Archangel's Legion gh-6

by Nalini Singh

  “No, I’ve already had too much caffeine.” Gwendolyn’s confession was a fracture in the reserve. “I appreciate you helping Eve.”

  “This is serious, Gwendolyn,” Elena said, struggling with the ethics of whether or not she had the right to share the truth about her biological grandmother. “Jeffrey really scared her. I don’t think he’s ever going to come to terms with the fact she’s hunter-born.”

  The other woman’s cheekbones pushed white against her skin. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t pull anything like this ever again.”

  Elena had total faith in Gwendolyn’s love for her daughters, but she understood her father far better today than she’d ever before done. “You can’t watch her all the time.”

  “No, but even though Jeffrey and I might not have the relationship he had with your mother”—a bleak reference to a painful earlier conversation where Gwendolyn had admitted she’d known of Jeffrey’s former mistress, and that the woman bore a faded resemblance to Marguerite—“your father needs me in a way I doubt you’d understand.” A sad smile. “He’ll keep his end of our bargain.”

  “Mom!” Eve tumbled out the front door at that instant, racing to Gwendolyn.

  As the other woman’s slender arms hugged her daughter tight, Elena hoped Gwendolyn was right in her judgment of Jeffrey. Because Elena would not stand by and watch him hurt Eve as he’d hurt her.

  “I’ll do whatever I have to, to protect her,” she said to Raphael later that day, outside the warehouse being used as an observation facility.

  Raphael had expected nothing less from his consort. “I’ve ordered our communications team to monitor Eve’s name, as well as the flight plans of the Deveraux family jet. You’ll know within minutes should there be anything that throws up a red flag.”

  The chain-link fence at Elena’s back was a harsh reminder of the grim reason why they stood here, but her radiant smile threw that into the shade. “Thank you, Archangel.” A distinct and very Elena glint in her eye. “It’s extremely awesome to be consort to a man who is lord of all he surveys.”

  “That, Consort,” he said, having already told her of his discussion with Titus, “is a fact Charisemnon and Lijuan would like to change.”

  “You know, that Charisemnon guy always wigged me out. Now I know why.” Folding her arms, she met his gaze. “I’ve asked Sara to make me inactive on the Guild roster for the time being. Tell me what you need me to do to help you ready the city for an assault.”

  35

  He cupped her jaw, proud of the woman who was his own, who didn’t flinch from standing by his side, come what may. “Talk to the vampire leaders, have them contain the panic within the groups to which they have access. We can’t afford any more impromptu executions.”

  Elena scowled. “Talk? I figured you’d want me working with the ground troops or something.”

  “Talk—not as a hunter, but as my consort.” Dropping his hand from her jaw, he wrapped his arm around her waist in readiness for takeoff. “Your presence will make the seriousness of the request apparent without further orders on my part.”

  “I suppose I can dig up some civilized-but-scary manners.” A kiss on the mouth as they rose into the air, the taste of her lush intoxication. “I don’t know absolutely all of the vamp leaders. Does the Tower have a list?”

  “Illium’ll go with you. He knows each by name.”

  “Wouldn’t he be the better option to talk to them?”

  “Before I had a consort, yes. Now, you speak with my voice.”

  That ring of silver bright under the winter sunlight, her expression suddenly solemn. “I won’t let you down.”

  “I know.”

  Ten minutes later, he watched her take to the skies with Illium. Do not allow her to come to harm.

  I’ll protect her with my blade and my life.

  Shifting his attention from the midnight and dawn of Elena’s wings on the strength of Illium’s promise, he picked up the phone. It was time for his second to return to New York.

  * * *

  Raphael spent the rest of the day finalizing the transfer of his senior vampires and angels into the city, while Aodhan handled daily Tower operations and Dmitri—linking in from the jet Raphael had sent for him and Honor—worked with his trusted people to ensure their permitted weapons reserves were at maximum. The next step would be to place anti-wing guns on a number of rooftops.

  “We’ll do it in the short lull after the late revelers head home and the early risers are yet asleep,” Illium told him, the lights of a night-cloaked Manhattan glittering at his back as the two of them stood at the apex of the Tower. “Better the guns appear overnight than to have the curious watching and broadcasting our efforts in the daytime.”

  “Agreed.” Raphael’s city never truly slept, but it was quietest in those twilight hours. “Do you have enough people to get it done within that time frame?”

  “Yes. Aodhan can also assist now that Dmitri has returned to take over Tower operations.” A steady glance from golden eyes shadowed by thick black lashes dipped in blue. “Sire, you can’t be here.”

  When Raphael raised an eyebrow, Illium stood his ground. “Forget the enemy, the morale of our own troops will take a severe hit if you’re seen to be assisting in such a ‘mundane’ task.”

  Raphael knew the angel was right. “The task is yours,” he said, and spent the next hour drilling a specialized night-maneuvers squadron before heading home.

  His consort was in her solar, cleaning her weapons with a single-minded focus that told him she wasn’t seeing the lethal items at all. Taking a seat across from her, he picked up a cut-glass tumbler and poured himself a drink from the decanter she kept for him, a silent invitation into her inner sanctum. “Illium tells me you charmed the vampire leaders.” Whatever she’d done, the effect had been immediate, the city calmer, vampires on their best behavior.

  She snorted. “Illium did the charming. I talked business—vamp leaders are all about that—and rampaging vampires are bad for it. We came to an understanding.” Lashes flicking up, humor in the gray. “I may have channeled you at your politest and scariest, to drive home the point that you’d be very, very disappointed should they fail in their task.”

  Lips curving, he took another sip. “You are proving to be a most efficient consort, Guild Hunter.”

  “Don’t you forget it.” A dagger pointed at him to underscore her command, before she went back to her cleaning.

  “Is it your father’s revelation that occupies your mind?”

  A nod. “I had a bit of time before you got home, so I logged into the Tower’s information network from here.”

  “Did you find her?”

  “Yes—the facts weren’t hidden. I just didn’t know to look for them before.” Fingers clenching on the dagger, Elena met eyes of pitiless blue that watched her with an intense patience that told her she mattered. “Her name was Elizabeth Parker.” Her heart pounded in sympathetic memory of the stunned shock she’d felt at the discovery. “Belle and Ari were his firstborn, but he didn’t give them her names, just me and Beth.”

  Elieanora Parker Deveraux and Elizabeth Marguerite Deveraux.

  Releasing and setting the dagger aside when her fingers began going numb, she dropped her head in her hands. “It’s almost as if it took him that long to trust in the happiness he’d found, have enough faith to open the door a fraction to his past.” Only for the horror to be repeated. “God, Raphael, no wonder he’s so damn fucked up.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  It was exactly the question she needed to hear. Somehow, she had to find a way to come to terms with a fundamental change in the fabric of her history, her vision of her father altered in a way she was having difficulty comprehending. And even though she knew Raphael had no sympathy for Jeffrey after what her father had done to her, he listened as she released the torrent of words and questions and confusion.

  Hours later, when she’d emptied it all from inside her head and could think
again, he took her to bed and held her safe from the nightmares, his wing spread over her body in a heaviness of silken warmth that made her feel safer than any weapon.

  * * *

  Raphael decided to rest in truth this night, his hunter’s skin warm against his own. She’d talked herself out and, in so doing, come to a kind of peace with the ghost of a woman she’d never met, but who’d thrown a shadow across her entire existence.

  “Elizabeth Parker,” she’d said quietly at the end. “She’s a part of me and I’m glad I know that.”

  Now, she lay tucked trustingly against him, her wings tangled around his body in the way of angelic lovers, his own acting as her blanket. Only when he was certain she’d fallen into a deep, nightmare-free sleep did he press a kiss to the warm curve of her neck and close his eyes.

  He dreamed again of that forgotten field, and of a woman’s bare feet as light as air on the ruby-flecked grass, his mother walking away from him after he fell to the earth, his body bloodied and bones broken.

  Except . . .

  He stood able-bodied on that field—and it was the same field, on the same day. He’d never forget the breathtaking clarity of the sky; the way the dew sparkled as if a careless hand had spilled a thousand translucent gemstones on the lush green blades; the distinctive patterns of light and shadow formed by the blossoming tree to the right; the tiny insect that crawled painstakingly across the grass, food held in its pincers.

  He’d watched that insect for what felt like hours as it made its way across the field. When the food slipped out of its pincers, it would stop, pick it up again, and restart its journey. Lying broken on the grass Raphael had thought of himself as an insect, too, an insignificant, discarded piece of angelic flotsam beneath an endless sky.

  Today, he could step on that insect without thought, ending its existence and struggle, but he took care to walk around it, the clear morning sunlight a cool brightness on his face, the slight wind adding to the sense that dawn had just broken. Tilting back his head, he saw nothing in the sheet of blue above . . . no, there was his mother. Though he stood in the wrong place, his view was the same as on that fateful day—when he’d watched her from a hidden vantage point, needing to see her free and beautiful just once more before he sought to bring her down, end her life.

  She’d caused the death of every adult in two thriving cities, creating a silence painful and eternal. The survivors had all been children, little ones so bruised in the heart that they’d curled up and died of terrible sorrow, hundreds upon hundreds of tiny lives snuffed out without ever being given the chance to truly burn.

  He’d known all that, understood she needed to be stopped, but she’d still been the mother who’d once sung him such lullabies that the Refuge stood silent to hear her. So he’d taken that single moment to watch her, to remember who she’d been before the madness sucked her under.

  Graceful and strong, her wings backlit by the sun, she flew above him . . . but now there was a cloud across the sun. That wasn’t right. There had been no clouds that day, the sun a burning orb that baked his spilled blood to crystalline hardness and threatened to boil him alive from the inside out.

  The clouds grew darker and darker, until they blotted out the sun. And his mother, she was gone. All he could see was a thick blanket of featureless gray. Beneath his feet, the verdant grass had turned brown, the insect a carcass. And the wind, it blew cool across his face, but it wasn’t fresh.

  It tasted old.

  There was no scent of putrefaction or of death, simply a sense of unfathomable age, of dark, hidden places full of secrets and whispers. Breathing it in, he continued to walk across the field, for someone was waiting for him. He was halfway across the dried-up landscape—so old, this place—when he saw that dawn had come . . . no, that was Elena’s wing arcing over him as she folded it away to reveal the skylight above their bed, the world outside the hazy formless gray of the time just before true daybreak.

  The rim of silver around her irises glowed in the muted darkness as she leaned closer. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “It was time.” He knew he’d never have reached the end of that field without . . . something, something he was meant to have in order to complete the journey. “Why do you watch me in such a way?”

  “Occasionally I wake,” she whispered, as if it were a secret, “and I have this instant where I don’t believe the happiness inside me, can’t imagine you could ever belong to me, but you do.” A smile that pierced the lingering grayness. “You’re mine.”

  “I had another dream,” he told his hunter, for she belonged to him as much as he belonged to her.

  Elena cocked her head, listening as he described the forgotten field and the weight of age, the scent of old, old things. “There was no sense of threat,” he said, “but I felt I’d lose something indefinable if I did not do an act of which I had no knowledge.”

  A thoughtful silence. “It might simply be your subconscious’s way of working out everything that’s been going on, but after that shared dream, I have my doubts.”

  As did he. “And you, Elena,” he said, deciding to let matters lie for now, for the intrigues of the dream world had to take second place to the harshness of reality, “what did you dream?”

  “Not a damn thing.” Her beaming relief segued into concern all too soon. “Did Jason send through another report last night?”

  “The reborn component of Lijuan’s gathering forces appears to be suspiciously small, especially given how many villagers have disappeared from the areas closest to her stronghold.”

  Elena sucked in a breath. “You think they might already be on the way?”

  “Or have arrived, been stashed away until needed.” It wasn’t impossible that they could’ve been smuggled in on shipping containers. A container would provide a perfect cage, and, once released, the starving and infectious creatures would decimate the population. “Jason also has information that Lijuan has ‘improved’ on her design so these reborn are not sentient in any way, simply creatures designed to kill and feed.”

  “Infectious, mobile weapons.”

  He nodded, agreeing with her assessment. “Charisemnon’s forces are also strong, but Titus has stepped up the aggression on their border to ensure Charisemnon cannot risk seconding any squadrons to Lijuan.”

  “That’s good news, isn’t it?” Elena said. “I know Lijuan has more fighters, but she can’t move all her forces against us or she risks leaving her territory vulnerable.”

  “She has also been an archangel for millennia, and as such, has many, many more older angels and vampires at her command.” Harder to kill or disable, the senior fighters could endure far longer than younger ones.

  “Hell, I didn’t even think about that.” Elena spread her hand over his heart, the look in her eyes telling him she was calculating every angle. “Home field advantage remains our best weapon.”

  “Yes, and we must utilize it in every way possible.”

  When they flew into the city a half hour later, it was to see its rooftops bristling with weaponry inimical to winged fighters.

  “Even the old angels,” Elena said, satisfaction in her tone, “will take time to heal if we blow the bastards to smithereens.”

  So bloodthirsty, hbeebti.

  A grin. “You know you love me that way.”

  “Which is why I wish you to join the squadron practicing with crossbows in the air.” He knew his consort would never sit in safety while her city burned, so he’d make certain she was prepared.

  “Good. I’m not fast in flight, but I’m a crack shot.” A tender kiss, a fleeting memory of the short, passionate minutes they’d taken for themselves earlier in the morning. “You’re meeting with Dmitri?”

  “Yes.”

  That discussion took over two hours. Leaving the other man to organize an extended sentry line, Raphael was about to take off from the Tower to meet Nazarach—the senior angel having relocated to the city overnight—when he felt the wind turn vio
lent, whipping his hair off his face. Along with its fury came a scent of age and old, old things. Buried things.

  The sky turned as red as the Hudson had done in a pulsing wave, the birds swirling a constellation above the Tower. Fighting the wind, Raphael lifted off, heading directly to those birds, called by an ancient power that licked over his skin. The tiny winged creatures parted to let him in, and so he became the center of the constellation as the bloodred sky pushed down on him and the warm rain was drops of blood on his skin, his face, his hair.

  36

  Elena looked up from the roof of the building where she’d landed when the wind turned murderous, her crossbow gripped in one hand and her heart kicking against her ribs. Raphael! she cried out with her mind, able to see him in the center of the fury of birds that circled black against a crimson sky.

  He didn’t answer, and the rain, it was blood that tasted of the sea and the wind and of Raphael, but below that was a chill old and inhuman. No, no, no! The cold power can’t have him! Jaw clenched, she strapped on the crossbow and ran over the edge of the roof, intending to ride the wind up to Raphael, but the force of it threatened to throw her against a building, smashing her to pieces.

  Gritting her teeth, she fought against the violence, but her wings had begun to crumple when a flash of blue appeared under her, holding position with a strength that made his growing power clear. Realizing what Illium was trying to do, she allowed herself to drop. He twisted at the last second to catch her, spiraling down to another rooftop in a controlled descent.

  As soon as they landed, Elena looked up again and saw that Raphael remained in the center of the bloodstorm, his mind distant from hers. “Can you reach him?” she said, screaming to be heard over the rising wind.

  His own hair whipping off his face, arms tight around her, and eyes glowing gold, Illium shook his head. “Something is blocking me, blocking all of us!”

  No, she thought again, this time not in panic but in resolute fury. No one was ever going to separate her from Raphael. He was hers. Focusing through the bloody rain that slashed at her face and turned the world crimson, she looked only for the archangel who was her own, her mind reaching for his, powered by a connection that was the sum of both of them.