by Nalini Singh
On his left ring finger was a chunky platinum ring with a square piece of dark amber that had a heart of pure white fire. Her mark. Worn always by a being who’d lived a thousand five hundred years before she ever existed.
If the heat coming off the sinkhole was a pulse, Raphael’s power was a throb that beat deep in her bones.
He was deadly and he was beautiful.
Most of all, he was hers.
And he had enough heart in him not to crush that of a small boy.
Beside Elena, the boy’s eyes widened at being acknowledged, the silent connection more than enough to bring joy to his childish world. Beaming ear to ear, he ran back to his parents—who’d only belatedly realized he’d slipped away.
Elena walked over to join Raphael at the edge of the sinkhole, aware of the deathly quiet that had fallen behind them. People trying not to attract the attention of a lethal predator. All except for a small and bright-eyed little boy who was ignoring his desperate parents’ attempts to hush him; he wanted to tell them all about how the archangel had seen him!
“He is a strong one,” Raphael murmured, though his attention was on the lava, hypnotic in its luxuriantly slow movements. “I will tell Dmitri to keep an eye on him as he grows.”
“Already thinking of recruiting him for the Tower?”
“An archangel’s work is never done.” He stretched his wings. One brushed across her back in a caress between lovers, between an archangel and his consort. “You are holding your wings with unusual rigidity.” Those piercing blue eyes formed of crushed sapphires and light caught the much more prosaic gray of her own gaze—prosaic but for the rim of silver that had appeared as she grew deeper into her immortality.
“I’ve wrenched the left one.” She made a face, reaching up with one hand to manipulate her shoulder in an effort to ease the discomfort. “I must’ve taken off at the wrong angle or something.” From the feel of it, she’d done a number on her poor wing. Hopefully the healers wouldn’t ground her while the wound healed.
But when Raphael frowned and began to raise his hand to her back, she shook her head. “Don’t waste your healing energy on me. I don’t want you at anything but full strength with all this going on.” She gestured to the deadly beauty of the hot, jeweled chasm in front of them. “Tower healers will fix me up.”
Frown not fading, Raphael nonetheless lowered his hand and returned his attention to the sinkhole. “I sense no aberrant energy from it.”
“Thank God.” She put her hands on her hips. “I can live with random lava, but I’d rather pass on zombies or other nasties crawling out.”
A whispering rustle, leaves shaking. The starlings rose en masse from the trees behind where the cabins had once stood, their tiny bodies a black cloud in the sky that swirled for a heartstopping moment into the shape of huge angelic wings. Then they were gone, scattering to all corners.
Elena looked to Raphael, saw his gaze remained skyward. Her own, however, locked onto the Legion mark on his right temple. The lines were complex, forming into the shape of a stylized dragon with no softness to it. It blazed a dangerous blue lit with searing white fire, an artifact of an ancient power that lived in Raphael.
Elena lifted her fingers to brush the mark. “It’s afire.”
The Cascade awakens again. I wonder how long this cycle will last, and if it will be the final one before the cataclysmic crescendo the Legion warn us is coming. Raphael’s voice was the sea at its calmest while treacherous currents swirled underneath. “Look up.”
Elena shivered, not wanting to see whatever it was that had captured an archangel’s attention. Not wanting to know why Raphael’s skin was suddenly brushed with a light that held edges of crimson. At the same time, she had to see, had to know the threat looming on the horizon.
She looked up.
The sky boiled as red and angry as the lava at their feet.
And the rain, when it fell, was almost hot enough to burn. Minuscule bullets fired into the snow, creating tens of thousands of tiny tunnels and causing the survivors to run for the shade of the trees.
None of that, however, was as bad as the haunting and old, old voice in Elena’s head that wasn’t her own: Child of mortals, your time comes. For one must die for one to live. A sigh drenched with a terrible sadness. You must die.
5
Chilled to the bone in more ways than one, Elena barely made it to the Enclave house as night began to fall in a cold curtain bright with starlight that cut. Her wing was no worse than when she’d first injured it, but she was exhausted. Her muscles ached. Her back felt as if it had been pummeled by a prizefighter. And her boots had turned into heavy cement blocks while she hadn’t been looking.
“I think I’m getting the flu,” she said to Sara on the phone, after collapsing on her back on the enormous bed in her and Raphael’s bedroom.
“Immortals don’t get the flu.”
“I’m only a fledgling immortal.” She could swear her bones had begun to ache too; maybe it was growing pains, a kind of immortal puberty.
She made a face at the horrifying thought. Puberty had been bad enough the first time around—she didn’t need a redo. “Was the rain hot in the city?”
“Melted the snow right down. Which means it’s now turned to ice—I almost brained myself three times on the walk home from the subway.”
A higher-pitched voice in the background, excited and fast.
“Come on, then”—Sara’s tone held a love intense enough to burn—“say night-night to Auntie Ellie.”
“Hi, Auntie Ellie! I gotta go to bed.” Words heavy with disappointment. “I made you a crossbow. I’m gonna paint it red for danger.”
Elena grinned despite her fluey exhaustion. “I can’t wait to see it.” Zoe Elena might be a girl of barely seven and a half, but she’d been “helping” Sara’s husband, Deacon, in his workshop since before she could walk. Six months ago, she’d graduated from plastic toy tools to miniature actual tools. “Give your mom extra kisses for me tonight.”
“Mwah! Mwah! Mwah!” Each word was accompanied by a loud smacking sound and Sara’s delighted laughter.
“Good night, cuddle bug,” Elena heard through the line, followed by a deeper voice responding to Zoe’s animated tones. Then Sara said, “Ellie, give me a minute to go tuck her in with Deacon.”
A knock sounded on Elena’s door at almost the same instant.
Levering herself up into a seated position with a small groan, her wings spread out on the bed behind her, Elena said, “Come in.”
Montgomery—handsome and precise in his black suit, his black hair newly cut, and his white shirt spotless—entered with a tray. “The sire asked Sivya to prepare a high-energy bite for you,” he said in his English-accented voice.
Elena’s heart did that mushy thing it only ever did for Raphael. The first time they’d met, he’d forced her to close her hand over a knife blade, cut herself until her blood dripped to create a dark splatter at her feet. Life and love had changed them both, until she could barely remember the cold and pitiless archangel who’d once hired her for a hunt unlike any other.
“Thanks, Montgomery. It looks like I’ve turned into an eating machine again.” Her stomach rumbled on cue as he put the tray onto a small table, then moved the entire thing closer to the bed. “Can you ask Sivya to make her special energy bars?” Elena’s immortal development surged and ebbed like the Cascade, with her body demanding enormous amounts of fuel during each surge phase.
“She begins even now,” Montgomery assured her.
Mouth already full of a delicious cheesy thing, Elena mumbled her appreciation. Montgomery’s eyes were smiling when he withdrew, closing the door behind himself. Elena put her phone on speaker then dug in.
“Ellie, you there?” Sara’s voice.
“Uh-huh,” Elena got out past the bite she’d just taken.
&nb
sp; “Zoe will stretch things out for another half hour,” Elena’s best friend said affectionately. “Extra bedtime stories, bathroom visit, a glass of water—our little scam artist’s got every trick in the book down pat.”
“That’s my girl.” Elena took a drink of the vitamin-infused water on the tray. “I actually called to say I won’t make it for coffee tonight.”
“I figured that after I heard about the sinkhole. Is it bad?”
“One fatality.” She’d made the notification personally on her way home, hurt wing or not. Imani’s sadness had been all the more affecting for being so contained.
“Foolish boy,” she’d said quietly as the two of them stood in the midst of the eerily blooming rose garden. “Now he will never have a chance to gain wisdom.” Her lovely, sad eyes had met Elena’s. “You are tired and yet you offer me the respect of words spoken from your own lips.” An incline of her head. “I will not forget, Consort.”
Behind her, the roses stirred in a cold wind, petals falling to the snow.
Drops of bloodred against pristine white.
Elena had left unsettled, the roses as unnerving as the unearthly voice in her head. That voice hadn’t spoken again after telling her she was going to die, and she hoped it’d stay silent forever. No one sane heard predictions of her own death from inside her own skull.
Talking to Sara was exactly the antidote she needed. After bringing her friend up to speed on the sinkhole, she said, “I managed to tear a muscle in my wing.” The increasing pain was why she’d returned ahead of Raphael—there was no point being in the field if she became a liability. “Senior healer did some work on it, slathered my shoulder in ointment then grounded me for the night.”
“How did you injure it?” Sara demanded, her tone curt in that way it got when she was worried. “Shouldn’t you be beyond that?”
Scowling, Elena told her best friend the worst of it. “Nisia said she’d only seen this injury on baby angels—actual babies—who were trying to do tricks before their bones hardened enough.” Needless to say, being compared to angelic infants who flew like drunk bumblebees had been excellent for Elena’s ego. “She thinks I must’ve been ‘too enthusiastic’ with my vertical takeoff this morning.”
“So it’ll heal?”
Elena swallowed her current mouthful before replying. “Within the week, but good news is I’m allowed to fly again come morning.” To lose the sky after gaining the beauty of flight would be a nightmare. “No verticals, but glides and low-speed wing movements are fine.”
Sara chuckled. “Remember that time you tore your hamstring jumping off a building on your first hunt?”
“Jeez, Jameisha tore a strip off me.” The now-retired Guild medic had been ancient even then, but they’d all been petrified of her wrath. “What’s she up to these days?”
“According to her last message, whatever the hell she damn well feels like,” Sara said in an excellent approximation of Jameisha’s croaky chain-smoker’s voice. “You should go rest,” she added afterward. “We can talk later.”
“No, I could use the company.” Grounded as she was, she’d just be eating and waiting for Raphael to get home otherwise. “What did you want to talk about?”
Sara took a long time to speak. “Archer,” she said at last.
Elena’s muscles bunched. Putting down the savory muffin she’d picked up, she leaned forward with her forearms on her thighs. “I’m still having trouble getting my head around it.” Hunters lived dangerous lives, but for Archer to have gone out the way he had, it just seemed wrong. “I half expect to find a message from him in my e-mail even though I went to the funeral, even though I know he’ll never message me again.”
Quinton Archer had been the Guild’s Slayer, the hunter charged with tracking down and executing those of their own kind who’d turned murderous. Hunters were trained killers after all, and had the expertise to avoid or eliminate anyone who stood in their path.
It took a hunter to track a hunter. It took the Slayer.
Archer had been so good at remaining unseen by skilled hunters that they’d called him the phantom. He’d been the Guild’s Slayer since Deacon stepped down from the position, but Elena had only met him about two years ago—at a dinner at Sara’s. The two of them had stayed in touch since; Elena knew he’d only given himself permission to begin the friendship because she existed outside the Guild. He’d never be called upon to track and execute her.
“It was seven months ago today that he died,” Sara shared softly. “I think about what his final moments might’ve been like each night when I close my eyes.”
Elena’s fingers clenched on the phone. “Do you think . . . ?”
“I don’t know.” Her best friend’s voice held the weight of what it meant to be director. “Losing his wife one year then his daughter the next messed him up—especially after he’d managed to get her into rehab, but he was upbeat the last time I saw him, said he had plans for the future. And the police confirmed skid marks on the road. It was just an accident on a rainy night.”
Elena nodded; better to believe that than to think strong, dangerous Archer had suicided by crashing his car into a closed gas station one dark, desolate night. The resulting fireball had lit up the entire surrounding town. “You need to fill his position,” she said, realizing it wasn’t only Archer’s death that haunted Sara but what it meant.
“Deacon stepped in on an interim basis,” her friend said. “But he can’t keep on carrying the load. There’s a reason he stopped being Slayer when we got together.”
“Yes.” Deacon wasn’t the kind of man who was threatened by female power; he and Sara would’ve never lasted had that been the case. But Sara desperately needed Deacon to be her husband and lover, never her subordinate. With him, she could lay down the mantle of Guild director and just be Sara as he was Deacon.
Deacon had also forged a new career path for himself; he was now a weapons-maker whose work was coveted by mortals and immortals both—to ask him to abandon that work would be to ask a gifted artist to lay down his tools. “Who are you thinking of?”
“That’s just it, Ellie.” Sara sounded as if she was moving, pacing. “Who do I ask to take this on? It’s a lonely, heartbreaking role. You saw how Archer was. The Guild is family to the rest of us, but the Slayer has to live in the shadows outside it.”
Elena thought of how Archer had never accepted an invitation that included other mortal hunters, how he’d only ever had a drink with her when it was just her and Ashwini or Honor. All hunters now associated with the Tower and thus beyond the Slayer’s purview. “The new Slayer will have me, Ash, Honor, and of course you and Deacon.”
“I just . . . I worry about him, too.” Sara lowered her voice. “He left that life behind years ago, but he’s stepped back into the darkness for me.”
Elena would never know all of Deacon’s demons, but she could imagine the toll being Slayer took on a man. “I could act as his backup once my wing heals,” she offered.
“Ellie. That’s not why I wanted to talk—I just need to vent, and Deacon’s already handling so much.” A sense of Sara pausing. “I’d never ask you to go after another hunter.”
History was a whisper of evil and a race against time between them.
“It’s all right, Sara. I did what was needed.” Or Bill James would’ve gone on killing young boys. “I’ve made my peace with it—and if you appoint me Slayer, the Guild will never have to worry about appointing another one.”
The idea of executing rogue hunters through time had her stomach twisting violently, but evil had to be stopped. Even when it came from your own family. “I’m stronger than anyone else in the Guild,” she pointed out. “Less liable to get wounded during the hunt.”
But Sara wasn’t open to accepting her offer. What she wanted was Elena’s input on creating a shortlist. Elena gave it without withdrawing her candidacy
for the difficult position. She also forced herself to continue eating. Her pants were already loose—if she kept losing weight at this rate, one of these days she’d flash all of New York when her pants fell right off.
She’d just ended the conversation with Sara when a hint of movement made her glance toward the windows. Snow had begun to fall again, soft and light, Manhattan a shimmering mirage through it. A snow globe world sparkling with tiny stars. But that wasn’t what caught Elena’s attention.
Rising, she walked to the doors that led out onto their balcony, wonder unfurling inside her. Raphael, do we have white owls in New York?
What do you see?
Owls gliding through the falling snow. She opened the doors, walking out to stand in the freezing cold just so she could watch the exquisite, unearthly creatures move silently through the air. A hundred of them, maybe more. They’re like living ghosts.
Graceful beyond compare, their feathers sleek and perfect, and their eyes huge orbs that burned a luminous gold. Her fingers curled into her palms, but she felt no fear, only endless wonder that such beauty could exist in the world. Their eyes are glowing golden. She reached out a hand to touch one that seemed a bare hairsbreadth away, but her fingers met only the snow.
And the cold, it was searing her bones.
The sea crashed violently against her senses. ELENA.
Shuddering, she stepped back from the snow, from the night, from the fucking voice in her head that had held her captive with musical words about the owls, and slammed shut the balcony doors. There are no owls, Raphael. She stared at the falling snow from behind the glass, her heart thunder inside her chest. Someone is messing with my mind.
That was when she noticed the owl sitting quietly on her vanity, watching her with eyes so haunting in their clarity and beauty that her soul ached.
6
Raphael scythed through the snow-laden blackness of the skies above his territory, his jaw a grim line and his mind only on getting to his hunter. When he neared their home, however, he was drawn not to the house but to the greenhouse that sat a short distance from it.
