by Nalini Singh
Another slow kiss. “I know you love me,” she said in the aftermath. “I know it was never about wings.” She struggled to explain the feelings tearing at her. “But before, I felt like a partner. Now . . . I’ve never been so weak.” Even as a mortal, she’d been stronger than most—a consequence of being hunter-born. “I’ve never been fragile, not even as a child.”
Unwavering eye contact, the chrome blue alive with lightning. “I could’ve killed you at any point during that time. Ripped you limb from limb without breaking a sweat.”
She sat up in his arms, scowling. “Really, that’s your idea of a pep talk?”
“You have stood your ground against me from the first time we met, when I saw no value in humanity and could’ve crushed you with no thought to what I was destroying. Power and strength have never been what makes us equal, hbeebti.”
The words hit hard.
Her lover was an archangel, one of the Cadre of Ten. The only being that could kill an archangel was another archangel. Elena stood no chance and never had. Yet they’d fought together, flown together, battled the reborn together, sent Lijuan to hell together.
“I feel dumb now.” And light inside, as if the bubbles she’d blown with Maggie were in her veins. “Can we forget this ever happened?”
His smile was dawn on the horizon . . . dawn edged with frost. The sheer violence of his new power cracked his skin with gold when he kissed her. She locked her arms around him and took the ice, took the lightning, took him. And when they hit the night skies above Manhattan, she felt not even a touch of cold, Raphael using his power to both shield them from the world and cocoon her in warmth.
They flew above a city of steel and light and color, and out to the ocean beyond. “I barely have any well-fitting underwear as it is,” she murmured against his mouth when he incinerated her camisole and panties before they could fall into the ocean. “Don’t let this go to your head but you’re so sexy that, right now, I don’t even care.”
The archangel who held her was lethal beyond compare . . . and his smile, it closed its fingers around her heart and made her breath catch. His kiss was raw heat and furious demand, the hand he ran over her body rough with possessiveness and hot with need. One muscled arm kept her locked to him as he squeezed her breast with the other.
Elena’s entire body clenched. She felt no fear, even high above the Atlantic; Raphael would never let her fall. They kissed, touched, tasted, their skin heating from the friction. Breath coming in hard pulses, Raphael said, “Dive?”
“Go.”
He angled them down . . . and folded back his wings, turning himself into an arrow headed toward the water. Elena screamed and laughed . . . then gasped in wonder as they crashed into the ocean encased in a protective shield alive with lightning. Legs wrapped around Raphael as they floated down and down into the fathomless dark, she felt wild and alive and real.
Raphael ran his nails down her back.
She shuddered hard. “The sensations are back.” Of an intimate caress on her wings, of contact she’d permit only one being in this world.
One hand going to her nape, the other repeating the touch. Groaning, she closed her hands over the arches of his wings, and massaged down at just the right pressure to make him insane. The kiss was all teeth and sex this time, their bodies hot and sweaty as they slid against one another.
She rubbed against him before reaching down between their bodies to close her hand around the thickness of his cock. Rigid steel covered in silk, he thrust into her hand. Already wet for him, she kissed her way desperately down his neck while continuing to torment him.
His wings began to glow. Her core pulsed.
When he put his hands on her hips and hauled her into exactly the right position to take him, she laughed the husky laugh of a woman who knew she was irresistible to her lover. Moaning as he thrust into her, she dug her nails into his flesh, coming around him on the first stroke.
He wasn’t holding back.
It was an aphrodisiac beyond compare.
Had anyone been able to see through the glamour, they would’ve witnessed the ocean explode with a hidden sun.
* * *
• • •
The next day, Elena took her knives and walked into a small practice ring low down in the Tower—she didn’t need the massive space of the main ring. Not today. It was time she got back to strength training—and figured out her current body. She could compensate for weak muscles and shaky arms, but she had to see if her hand-eye coordination had survived the chrysalis.
She was only ten minutes into it when Dmitri walked in dressed in black cargo pants and a black T-shirt decorated with the faded logo of a metal band. “Space is taken,” she said with a scowl. “I booked it last night.”
“Came to see if you needed any help.” A smirk. “I’m feeling sorry for you since you’re so skinny and pathetic right now.”
Elena gave him her most fake smile. “Want to act as my target? I’m sure it’ll improve my accuracy one hundred percent.”
Dmitri raised both eyebrows, then smiled, slow and sensual. “Why not?”
And so began the craziest throwing session of Elena’s life. Dmitri was a deadly fast vampire and her muscles remained wobbly, but it turned out that her hand-eye coordination was just fine. So was her ability to think on her feet. Ten minutes. Twenty. Thirty.
She threw a second blade on the heels of the first, after he’d already committed to his avoidance strategy.
It slammed home in Dmitri’s shoulder. The hilt quivered from the impact.
They both froze for a taut, silent second. Until the wet patch on his T-shirt began to spread. “Fuck! Get that out right now! Honor will goddamn murder me.” She’d never expected to score such a solid hit—Dmitri was too fast, too experienced. “I’m getting you some blood.”
Elena ran to the fridge just outside the training ring, grabbed a bottle. Powerful as he was, the infusion of blood should cause the wound to heal in a matter of minutes. Well before Honor laid eyes on it. Because it was one thing to threaten her friend’s bastard of a husband, quite another to wound him badly.
Hilts didn’t quiver that way unless the blade had hit bone.
Dmitri had finished pulling out the knife by then. Flipping it around, he lobbed it back to her. “It’s just a scratch. Like being bitten by a mosquito.”
“Shut up and drink this.” She thrust the bottle into his hand.
“Such solicitude. I’m touched.”
Tendrils of fur and champagne wrapped around her, decadent chocolate sinking into her taste buds at the same time. Gritting her teeth, she backed off. “Scent games? You want me to stab you again?”
Having finished half the bottle, he lowered it and shrugged. “I’m the one bleeding.” He touched the wet patch—which had stopped its terrifying spread at last. “No more mollycoddling you, sweet Elieanora.”
“You’re an asshole,” she said past the avalanche of drugging scent, though her lips wanted to kick up. The asshole happened to be the most powerful vampire in Raphael’s territory, brutal and deadly—and he’d just told her that he was taking off the kid gloves.
As a compliment, it was a damn fine one.
Shit, she owed him now. He’d been nice to her. It was an utterly horrifying thought. But not enough to stifle her grin. Her hands closed on the hilts of her blades. “Ready for round two, or does bubby-wubby need another bottle?”
Dark eyes gleamed, champagne spun in her head, and Dmitri moved.
Her blades flew like silver fire, streaking through the air with lethal accuracy.
23
One month after the ridiculously fun session with Dmitri—not that either one of them would admit that even on pain of hideous torture—and Elena wasn’t yet as muscled as she would’ve liked. Her weight was only up to eighty-five percent of her normal, so she still felt a bit too
insubstantial, but she no longer had any appearance of illness.
The sex mojo had returned twice more in the week after the knife session. Her body had stopped glitching after the second boost. After that, anything she’d achieved, she’d done so through teeth-clenched hard work.
When she applied to the Guild to return to active duty, Sara said, “You have to pass the post-injury physical.”
Elena would’ve been insulted at any other response. Guild medics gave her a clean bill of health, though lightning fissures did still break out over her body at times—as if a bite of Raphael’s power had woven itself into her bones, the heart in her chest strong enough to manage archangelic energies.
Her status on the taxonomic tree however, continued to give everyone fits. She was immortal, of that there was no doubt. Not an almost-immortal like a vampire, not a baby immortal as she’d been before the chrysalis, but equivalent to an adult angel of around three hundred.
Except she wasn’t an angel. Her DNA was distinctly odd and the only wings she had were phantom ones that tormented her with how real they felt. At times, she had to check in a mirror, confirm there was nothing on her back, no graceful arches, no feathers of midnight and dawn.
Elena struggled with that until Naasir, of all people, decided to pay her a visit. “I am the only one of my kind,” he said to her as they sat on the edge of a balcony, their feet hanging over it and the metallic silver of his hair choppy and striking against the rich dark of his skin, the undertone of gold reminiscent of a leopard’s coat.
Elena pinned him with a narrow-eyed gaze. “Do tell me more about your unique kind. I’m all ears.”
Naasir threw back his head and laughed, a beautiful wild creature who delighted in playing this game with her. She’d forbidden Raphael from answering the question, from telling her of Naasir’s origins or where he fit in a world of angels and vampires and mortals; this was a mystery she’d solve herself.
Naasir leaned in close, the metallic silver of his eyes in no way human, and whispered, “I have the pelt of a tiger sometimes.” He held out his arm and, as she watched, his skin turned striped.
Gasping, she grabbed his arm without thinking. She and Naasir weren’t close as she was with Illium, but he didn’t reject her touch. Rather, he sat with the patience—and smirk—of a smug feline.
“I came here because Jessamy told me that you are now a one-being, too.” A penetrating glance, his head cocked in a way that wasn’t human, wasn’t angel, wasn’t vampire. “Before, I was lonely. Then I found my family.”
She knew he was talking about Dmitri and Raphael and all the others of the Seven.
“Then I found Andi.” Pure delight at the thought of his mate. “I am a one-being, but I am not alone. You are not alone.”
No, she wasn’t alone. And she was deeply, fiercely loved. “Thank you,” she said to the wild creature who’d come such a long way because he’d known she needed him. “Will you stay?”
“Only today.” A smile that was all teeth. “I will go home via the India-China border. The current quiet makes my fur stand up the wrong way—I smell the darkness building. I’ll spy for Jason.”
“Yeah, I have that itchy feeling, too.” As if a volcano was getting ready to blow—but none of the archangels or their spymasters had found anything of note. Even the unexplained disappearances in China had stopped. So had the ice storms, geothermal disturbances, flooding, and swarms of wasps.
The world was at peace.
But as Caliane had pointed out: “The eye of the storm is always dead calm.”
Everyone was waiting for storm winds to hit again.
She waved Naasir off only hours later, then turned to her archangel. “Any news?”
A grim shake of his head before he took a hard kiss, then rejoined a squadron training exercise. He was putting all his spare time into helping their people become stronger, more prepared for whatever was about to hit. Elena, for her part, was sparring against strong vampires and angels every day—Raphael included—as well as picking up local hunts. It was good to get out, test her body in the real world, add another layer of strength. She needed to be ready to stand beside her archangel when the eye passed.
A week after Naasir’s visit, and she’d just completed her third successful retrieval.
Having delivered the runaway vamp to his angel, Urizen, she now stood on top of the seven-story building owned by the angel and smiled. Around her was a garden starting to hunker down for winter, but with enough color in it still that she’d spotted the vines and tree branches from the sidewalk.
Urizen had been delighted at her interest, had shared that he personally took care of the space. “Please go up. I’ll join you after I’ve dealt with Ox.”
“Is that really his name?”
“Worse. He chose it.” The short and stocky angel with wings of off-white brushed with streaks of sunset orange had thrown up his hands. “Now he tries to run only ten years into his Contract, as if he did not walk into vampirism with his eyes open.” Exasperation altered into cool resolve, the cream of his complexion suddenly without warmth. “I do not enjoy punishing my vampires. The garden will be a welcome balm in the aftermath.”
Before walking into the immortal world, Elena hadn’t understood that not all angels were cruel and heartless. Many were like Urizen, forced into cruelty to rein in vampires who would otherwise splatter the world in scarlet. Because while Ox was no genius, he was viciously strong, had come at Elena with teeth bared and hands clawed.
Vamp was on the edge of bloodlust.
Jaw tight because there was a chance Urizen wouldn’t be able to haul him back, leading to an automatic execution order, she turned her attention to the garden. A few hardy plants hung on to their fall foliage, the yellows, reds, and oranges brilliant against the azure of the cloudless sky.
No angels flew in that sky. Anyone not on sentry duty was probably watching the winged game of baseball Illium’s squadron had put together, with Illium as referee. He only ever played if Aodhan was also playing.
She was about to run her fingers along the trunk of a five-foot-tall tree with leaves of dark red fading into deep brown when she remembered she had to think “don’t grow” thoughts while doing so. It had been three weeks since she’d last accidentally supercharged a tree, but since this was on a roof, she decided not to risk it. Instead, she admired it from afar, picked a couple of weeds out of a patch of hardy winter-greens, and tried to narrow down a fresh gingery scent that lingered in the air.
She’d just worked out that the source was a small groundcover plant when a movement from the taller building to the right caught her eye. It proved to be a flutter of color situated a couple of stories higher than her current position; her first thought was that someone was about to lose a towel they’d hung over the railing to dry.
Then her brain put all the pieces together.
Elena began to run, her heart pulsating in her mouth. She knew her voice couldn’t travel that far, but she yelled out a desperate warning to whoever was looking after the toddler who’d managed to climb over the balcony railing and was now clinging to it by his fingertips while his legs kicked helplessly in the air. He had to be screaming, but no one ran out of the apartment to rescue him.
No angels in the sky. Urizen deep inside his home. No one on a nearby balcony who could scramble to get to the child. Raphael was fast, but she had no idea of his current location and the kid had a matter of seconds at best.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
She touched her mind to Raphael’s anyway, because if this all went how she thought it would, both she and the little boy would need healing. Serious healing.
Raphael! Urizen’s place!
No more time.
She couldn’t fly. But her bones had been pronounced immortal-strong. And seven stories was survivable for an immortal of three hundred if she fell correctly and made s
ure her head didn’t get separated from her neck. Decapitation would be a serious bummer to her desire to spend eternity with Raphael.
All these thoughts and more passed through her mind in the second it took her to cross half the length of the roof. The rest of the time, she spent calculating her odds. The distance between the two buildings wasn’t huge. If she jumped at the right moment and aimed her body weight perfectly, she could put herself in the correct position to catch the little guy before he fell. Curl her body over and around him and her stronger bones would take the impact of the fall.
One of the toddler’s hands slipped off the railing.
He was going to fall at any second.
Elena’s foot hit the edge of the roof and she launched herself into the air, her eyes never leaving the child.
He lost his final grip just as a frantic female face appeared at the balcony. Her terror shattered the quiet, but Elena barely heard it, her body flying through the air. Angles, weight, position, her hunter’s mind worked it all out with ruthless efficiency . . . and a small, screaming weight fell into her arms, the momentum of the catch sending her tumbling.
Fuck, this was going to hurt. Bad.
She tucked herself around the little boy’s petrified body as the air rushed past them at terminal speed.
24
Raphael! Urizen’s place!
Raphael switched direction without hesitation, pulling such a tight turn that his wing muscles protested before they blazed into white fire and he was moving at speeds that turned the world into a barely visible blur.
That hadn’t been terror in Elena’s voice. It had been determination coupled with a sense of desperation. He wasn’t far from her but the journey there felt like an eternity. He arrived over Urizen’s building . . . just in time to see Elena catch a falling child in her arms and begin to spiral down to the ground.
Raphael flew toward her at lightning speed, but he knew he wasn’t going to make it. The child’s weight and momentum were causing her to drop at a catastrophic rate and she hadn’t begun very far from the ground. She was going to smash herself into pieces. But, tightly curled as she was around the child, she might save that small life. Raphael knew the choice she’d tell him to make if he had to choose between saving her and saving the child.
