by Nalini Singh
The entire world stilled. Snow began to fall, soft and delicate.
Raphael turned, cupped her cheek, and did what he’d been aching to do for the entire past day.
Dipping his head, he kissed her. He had never loved before her and he would never love after her—there was no after Elena for him. My love for you is the deepest truth of my existence. Spring and summer, fall and winter, I would spend all the seasons of my life with you.
Raphael. Her hand flat against his heart, his hunter kissed him back with a love that was fierce and defiant and forever. When our winter comes, I’ll go to sleep in your arms with a smile.
A glow surrounded them as they kissed in the falling snow, his golden lightning dancing over her skin and her stormfire possessive over his wings.
“Hello, Archangel.” Spoken against his lips.
He rubbed the pad of his thumb over the snow-cool skin of her cheek. “Hello, Hunter-mine.”
Around them, their people smiled and carried on in their tasks.
“Just so we are clear, hbeebti, I am not over the fact that you flew directly into an archangelic battle.”
A grin broke out across her face. “But I did it with a grenade launcher,” she said proudly. “Admit it, that was some major badassery on my part.” Her eyes flicked past his shoulder. “Speaking of which, damn but Imani is good with the war hammer. She’s got no manners at all when she goes to whack off an enemy fighter’s head.”
Raphael felt his lips twitch. “The rules of war are different from the rules of the household or polite society. If you recall, her etiquette guide had a full chapter on such ‘acceptable deviations from the norm.’”
“I was probably going la-la-la and trying to drown out your voice then,” she admitted, unrepentant. “After this war is over, you can read it to me again.”
Falling into step with one another, they carried on speaking to their people—including an Imani who had her curly hair tightly braided to her skull and was clad in armor of weathered black that featured layered arm plates as well as neck protection. “The young and foolish”—a pointed look at Raphael—“can expose their arms.” Lush lips pursed in a tawny-skinned face of arresting beauty. “I prefer to keep my limbs.”
Is Imani scared of anyone?
How did you describe her to me once? Ah yes. A grande dame who has no time for anyone’s bullshit. That is Imani. Raphael wanted to smile. I have always liked her for that.
I should’ve guessed. A laughing glance. You do have a thing for a certain kind of woman.
It is a weakness. Raphael sometimes thought he must’ve fallen for Elena the first time she stood toe to toe with him, though she’d been a mere mortal and he an archangel.
Later, after they’d moved on from Imani, she said, “Why don’t most of you wear arm and neck protection?”
“Such armor has little impact on one who fights with a heavy weapon such as a war hammer, but the added weight and stiffness causes a minor reduction in speed for those who use a lighter weapon.” And in a battle among immortals even that miniscule reduction could mean life or death.
“Got it,” Elena said at once. “Either you all wear it or none of you do.”
They reached a gathered squadron a moment later, and their attention shifted.
When they finally took off from Central Park, it was to heavy darkness. Flames flickered against the night sky, as both his people and Lijuan’s lit them for light, for heat. Elijah’s pulling energy from the city’s grid had blown out critical circuits in many areas. The Tower itself had large generators, but they’d decided to prioritize use by the infirmary and by the Tower’s technical team.
Raphael’s side also had flashlights and high-power lanterns at the ready, batteries stored all over the place. They would show none of that right now, however. Let the enemy believe that Raphael’s army was blind in the dark, too. All the while, Naasir and his team crept about in enemy territory, their task to cause as much destruction as possible.
It was time they took the war to the enemy’s door.
65
The explosions came at three o’clock in the morning.
Warned by Naasir, Raphael was high in the sky near the main front, while Elijah had taken the other half of the city. Their troops were hunkered down and ready to move using the cloudy and moonless night as a shield. Ten senior squadrons had made their way to rooftops close to enemy territory.
Others watched to ensure Lijuan’s people weren’t doing the same.
Elena had joined one of the archer and shooter teams. She’d given him all the wildfire she’d regenerated, but it had little to work with in him—the constant battles against Lijuan’s proxies had taken a toll, his body struggling to produce wildfire at a fast enough speed to keep up with his expenditure.
So be it.
He remained an archangel, one more skilled in strategy and tactics than Lijuan. Lost in her delusions of godhood, she could be pushed into unwise decisions. If she rose today, it wouldn’t be at full strength—he’d husband his and Elena’s combined wildfire, use it in a strike that turned Lijuan into a mindless creature of screaming pain.
Regardless of the threat posed by Lijuan, they couldn’t not launch the assault today—they had to find a way to cripple her army or his and Elijah’s troops wouldn’t have a fighting chance of survival. Another major battle and their people would be massacred, the streets awash with their blood.
A fireball punched the night sky as the windows of the first building blew out with a massive smash of sound. Many of Lijuan’s troops had bedded down in that building. They died in a hail of heat and crumbling foundations. Another building blew at the same moment, then a third.
Raphael scraped the sky with angelfire in the aftermath, cutting down the disoriented mass of fighters attempting to escape the shrapnel from the buildings.
More explosions lit up the night in enemy territory, these finely targeted. Naasir’s team was blowing up the remaining pipes that brought in clean water, and they were disrupting sewage lines so that the filth would flow into the enemy camp. A small demolition team had been tasked with destroying roads that led out of the port area.
Their aim was to trap Lijuan’s ground troops and annihilate her winged fighters.
Raphael’s archers slammed fiery death down on anyone who escaped the angelfire that burned in the sky. His troops began to move forward, squadrons landing on rooftops in a wave of silent death, while ground teams pushed their way through the rubble, eliminating the enemy on every side as they went.
Obsidian rain began to slam at them minutes later, but it was too late. They’d reclaimed much of what they’d lost. Raphael didn’t hold back his angelfire, his aim to wipe out as many of Lijuan’s generals as he could. But the senior leaders suddenly all dropped out of the way at precipitous speed.
KNEEL TO YOUR GODDESS!!
He saw her then, higher in the sky than him.
Her face was skeletal, and she appeared to be missing one side of her body. Her gown flapped against empty air where her thigh should’ve filled it out, and above, the fabric was being sucked in against her side—her rib cage was partially or fully missing. None of that stopped her from raining death down from the sky across a vast, vast area.
Lovely shimmering starlight obsidian shards of pain and horror.
He’d intended to save his wildfire until he could get it into her body, but hundreds of people would die if he didn’t stop her.
He spread out his wildfire in a shield across the sky. The deadly rain hit and dissipated. But Lijuan wasn’t done. She threw down another barrage. His shield held. Just. Wounded she might be, but her power was a terrible thing.
Whatever Lijuan had become, she was growing stronger with each passing day. Even at full power, he couldn’t hope to defeat her, not in a direct fight as this had become. Not when she could spread her attack across suc
h a devastatingly large area.
He could carry on, infuriate her into a mistake so he could get close enough to inject her with wildfire, but the price of his choice would be grave upon grave upon grave.
He had no choice. Retreat! he ordered. Fall back!
Even as he gave that order, he shaped the last drops of wildfire in his body into small pellets, then shot them through his shield. He’d taken a precious extra second to time it just right, so the pellets—so small they were near invisible against her rain of starlight obsidian—would pass through in the gap between one blast of the rain and the next.
Lijuan hadn’t moved since this began; he hoped that held true for another second.
Two of the pellets were smashed out of existence by falling shards, but the other five punched into Lijuan’s heart.
Lightning lit her up from within. Blood trickled out of her mouth.
Raphael didn’t take that for an advantage of any kind. The only reason he’d achieved so much with so little was because she was already wounded. But wounded or not, she had plenty of firepower in her. She targeted him alone with the next volley.
His shield collapsed, the wildfire dissipating under the rain of black.
Raphael had nowhere to go that wouldn’t put his troops in the line of fire. An angelic squadron was retreating below him. He used angelfire to disrupt the starlight obsidian. It couldn’t eliminate or cancel out Lijuan’s poison, but it was strong enough to send it off course.
The shards smashed into the buildings on either side of the squadron; they flew out of danger moments later. It was the ground troops he had to worry about now—they were too deep in enemy territory. It’d take them time to retreat to safe ground. Even had the subterranean network of tunnels survived the aboveground detonations, they’d been designed for lone operatives, not large numbers of troops.
Lijuan laughed and the sound was incongruously lovely. Why do you fight so? A chiding tone to her mental voice, almost of the archangel she’d once been. You have only the power in your flesh. I am a goddess. I have the power from my people. Another hail of pain and death clothed in beauty.
He had nothing left. No wildfire. No angelfire. Nothing but his swords, with which he’d attempt to deflect some of the shards, so his ground troops would have a slightly higher chance of a safe retreat.
Gray bodies suddenly filled the sky in front of him.
His Legion took hit after hit, each body falling limply to the earth as the black poison ate them up from the inside out.
Bronze lightning fell from the sky at the same instant, aimed directly at Lijuan. One got her in a direct strike, burning great swathes of flesh from the healthy side of her wildfire-riddled body. She screamed and aimed her firepower up above, but the person there was invisible against the smoke-hazed sky.
Raphael recognized that lightning but he couldn’t spot Michaela, either. Infuriated, Lijuan shot another hail of black at the Legion, poisonous shards that they blocked with their bodies. Michaela hit Lijuan with another direct strike—this one succeeding in destroying a wing. Lijuan’s face faded and then her body rippled and she was gone, no doubt to feed again.
Raphael had survived the skirmish but the damage done was catastrophic. For the first time, he saw despair in the faces of his people. It had cost them so much ingenuity and skill and blood to gain that ground. Only for Lijuan to claw it back in a matter of minutes.
Elena. Fly with me. He needed his consort in a way that had nothing to do with war or power—and his people had hurt Lijuan’s forces enough that they weren’t pursuing the retreating soldiers, just holding their side of the line.
Stormfire wings rising from one of the rooftops. “We’ll get that land back,” she said when she reached him. “We did it once, we’ll do it again.”
“No, Guild Hunter. You know as well as I do that the explosions gave away one of our only advantages—Lijuan’s people will even now be scouring any buildings within sight for booby traps.” He just hoped Naasir, Janvier, Ashwini, Demarco, Holly, and the others would make it out. “It is not the loss of territory that worries me, it is what that loss is doing to our people.”
Faces looked up at him from rooftops and even in those who had managed to hold on to hope, the hope held a ragged edge. “They just saw their archangel consummately defeated. Had the Legion not stepped in and taken the blows meant for me, I would not be here speaking to you now.”
“You’re in pain.” Elena’s tone was sharp. “She got you.”
“Twice,” he told her. “Once on the shoulder very close to my neck, and the second at the side of my rib cage. It’s eating away at me.”
“The wildfire,” Elena began.
Raphael cut her off with a shake of his head. “There is nothing left. I am out of power and I know you gave me the last droplets in you.” He deliberately brushed his wing across Elena’s even as Lijuan’s starlight obsidian dug scalding channels of agony in his ribs and shoulder.
He’d be in the same shape as Antonicus if not for the fact the two hits had been glancing and his ability to generate wildfire seemed to come with a limited immunity. But that would only slow the process, not stop it. Already, the black poison was attempting to get to his heart, the channels all aimed in that direction.
* * *
• • •
A couple of minutes later, her stomach a nauseous knot, Elena stood on a high Tower balcony and looked up at the sky to see a meeting akin to one that had taken place during her first meeting with Raphael. Two archangels in the sky, one with wings of gold and white, the other with feathers of shimmering bronze.
Michaela was even dressed in a long-sleeved bodysuit as she’d been that long-ago day. When the Archangel of Budapest landed on the balcony with Raphael, the bodysuit proved to be a dark green with a slight shimmer to it. Her hair was the same silken tumble down her back, her face startlingly beautiful. The milk chocolate hue of her skin was rich despite the night darkness, holding a warmth that Elena had always thought at odds with the biting edge of her personality.
Today however, there was no sarcasm, no curl of the lip. Michaela just nodded at Elena—her gaze narrowing slightly at the sight of Elena’s stormfire wings—before turning to Raphael. “I saw reports from this city, knew I had to come.”
“What about your territory?” Raphael asked with no indication of pain in his voice, though Elena knew it had to be torturous. “The reborn infection? The children.”
“If she wins this war, it will not matter that my territory is clean of infection.” A gravity to Michaela’s presence that Elena had never before felt, the sudden sense that this woman was an archangel. “If we beat Lijuan here, then we have a chance to salvage my territory.”
“You have made a difficult choice.” Raphael inclined his head in an acknowledgment between equals. “Your babe?”
A tightening of her features. “The Cascade gave me the ability to create power constructs that survive outside my body. I built Keir a shield that protected him and my babe—he says it held until he was nearly to the Refuge. They are safe.”
Elena found herself exhaling a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. The idea of Keir and a newborn dodging the death stalking the world had been a horrific one.
“My power did damage to Lijuan,” Michaela said. “Is it possible I can assist you to victory?”
To Elena’s surprise, Raphael nodded. “My wildfire in her likely increased the impact, but you read slightly differently to my healing senses—there remains an imprint inside you of the life you so recently birthed. It is fading but not yet gone.”
And Lijuan was a creature of death.
“Good. I will assist you in ending her, then I will return home.”
“What is the situation on your side?”
Elena knew Raphael had to have that critical information, but panic clawed at her—the poison was eating at
him from the inside out. Already, she could see the creeping edge of blackness on one wing.
“Bad,” Michaela said shortly, her face grimmer than Elena had ever seen it. “When I left, Alexander and Zanaya were attempting to drive the reborn into a single valley so that we could scorch them with fire.” The vivid green of her eyes took in the smoldering city around them, smoke yet rising to the sky from the earlier detonations. “I have told Alexander that this is more important. It is where we win or lose the world. But he sees coming here as abandoning his people. He is a fool.”
Elena wouldn’t describe the Archangel of Persia as any kind of a fool, but she had to agree with Michaela that the long-term picture had to take priority.
“The children . . . It is difficult.” Michaela blinked rapidly, her throat moving. “All our troops are severely demoralized from having to cut down those we are programmed to protect. I kept seeing my own babe, kept thinking that each child was another woman’s heart.”
Elena couldn’t imagine the horror of facing infected child after infected child. She’d frozen when faced with a single infected child during the last battle, a sundress-wearing girl who’d come off an infected cruise ship. The idea of having that nightmare moment repeated in a continuous loop . . . Bile coated the back of her throat.
The sky boomed with a massive burst of sound without warning, a huge overwhelming force that was a roundhouse punch to the side of the head. Elena’s ears popped, her head ringing. Archangel, what the hell was that?
Eyes the most violent shade of blue in this world held hers. An archangel has died.
66
As Elena’s skin chilled at Raphael’s words, the sky began to fill with clouds pregnant with snow. That didn’t happen with Uram. He had died in a blast of pure white light that lit up the entire city before it faded out of existence, no trace left of the Archangel of Blood.
