Archangel's Prophecy

by Nalini Singh

  Reaching Raphael with soft beats of her wings, she looked at him with those sightless eyes. “You have half a heart.” A pause, a frown. “And you have two hearts. Yet you are not whole.”

  “I won’t be whole until my Elena wakes.” An absolute truth. “What do you see?”

  “The future has warped.” A bloody tear dropping to stain her gown. “I see . . . nothing. I see a million possibilities. I see chaos and horror. I see hope and life. I see everything that could be.”

  We battled destiny and changed time, Elena-mine. The future was now theirs to shape.

  Cassandra touched his face with fingers that bore nails encrusted with blood. “Ambrosia will flow and a mortal will be made an angel when an archangel loves true.” She spoke the words in a singsong voice. “That is what I saw and that is what I wrote and that was a future born.”

  “Elena is the first angel-Made.” That was the answer to why there were no records, no road map to follow; the legend of ambrosia had been born of a prophecy spoken by an angel so old she was legend.

  Cassandra held out her arms. “This child of kin’s bloodline is mine. In this moment, and in this time, she is mine.”

  Raphael gave her Favashi because there was no other choice and because Favashi had spoken of this place. “When will she return?”

  “Madness is coming. Life is coming. Wonder is coming. Death is coming. The future warps again and again.” Tiredness, such aching tiredness. “I try so hard to Sleep, but even in my Sleep, I dream. I see.” A pause. “I helped your love, this prophecy-of-mine, alter time. A new dawn not yet seen, not yet known.”

  She hugged Favashi’s frail body close. “Fire cleanses. I knew fire would be needed. On this day and in this time, fire would be needed. For you alone cannot fight what she has become. The Cadre alone cannot fight the evil that Sleeps.”

  Cassandra pressed a kiss to Favashi’s brow. “Archangel of Death. Goddess of Nightmare. Wraith without a shadow. Rise, rise, rise into your Reign of Death. For your end will come. Your end will come. At the hands of the new and of the old. An Archangel kissed by mortality. A silver-winged Sleeper who wakes before his Sleep is done. The broken dream with eyes of fire. Shatter. Shatter. Shatter.”

  More bloody tears. “This was to be. Death, endless death, followed by victory. But you and the fragile, courageous prophecy-of-mine have rewritten destiny, erased the future to be. Time warps and changes. Only one constant remains. The Sleeper, the Wraith, the Goddess. She will rise and she will be monstrous.”

  Cassandra began to lower herself into the lava. She was a being of liquid fire again before she reached the molten core, Favashi invisible against her.

  The sinkhole began to close over in front of their eyes.

  Two minutes after the encounter with an Ancient out of angelic myth, there was nothing there, no sign a sinkhole had ever existed. The earth was not bare. Grass grew, pebbles rolled around on it, and the wind swirled snow against the barrier of the fence.

  Elena would not be pleased to have missed such a sight.

  Inside his chest, his heart gave a sluggish beat. Come, Illium. You must watch for my fall today.

  The blue-winged angel flew below him all the way home.

  But even safely landed, Raphael could not yet rest. First, he must warn the Cadre about China. He called an urgent meeting using a signal that was never to be ignored. Their faces appeared one after the other on the screen in his study, cold and immortal and altered with Cascade-born power.

  Only Michaela, strikingly beautiful and deeply manipulative, was different. She appeared . . . faded, tired.

  Raphael described only what had happened to Favashi, shared only what Cassandra had said about Lijuan being a monstrous world-destroying force when she next woke. Too big for even the Cadre.

  It was Caliane who broke the silence that had fallen after his short, curt report. “I would ask if you dreamed this, my son, but I know you are too practical and pragmatic a warrior to create fantasies—and I saw Favashi’s strangeness firsthand a month earlier, when I flew to offer her counsel.”

  Neha was the next to speak. “So did I,” said the Archangel of India, her sari a yellow that made her skin shimmer with light. “I wanted to brush it off as arrogance, but there was a falseness to her presence, as if a shadow lay atop it.”

  Raphael conserved his energy and let the ensuing discussion flow at its own pace until Titus said, “China is not safe.”

  All the Cadre nodded as one.

  Even Charisemnon’s expression was black. Archangels, after all, were not supposed to be prey. Such a line had never before been crossed in their histories.

  “It cannot be left unguarded.” Alexander’s silver eyes were a painful echo of the ring of silver around Elena’s irises. “We saw what happened in the short period that Lijuan was missing. We cannot know how long Favashi will be gone.”

  “She was adamant that whatever it is that Lijuan left behind in her territory, it affects only archangels,” Raphael pointed out. “Favashi has a number of strong men and women loyal to her who can run things in the interim. There are also enough of us that we can rotate through China to ensure no one in her territory forgets the Cadre exists even if they do not have a resident archangel.”

  A cycle of flights was swiftly worked out. None of them would land in China, but an archangel didn’t need to land to make his or her power felt. Raphael, Astaad—Archangel of the Pacific Isles—and a number of others would stay in Japan when it came time for their turn at policing Favashi’s territory in her absence.

  Caliane was considered neutral ground. She wasn’t neutral, of course, would always fight in Raphael’s corner. But she also wouldn’t take it amiss if an archangel guested in her territory—perhaps it was because of her love for Nadiel, but Raphael’s mother could tolerate the presence of another archangel close by for relatively long periods.

  It was also agreed that none of them would use an archangel’s absence from his or her own territory to attempt to gain a foothold in that territory. The rest of the Cadre would unite against any such attempt, no matter friendships or alliances. This was a thing about controlling vampires; the Cadre would not let the world drown in bloodlust regardless of their other enmities.

  Neha volunteered to take extra shifts. “It will be less of a distance for me, and seeing me will remind them that an archangel resides within easy reach.”

  Caliane also volunteered to do extra shifts. “Five years,” his mother said afterward. “If Favashi yet Sleeps, then we must make a long-term plan.”

  “It is settled,” said the Cadre, and the meeting was over.

  His wound bleeding under his leathers, Raphael staggered up the steps. Such a wound needed the deep recovery of anshara, not a battle against another archangel.

  Sire. Sire. Sire. The Legion’s voices filled his head as he entered the room. The chrysalis is too small. Dismay in every word. Where will her wings grow?

  Hand pressed to his heart, Raphael crashed onto the bed and onto the silken filaments that flowed from the chrysalis that was too small to hold his hunter’s tall body and extraordinary wings. His own wing fell across the chrysalis and his heart, it stopped.

  The Legion

  The Primary watched Raphael’s blood seep from his body in a direct line to the chrysalis, where it was absorbed without a trace. The filaments from Elena’s chrysalis spread over him, cocooning him in a delicate blanket.

  The Legion sat. They held guard.

  Time passed.

  Others loyal to the aeclari came to the place where they slept, but they did not disturb the sleeping pair. The one the Legion thought of as the Blade entered only once, to ensure his archangel lived.

  He told the Legion that the archangel was not in anshara, the deep healing sleep that also allowed reason. Raphael’s sleep was beyond that. He didn’t breathe. His heart didn’t beat.
But he lived, his hair midnight under the filaments of white and his skin cracked with gold.

  Of Elena, no one knew. The chrysalis was opaque to the healer who had watched Elena become an angel, and he left with sorrow deep grooves in his face.

  The one she called Bluebell stood often on the balcony, a silent sentinel.

  A warrior child came to the house once. She demanded to see her sister, but the Legion knew this Elena would never permit. They were not mortal, but they had been enough in the mortal world to understand what it was to protect a young heart. But they did not have to tell the warrior child she could not see Elena.

  The one called Montgomery, who often asked the Legion if they needed food or drink, did the task with a quiet voice, and gentle arms that held the warrior child close when she cried. But it was the Blade who spoke to the others, for they came to the Tower in search of Elena. Sara, the friend of Elena’s heart who spoke for all the other hunter warriors. Jeffrey, the father who was not a father. And Beth, a sister so scared of the Tower, but who came asking after Elena.

  Others did not come, but the Legion heard the Storm with black wings talking to the Blade and they knew the Cadre watched New York. Where was Raphael? they asked. Where was his consort? When the one who had sent disease to the aeclari’s city thought to grasp at this land, the archangel who laughed and made women smile massed his forces on the diseased archangel’s border and peace held.

  The Mother came. She fought with the Blade to see her son. The Blade would not move. “You are an archangel,” he told her when she threatened his life, “but he is my liege. I cannot allow you to pass.”

  The Mother was very strong, but she was not mad. Not in this life. She fought bitterly, but she did not destroy. And she made it clear to the others of the Cadre that if they came for New York, they would come for her. The General who had once been the Mother’s sent his birds of prey and his wild cats to the city in a silent symbol of allegiance.

  And the peace held.

  When the Queen, who mourned her daughter and looked at Raphael with hate but also sometimes with sorrow, told the Blade of the continuing strangeness in the land of the giver of death who Slept, he told her he would tell his sire. He said nothing about when, and she did not ask.

  And the peace held.

  Quakes ravaged the lands of the archangel who was of water and islands. Such things should not be, but they were. Ice furies hit the lands of the archangel of sunlight and silver. Heat scalded the mountainous territory of the archangel of beauty. And deep inside the territory of the giver of death who Slept, there was a growing hollowness, thousands gone without a trace.

  But the peace, it held.

  Those of the house of the aeclari accepted the Legion’s right to guard the sleeping place, their activity muted and near-silent. Without the archangel and his consort, they moved like automatons deprived of their reason for being.

  The Legion saw all of this. They were seven hundred and seventy-seven, and they could not all stand sentinel while the aeclari slept; they did many tasks and the knowledge was shared. But always, their core watched and held guard. This was their truth. This was their existence.

  The chrysalis grew. Too slow. Too small. Still too small.

  The Legion did not move.

  They listened for the restarting of an archangelic heart.

  They waited for the chrysalis to open.

  They watched.

  48

  “Shh, my darling, shh.”

  Raphael had not stood in this verdant field far from civilization for . . . a long time. He had been a boy when he fell. When his mother crashed him to the earth. His blood had been rubies on the pure green of the grass, each filament so perfectly designed, each dewdrop a diamond.

  And his bones, they’d been in so many pieces he could not even crawl.

  He’d lain in the field as the seasons turned. He’d watched an insect labor across the earth. And he’d listened to the birds sing. They had brought him berries, those birds, thinking him a fledgling fallen out of the nest. There he’d lain with his broken wings spread out on the grass while it grew around him, over him.

  Wildflowers had bloomed in his blood.

  He’d been haunted by the memory of his mother’s delicate feet walking away. Her bare soles stepping on the grass bejeweled with his blood while the white of her gown flickered at her ankles.

  “Eyes a blue as pure as the heart of the sun. Hair the heart of midnight. My son who is her mirror.”

  On this field, he’d been a broken mirror.

  Raphael frowned as the birds fell silent. “Mirror,” he spoke aloud into the silence of this field where his mother had left him.

  Aeclari are mirrors.

  The mirror is not enough.

  Sounds clashed into the peace of this place out of time and he knew he dreamed. And he thought of the last time he’d lived this memory. Elena had invaded his dream then. She’d found him in the stygian darkness of the sea, too, when the Legion drew him into their domain.

  Sounds shattered the silence once more, sword against sword, a desperate battle.

  “A little help here, Archangel.” The voice was faint, but he’d know it even were it soundless.

  His consort was invading his dream again.

  Though he knew it was only his mind attempting to find hers and filling in the emptiness with illusion, Raphael withdrew his swords from the crisscrossed sheaths on his back and stepped forward out of the grass and into a deep gray nothingness that reminded him of the darkness below the ocean.

  He’d lit it with wildfire then, creating a small sun.

  Coaxing newborn flickers of wildfire from his body, he threw it up into the gray. It cut light across the world. And he was spinning before he’d consciously processed what he’d seen, his back slamming up hard against Elena’s.

  He lifted his swords to block the strike of an assailant that had no face.

  “What took you so long, Archangel?” Elena called back.

  “I’m growing my heart around yours,” he answered even as he spun to help her block the advance of three bloodlust-driven vampires with hooked claws. “I’ll keep your heart safe, but it’s too mortal for an archangel. I must grow an immortal one around it.”

  Breath hard, Elena said, “That’s super-weird, because I have the most ginormous heart inside my chest. I’m getting used to it, though.” Her back slammed against his again, the ridged scars where he’d amputated her wings apparent to him even through her clothing and his. “The Cascade fucking took my fucking wings!” Each word accompanied by a throwing blade finding its mark.

  Raphael’s body stirred, his blood wildfire. “Am I in your dream, Elena, or are you in mine?” She felt real, not an illusion. When his skin brushed hers, when his wing moved across her body, when her voice reached him, it all felt right.

  “No idea.” A possessive kiss when she faced him again, the rawly physical act erasing any notion of dreams and illusions.

  Her eyes melted to silver, inhuman in their beauty. “I remember now, Archangel.” Twisting out, she blocked another attack, as he did the same.

  When they came together again, she was breathless. “You shouldn’t have given me your heart. You shouldn’t have taken mine—it was fully mortal with a side of Cascade weirdness.”

  “A thank-you would be nice.” He beheaded a horde of reborn with rotting limbs. “It’s not every day a man gives you his heart.”

  “What did I say about the jokes?” She poked him gently with the hilt of her sword before they were deluged by opponents.

  In a small moment of peace: “Raphael, how long can we keep this up?”

  “Not long,” he said, able to see the green of the grass beyond the gray. He could step out and be back on that field so brilliant and bright and bloody. “Can you see the field?”

  “What field? The on
e you dream?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nope.”

  “Then I am in your dream.” If his mortal consort had once invaded his dream, could he not invade hers? She’d anchored him in the dreams, in the bloodstorm that had sought to turn him into a cold, heartless being of pure power.

  Hauling Elena against him, he sheathed one sword and gripped the side of her neck. “Elena-mine, as you were my anchor, now I am yours.”

  Her hand rose to his cheek, her sword falling to her side even as the wildfire light began to fade and the darkness crept closer, ready to consume her. Behind him, the green of the field grew brighter.

  “I’m so tired, Archangel,” said his wild and beautiful Elena who didn’t know the meaning of giving up. “We really need to wake up.”

  He resisted. “The chrysalis is too small.”

  “No wings? Or are we talking even more missing limbs?” She pressed her fingers to his lips. “We’ll find out soon enough.” A sigh before she came into his arms.

  Around them, the gray raged, reaching out grasping tendrils toward her. And he knew . . . he had to wake them up before the Cascade got what it wanted and consumed her. Even Elena could not battle forever. “How do I wake us?”

  “Remember the bloodstorm,” she said, her eyes closed and her sword dropping to the floor as her strength deserted her.

  His mind bled with thoughts of the sky that had boiled crimson, the rain like shards of ice. He’d given up the dark and old power that wanted to fill him to the brim because that same power would kill Elena with its coldness.

  He’d ejected it from his body, waking himself back to reality.

  Today, it was golden lightning become wildfire that filled his veins. A power he could control. A power he could use and that didn’t use him. But—“No power is worth you, Elena-mine. I would give up immortality for a single mortal lifetime with you.”