Archangel Rafe (A Novel of The Seven Book 1)

by Lisa Hughey

  “No.” He speared his gaze toward Rafe, his palms flat against his wife’s heart nadis. “Help me save her.”

  The absolute pain in the man’s gaze stabbed something hot and uncomfortable in Rafe’s stomach. “It doesn’t work that way.”

  With trembling fingers he brushed the matted strands of hair from her still face. “Please.”

  “I can’t.” A hot ball of regret hovered in the region of his heart. “No one could save her.”

  “She is my life.” Tomasz’s voice broke but he never took his gaze from her as if she would disappear if he looked away. He grasped her hands in his and rocked back and forth.

  “Beloved,” he whispered over and over again as he brushed his lips softly over her forehead as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. “She wasn’t sick this morning when I left for work. How could this happen?”

  Rafe didn’t know. The virulence of her case was particularly disturbing. In a normal avian flu the incubation period was six to eight days.

  “She’s gone,” Rafe said quietly.

  The man’s grief howled out into the tiny canvas tent, and swirled through the air with near physical force. Raw emotion poured from him like hot lava over cooled magma, burning everything, melting the foundation of his life.

  “I’m sorry.” Angelina sat still as a stone in the chair by the little tray table, her eyes tortured as she stared at the man and his dead wife, her voice less than a murmur.

  Greta ignored Rafe and Angelina, gliding toward her son, and placed her hand on his shoulder. But he didn’t move. He knelt next to the cot with his head down, grief in every rigid line of his body.

  “Come, Tomasz. We must be strong for your daughter,” his mother spoke softly, the lines in her face more pronounced in grief. But her words were clipped and resolved. She would take care of her son and her granddaughter.

  Rafe said gently, “I need to take her.”

  “No.” Tomasz rose to his feet swiftly. “I will take her.”

  Rafe’s gaze cut to Angelina, still sitting in the chair as if carved from sandstone. Unmoving. Trying to heal the woman had depleted her energy reserves. If he hadn’t been so focused on handing off the little girl to get her out of the tent, he would have made Angelina wait until he was beside her to help draw the excess energy from her.

  He’d known the woman was sick. But even he hadn’t realized how ill she was until Angelina collapsed next to her. Angelina didn’t have control of her own abilities yet. He should have been there to make sure she didn’t overload her own system.

  As he took in the hunched curve of Angelina’s body, he knew he had made a terrible mistake.

  Tomasz rubbed at the woman’s arm, then caressed the soft inside of the woman’s elbow. “Is this why you didn’t save her?” Tomasz spat.

  “Shhh.” Greta shushed. “Never you mind.”

  Rafe expanded his body with breath, filled his lungs with air, bulked up his shoulders to stand to his full height until he towered over the younger man. “What are you talking about?”

  “You wanted her to die.” Tomasz charged toward Rafe, fists clenched, face set in a mask of hatred.

  “Why would I want her to die?” Rafe countered calmly in the face of Tomasz’s rage. “My purpose is to save humans.”

  “Exactly,” Tomasz snarled. He strode back to his wife, grabbed the dead woman’s arm and lifted the limb toward Rafe. He could finally see what Tomasz had been rubbing. “But not these humans, right?”

  The mark of the Nephilim.

  Rafe’s first thought was danger. Threat. Enemy of humans. The Nephilim were responsible for thousands of years of misery before they were supposedly eradicated. Rafe’s body readied for action. His muscles hardened, his vision lasered to the perceived threat, the enemy of the human realm. His blood pulsed with adrenaline, a need for action, an overwhelming compulsion to attack. “She is Nephilim?”

  “Tomasz, what have you done?” Greta whispered, her gaze shooting to the child asleep in her arms.

  The tent was full of shocked silence. As if no one could believe Tomasz would blatantly admit to harboring a Nephilim. The Nephilim really were back.

  Rain beat mercilessly against the canvas. Water had begun to saturate the ground. The trampled grass beneath their feet squished with the amount of liquid rapidly building up in the dirt.

  And no one moved.

  He remembered Angelina’s defense of the Nephilim. Could the Realm have been wrong when they tried to eliminate the entire race? He needed more information. Stas’s words came back to him. Right before he’d passed, he’d said, “Don’t judge them. They are the same as me, just different.” Suddenly his words made much more sense.

  Rafe gave Greta a hard look. “We will speak of this later.” And she scuttled away with the little girl.

  His body relaxed slightly and he assessed Tomasz’s anger and grief in the tense atmosphere. And the still, silent truth of a race thought long dead.

  His gaze went back to the young woman. A threat to no one any longer.

  He thought about her insistence that they treat her daughter first. She had been no enemy to humans. The virus had aggressively attacked her body. Could the virus be attacking Nephilim? For that information he’d need to know who was Nephilim and who wasn’t. But suddenly the fact that the virus ran in families made that possibility more likely. What the hell was going on?

  Tomasz snatched up his wife’s body and carried her toward the door. “She never hurt anyone. She didn’t deserve to die.”

  “I agree.” But Rafe still had to adjust to the idea that Nephilim were not bad.

  Just as Tomasz needed to care for his wife, Rafe needed to attend to Angelina. After her last outburst, she was far too quiet. A quick glance to Angelina confirmed her safety, still mute, remote in the corner, unaware of the tableau of drama. She was fine. Safe. For now.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Sweat coated her skin. The dark humid night wrapped around her like a blanket, and yet, she was so very cold. With her back against the cool file cabinet, she huddled in the darkness, barely breathing. Failure chained her down, her arms and legs anchored by invisible links that kept her prisoner.

  Her heart beat in a slow dirge, and she wondered how, why, hers still beat when that poor woman’s was silent.

  Nothing touched her. Not the slowly soaking walls of the tent. Not Greta, not Rafe. Not the anguished stare of the woman’s husband, a healer himself. She had seen his mark when he’d so tenderly brushed his dead wife’s hair away from her face.

  She needed to stay numb. Needed to stay in that frozen wasteland because if she let herself start to feel, she would fall apart. She blinked back tears, not ready to go there.

  However frozen her body was, her mind moved at the speed of light. Images of her childhood flashed like a strobe, and revealed a new snapshot each time, alternating between her life as it was and thinking about the girl who had lost her mother. She visualized all the times the girl would need a mother who wasn’t there. Each flash suppressed more of her ability to breathe until her lungs barely inflated before shoving the air back out again. As if she were unworthy of the oxygen.

  She couldn’t bring herself to turn her head. To look at him. To watch him leave. She waited for the brush of the tent door, for the sound of him walking away. And she stared blankly ahead.

  Angelina sensed him before she heard him. The air rustled next to her. “Angelina,” Rafe’s whisper was soft in her ear.

  “Angelina.” He gently twined his strong, hard, capable fingers through hers, and his warm, solid palm tethered them together.

  And still she didn’t move, her body leaden and unresponsive.

  “You’re freezing.” Rafe lifted his other hand to run his palm over her bare shoulder and skim along her forearm. Heat from his hand scorched along her nerve endings, and awoke her from the numbness. She didn’t want to feel. It was cowardly, but she needed to stay frozen, to stay in this stasis, because if she warmed up enough to feel, An
gelina wasn’t certain what would happen to her.

  “Go away,” She ground the words out, past the strangling grip of failure. Don’t drag this out. Don’t give me hope. Just leave.

  “I can’t.” He lifted her into his arms effortlessly.

  The heat from his body seeped into hers, and warmed her up, but she didn’t want to be warm. She couldn’t allow any feelings in or she would shatter into a thousand pieces.

  “I need to get out of here.” Angelina struggled in his arms. Her prior lethargy was replaced with a frenzied urgency. She had to get out of this tent.

  “It’s pouring.”

  “I don’t care.” She was nearly frantic. “I need to get out of here.”

  Panic, sharp and urgent, struck her. She couldn’t stay in this tomb one more moment. Not with the spirit of the dead woman and her husband. His anguish hovered in the tent like a specter. To be loved like that. To love someone that deeply. To feel the ache of loss in every pore. That would be a gift.

  “Okay. Okay.” Rafe finally seemed to understand she was about to lose it. “I’ll get you out of here.”

  And in that moment she realized it was too late. She would shatter when he left. As much as she’d tried to keep herself apart, tried desperately not to get used to his presence, she understood now that loving him was inevitable.

  And just as inevitable was the knowledge that they were doomed.

  To think she could protect her heart and her soul had been laughable. How she ever thought she could was beyond her.

  “Now. Please.” She clung to his shoulders, needing his strength, needing him, for however long he would be with her. “Please.”

  With a one handed grab, he snatched a slicker from the center pole that held up the tent. The wind had picked up until it ripped at the canvas walls as if trying to pry out the emotions and wrestle them from the air around them.

  Rafe ran through the pounding rain toward the house. Toward safety. The sharp stinging drops pummeled her face, and she lifted her head up toward the sky. She wanted the punishment. Wanted the pain. And knew it was miniscule next to what was coming.

  ***

  Rafe burst through the back door of the farmhouse, and paused inside the mudroom. He gently set Angelina down on the colorful braided rug and snagged a towel from the hook inside the doorway.

  She shivered uncontrollably, her entire body was chilled. Rafe rubbed the towel over her soaking wet hair to dry her off. Rafe rubbed at her streaked hair. Goose bumps stood out in sharp relief on her forearms, and her nipples were hard points through her wet cotton shirt.

  Concentrate, Rafe.

  She just stood there. Her arms hung limply by her side as if she didn’t care that her body temperature had dropped. The air was hot and humid and though the rain was cool, she shouldn’t be this cold.

  “Carus. We need to get you warmed up.” Rafe led her to the bedroom that Greta had prepared for them. After he opened the door, he catalogued the double bed and the cot in the corner. He needed to wrap her up to stay the shivers that wracked her body.

  “You need to get out of those wet clothes.” It was already too hot in the house to turn on the heat.

  Rafe left Angelina standing beside the four-poster bed and went in search of a thick, heavy blanket. But when he returned, she hadn’t moved. She stood in the same spot, and if anything, her shaking was worse.

  “You have to get warm.”

  She looked at him with bruised eyes, her stare uncomprehending, as if her psyche had taken too much and couldn’t bear anymore. In that moment, Rafe understood that Angelina had too much compassion. She cared too much for her patients. Her brain had just shut down, shut out the trauma of the last hour.

  Rafe began to strip off her sopping clothes. He lifted the white cotton long-sleeve shirt over her head, tried to ignore the expanse of soft, pale skin. Goose bumps covered her torso and spread down her flat stomach while her nipples poked through her simple cotton racer-back bra.

  Hesitantly, he reached for the button of her jeans. The smooth skin of her abdomen contracted, reacting to the light brush of his fingers. The rasp of the zipper was overly loud in the silent room. Rafe’s heartbeat picked up its rhythm as he slid the wet fabric down her hips and over her thighs to puddle at her feet.

  “Come on, Carus.” Rafe knelt and gently lifted her foot from one pant leg and then the other. Her movements were jerky and uncoordinated. The need to give comfort was strong. Stronger than it had ever been. Her sorrow, the emotion that had first drawn him to her in her dreams, pulled even stronger now that he knew her.

  But Angelina continued to stand there as if cemented to the floor. Using the towel, he rubbed at her body. He was worried about her. Subtly he examined her, and searched for any of the virus, for any illness or energy that needed to be converted.

  But shockingly, she had managed to replenish her own stores without Rafe giving her extra energy. With every use of her Vis viva, she grew stronger and her power fed her ability.

  Angelina continued to shiver in the hot night air. He had to get her out of the wet bra and panties. Sweat beaded on his brow as thoughts of undressing her painted an erotic picture in his mind. Roughly he yanked open a dresser drawer, and hoped for warm, dry clothes for her to wear.

  Right on top was a pure white, near virginal nightgown.

  Carefully Rafe slid the nightgown over her head as she waited passively. Lace adorned the neckline along her delicate collarbone. He had to take off her underwear.

  With shaking hands, he reached inside the keyhole neckline of the soft worn cotton to flick open the front clasp of her bra. Careful not to actually touch her body, he slid the straps off her shoulders and down the cool skin of her arms. But she didn’t react. Not at all.

  “Can you take off your underwear, Carus?”

  She just stared at him blankly.

  This must be some sort of test. The Universe wanted to make sure he was committed to obeying the rules that the Thrones had lain down centuries before. What else could it be?

  He knelt before her, the cold wet fabric of his jeans chafed as his knees rested on the scarred hardwood. He lifted the hem of the old-fashioned lace nightie, and wondered what he’d done lately to be subjected to this intimate torture.

  Her plain white panties rode high on her hips and hit her bellybutton. The serviceable cotton was not remotely sexy and still his body reacted as if she wore a corset and garter.

  All day he managed to keep his carnal thoughts at bay. The puzzle of the virus and the steady influx of patients left little time for distraction. But here in this intimate room with the bed beside him, the lustful feelings that had become harder and harder to fight wove their way insidiously through his mind.

  And the fear that had gripped him when she’d refused to release from Tomasz’s dying wife finally found an outlet.

  Not the right time, Rafe.

  There was no way he could get her underwear off without contact. With exquisite care, he cupped her hips, hooked his fingers in the sides of the damp cotton, and tried carefully not to have his hands stray to the rounded globes of her butt.

  A rush of desire flushed his skin, filled his member. His cock expanded painfully against the cold wet denim.

  He shouldn’t be turned on. Damn, he was one sick Archangel. Without volition, his palms skimmed the muscles of her legs as he eased her underwear down her still shivering body.

  “I need to examine you.” He needed to find what was wrong and fix it.

  “Knock yourself out.” Listlessly, she stared straight ahead at the intricately painted wooden cuckoo clock, the ticking loud in the still and silent bedroom.

  With a quiet efficiency, Rafe ran his hands above her body. What was wrong with her?

  He held his hands above her, and started at her fingertips. He slowly moved his hands over her body, searched for any illness. Could the virus have somehow transmitted to Angelina? Because of her Angel status, it was nearly impossible for her to get sick. And yet
, her breath was shallow. An odd sensation whispered over his heart as he concentrated. A shadow of panic flitted in his mind. What was wrong with her?

  “Where does it hurt?” He had reached her shoulders, and hovered, undecided which way to go next. Her breath was still shallow, so he concentrated on her lungs. That was where the virus seemed to be centered in the people who had died so far. The airborne disease spread to the population invisibly.

  He held his hands over her lungs and searched carefully for any change in her energy vibration. She was fine. She was exhausted, more from the heat and the sheer number of patients examined today than from any kind of illness.

  Rafe felt the subtle tension in his body ease. But as his worry eased, a new energy took its place. How could an attraction this pure be bad?

  Wrong. Forbidden. Love. But he couldn’t see how the feelings between them were wrong. Which meant there should be no wrong in the love of Tomasz and his dead wife.

  Rafe’s hands were directly over her breasts. And he had pinned her between the hard straining muscles of his body and the solid unmoving bulk of the old-fashioned, four-poster bed. Her peach nipples shadowed the worn white cotton.

  Angelina’s breath caught as she noticed the position of his hands. The hard berries stiffened further, her arousal heightened by the heat of his palms.

  The air in the room turned sultry. Desire swirled around them. He couldn’t look away from those stiff little points. Blood pooled low in his groin, his erection grew heavy with his seed. For her.

  He should back off. Give her some room. Leave her to recover in peace. Instead, he curled his hand around her jaw and tilted her mouth up to his.

  Just once.

  Just one time. To taste her. To find their connection in the lush recesses of her mouth.

  Rafe brushed his lips against hers. Her lips were cool against his heat. He rubbed his nose against the curve of hers. Her eyelashes fluttered against his cheek, the touch soft and tentative. Her silky hair taunted his cheek and her lush breasts were cushioned by the hard bunch of his pectorals.