by Nalini Singh
The child. Always the child.
He went to try and cut under her, catch her and the child both, though he knew the attempt was futile. Even wings of white fire couldn’t eliminate the space between two objects. His heart screamed. Elena!
A sudden explosion of light above him . . . and no bloody bodies on the street. Low as he’d flown, he had to land or smash into a wall. When he looked up, what he saw had him launching into the air once more. Elena stared at him in silence. Even the screaming child had gone silent, shocked by the sudden halt.
“Raphael.” It was a whisper. “Am I levitating? Just to clarify, I’m fine with levitating rather than being hunter-flavored mincemeat.” She looked down. “Phew. Even if I stop levitating now, this baby will be fine and worst I’ll get is a turned ankle.”
“Land.” His voice came out hoarse. “Land, Elena.”
“Land?” A furrowed brow, a taut voice. “Archangel, I haven’t exactly figured out the levitating thing yet.”
Breathing with icy calm even though his newly regenerated heart was a massive drum, he put his hand on Elena’s shoulder and pushed her down until her feet touched the asphalt. The screaming woman from the balcony had disappeared, was probably frantically running down the stairs to get to her son.
Who was now beaming at Raphael through a tear-streaked face, all dark eyes and hair, his skin a pale brown. He held out two chubby arms right then, and Raphael plucked him out of Elena’s hold. The child laughed and tried to reach for his wings.
In front of him, Elena folded her trembling arms. “There’s gratitude for you. I saved his life and he goes gaga over you. Typical.” Her voice shook, no bite in her tone and her pupils huge.
“Elena, look over your shoulder.”
“Did I magically grow wings?” she said with a wry smile before glancing back. She froze. Her throat moved in a hard swallow. She turned back to him very, very slowly. “I wasn’t levitating.”
“Seth!” A woman’s desperate cry. “Seth!”
“Mama!” The toddler leaned out toward his sobbing mother; he was grinning, having managed to grab hold of Raphael’s feathers before his mother arrived.
The distraught woman hugged her son close, her entire body shaking hard enough to fracture. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said through her tears. “We were dancing in the lounge with the music up, and I had to go into the kitchen to check on the stew. I was away for two minutes. I don’t know how he—”
“Climb chair mama!” her son informed her with delighted pride.
They all looked up to the outdoor seating on the balcony. The woman’s face went bone white. “I’m going to go throw that in the Dumpster right now.” Wiping off her tears with the back of one hand, she looked from Elena to Raphael, finally seemed to realize who it was that had caught her boy. “T-t-thank you.”
“I’m glad I could help.” Elena’s voice was stronger, but Raphael saw the rigid tension in her neck, the dark blot of her dilated pupils.
“Go, be with your son,” Raphael said, giving the child’s mother permission to run—he could see the need in her eyes. No ordinary adult mortal liked coming face-to-face with an archangel.
Children were another story.
Young Seth, unaware he’d used up one of his lives as well as his mother’s, waved at them over his mother’s shoulder.
Elena waited until the twosome had disappeared into the building before she stepped close to Raphael. “Are the you-know-whats on my back still there?” she whispered, scared that talking about the impossible would poof it out of existence.
Her archangel nodded.
Breath shallow and fast, she dared look over her shoulder . . . to see unearthly wings of white fire electric with a storm of golden lightning. That lightning moved, dazzling and alive, but the shape of her wings remained unbroken. They were big, the same size wings she’d had before the chrysalis. “Touch it,” she rasped, not ready to believe she wasn’t hallucinating.
Maybe she’d hit her head hard when she landed, was now in la-la land.
Raphael made contact. Elena shivered, sensation arcing through her nerve endings.
“I feel no solid surface.” Raphael touched her again; when he withdrew his hand, it came out coated with tiny lightning strikes that sank into his skin. “Do you want to attempt flight?”
“Yes, I have to know.” A light flashed not far in the distance at the same instant. “I think we’re being paparazzied.” Regardless, she drew in, then spread out her lightning storm wings. “Wish me luck. Vertical takeoffs were never my forte.”
She was four feet off the ground before she realized what had happened. The pulse in her neck skittered, her skin hot. Home, Archangel.
I’ll fly under you.
Neither one of them had to articulate the reason why—Elena had no idea where these wings had come from or how long they’d last. But as she took to the sky, she felt no fear, only a bone-deep joy. The events of the past few minutes—such a short time—ran through her mind in a repeating loop.
“I can’t believe I asked you if I was levitating!” she called out to Raphael once they were high enough up that no one else was going to hear them.
I will be magnanimous and blame it on shock. It will be a hushed secret between an archangel and his consort.
Laughing, she swept to the left, then back around to the right to test her maneuverability. They function just like flesh and blood wings. Eyes hot, she had to blink to clear her vision. You gave me your heart, a heart that can process violent Cascade energies—you gave me back my wings, Raphael.
The salt-laced sea in her mind, huge and cold and of Raphael. I may have provided the raw material, Guild Hunter, but you made the choice. Wings of fire and lightning can fit in a chrysalis that is too small.
Despite her desperate desire to fly and fly, she went straight to their Tower balcony. After landing beside her, Raphael cupped her face and pressed his forehead to hers. There they stood, no words needing to be spoken.
When they did walk inside and down to the infirmary level, it was to run into Dmitri. He took one look at her and shook his head. “Don’t scorch the walls.”
Striding over, Elena hauled down his head and kissed him hard on the lips. “Today, even you can’t annoy me,” she said into his stunned face before releasing him.
A laugh sounded from not far down the corridor, where Dmitri’s wife had just emerged from Lucius’s office. Honor’s eyes were dancing. Dmitri, meanwhile, was looking at Elena in utter horror. “We will never speak of this again,” he said. “Ever.”
“I think he could use a hug,” Elena said to Honor.
“You two are awful together and I love you both. And your wings are a showstopper.” With that, Honor walked over to console her scowling husband.
Raphael meanwhile, was wearing a suspiciously bland expression.
Elena jerked up her head as they continued on down the corridor. “What?”
“I have never seen that look on Dmitri’s face in all my life. I also cannot wait to see the look on your face when it sinks in that you kissed Dmitri.”
“All worth it.” Full of sunshine and sparkles and freaking puppy dogs, Elena all but skipped into Nisia’s office.
The Tower healer and Keir were seated on a small dark blue settee, their heads bent over a pile of charts and notes. A single glimpse of Elena and they were over her like a rash, muttering and examining and talking in a fluid language Raphael told her was a variant of Aramaic. It was as Keir was about to take a reading that her wings disappeared in a silent whoosh.
Elena tried not to panic. “Raphael, what’s my back look like?”
“Your leather jacket boasts two wing slits with the edges sealed shut as if by heat.” He helped her get the jacket off. After which, she pulled off the long-sleeved T-shirt she’d been wearing underneath. Turning her body toward
the mirror Nisia held up, she sucked in a breath.
A familiar tattoo covered her back: a fiery outline of wings that blazed before settling into a glittering light under her skin.
“Your wings have always been present,” Raphael murmured, running his finger along the edges and making her toes curl. “At least since the day we first saw the fire tattoo.”
“I don’t know how to bring them back.” It was hard to breathe.
Eyes as blue as a mountain sky met hers. “Remember how you learned to fly?”
“You pushed me off a cliff.”
Nisia held out a palm. “Wait, just wait.”
“I am not sure that’s the greatest idea,” Keir began, but Elena was already putting her clothes back on.
Dire alarm marking their faces, the healers hurried after Elena and Raphael as she and her archangel strode out onto the balcony. When she saw the Legion’s gray wings filling the air, she knew Raphael had called them. Her personal catching team. She walked to the very edge. “I’m ready.”
No hesitation, no questions; the love of her life pushed her into a deadly fall before sweeping down and below her with his arms open, ready to break her fall. Elena didn’t panic, just thought of her wings. Her body kept accelerating. And accelerating. Shit. She was about to slam straight into her archangel. I need wings now!
A wrench at her back. A jerking halt.
“Yee-fucking-hah!” She dived straight at Raphael, laughing, and they played like wild winged children. The Legion swept and flew around them, their voices in Elena’s head.
We have not seen this.
We did not know.
The chrysalis was not too small for this.
You are new, Elena.
We are new.
We are . . . happy.
25
Caliane’s tone was frosty when she called Raphael that night. “You did not have to keep your consort’s lightning wings secret from me.” Her eyes were the same shade as his and at that instant, they were Arctic ice. “I am not the enemy.”
“No, Mother, you are not.” She had fought for him since her return. At the same time, she had once been an insane archangel who’d left him to die on a forgotten field, his blood rubies on the green, green grass.
Raphael couldn’t forget, saw both sides of her. And so, he chose his words with care. “We did not wish to speak of it until we knew all there was to know about Elena’s new physical state. Unfortunately, an accident with a child altered the timeline.”
“I see.” The slightest thaw. “I will accept that as a warrior’s decision not to expose her strength to all the world while it is nascent.” A raised eyebrow. “Where is your consort?”
“Right here, Lady Caliane.” Stepping into frame, Elena inclined her head just enough that it was polite without calling her own status as Raphael’s consort into question. “Would you care to see my wings more closely?”
Appearing mollified by the offer, his mother nodded.
Elena’s wings erupted out of her back in a flash of electric lightning, a storm surge barely contained. She shifted so that Caliane could get the full effect.
Raphael had rarely seen his mother lost for words, but today, Caliane was silent until she said, “You, my child, are a being of change.” It wasn’t an indictment. “My son will certainly never suffer ennui with you as his love.”
His mother signed off soon afterward.
Of course they flew that night.
Elena’s wings dazzled against the ebony of the sky. I look like a giant lightbulb, don’t I? One of those ones they have at the science center with all the arcs of electricity inside.
Raphael felt his cheeks crease. You are extraordinary. So preternaturally beautiful that he knew anyone looking up at the sky would be spellbound. A career as a spy, however, might be beyond your reach.
She burst out laughing, and they flew on. They danced. An archangel and his consort tangling limbs and bodies in a carnal union that made them both whole.
It was as they were returning home, their clothes lost over the ocean and Elena held in Raphael’s arms so that his glamour would cover her, that her wings spluttered out. Frowning, she bit down on her lower lip. “I can’t make them come back.”
“You may have overexerted yourself.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right.” But her face was tight, her body tense.
Being unable to give her solid answers, being unable to fix this, it had his power calcifying into granite edges inside him, hard and cutting.
After arriving home, he wrapped her up in his arms and wings and kissed her until nothing existed but the two of them.
Breathless in the aftermath, Elena tugged Raphael into the bedroom. “I think we need round two today.”
They fell into bed together, with Elena lying on Raphael’s chest, his wing over her body. She stroked his hair back from his face. “I’ve complicated your life, haven’t I, Archangel?” He was one of the Cadre, a being used to control—but he could do nothing to control what was happening to her and it was savaging him.
She’d tasted the cold fury of it in his kiss.
“It rages through me, the anger,” he told her, the lines of his face flawless in their masculine beauty and his voice a thing of frigid death. “I want to break the world.”
“That’s the Cascade pushing you. It wants violence, death, anger.” Fisting a hand in his hair, she said, “Fight it. Stay my Raphael.”
Cold immortal eyes. “No matter who or what I become, I will always be yours.” As he gripped the back of her head and drew her down into a kiss, she realized he’d never made the promise she’d demanded.
* * *
• • •
While Raphael fought the rage that wanted to take root inside him, his consort spent the coming days testing her wings, figuring out their endurance.
“I must go to China,” he told her two weeks after she first flew. “It is my turn to oversee the territory. You’re coming with me.”
She looked up from where she was polishing her brand-new knives, barefoot and in pajamas, her choppy hair tucked carelessly behind her ears. “Yes, Your Archangelness.” A tug of her lips. “I can’t let you out of my sight, either.”
Raphael wasn’t certain he’d ever reach that point.
“My endurance isn’t as high as yours,” Elena added as he removed the top of his leathers. “I’ll probably need to land in places—but if you dare set a single foot on that poisoned land, I’ll shoot you.”
“I have no desire to be infected by whatever Lijuan left behind.” Bare to the waist, but with his pants and boots yet on, he picked up one of her knives, testing the balance. “You have a piece of my heart. You may be susceptible.”
“If I am, let’s find out while you’re full of wildfire that can burn out the poison.” She slipped a blade into a thigh sheath. “But, the toxin is keyed to archangels and I’m a weirdo hybrid. Never thought that’d be an advantage.”
“Get so much as a scratch on your body and I will lock you in a steel-reinforced room for the rest of your life.” He wasn’t certain he wasn’t speaking the absolute truth.
Rising, she hauled him close and took a kiss that was slow, deep, defiant. “I’d just break out.” Another kiss. “I know you’re freaked out. So am I.”
“Archangels do not get ‘freaked out.’” But he kissed her anyway. “Pack a gown. Mother has been making noises about an evening event to celebrate our ‘triumphant return.’”
Elena groaned and banged her head against his sternum.
The anger and fear knotting up his insides softened. “Your favorite angel, Tasha, will be present.”
“I’ll get you back for that.” A glare. “But your taunt has found its mark, curses on you. I’ll now have to rustle up a fabulous evening gown so Tasha McHotpants can’t show me up by being all gorgeous and com
petent.”
That, he thought, was what annoyed her the most: Tasha was someone Elena might actually like if not for the fact that Tasha had made it clear she’d enjoy picking up where she’d left off with Raphael. It had been foolishness on Tasha’s part, with no chance of success, but it meant Elena and Tasha would never be friends.
“Montgomery has no doubt already assembled a suitable wardrobe for you.” Most of what his consort called her “fancy clothes” had burned up in the inferno of Raphael’s power. “Speaking of which—Maeve is asking if we’d like the house rebuilt as it was, or if we want changes.”
“It was a spectacular house.”
“How about a special room for all your knives?” he said in a small joke between an archangel and his consort, but Elena lit up like a candle.
“Really? You don’t think that’s excessive? It could be a small room. Just with lots of wall space.” A sudden frown. “Were you making fun of me?”
“A little, but now I will build you the best knife display room you’ve ever seen.”
Elena’s lips twitched. “Don’t forget the spot for my crossbow.”
“It will have a podium of its own with a dedicated spotlight.”
“As it should.” Feet bare and grin wide, she stood on his booted feet. “Talking about blades makes me hot.”
“Any more sharp objects on you today?” he murmured against her ear.
“You’re safe.” Her mouth was wet and soft on his chest, her tongue licking him up in tender flicks.
His blood felt so cold at times these days, but never when he was with her.
Hand pressed against his heart, she threatened a playful bite . . . then paused, her head cocked slightly and tiny lines flaring out at the corners of her eyes. “Put your finger on the pulse in my neck.”
“I have never partaken of this deviant sexual act.”