Archangel's Legion gh-6

by Nalini Singh

  It was as if a great wall stood between them, but Elena wasn’t about to give in. Hacking at it until it felt as if her mind was as bloody as the rain, she smashed a hole big enough to thrust her hand through. Raphael!

  * * *

  He heard Elena’s voice in his mind, cutting through the whispers that surrounded him, whispers that weren’t words but that he understood all the same. This was a test, the voices said, as had been the others. But who would dare test an archangel? That was a question to which he had no answer, but he knew one thing: no power in the universe could separate him from his hunter.

  Smashing through the gray wall of whispers, he grabbed hold of her hand. I am here, Elena, he said, the connection between them pure and unhindered. Fly to me.

  The wind—

  It won’t stop you. Nothing had the right to touch his consort without his permission. Illium, he said to the member of his Seven who held her safe, release her.

  Parting the wind with a blade of agonizing power, he watched her take off, her wings a spread of midnight and dawn streaked with indigo and twilight blue, resplendent against the bloody rain that soaked the city. That rain parted for her as the wind had done—as the birds now did. Until her body aligned with his, her hands on his shoulders, her wings folding in silent trust, his arm around her waist.

  Bright eyes of silver-gray searching his own. “You’re here.”

  “Yes.” The power, cold and beautiful and dangerous, had threatened to swallow him, but in his refusal to be cut off from Elena, he’d found the clarity to understand once more that he couldn’t hope to control the vicious strength of it . . . but even a mere taste had been potent. If he could just find a way to hold a fraction of it, no other immortal would dare turn his or her eyes to his territory.

  Elena’s fingers digging into his shoulders. “Hey, hey, your eyes are going black again.”

  “So much power, Elena,” he said, burying his face against her hair as the cold fingers of it snaked through his veins. The whispers urged him to accept what he was given, as the scent of age, of time, filled his senses, as if this power had slept an eon and woke only for him. “I would be the most powerful archangel in the world.”

  Shivering at the ice in that whisper, in her awareness that his heart no longer beat, his breath frigid, Elena tugged back his head to look into those inhuman eyes. “You would be a monster,” she reminded him. “I’d be nothing to you, my life one you’d snuff out without thought.”

  “You are everything.” His kiss was so cold it threatened to shock her own heart into halting its beat. Unlike him, she wouldn’t survive.

  Raphael, my . . . she managed to get out through the searing cold, her breath frozen in her chest when he broke their kiss. I’m dying, Archangel. It took all her strength to force that out past the ice in her brain.

  A blink, incandescent blue flaring outward from his irises as one of his hands flattened over her breastbone. “NO!”

  A punch of violent white-hot power that made her scream, her back bowing and her heart stuttering back to life. Somehow finding the will to think, to get her frozen hands to his cheeks to cup his face, she said, “Let it go,” through chattering teeth. “The power isn’t worth the price.”

  Both arms crushing her close, his breath still frigid but his eyes that incredible, astonishing blue, he said, “Hold on, hbeebti.”

  The sky exploded in an ear-piercing lightning storm of blue electric with piercing white fire that sheared away the ruby red to expose patches of the sky as it should be. With the blood went the abnormal cold and Elena found herself gulping in air that didn’t feel as if it was frozen crystals in her throat, in her lungs, her heart kicking into a normal rhythm.

  She jerked when the first icy droplet hit her cheek . . . but this was only water, the air scented with the clean, fresh ozone of the rain that crashed down from a storm-darkened sky, washing away the stain of blood. Leaning back as much as she could given the tightness of Raphael’s hold, she tugged down his head with a hand on his nape and kissed him again—this time, the raw heat of him made her body burn, her breasts swelling against the heavy wetness of her combat gear.

  “Glad to have you back, Archangel.” Another soft, suckling kiss of his lips, warm and alive, the rain turning to steam where they touched.

  His forehead dropped to her own, his breath harsh and chest heaving. “I want no power that makes me cause you harm.” One hand rising between them, he rubbed it over her bruised heart, the curls of heat telling her he was fixing the damage.

  “All good,” she murmured when he dropped his hand, her skin prickling with the need to reinitiate their bond in a more primal way.

  “I also,” he said, his body pushing hard and ready against her abdomen, “do not want any power that turns my cock to ice.”

  Oh yeah, he was back, she thought with a grin. “You have no idea how fervently I second that.” And though they hung in the midst of icy winter rain, she took the time to press her mouth to his, to indulge in a kiss so sexual, he might as well have been inside her body. No ice, no distance, only a molten heat between male and female, between an archangel and his consort.

  * * *

  Landing at the Tower, Raphael discovered from Aodhan that people were scared, believing he’d made the sky rain blood.

  That, Raphael thought, could work to their advantage.

  When he said as much to Elena while they dried themselves off in their Tower suite, she paused with the towel over her breasts, a gleam in her eye. “You should make sure Charisemnon and Lijuan hear about your new ‘power.’”

  “I’m certain they’ve already heard.” Dry, he took the towel and bade her turn so he could pat the last of the moisture off her wings, her feathers designed to sleek off wet. “Dmitri says recordings of the event are already trending on media sites worldwide.”

  “Right, what was I thinking?” Elena threw up her hands. “That New Yorkers would actually, I don’t know, hide or something else sane when the sky was raining freaking blood?”

  “Our people are not so timid.” Dropping the towel, he drew her close and touched his lips to the side of her throat.

  She shivered, leaned back into him, and they simply stood skin to skin for a stolen moment.

  The memory of her warmth was still with him when he met with Nazarach minutes later. The dangerous midlevel angel with wings of burnished amber and skin of gleaming black had bad news. “I’ve had a confirmed report that reborn have been spotted on the outskirts of Atlanta. It’s believed the initial group was brought in on a long-haul truck, possibly after being smuggled in through shipping containers.”

  Raphael hadn’t expected such sneak tactics from Lijuan on the eve of true battle. He’d believed she’d unleash her reborn during the actual battle, to go up against his ground soldiers. No doubt this was Charisemnon’s influence. “Take your squadron and go stamp out the menace before it spreads.” He couldn’t leave the task to younger, weaker angels, not given the danger.

  “If New York falls—”

  “We can’t afford for the reborn to infect any part of the territory. They’re too virulent.” Holding the Tower remained critical, but that didn’t mean he’d permit the rest of his territory to fall into ruin.

  Nazarach left with a promise to return as soon as possible. When Nimra came to Raphael with the same reports about her territory a few minutes later, followed by Andreas, Raphael had had enough. Anger simmering under his skin, he put through a call to Lijuan’s second. The old archangel eschewed modern conveniences, but her people had recently convinced her to upgrade.

  Xi, with his black eyes and striking wings of red-streaked gray, answered within moments. “Archangel.” A polite incline of his head. “How may I be of service?”

  “I have a message for your mistress,” Raphael said, too furious to temper his words. “Tell her I did not expect such cowardice from her.” He ended the call as anger flushed red across Xi’s sharp cheekbones, and was unsurprised when Lijuan’s
face appeared in the glass wall of his office moments later, in a show of her power.

  “You dare call me a coward?” Unhidden rage, her face skeletal as her physical form faded in and out.

  Raphael held her gaze, his own rage as potent. “What is it if not cowardice to release your reborn on the edges of my territory, forcing me to scatter my forces?” He gave away nothing by admitting that, since news of the fighting against the reborn would soon spread across the world. “You must believe your forces weak indeed that you use such contemptible tactics.”

  Curling black in her irises. “You should take care in making such accusations.”

  “Ask Xi to turn on a television set. I’m sure the pictures will be available within minutes.” Continuing to face that inhuman visage with its gaping eye sockets and mouth full of silent screams, he said, “Perhaps you should choose your allies more wisely,” certain Lijuan had put Charisemnon in charge of her reborn forces.

  No response, her face disappearing from view . . . but there were no more reports of new infestations in the hours that followed. That still left them dealing with the creatures already loose in the territory—and that proved no easy task for his people, even though Jason’s warning meant they were prepared for Lijuan’s “improved” design.

  These new reborn didn’t shuffle; they ran in a fast crablike walk. And they weren’t sad or broken at being trapped in their dead bodies; they were mindless creatures that wanted only to feed on living flesh.

  Then they discovered Charisemnon hadn’t forgotten the port city of New York.

  * * *

  “Jesus Christ,” Elena said, watching the reborn scrambling down the sides of the cruise ship that had apparently berthed early evening, soon after the steady rain had tapered off at last. Under guard because it had stopped in Charisemnon’s territory some weeks earlier, before the start of hostilities, it had been scheduled to be searched and processed in the next half hour.

  Then one of the dockside workers noticed the blood-soaked “guests” on deck.

  “How the hell did people not know they had those creatures on board?” She shot a crossbow bolt at one particularly fast one that had made it onto the pier, taking out its heart and immobilizing it for the moment.

  At least the pier blazed with floodlights, making the task easier.

  Beside her, Illium unsheathed Lightning, the sword a gleaming piece of death. “No one to ask, but if I had to guess, I’d say Charisemnon’s staff booked out an entire deck for their party and either bribed or threatened someone into permitting them to board at night, before the other passengers. These reborn don’t look human enough to pass otherwise.”

  He used Lightning to point out another snarling creature about to hit the pier, so she could shoot it. “The initial group of reborn was most probably a small, manageable number, kept alive and sated with the flesh of living victims brought on board at the same time.”

  “With the plan to unleash them on the other passengers once they’d docked in New York,” Elena completed, seeing the gruesome logic of what he was saying. “Each person they feed off, but leave relatively whole, then rises to become another weapon.”

  Illium nodded. “I assume their handler was alive until an hour ago, since he kept them from rampaging till the ship docked, but either he’s dead now or he didn’t get the order not to attack.”

  Down!

  Dropping at Raphael’s order, Elena covered her ears as he blasted the cruise ship with a bolt of power from above. The massive piece of machinery simply disintegrated, taking the majority of those inside with it—Elena knew the friends and relatives who’d come to meet the ship were distraught, believing their loved ones might somehow have survived the monsters, but Elena knew that was a false hope.

  The reborn scrambling off the ship had had mouths rimmed with blood.

  No way would they seek to abandon a buffet of trapped humans unless that buffet was now empty. Especially given the report that had come in from Nimra’s territory stating the creatures could scent living prey from meters away and would gang up to break through any impediment to that prey, their focus so absolute, it could be utilized to set up an ambush.

  Today, however, it wasn’t about drawing the creatures to a certain point but making sure none left the pier alive.

  “Go! Go! Go!” she yelled to the ground fighters around her as the dust cleared to show some of the reborn had managed to jump free of the ship before it blew and were now swimming to shore.

  Raphael dropped down to join her, unsheathing dual swords rather than expending more power on creatures that could be killed by being beheaded. And so began the grim task of cleaning up the mess Charisemnon had dumped on their doorstep. The absolute worst moment of the entire operation came when Elena found herself face-to-face with a twelve-year-old girl in a drenched sundress, her exposed skin bearing vicious scratches . . . and her teeth stained with blood.

  Claws out, the girl screamed and ran at Elena, feral hunger in her face.

  37

  Hot blood splashing against Elena’s combat gear, that small, blonde head rolling off into the water, Raphael’s hand cupping the side of her jaw. “Elena.” It was a snapped command.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay.” She’d just frozen there for a second, unable to raise her hand against a child. “I forgot there must’ve been kids on board.”

  Ten minutes later and the mobile reborn were all dead. “How many in the water?” she asked Illium, who’d been talking to the teams of vampires in watercraft on the river, their spotlights sweeping the water.

  “Two or three dozen at most. The Sire’s strike incinerated the majority, but we need to make certain none of the drowned are given the chance to rise.” Wiping the back of his hand over his mouth, he walked over to the drowned bodies laid out on the pier and began to behead them one after the other.

  He hesitated at the tiny body of another child, this one a boy of barely four or five.

  “Illium?” she asked when he went down on one knee beside the body, not knowing what answer would be worse—evidence that the child had been alive when Raphael blew up the ship or that he’d joined the monsters.

  The blue-winged angel’s eyes were bleak as he rose and brought down his sword across that fragile neck. “There was flesh caught between his teeth, under his fingernails.”

  Rage and sadness burning in her gut, she got a lift from Raphael into the sky and began to sweep the river to make certain none of the bodies had washed downstream. All it would take to spark a deadly infestation was for one reborn to come back to the mockery of “life” that was Lijuan’s gift to her people.

  * * *

  After the unrelenting horror of the past few hours, Elena was in no mood to see stunning wings of silken copper in Raphael’s office. Needing to deal with an urgent situation in another part of the territory, he’d returned to the Tower thirty minutes earlier, while she’d remained behind with the team doing the final checks to make absolutely certain the reborn threat had been neutralized.

  Tired and dirty, she wanted a shower, the arms of her consort, food, then sleep, in that order. Instead, she saw Tasha of the warrior’s blade and faux friendliness put her hand on Raphael’s arm as she leaned in close to Elena’s man, who was still in his bloodied combat leathers. Face uptilted and that glorious scarlet hair tumbling down her back, the other woman hung on Raphael’s every word.

  Elena didn’t realize she had a throwing knife in her hand until the scent of the sea and the rain crashed into her mind. Getting blood out of white carpet is extremely difficult, hbeebti.

  Fuck the carpet. Why are you allowing another woman to touch you?

  I was attempting to be polite to an old friend, but clearly, that approach has failed. Lifting Tasha’s hand off his arm, he placed it by her side. “I’m afraid we won’t be able to accommodate you at the Enclave. There are, however, guest quarters in a skyscraper nearby.”

  “Oh? I am disappointed, Raphael.” Tasha’s voice was musical eve
n in her regret. “I truly believe I can offer assistance with what is happening in your territory.” A smile Elena could hear in her tone. “A sounding board as well as my sword.”

  It was the last sentence that threw the switch on Elena’s temper from hot to cold. Bitch knows I’m here and she’s trying to provoke me. Why? So she can show herself to be the more cultured, civilized one? Does she think you’ll love me less if I lose my temper and act like an idiot? The absurdity of such an idea astounded her. Or that I’d turn tail and run, even if she humiliated me? Pride mattered nothing when it came to her love for Raphael—she’d crawl naked and bloodied over hot coals to get to him.

  She has no comprehension of what we are to one another. A single, searing instant of eye contact that made her heart ache. Tasha thinks as many immortals do—in terms of political alliances.

  “Tasha.” She waited for the other woman to turn, ersatz surprise in those slanted eyes of emerald green. “The old days might have been ‘saturated with joy,’” she said, quoting something Tasha had just been saying, “but time has moved on.”

  “You are young, Elena.” If Tasha’s smile had had any more sugar in it, it’d need to come with a warning label from the dentist. “You cannot understand the bonds that tie together those of us who’ve known one another for a millennium and more.”

  Oh, I’m soooo terribly, terribly wounded by that velvet arrow.

  Laughter in her mind, the kiss of the sea. Velvet arrow? Your use of language is getting more creative by the day.

  I can’t take credit for that one. It’s all Bluebell. Now be quiet so I can concentrate on not stabbing Ms. McHotpants through the heart to put her out of her misery.

  “I may not understand the bonds of such a long shared past”—Elena relaxed against the doorjamb—“but I understand the present. And in the present, you’re attempting to seduce my consort. It cheapens you, Tasha.”