by Nalini Singh
“A knife—such ornamentation was popular in another age.” Lijuan’s attention shifted, as if the necklace that had caused Elena so much pain no longer mattered. “Such beautiful wings. Will you show them to me?”
Elena didn’t want to show this creature anything, but the request had been polite. She wasn’t going to cause a political incident simply because Lijuan was so inhuman it defied understanding. Moving to give herself space, she spread out the wings her archangel had given her even as he gave her life. But when Lijuan raised a hand as if to touch, she snapped them back.
Raphael was already speaking. “It’s not like you to break protocol.”
“My apologies.” Lijuan’s hand dropped, but her eyes remained on the parts of Elena’s wings visible around her body. “My only defense is that they’re quite extraordinary.”
Elena wished she could tighten her wings even further. “Thank you.”
Lijuan took the acknowledgment as if it was her right. “My own, as you can see, are so very plain.” She spread her wings.
They were a soft dove gray. Gentle. Utterly exquisite in their silky perfection. “Plain perhaps,” Elena found herself saying, “but all the more beautiful for it.”
Lijuan refolded her wings. “So honest. Is that why she intrigues you?”
Raphael answered with an implied question. “You care little for such earthly emotions.”
“Ah, but you intrigue me.” Touching his hand, Lijuan gestured to her left. “I thought we could eat informally.”
Elena about swallowed her tongue at that. This room might not be a dining room, but it was sumptuous beyond description, the back wall lined with mirrored panels bordered in ornate gold, the right wall hung with tapestries that surely cost in the hundreds of thousands, the front wall full of windows that looked out into the sparkling—and always elegant—revelry of the courtiers below. The left wall, the wall below which they were to sit, was where the butterflies lingered.
Moving reluctantly to stand beside a chair upholstered in a stunning jade, she couldn’t help but look up at the creatures frozen forever in stasis. “There’s no glass,” she said almost to herself. “How do you keep them from decaying?”
Another tinkle of laughter. Her heart chilled as she realized what she’d said.
“Have you not told her my secret, Raphael?” Eyes that sparkled with girlish mischief.
Creepy.
Raphael touched his hand briefly to Elena’s back. “It isn’t such a secret any longer. Favashi spoke to me about it yesterday.”
“But you knew before them all.” Lijuan took a seat on a chair that had been made to accommodate wings, having a central column for support, with the sides curving gracefully away. “How is the black-winged angel?”
Raphael waited for Elena to take a seat before taking one beside her. “Jason’s looking forward to the ball.”
The civilized conversation masked an undercurrent of danger that licked at Elena’s ankles like a sentient fire. Raphael had told her that Jason had been injured by Lijuan’s reborn. Now she wondered if the attack had been on purpose. A warning?
Lijuan lifted a hand and the corpse of a bright blue butterfly fell from the wall into her hand, the pin dropping soundlessly to the carpet. “And the young one? The pretty one?”
“I decided it would be best if Illium didn’t join us,” Raphael said without missing a beat. “He might have proved too much of a temptation.”
Dropping the butterfly onto the table, Lijuan laughed, and this time, it was darker, full of—if you could call it that—true humor. “Hmm, yes, those wings are rather magnificent.” Her eyes tracked to Elena’s. “As unusual as yours.”
“Unfortunately,” Elena said, knowing she had to stand her ground, no matter if this archangel could crush her with a single thought, “I’m not a collectable, either.”
“Oh, I don’t want to have your wings mounted,” Lijuan said, her hair continuing to dance softly in that eerie breeze that touched nothing else. “I find you far too interesting alive.”
“Lucky for me.” Except she didn’t think so. Leaning back in her chair, she let Raphael and Lijuan carry on the conversation. As they talked, she watched, she listened . . . and she tried to figure out why Lijuan seemed so very wrong.
Yes, her power was one that made Elena’s skin crawl, but Raphael had once broken every bone in a vampire’s body and left him as a caution to others. And their conversation on the plane had made it clear he was as capable of that kind of brutality today as he’d been the day she first met him.
Yet she took Raphael to her bed night after night, clung to his embrace when the nightmares got too bad. Trust, there was trust between them. But even before, when he’d only been the Archangel of New York—hard, cruel, certainly without mercy—she’d never felt this creep across her skin, this sense that she was in the presence of something that simply should not be.
“Ah, here is the meal.”
Elena had already turned her head toward the door, having scented the approaching vampires.
Jasmine and honey.
Sweet balsam wood dusted in cinnamon.
A kiss of sunshine touched with paint.
Odd combinations, strange scents, but vampires were like that. She’d asked Dmitri what they smelled like to each other. The vampire had given her that taunting smile he kept just for her. “Nothing. We save our senses for the mortals—for the food.”
The three who came into the room were all male, but one alone bore the oil-slick black hair and almond-shaped eyes of Lijuan’s homeland. He was the balsam wood. Beside him was a Eurasian man with the solid shoulders of a boxer and the sky blue eyes of some boy from Kansas, his face not quite put together right, but arresting all the same despite, or perhaps because of, his unusual features. He was the jasmine. And the sunshine—her stomach twisted at the memories evoked by that scent, memories of blood and death, putrid flesh lying on every side as Uram squeezed her shattered ankle.
The sunshine shifted closer, laid a delicate setting of hand-painted porcelain on the low, carved table that was the only barrier between her and Raphael, and Lijuan. His hand was the lustrous darkness found at the heart of the mpingo tree, so rich, so pure that furniture made from the heartwood went for thousands upon thousands of dollars.
His skin was so beautiful, so evocative of the months she’d once spent in Africa, that it took her a moment to look into his eyes, to realize that he was dead.
Raphael knew the instant Elena realized the vampire standing before her, pouring honey-colored oolong tea into a tiny cup, was one of the reborn. Her entire frame went still, so very still, the quiet of a hunter who’d sighted prey.
He could’ve spoken to her mentally, warned her not to betray fear, but with Lijuan’s growing abilities, it was possible she might hear the warning—and Raphael would not do anything that would paint Elena as weaker. Instead, he trusted his hunter, and she didn’t let him down.
“Thank you,” she said politely as the reborn finished pouring.
A small nod from the vampire who was so fresh, so new, he couldn’t have been reborn long. His eyes—yes, there was something there, knowledge of who he’d been, what he was now. But there was no panic in them. Perhaps the man didn’t yet understand what he’d become. Raphael waited as the reborn moved around to pour for him, even as the blue-eyed one poured for Lijuan.
“A toast,” Lijuan said, lifting the cup as the men began to transfer the food onto the table from a serving cart made of wood and gilded with gold. “To new beginnings.” Her eyes were on Elena.
Raphael fought the primal urge to step in between, to protect Elena from a threat she had no hope of surviving . . . but then, he thought, his hunter had survived him. “To change,” he said.
Lijuan’s gaze moved to him, but she didn’t challenge the subtle difference in his toast. “That will do.” She waved a hand at the three men, and they left as silently as they’d arrived.
“No audience?” Raphael passed Elena a
small platter that held a sweet red bean cake he knew she’d like.
“Not today.” She watched Elena eat the cake he’d given her. “Does food continue to hold pleasure for you, Raphael?”
“Yes.” It was a simple answer. He was still rooted to this earth, to the world. “You no longer eat.” It was a guess, but he wasn’t expecting her nod.
“It’s become unnecessary.” She sipped from the cup in her hand. “With friends, I make an effort, but . . .”
He understood what she was saying. No archangel would ever starve to death, even if he or she stopped eating altogether. However, lack of sustenance would eventually begin to leach power. It might take years, perhaps decades, but the loss might well be permanent. An archangel couldn’t afford to take that chance.
Lijuan was telling him she’d gone beyond that. Which brought up the question of how she was now gaining her power.
“Blood and flesh?” he asked, conscious of Elena remaining uncharacteristically quiet beside him. Some would’ve said she’d been cowed into silence. He knew very well that she was listening, honing her knowledge, making note of any possible weakness.
“That would be a devolution,” Lijuan said, her hair feathering as if caressed by ghostly fingers, “and I am evolving.”
Elena waited until they were behind the closed doors of their bedroom before giving in to the shivers. “She’s . . . what is she?”
“Power in its purest form.” Walking to the painted wooden doors that led to their private courtyard and balcony, he spread them open. “Come. The air will cleanse.”
She took the hand he held out, let him lead her into the crisp winter air. The Forbidden City spread out like a sea of multicolored stars before her, dancers still swirling gracefully in the main courtyard as music played, haunting, evocative, beautiful enough to bring tears to the eye.
Standing in the circle of Raphael’s arms, her head against his shoulder, her arms around him, she took her first real breath in hours. Her lungs sucked in the air as if parched, her throat seeming to unlock with a quiver of relief. “That music—what is it?”
“The ehru.”
For long, quiet moments, they just stood there, letting the music soak into their bones. Elena was the one who spoke first. “You don’t think she steals power from others?”
“No.” Raphael stroked his hands over her wings, and the rush of sensation was welcome, a reminder that she was real, nothing like the creature who’d sat across from them in that room full of silence. “If she could do that, her courtiers wouldn’t be so healthy. Lijuan has always first played in her own territory.”
“Like with the reborn.” She shivered again, slipped her hand under his shirt to touch the uncompromising masculine heat of his skin. “That vampire—he smelled of sunshine and paint. He was new . . . fresh.”
“He thinks he’s been given a second chance,” Raphael said, remembering the loyalty in that dark gaze as it had swung to Lijuan.
“When do they start to rot?” she forced herself to ask.
“Jason is almost here.” He could sense his spymaster getting ever closer. “He’ll have the most recent information—but from what we know, it depends not only on the amount of power she expends, but on what she feeds them.”
“Flesh,” she whispered. “Human?”
“Or vampire. It seems to have little significance.” There’d been no reports of angels being sacrificed for Lijuan’s pets, but Raphael wouldn’t put that depravity past the oldest of the archangels.
Elena’s head lifted up at that instant. “Storms,” she whispered. “Jason smells of the wildest of rainstorms, lightning and fire.”
“Has the new aspect of your ability stabilized?”
“No.” Her eyes followed Jason’s descent from the sky, though the black-winged angel was but a shadow. “It switches on and off. Mostly off.” She pressed her lips to Raphael’s jaw. “But you, you’ve always been the rain, the wind, inside my mind. I taste you when I sleep, when I wake, when I breathe.”
If Jason hadn’t landed then, Raphael would have drawn Elena inside, taken his fill of her own unique scent. As it was, he ran his hand to close over her nape, brushing his mouth over the sweet curve of her ear. I will taste you tonight, Elena . Be ready for me—I won’t stop until you scream your pleasure.
He heard her heart hitch, her breath catch. But his hunter had never yet backed down from a challenge. Anytime, angel boy.
34
“Sire.” Jason folded his wings behind him and waited for permission to speak.
Raising his head, Raphael nodded in greeting. “Come, we’ll talk inside.” Lijuan’s strange sense of honor would ensure their living space was free of spies—real and technological. She’d consider it beyond the pale to intrude upon her guests’ privacy.
Inside, Elena leaned up against the dresser as Raphael and Jason stood in front of it. The angel’s tattoo was almost totally re-inked, a piece of living art that covered the left-hand side of a face and spoke of ancestry from lands far distant from one another. The story of Jason’s parents was considered one of the great angelic romances. And for a while, it had been.
“Were your men able to discover anything else?” he asked his spymaster.
“Whatever it is that she kept in that room in her stronghold,” the black-winged angel told him, his voice crystal clear, perfectly pitched, “it has been shifted here.”
“One of the reborn?”
“Yes, but a special one—extreme care has been taken to protect it on the way here.” That perfect pitch altered just enough to telegraph Jason’s revulsion. “There are reports of young women missing along the caravan route.”
“She’s feeding her reborn with the living?” Killing humans was no taboo, but for this, in this way . . . it might disgust even Charisemnon.
“We haven’t been able to find any remains to confirm,” Jason said. “But the disappearances match the caravan route—and had they wanted the dead, bodies had recently been interred in all the villages.”
“Lijuan is considered a goddess,” Raphael said, remembering another time, another angel turned god. “The villagers would’ve raised no complaint.”
“No.” Jason’s jet-black hair, unbound, caught the light as he bent his head, took a deep breath. “That isn’t the worst of it.”
“There’s more?” Elena’s voice was openly shocked.
Jason raised his head. “There are rumors, strong rumors, that those mortals in her inner court who weren’t chosen to be Made . . .”
“Dear God,” Elena whispered. “They’re asking to be reborn?”
“It seems they are being seduced by the newer reborn,” Jason confirmed. “The ones who’re being kept long-term in a physical state akin to life by being fed flesh.”
“The young or the old?” Raphael asked.
“Older—but I don’t think that’ll last.” Jason shook his head.
“Why?” Elena looked at Raphael, her eyes uncomprehending. “They must know or guess that they’ll likely have much shorter lifespans than if they’d allowed nature to take its course.”
Jason answered before Raphael could. “It’s the promise of immortality, the hope that Lijuan will find a way to keep them alive for eternity. Some would give up everything for that.”
Elena heard something in that statement, an undercurrent that held a wealth of meaning. She looked at the angel who was always a shadow, his exotically handsome face inscrutable, his wings a sooty charcoal that let him blend seamlessly into the night. “For the promise?” She shook her head. “I just can’t understand when the reality is that they’d become less than slaves.”
“You’ve never chased immortality,” Raphael answered. “You don’t comprehend the hunger of those that do.”
That made her pause. “Maybe I do,” she said, and wished she didn’t. “My brother-in-law loves my sister . . . but he didn’t wait for her to be accepted as a Candidate. He wanted to live forever more than he wanted my sister beside him.” A
nd now Beth would grow old while Harry remained forever young.
Harry had vowed to stay beside Beth, and for some reason, Elena believed him. But she wondered if Beth would accept his devotion. Would her sister’s love survive the knowledge that she’d been second best to immortality, that one day she’d die, leaving Harry to meet someone else, love someone else?
Her gaze locked with Raphael’s, her heart a painful fist in her chest. Because she, too, would have to watch her sister die.
I won’t apologize, Elena. It would be a lie—I couldn’t let you leave me.
The raw honesty of the answer, of the emotion behind it, rocked her. I forget, and then I remember and it hurts all the more.
Beth will turn to dust when her time comes, but she’ll die knowing her children will be watched over by an angel.
She gave a jerky nod, met Jason’s gaze, realizing for the first time that his eyes were black, so black it was almost impossible to distinguish pupil from iris. “Will the courtiers turn against Lijuan if we prove to them that there’s no immortality in being reborn?”
Jason’s wings rustled as he resettled them, but even here, in this room full of light, he’d managed to find a shadow, until she had to concentrate to see their outline. “We may turn a few, but most are too used to seeing her as their goddess. They’ll follow blindly where she leads.”
Giving Lijuan an endless supply of bodies for her army of the dead.
35
Elena lay in Raphael’s arms, her body exhausted in the most sexual of ways. The archangel had kept his promise. He’d made her scream. Her heart was still thumping with the echo of searing pleasure when she fell into the warm darkness of a peaceful sleep. So peaceful that it took her a while to understand what it was she was hearing.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
“Come here, little hunter, taste.” A finger pressing to her mouth.
She clamped her lips tight, but the taste, it seeped inside anyway, an insidious, unspeakable thing. No! Her mind refused to realize what it was, refused to understand.
