by Nalini Singh
Aodhan’s sister had given birth to a healthy baby boy.
Though Aodhan wasn’t close to his sibling—she’d been seven hundred years of age when he was born—he’d wanted to be there for her as she and her lover settled into their new lives as parents. “I think I would like to be an uncle,” he’d confessed. “My sister feels the same. She does not wish me to be a stranger to her child as she and I are to one another.”
In turning his wings toward the Refuge and the infant angel of his familial bloodline, Aodhan had left behind a city he loved, and a blue-winged angel with whom his relationship had undergone a seismic shift in the years since he first came to New York.
“I spoke to Aodhan before the earth tremor,” Illium said at that instant. “He was babysitting his nephew while his sister and her mate had time alone.”
“That baby is criminally adorable.” Elena’s attempt at a scowl turned into a fascinated smile. “I can’t get over those tiny transparent wings stuck to his skin. It’s almost as if they’re a tattoo on his back, an imprint of where his true wings will grow.” A pause before she added, “Though, yeah, I can see how giving birth would be a freaking horror show if babies were born with actual wings.”
Illium laughed at her shudder.
Raphael’s own lips twitched. “The bones will harden over time,” he told her, having witnessed the transition in the periods he’d spent standing watch in angelic nurseries as a young angel. “Feathers won’t begin to grow for two or more years, and even then, they will be baby feathers so fine as to appear to be fluff.” Angelic children took a long time to become capable of flight, their wings growing apace with the development of their minds.
“My mother often thanked the heavens I didn’t gain the ability to fly as a toddler,” Illium offered. “Apparently I was a walking, babbling emissary of impending disaster. Wings would’ve been the final straw.”
Grinning, Elena picked up the mug of coffee Illium had just refreshed for her. “Did Aodhan send you any new pictures?”
Illium nodded and began to reach for his phone. That was when Elena’s mug smashed to the floor in a pungent stain, Raphael’s consort doubling over with her hand pressed against her chest.
* * *
• • •
The pain was a spiky ball of razor-sharp knives inside Elena’s chest, the hand she pressed over the spot doing nothing to ease the agony. She couldn’t even cry out, her voice stolen and red spots dancing in front of her eyes. Shivers wracked her body.
She clung to Raphael when he swung her up into his arms and laid her down on her back on the floor of the greenhouse. Her wings would be filthy, she found herself thinking through the haze of red, as Raphael tugged away her hand from the top left of her chest and placed his own on it.
His expression went rigid, his wings limned with light, and she knew his healing energy hadn’t regenerated. Before she could attempt to reach out with her mind and tell him . . . something, the pain drained away as hard and as fast as it had hit.
The vacuum it left behind howled with emptiness.
Sucking in a breath, and conscious of Illium crouching beside her, his face stark, she wrapped her hand around Raphael’s wrist. The strength of his bones, the warmth of him, the beat of his pulse, it anchored her. “It’s gone,” she murmured in a voice roughened by screams she hadn’t vocalized.
“You’re certain?” A harsh archangelic demand. “No residual pain?”
“I feel bruised, but that’s it.” As if she’d imagined the terrible, overwhelming agony. “Did I just have the angelic version of a heart attack?”
“Angels don’t have heart attacks.” Raphael helped her up into a seated position, and when Illium wove his fingers through her free hand, he didn’t object.
“Ellie.” Illium’s hand clenched on hers, his left wing slightly overlapping her own. “What was that?”
“No idea, Bluebell.” When she described the sensations, neither her archangel nor Illium had any answers for her.
“Come.” Raphael’s voice held no room for argument. “We will go inside and contact Keir.”
Elena’s face was flushed. Her heart pounded like a hammer. She wanted to say that it had been nothing, but burying her head in the sand wouldn’t make the bewildering assault on her body disappear. The dark existed whether you looked at it or not. She’d known that since she was ten years old, since she’d shut her eyes and pressed her hands over her ears and hoped the monster would go away.
He hadn’t. He’d slaughtered her older sisters and forever broken her mother.
Night after night, long after the monster was vanquished, she’d heard Belle’s dying breath.
Night after night, she’d slipped and fallen in Ari’s blood.
And night after night, she’d seen her mother’s broken arms and legs dragging on the floor as she tried to crawl to her dying children.
“Pretty hunter. Pretty, pretty hunter. I’ve come to play with you.”
Slater Patalis’s singsong voice was a horror Elena carried in her soul and would to her last days, but it hadn’t surfaced for the past two years, her sleep free of that nightmare at least. It seemed tonight was her lucky night, complete with ghost owls and being stabbed by knives inside her own body.
“Sire.” Illium’s cheekbones cut white against the golden hue of his skin. “I’m meant to relieve Dmitri at the Tower within the half hour.”
“Go—and send Nisia here,” Raphael said. “Elena will tell you the outcome.”
She loved Raphael impossibly more for that, for understanding that, right then, Illium needed to know the people he loved were safe. He was having a hard time with Aodhan so far out of reach, the two yet struggling to come to a balance in their relationship—Illium had become used to being the stronger one in the partnership, the one who looked after a badly traumatized Aodhan. But Aodhan was coming out of his shell, and the man he’d become wasn’t the boy Illium remembered.
The blue-winged angel walked out of the greenhouse with them, taking off in a wash of wind that flicked up snow into the air in firefly sparks. Normally, Elena would’ve stood on the cliff edge and watched him fly across to Manhattan. She didn’t think she’d ever become jaded enough to not appreciate the sight of an angel in flight.
Tonight, however, she kept her hand linked to Raphael’s, and the two of them walked directly to the study entrance into the house. “Take off your boots,” she said at the doorway.
Raphael gave her that look, the one she called his Archangel look. But Elena wasn’t swayed. She needed this instant of domestic normality to fight the roar of fear at the back of her mind. “Montgomery will banish us if we destroy that gorgeous handwoven rug with our wet boots.”
Raphael didn’t point out that he owned everything in the vicinity, rug included. He took off his boots. And she knew. He was fighting fear, too. She felt an ache deep inside her heart; she was the reason he understood fear, and she wished that weren’t true.
Together, the two of them walked to the large screen on one wall, and Raphael initiated the connection to Keir’s office in the Medica, deep in the mountainous landscape of the Refuge—a place hidden from human eyes, where angelic young were born, learned to fly, and grew to adulthood.
Nisia arrived midway through their conversation with the healer who’d watched over Elena’s transition from mortal to angel. Today, Keir—pretty face, slender body, unparalleled medical knowledge—watched from the screen while Nisia examined her.
Elena might’ve felt vulnerable sitting there dressed only in her pants and a thin camisole except that she may as well have been a horse when it came to the two healers’ interest in her body. What language are they speaking? she asked Raphael after trying and failing to pinpoint anything familiar in the words Nisia and Keir were exchanging.
Her archangel was a wall at her back, his hand a welcome weight on her shoulder.
I believe it is a form of Old Ossetian intermingled with snatches of Laurentian and the angelic tongue. Also, now they’re throwing in Vietnamese.
You’re making that up, Elena said, though she had caught the odd word that made her think of the Southeast Asian country.
There is no humor in me today, hbeebti.
“Take a deep breath and hold it,” Nisia told her, switching to English with the fluidity of an immortal who’d seen empires rise and fall.
Elena did as instructed, reaching up her hand at the same time.
Raphael’s bigger hand closed around hers, the susurration of his wings as he opened then closed them, the sound of home, of family. Never would she associate it with anyone but him.
“Sire.” Nisia frowned, her brown eyes dark. “The shadows . . .”
Only a healer would dare tell the Archangel of New York to step out of her light. Elena’s lips quirked; she tipped back her head to whisper, “I think she’s saying you’re hovering, Archangel.”
Raphael moved at once out of Nisia’s light, for he would do nothing to diminish her ability to help Elena. He did, however, keep his hand linked with Elena’s. She was so brutally fragile. A truth he managed to forget most of the time else it would drive him mad. His consort was fierce, a warrior . . . and still so easy to harm.
Seeing her brought down by pain was a sight he wished never to relive. He had nearly lost her in battle, and in that first fall, when she’d lain broken in his arms, but those things could be foreseen in the context of their lives as hunter and archangel. But to be ambushed by an attack from within her own body?
No. Raphael would not lose Elena to such an insidious foe.
“I can find nothing.” Nisia rose to her full diminutive height, her simple gown a dark blue-gray and her pointed features shouting dissatisfaction. “The cut is clean, uninfected, and there are no marks on the surface of her skin to indicate an insect bite or other contagion. I see no signs that denote sickness in her blood or bones, but tests will be done for certainty.”
“We should use the human medical device.” Keir pushed back the black hair that framed his dusky face, his uptilted eyes intent. “Elena is unique. We cannot predict how her body will change as she matures.”
Raphael stirred. “You have no news on previous angels-Made?”
“Just so.” Keir’s delicate face was calm, but his hand fisted on the wood of his desk. “I have searched the oldest records in the Medica, spoken to healers far more aged than myself, all to naught. Our medical knowledge of ancient angels-Made appears forever lost.”
8
“What of Jessamy?” Beloved of Raphael’s weapons-master, the angelic historian was Keir’s partner in the search for information on Elena’s predecessors.
“She has managed to speak with an Ancient one who eschews the world but does not Sleep.” Keir pushed back his hair again. “He is rumored to be five hundred thousand years of age. We may find an answer among his memories—but it will take much time for him to search the crevices and fissures where such memories might reside.”
Raphael’s free hand curled into a fist, but he knew there was no way to rush an immortal of that age. When a being got to be so old, his memories were stacked layer upon layer. Not forgotten but lost in a warehouse that held millions upon millions of recollections.
“The scan”—Nisia’s voice was crisp—“I will fly ahead and organize it. Sire, Elena, please follow.”
“I will call through there.” Keir logged off on those words.
“I feel up to the flight,” Elena said after Nisia had left and she’d pulled on clothing suitable for the cold.
“Guild Hunter, do you wish to make me watch you spiral down into the frigid Hudson because of another assault of pain or because your wing has failed?” The words came out cold, clipped.
Rather than responding with anger, Elena pressed her palm to the side of his face. “Hey. It’s Cascade weirdness. It’ll pass.”
“No one can predict the Cascade.” It followed its own rules, reshaping immortals and the world as it saw fit. “I will fly you across.”
A taut moment before his warrior consort’s lips tugged up. “One free pass,” she said firmly. “To be redeemed tonight.” She pressed a finger to his mouth before he could respond. “After that, you trust me to take precautions.”
Raphael couldn’t get the image of her plummeting from the sky as a result of a vicious slap of pain out of his mind. That very horror had happened to Illium, though the reason for the blue-winged angel’s crumpled wings was apt to be very different from the hurt that had taken Elena to the ground.
Yet his living nightmare could not hold sway here, for he knew one thing about his consort: to clip her wings would be to kill her. “Tonight only,” he agreed, even as fear tore at his soul with clawed hands, leaving it shredded.
Scooping her up into his arms, her wings neatly pressed to her back and one of her arms around his neck, he carried her out into the snow then lifted off. Three barges made their laborious way along the Hudson, but the rest of the water was dark on this moonless night dotted with stars hard and cold.
Below them, snow haloed the world in a strange twilight seen only in winter, the effect muted the closer he winged to the brilliant heart of Manhattan. Only four days earlier, he’d flown with Elena through just such a twilight—for no reason but that he loved her and she’d wanted to wing through the winter landscape.
Tonight, the wind whistled past his skin with biting teeth, but he shrugged it off while curling Elena closer to the heat of his body, well aware she keenly felt the cold. She pressed her free hand over the archangelic heart on which she’d written her name and stayed silent as they flew to the soaring column of light that was his Tower.
* * *
• • •
Allowing a barely dressed Elena to be swallowed by the maw of the machine took teeth-gritting control on Raphael’s part.
But nothing went wrong and now his hunter—fully dressed once more—stood in front of him, leaning her back lightly against his chest. The contact soothed the serrated edges of his mood, but the change was temporary and would remain temporary until they had pinpointed the cause of Elena’s pain.
“So?” Elena said to Nisia and Keir. “Anything to see?”
“Nothing.” Lines marred Keir’s ageless face, his frown deep enough to create shadowed grooves on his forehead and at the corners of his eyes. “Other than a minor tear in your wing that’s well on the way to healing, there is nothing physically wrong with you.”
“Having eliminated all other possibilities”—Nisia folded her arms—“Keir and I believe it to be a Cascade effect. The timing is too coincidental.”
It wasn’t the answer Raphael wanted to hear. “Elena, has the cut on your forearm begun to heal?”
“It must have.” She pushed back her sleeve. “Drat, a piece of fluff caught on it.” Tugging off the lint, she stared thoughtfully at the wound. “It’s not as angry as it was before. No bleeding, either.”
Nisia was already reexamining the break in her skin. “I’m not happy with this progression. It should be close to sealed by now.”
Elena’s wings moved restlessly against Raphael. “Is it possible my body’s just funneling energy into something else and ignoring minor wounds? Because I’m starving again.”
“I understand your concern, Raphael,” Keir said, having followed along with Nisia’s examination. “But in this case, Elena may be correct.”
“I’ll continue to watch over it, regardless,” Nisia added. “Elena’s immune system is working—it’s simply slower than it should be.”
No, it was working at exactly the right speed for a mortal.
The problem was that Elena wasn’t mortal any longer.
* * *
• • •
Elena could feel Raphael vibrating with protective fur
y at her back. He was an archangel, unused—as he’d pointed out himself—to a lack of control. It was a big part of the reason she’d had to fight so hard at the start of their relationship to get him to treat her not as a cherished lover, cossetted and protected, but as a hunter, a warrior, his partner.
Not that she blamed him for backsliding tonight. She’d been fucking terrified, too. But the moment was past, and their relationship would crumble and die if she stopped being herself. Which was why she insisted on flying home under her own power.
Once airborne after gliding off a high Tower balcony, she didn’t only fly, she dipped and dived without breaching Nisia’s order of “no tricks,” and in so doing, succeeded in driving her archangel to insanity until he finally played with her. Spiraling up into the starlit sky together under Raphael’s breathtaking physical strength, they fell as one to the earth before separating and sweeping out toward the Enclave.
She was laughing when she landed on the snow, her wings dusted with flakes that had begun to fall from the sky as the clouds moved in. “Come on.” She grabbed his hand. “I’m so hungry I could eat my own arm.”
Eyes as blue as a high mountain lake held hers, Raphael’s hair flecked with snowflakes and his wings wrapping around her in an immortal embrace. “Elena.”
“I know, Archangel.” She and Raphael, they had been intimate friends with loneliness before their worlds collided. After that fateful collision, they’d made a promise to one another, to never fall one without the other.
To never leave the other alone.
“I know,” she whispered again, wrapping her arms around his body and holding on with desperate tightness.
He held her as fiercely in turn, but the cut on her forearm stayed unhealed, and one of her wings threatened to drop into the snow, an injured limb being dragged behind a healthy body.
