapped like a whip.
“No. Even a hardheaded hunter like me learns her lessons after two near-lethal mistakes.” If she didn’t, she’d have been long dead by now. “Thank you for the assist.”
“I’m glad to know I have some use.” A voice so cold, it was a wonder she didn’t have hypothermia.
“That’s not fair.” She might’ve been an idiot with the flight, but that didn’t mean he could walk all over her. “I’ve never been more intertwined with anyone my entire adult life!”
“And it makes you afraid.”
Her breath caught, and she wanted to say no, to remind him she was a blooded hunter, fear nothing but a tool. But what she said was, “Yes,” because this fear threatened to strangle the life out of her. “I haven’t been this afraid since I realized the monster was in our house.”
“Do you think I don’t understand?” Every muscle in his body went taut, his voice so rigidly controlled, she knew he battled brutal emotion. “Have you forgotten what I said?”
“I didn’t know fear until you, Elena. Use the power wisely.”
Shaking her head, she wrapped her arms tight around his neck. “I haven’t forgotten.” Lips against his, she reminded him of something, too. “I cut you some slack when you went all caveman. Cut me some here.”
“I didn’t almost kill myself when I went ‘caveman,’” he said, his kiss hard and hot and possessive, all of it spiced with molten anger. “I didn’t make you watch as I did my best to cause myself mortal harm.”
30
Her seriously pissed-off consort flew Elena almost the entire way home.
Now that the madness of the fear-laced anger had passed, she was damn well embarrassed. Not only that, but her wings felt like jelly where they weren’t threatening to (painfully) detach from her flesh. Still—“I can’t have you carrying me into Manhattan. If Ransom spots me on his high-powered telescope, he won’t stop teasing me until I’m at least eighty-seven.” The truth was, her returning home in Raphael’s arms might be seen as a sign of possible weakness by their enemies, should any be watching.
Raphael’s responding glance told her he knew the real reason for her request. “No lies, no half-truths. Can you deal with any flight?”
Elena took her time assessing her body. “Yes, as long as we keep it lazy, like we’re out for a stroll.” It would hurt like a bitch later if her archangel decided she should suffer for her sins and refuse to heal her—and she’d deserve it if he did—but a few extra minutes of gentle flight wouldn’t alter that for the worse.
“Be ready to open your wings.” Releasing her with care, Raphael positioned himself above her.
She knew it was so he could grab her if her wing snapped. Archangel?
Yes, Consort?
Yup, he was definitely still supremely pissed. I just wanted to tell you something I probably don’t say enough, she said, as they flew over the George Washington Bridge, her altitude low enough that she could see the late-night commuters. I love you.
That has never been in question.
His icy answer made her grin. Yes, the love had never been in question—on either side. I wonder if Montgomery has cake in the kitchen. Back when she’d been mortal, she’d sometimes wondered why no one ever saw an overweight angel. Now she knew exactly how much muscle strength it took to fly, energy burning off with each wingbeat. She was eating five times what she’d done as a hunter, and just barely managing to keep her weight at a healthy level. Do immortal bodies run at a higher metabolic rate?
No one has ever tested that to my knowledge, but yours is undoubtedly doing so as immortality grows deeper into your cells.
That made sense, she thought, just as the sky in the distance began to boil black and thunderous. “Raphael.”
Land on the closest surface. Now!
Looking down, she saw a passing barge and was down three seconds later, Raphael landing beside her. The crew stared slack jawed, but didn’t approach. “I have my cell phone,” she said, having stuffed it into a pocket from force of habit. “I can call Aodhan—”
“It’s done.” Raphael’s eyes remained on the roiling blackness as he spoke. “All of the angels in the air have received the instruction to land.”
Skin crawling at the phenomenon, Elena made a different call. “There might be another incident,” she told Sara, knowing that as Guild Director, her best friend had access to an automated warning system that could send out a text message to every hunter in the vicinity. “Tell everyone to watch for—shit, tell them to watch for anything.”
“Got it.”
Hanging up, Elena stood with her body aligned to Raphael’s, their eyes skyward as the barge continued to move along the river. The crew had their heads tilted back now, voices pitched high and words tumbling one over the other as they spoke rapidly in an unfamiliar language.
Elena’s faint hope that the unnatural clouds would just disperse or float out to sea died a quick death when the boiling patch settled right over the barge, following it as the watercraft traversed the river. Then the cloud began to fall at high speed, causing the crew to scream, duck, but Elena and Raphael kept their eyes on the sky.
So they saw the “cloud” wasn’t a cloud at all.
“They’re not falling.” That alone distinguished this phenomenon from the one that had begun the strange events.
As they watched, hundreds—thousands—of birds landed all around them, until the tiny winged beings completely covered the barge, their combined weight making it sink deeper into the water. The truly eerie thing was their absolute silence. No chirping, no fighting even where they sat on top of one another, nothing . . . but for the fact that every single set of tiny bird eyes was locked on them.
No, not on them. On Raphael.
Okay, creepy. They’re staring at you.
Or something is.
The birds rose into the air in a mass of wings the next instant, dispersing so fast it was difficult to imagine they’d been there as a cohesive force—until she looked at Raphael. His skin burned with cold power, as if a cool blue light glowed beneath the surface of his skin.
Come, Consort.
Heart thumping against her ribs at the piercing ice of his mental tone, she ignored the cringing crew to turn into his arms for the liftoff. He released her as soon as they’d gained the correct altitude, both of them angling toward the Tower in silence. Aodhan was waiting on the balcony outside Raphael’s office, his eyes reflecting the glittering night of Manhattan in jagged shards.
“No casualties or injuries,” the angel said, “no reports of anything except for garbled messages originating from a barge on the Hudson.”
“Thank you, Aodhan.”
Waiting until the angel left, she walked to stand beside Raphael on the very edge of the railingless balcony that looked out over the nightscape of their city. “Archangel.”
“Yes.” He turned, and on his face, the red blemish pulsed.
Again, he was distant. But this time, she didn’t wait. Shifting to stand toe to toe with him, she drew him into a kiss that tasted of the sea and of darkness, cold, silence. Heavy and old, so old, as if the silence had grown for thousands upon thousands of years, until it was an entity that lived and breathed.
Shivering, she pressed closer, her breasts crushed against his chest, his hand fisted in her hair. It wasn’t until she broke the passionate ice of the kiss, her chest spiderwebbed with frost, that she saw. “Your irises”—that incredible, unearthly blue—“they’re black.”
“A temporary effect.” Raphael could feel the darkness as it crawled through him, chill and drenched with a strange, potent power. It sank into his cells, an intruder the angelfire inside him attempted to eliminate.
>
He fought his instincts, knowing he needed to own this power, hold it—except it threatened to own him. Even now, his blood felt as if it crystallized into frost, his view of the world filtered through a layer of chilling remoteness, until only Elena was drenched in color. Vibrant and alive and with the wings of a warrior, she burned against a backdrop of gray, the rest of the world meaning nothing to him.
If he needed to obliterate this city to win the war, it would be an inconvenience that could later be remedied. Millions would die, but he was an immortal, knew others would replace them given enough time. All that mattered was the power, holding on to it, shaping it, becoming it.
Fingers on his cheeks, the silver ring around Elena’s irises liquid fire in the night. “No.” It was a deadly quiet word. “It can’t have you. You’re mine.”
And he knew. Shoving Elena behind him so she wouldn’t unbalance and fall, he rose into the sky, high above the clouds, past where even Illium or Aodhan could fly. Land! It was an order blasted out to every single angel in the vicinity.
Then, and with only the slightest hesitation at the loss of the profound violence of power, he released the dark matter of it in a lightning storm that cracked the sky.
* * *
Elena fought the screaming urge to go to Raphael, the need a raw compulsion in her chest as she tried to use the sense of reason she hadn’t used earlier. Not only were her wings in bad shape, she’d be struck down by a lightning strike within seconds of takeoff. There was too much of it in the air to avoid.
She could see angels landing wherever they could all over the city, many who’d been up high simply folding their wings so they’d plummet closer to the ground in an attempt to outrace the lightning, before snapping out their wings at the last minute. She witnessed a few close calls but no injuries, Raphael’s warning having come in just enough time, but her archangel, he burned in the center of a cold white storm.
“Ellie.” Illium’s hand on her nape, Aodhan on her other side. “The Sire has gained another ability.”
No, she thought, he’d just rejected one, but kept her silence.
An hour, an eon later, there was no more lightning in the sky and Raphael winged down to hold out a hand toward her. Taking it, she stepped off the edge, their hands parting as she swept around to fly side by side with him, heading homeward—though she was dead certain he had her in his sights the entire time, ready to catch her if her injured wing threatened to collapse. But she made it home, where Raphael used his healing ability to ameliorate the damage.
She wouldn’t have been surprised if the reminder of her injury, and how it had come about, reignited his temper, but he sent his power into her in silence, the warmth of it an embrace. “You’ll be fine now, Guild Hunter.” A kiss on the back of her neck.
Skin heating in response, she turned in his arms, the glow from the library fireplace gilding them both in gold. “Talk to me, Archangel.” If she had a tendency to shut down, pretend things didn’t matter, then Raphael had the habit of handling everything himself. Not surprising, given his status as an archangel, but he had her now.
Walking to the square crystal decanter on a side table, he poured a splash of amber liquid into a tumbler and threw the liquor back in a single hit. Alcohol didn’t affect angels as it did humans, and it had no effect on Raphael, but he’d told her he liked the kick of heat, the taste. “If this is the emergence of a new power,” he said, the fire reflecting off the faceted tumbler, “then it’s one I cannot control.”
Taking the tumbler from him when his fingers tightened, threatening to turn the crystal to dust, she put it down. “You’ve only had two chances to—”
“It changes me,” he said, cutting through her words. “You sensed it attempting to take control. You were right.” His fingers clenched on the mantelpiece, his wings arcing to the floor in a display of white fire. “I could murder millions in the grip of it and not blink.”
Her stomach lurched, her eyes rising from the stunning beauty of his wings to his face. “Drop the glamour.” The instant he did, she swore.
Striding over, she traced the dark red with a fingertip. “It’s grown.” Not only that but it had curved with a jagged edge, the line thicker, darker. “This can’t be coincidence—it’s linked to the power fluctuations in some way.”
Raphael shoved away from the mantel. “It matters nothing, not when to utilize the power, I must allow it to erase my personality. I may as well give the city to Lijuan if the Raphael who rules it is one forever in the Quiet.”
Elena tried to think past her instinctive repudiation of the idea of him permanently in that place of malevolent calm where he was no longer the man she loved, the man who loved her. “The birds,” she said suddenly, something niggling at her. “The first time they fell, is it possible it wasn’t one event but two?”
Raphael’s eyes, no trace of that cold liquid black in their depths, locked with hers. “You believe it was mischance they got caught up in the wave of disease that took down the angels?”
“The sky boiled just like tonight,” she said, trying to put her instinctive realization into words. “Could be they were coming to you and were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time—remember, they were moving from Manhattan to the Enclave.”
Wings continuing to flicker with that illusion of luminous white fire until he moved out of range of the firelight, he pushed open the doors to the lawn. “You may be right.”
“But it doesn’t give us any answers, does it?”
Standing in the doorway, his eyes on the pristine snow beyond, he said, “The power, it seduced, whispering to me to weave it into my own cells.” A glance over his shoulder. “Before you, I would’ve no doubt accepted it and it would’ve destroyed me from the inside out.”
She followed him when he stepped out onto the stretch of unbroken white, a snowflake falling to dust her cheek, her wings kissed by the soft, whimsical rain. It wasn’t heavy, just enough to be pretty, covering up their tracks from the house in a glittering veil, the unexpected stars above making the ice crystals sparkle.
It seemed wrong to talk about the horrors of war and power in such a magical moment, but they had no choice. “Before you,” she whispered, “I was shut up inside my heart, protecting it from harm, and never knowing the glory I missed.” She linked her hand to his. “You and I, we’re a unit. I dare any evil on this earth to tear us apart.”
Spreading his wings, Raphael drew his warrior into his arms, and as he closed those wings around them both, he knew that while war was inevitable, the loss of his soul was not. The chill price of immortality was one Elena would never allow him to pay.
“I would rather die as Elena than live as a shadow.”
His consort’s words from their courtship—though perhaps she would not call it that—whispered into his mind. Raphael had no intention of dying or of surrendering his territory to anyone, but should he ever be forced to make that choice, he would rather go into the last goodnight as Raphael, the archangel who fell in love with a mortal, than Raphael the archangel so bloated with power that he no longer understood such an emotion.
“One thing good came out of tonight, though,” Elena said, leaning back so their eyes met, her hair wildfire against the backdrop of white. “The lightning storm will give anyone getting ready to attack second thoughts about exactly what you’ve gained in the Cascade.”
“Possibly, but what troubles me is why they haven’t already launched a direct assault.” Even with everything he and his people had done to hide the extent of the harm done to the city’s defensive force, their enemy had to suspect he or she had struck a vicious blow. “It makes me believe they wait for something, something with enough chance of so fundamentally changing the balance of power in any war that they willingly risk giving New York extra time to prepare, rather than capitalizing on the damage already done.”
“I really need that cake now.”
Startled laughter in his blood, unexpected light in the shadows, the tas
te of snow in her kiss. And he knew that come what may, they’d stand together. In the light and in the terrible darkness.
31
Jason’s report at noon the next day made it deadly clear what they would face when the hostilities did begin. “Lijuan is openly consolidating her troops,” Raphael told Elena after scanning the report.
“How bad?”
“Her numbers have always been greater than mine—a consequence of her age.”
Elena didn’t need Raphael to spell it out to realize that Lijuan had been kept in check previously only because every member of the Cadre was more or less equal in power, thus Lijuan risked death in a fight. That clearly no longer applied. “Is there any chance New York isn’t the target?”
“No.” He showed her a piece of heavy paper, the texture rough silk, as if it had been handmade. “A courier brought this in just before you came up from the infirmary.”
Elena couldn’t read the message, but recognized the language as an ancient angelic one she’d seen in one of Jessamy’s history books. “It’s a declaration of war,” she guessed.
“Lijuan is ‘civilized’ to the end.” Expression harsh, he glanced back down at his spymaster’s report. “Jason also confirms there is no indication whatsoever that she has gained the ability to cause disease, and the fact she wasn’t in the vicinity of Amanat at the time of Kahla’s infection bears out the theory she has a conspirator.”
“So we might be about to face not one but two enemy archangels.” Meanwhile, the Tower infirmary remained full, only three of the injured fighters having recovered enough to rejoin their squadrons. The good news, however, was that with the transfers from outside the main city, they weren’t as badly disadvantaged as Lijuan might believe.
“We’ll also have the benefit of fighting on home soil,” Raphael pointed out when she shared her thoughts, “while her fighters must arrive on the wing. I’ll speak to Elijah, test the strength of our alliance—the odds change dramatically if we and our people stand together.”