by Nalini Singh
“Next time, I’d appreciate you warning your mother that you’re about to take a nap.” A black scowl. “Lady Caliane’s last threat included having me drawn and quartered.”
“You survived.” That he had was a measure of his mettle; Raphael’s mother, after all, was an Ancient.
Dmitri’s next question was quiet. “Elena?” A worry in his dark eyes that would astonish Raphael’s consort, the two were such determined adversaries.
“The Cascade has underestimated my hunter’s will.” He opened out his wings to check their status. They remained aflame but the odd feather was beginning to show through, so the white fire was apt to settle in the coming hours. “I must go and close the chasm from which Elena and I arose.”
“Raphael.” Arms folded again and feet set apart, Dmitri got in his way. “Contact your mother before you go or I swear I’ll tie your wings together and drag you inside to make the call.”
The cold power in him whispered for him to take offense at such insubordination, but Raphael had no intention of becoming its puppet. “I will do it as soon as I fulfil a promise to Elena.” Dmitri was right—Caliane might’ve once been mad, might’ve left him bleeding and broken in a forgotten field, but she’d risen sane and she’d been firmly on his side since.
Nodding, Dmitri left to return to his duties, while Raphael swept off the balcony to head to the storage unit where Elena kept her childhood. She visited the space regularly, made sure her things were free of dust, told him stories about pieces when he was with her, but while she’d given her sister Beth anything she wanted from within, she’d never brought a single item home herself. Today, however, when he returned with the quilt and opened it over her, she tugged it closer and snuggled down.
He brushed his hand over the near-white silk of her hair, what he felt for her such a huge violence inside him that it had no name. “To the end and beyond, hunter-mine.”
Forcing himself out of the room, he shut the door quietly behind himself, then went to the screen mounted on one wall of the suite’s library. He could’ve used a phone to call Amanat, but Caliane didn’t trust in such things. She was barely comfortable with the system that allowed them to see each other as they spoke.
The face that answered on the other end was a familiar one: uptilted eyes of dramatic green, hair of a deep, deep red, skin that was close to translucent and wings of copper silk.
Tasha would never pass unnoticed through a crowd.
Her eyes widened at seeing him, a gasp exiting her throat. But the woman—and warrior—who’d been his lover when they were young angels first spreading their wings was already moving out of shot, and he knew she was getting his mother.
Tasha was as loyal to Caliane as Dmitri was to Raphael.
When Caliane appeared on the other side, it was with a frown marring her forehead. “What—” She cut herself off, her face softening in a way it only ever did for Raphael. Placing her hand on the screen on her side, she whispered, “My son. You are home.”
Raphael echoed her gesture on this side, placing his palm over hers. “We will speak further soon, Mother. I must take care of my territory now.”
Caliane had been an archangel longer than Raphael could imagine; she didn’t argue against his priorities. “That upstart vampire you call second needs to learn how to speak to his elders, but he has done you proud.” Regal and a touch haughty, Caliane’s words nonetheless held the approbation of an archangel who had never been afraid to have strong people around her. She had taught him how to rule by example.
Until the madness. Until the death.
“I never doubted he would.” He inclined his head. “I will go now.”
“Before you do—your consort?”
Once, that might’ve been a barbed question, but Caliane and Elena had made their peace. It would always be an odd peace with jagged edges, but that was what happened when two strong women collided and one of them was used to being obeyed in all things—while the other obeyed only the dictates of her conscience.
“She is resting,” was all Raphael said; he and Elena would have to speak when she woke, decide their next course of action. Until then, he’d share nothing of her physical state.
After ending the call, he looked into the bedroom. A glint of hair of near-white . . . and the muted glow of her skin beneath the quilt. His hunter was curled up on her side in a tight ball, her knees tucked to her chest and her spine curved, her head curled over her knees. The tattoo on her back pulsed with light in time with her heartbeat.
Jaw clenched, he fought the urge to shake her awake from that torturously constricted position that had permitted her to emerge from the chrysalis with all her limbs. He lost the battle. Elena.
A sleepy mumble from her mind, the warm steel of her presence a kiss.
Muscle memory, he told himself. That was all. But he touched the back of his hand to her cheek to reassure himself of the life of her.
Sighing, she snuggled deeper into the bed . . . just as droplets of fire fell from his wings to dance over the exposed side of her face. She shivered as first one small flame sank into her flesh, then another, but didn’t wake.
The power spread under her skin in a soft burst that made her veins pulse a luminous gold for a startling second before the effect faded into a softer radiance. Soft or not, his hunter remained very much “glow-in-the-dark.”
He could imagine her displeased scowl when she woke.
Leaning down, he pressed his lips to her cheek. “If it is any consolation hunter-mine, my wings continue to burn and my eyes are alive with lightning.”
Archangel. A soft, sleepy murmur from a mind caught in deepest sleep but aware of him and what he meant to her.
The hand clenched around his heart stopped squeezing. Sleep, hbeebti. I will be home soon.
He stopped long enough to pull on a sleeveless tunic, and put into his pocket a set of small sample bags Keir had left behind. “Your scientists,” the healer had said, “will no doubt appreciate any samples you are able to retrieve from the chasm.”
As he took flight from the balcony off their bedroom, he paid attention to the performance of his wings, checked his speed. Everything felt as it ever had, as if he had flesh and blood, feathers and bone and tendon under his command.
Satisfied with his ability to control his body in the air, he swept across the glittering sunlit skyscrapers of his city, past the showy forms of trees ablaze with one last burst of color before their winter slumber, and over the chilly waters of the Hudson. Calmer now, it glimmered under the early afternoon sunshine, sparkles dancing off its surface.
He could see Illium’s wings from here, the wild blue vibrant even against the crystalline blue of the sky, the silver filaments bright shards. The angel held a hover near the edge of the cliffs. He’d also ordered members of his squadron and of the Legion to create a wide barrier around the dangerous hole in the ground.
No unauthorized wings moved in the air above, and no one walked anywhere in sight. Illium, have there been any reports of casualties in the Enclave?
No. I had members of the squadron fly over the area—they reported no fallen or wounded individuals.
Angling his body to wing high above Illium and the others, Raphael took in the wound in the earth. From so far above, it was a dark blot in the landscape, a scar that should not exist.
No power swirled in or around it. No lava glowed.
Dropping down, he landed on the very edge of the hole. Illium and the Primary soon came to land on either side of him. When he glanced at the Primary, he saw a strange thing: the Primary was now almost completely colorless. The transition had begun before Raphael went to sleep in the bed beside Elena.
The second becoming, that’s what the Legion had told Elena when she asked why they were losing the colors that had begun to appear in some of them. As Elena had regressed back into humanity, the Legion had
regressed into the grayness that was the color palette with which they’d risen from the lightless deep.
But Elena was no longer mortal, and yet the Primary remained colorless. “Has the second becoming ended?”
The Primary tilted his head to the side. “No,” he said after a pause to consider the question. “We are deciding.”
Putting the matter aside for now, Raphael looked into the chasm created by the power that was ice in his veins. Such a cold, cold power. A power that whispered in his ear that Lijuan was an imposter and he was the true god.
The one who should be worshipped.
13
A kiss of heat inside him, a pulse of defiant life. A piece of Elena’s heart, refusing to surrender him to the immortal cold.
Raphael fisted his hand. “I’m going to fly down and ensure there are no hidden dangers.” As he would not become a mindless tool for the Cascade, he would not build his and Elena’s home on poisoned soil.
Illium stirred. “Sire, you just emerged. I’d rather you didn’t disappear back into the black hole.”
The angel with eyes of aged gold and a face of pure beauty—gaunt now in a way angels rarely became—was too young to give Raphael orders. Their relationship was far different from the one Raphael had with Dmitri. Raphael had held Illium as a newborn, known him as an unwieldy child angel with wings he could barely control.
He’d watched the youth Illium had become fall so madly in love that his heart had broken forever with the loss of his mortal lover. And he had known Illium as a young warrior who mourned the loss of a friend who had been trapped inside his own torment for two hundred years.
All these things and more made up the ties between Raphael and Illium. “I have nothing to fear down there,” he said, for the greatest risk was in his blood, in the power that sought constantly to shape him into a weapon of chaos.
Lijuan believed herself a goddess, so he must be a god.
The Cascade was nothing if not a blunt hammer.
“If I cannot contact you”—Illium set his jaw—“I’ll fly in to search for you.”
“Let us hope it doesn’t come to that.” Raphael stepped into the chasm, his wings spread to control his descent.
His primaries didn’t come close to touching the edges.
In places, the walls around him were glassy. Either the energy he’d released had solidified natural minerals into a glassy surface, or pieces of their home had become bonded to the earth. Here and there, he saw the odd item he recognized—a spoon, part of a stair railing—but the majority had been pulverized.
Sorrow sang an unexpected song in his heart. The Enclave home was where he’d first made love to Elena. It was a place all of his Seven had called home many times over their lifetimes. It was where he’d begun a friendship with Elijah. And it was the house in which his mother had come to stay after waking from madness.
But . . . he’d built this home as a lone archangel. He would rebuild it as one half of an unbreakable pair.
Most of the earth is simply compacted, he told Illium. I should be able to churn up the dirt so that the walls collapse inward, eliminating most of the hole. What space remains, we will fill using soil excavated from other areas.
That new skyscraper being built in Soho, Illium said. Tons of earth just sitting around. I’ll put a squadron on standby to bring across as much as we need.
Raphael continued his descent. There were no scorch marks, nothing that indicated a raging fire. Just crushed and broken things that spoke to the violence of the power inside him. Halfway down, he halted and placed his hand against the soil, felt a faint warmth—it was an echo, an imprint left behind by the energy that crawled across his wings and lived in his bloodstream.
He kept on dropping.
A glint caught his eye. After tracing his way back to the spot, he laughed at what he saw. Carefully digging out the leather-bound book with gold lettering on the spine, he dusted it off and put it in a side pocket of his pants. Elena would be aghast that of all their books, it was Imani’s tome on angelic etiquette that had survived unscathed.
He picked up nothing else on the way down and was soon standing with his feet on the earth where he had awoken with Elena. Pieces of the chrysalis lay broken around the imprint of his consort’s body. Crouching down, he reached out to touch one.
It crumbled into dust so fine it was mist in the air.
Nothing but a discarded shell. Devoid of Elena’s energy, it could not exist. He took a sample of the dust for the scientists in any case, stored it away with Imani’s worthy tome.
As he rose back to his feet, he found himself searching for a mind so old it made his bones ache. Cassandra?
Silence. Not even the distant murmur of a presence. Yet he had no doubts the lava shield had been hers. Perhaps she hadn’t even been aware of it, the act done by the last vestiges of her conscious mind. He would have to speak to Elena, confirm whether she sensed any remnants of the Ancient’s consciousness. The archangel with the terrible gift of foresight had always spoken to his hunter the most.
For Elena was Cassandra’s prophecy.
After taking another look around to ensure he’d missed nothing, Raphael spread out his wings and began the flight upward. He scanned the walls as he flew, but the only other thing he recovered was a spoon that had been bent and twisted into such a strange and complicated shape that he thought Elena would find it intriguing.
As he slipped it into a pocket, he considered whether she would want to decorate their new home herself . . . and laughed at the sudden impression of utter horrified negation that came through loud and clear. Guild Hunter? He hadn’t realized he’d reached for her until her response.
Go away. Am sleeping. A grumble of words. Woke up at nightmare image of having to choose paint colors and carpets for formal dining and living areas. I can make a nest of our suite, but then you’re on your own. Her mind was already fading as she spoke the last words, her body too exhausted to do anything but rest.
But she’d left him with a smile on his face. The two of them would put their stamp on the house in ways that mattered, with items that held meaning to them, but otherwise, they would rely on Montgomery. As Raphael had done once before. A relatively new archangel at the time, he’d been content to live in the first iteration of his Tower—his household staff had consisted only of his cook, Sivya, and her assistant. It was Neha on whose advice he’d built the Enclave home.
“This land is young as you are young,” she’d said on her visit. “It suits you—but your Tower is a rough construct. Some in the Cadre will look down their nose at your lack of a formal court and consider you weaker because of it. You must build a residence fit for an archangel.”
During the build—to which Raphael had lent his strength—he’d begun to notice that nothing was ever out of place at certain times of day. Tools were clean and sharpened; water, mead, food, and blood supplies provided like clockwork; broken items replaced and the detritus taken away.
When he’d asked Dmitri who was responsible, he’d been introduced to a dark-haired vampire who met his eyes only in flashes, the physical scars of his human life as a low servant yet apparent on his face and upper body. But even then, Montgomery had not flinched at being in the presence of an archangel.
By the end of the build, Raphael had such faith in the quiet and hardworking vampire that he’d put Montgomery in charge of furnishing the entire house. That was when Montgomery had flinched. “But, sire, I am only a servant!”
“You are a man who notices the smallest detail. I have faith in your ability to create a home suitable for an archangel.”
It had taken Montgomery a year. He’d asked if he could go to Neha’s court, to Titus’s, to Uram’s, to Lijuan’s, so he could see examples of an archangelic home, and Raphael had sent him off with suave and sophisticated Trace as a guide.
Montgomery had come back with
painstakingly knotted silk carpets from India, wall hangings from Africa, a hand-carved settee from the hinterland of Uram’s territory, artisan-painted screens from China.
He’d also returned with a statuette he’d found “abandoned” in Neha’s court.
It had taken Raphael two decades to realize that Montgomery had “rescued” the item because it wasn’t being appreciated. By then, the vampire was running his home with elegant efficiency and his tendency to rescue items now and then was a small peccadillo. Raphael quietly returned what needed to be returned, and Montgomery continued to ensure his house was a stunning showpiece in the formal areas—and a welcoming haven elsewise.
Emerging into the sunshine on that thought, he told both Illium and the Primary to clear the skies and to ensure no one had returned to nearby homes since their earlier evacuation. “I do not foresee a second explosion but let us not take any chances.”
Only once the two confirmed the area remained devoid of unauthorized life did Raphael drop back down into the chasm. Halting a quarter of the way up from the bottom, he began to surgically target the walls with his power. What emerged from his hands was a melding of vivid blue and lightning-shot gold.
The archangel he had been and the archangel he was becoming.
He had to recalculate after the first hit did more damage than good; his power was violently strong, more so than prior to the chrysalis. It took him three strikes to gain an accurate gauge of what was needed. The chasm began to crumple inward with slow grace below him as he flew up, continuing to weaken the walls as he went.
This time when he shot out into the fall sunshine, it was to turn and see the scar in the earth collapsing behind him. The rumble of sound was huge and dull, and it seemed that the soil moved in slow motion. But dust soon puffed into the air, the rumble ceasing as the earth settled. Loosened by his strikes, much of the compacted soil had released itself back into the chasm, but a significant dent remained.
Wings of blue edged in silver in his peripheral vision. I will take care of it, sire.
