Archangel's Kiss gh-2

by Nalini Singh

  His eyes locked with hers.

  “Come here, little hunter. Taste.”

  The words were a husky whisper inside her head, a thousand screams rolled into one. She knew Lijuan was speaking to her, but all she heard was that singsong voice that had haunted her for almost two decades.

  “Run, run, run.” A giggling parody of Ari’s dying attempt to help Elena. “She won’t run. She likes it, you see.”

  Elena felt the nightmare spiraling out beneath her, a bottomless pit from which she might never escape. It sucked at her, tinged with the laughter in the monster’s eyes, the nauseating joy in his expression—as if they were bound, as if he had a claim on her. She felt her legs begin to tremble, her heart jerk as she found herself back on that floor, scrabbling back on bloody tiles with hands that kept slipping, kept holding her prisoner. It was wet, cold, but Ari’s eyes—

  A rush of rain in her head, untainted and strong, a scent that thundered of the sea, of the wind. Elena, I stand with you.

  It was a sudden, sharp realization flavored with the relentless strength of the tide—she wasn’t alone in that room. Not anymore. Buoyed by that truth, she stepped back from the abyss, walked into the present, and saw the repugnance that was Slater Patalis standing beside Lijuan.

  The vee of his shirt revealed smooth, unblemished skin, free of the ugly scar created by the Y incision cut into his flesh during the autopsy performed by a Guild pathologist. Elena had watched the video over and over, until she’d convinced herself that he was dead. It had been too little justice for what he’d stolen from her, but it had been justice. Lijuan had no right to erase that, no right to use Belle’s and Ari’s deaths as part of a game that would hold Lijuan’s interest for no more than a flicker of time.

  Her entire body filled with anger, clean and bright. It sang with a kind of purity she’d never before known. The monster was smiling while her sisters lay dead in their graves, while her mother’s body hung forever in the wall of her mind, creating a shadow she’d never forget.

  Her spine turned to iron forged in the fires of grief. “Aodhan,” she said, knowing Lijuan wouldn’t guess her intent—wouldn’t imagine she’d dare, “would you mind kneeling for a second?”

  The angel went down in a graceful kneeling position an instant later, his head bowed . . . to allow her to reach the swords that lay flush against the center of his back. Sliding one lethally sharp blade from its sheath, she sliced off Slater Patalis’s grinning head with a single clean stroke, her strength fueled by decades-old anguish.

  Blood fountained in an arterial spray that wet her face, turned the cherry blossoms black, but she was already shoving the blade into his heart and twisting it into so much pulp. His twitching body fell to the ground with a thud as she removed the red-slick blade. “Will she be able to make him rise from this?” she asked Raphael, her voice without inflection, without mercy. Slater didn’t deserve her emotions, didn’t deserve anything but the cold hand of a long-delayed justice.

  “Perhaps.” Blue fire ringed Raphael’s hand. “But this should ensure a permanent death.”

  A dark gray ash replaced what had remained of the worst killer vampire in living memory.

  The entire thing had only taken a few seconds. Still holding the sword, she met Lijuan’s eyes. “My apologies,” she said through the heavy blanket of silence, “but the gift wasn’t to my taste.”

  The Chinese archangel’s hair whipped back in that ghostly breeze as she walked to stand opposite Elena, the ashes of Slater’s body between them. “You cut my amusement short.”

  “If death is truly the only thing that amuses you any longer”—Raphael’s knife-edged voice—“perhaps it’s time you stopped interfering in the world of the living.”

  Lijuan met his eyes, her own so pale that there were no irises, no pupils, just an endless spread of pearlescent white. “No, it is not my time to Sleep.” Raising a hand, she ran the back of it along the face of the dark-skinned reborn who’d come to stand beside her. “Adrian is not ready to die, either.”

  Power filled the air, until the electricity of it sparked along Elena’s skin. She felt Raphael begin to glow, heard Aodhan rise, unsheathe his remaining sword as Jason moved out of the shadows, and she knew this battle might end them all. Death will be an easy price to pay to stop her, she thought to Raphael.

  So brave, my hunter. It was a kiss.

  As she handed his sword back to Aodhan, taking out the gun that wouldn’t stop a vampire, but might just slow down an archangel if only for a fraction of an instant, she saw a flare of power on Raphael’s right, a power she’d tasted before. Michaela. Standing beside Raphael.

  Another flare of power. Then another, and another, and another.

  Elijah, Titus, Charisemnon, Favashi, Astaad.

  Whatever drove the other archangels to unite against Lijuan, their combined power was a blast of heat, one that would have shoved her out of the circle had she not been pinioned between Raphael and Aodhan.

  A cool, cool wind. Power, such power. All of it touched with death.

  Lijuan laughed. “So, you would all stand against me.” Amusement in every syllable. “You cannot imagine what I am.”

  Lijuan’s power was cold, frigid against the heat of the others . Raphael had been right, Elena realized with horror, the oldest of the archangels might just have become the truest of immortals, going beyond the hand of death. It was as that thought passed through her head that her eyes met Adrian’s.

  Liquid dark, those eyes were so calm, so patient, and . . . so full of pain. He knew, she thought, he understood now what he was. Yet in spite of it all, his devotion burned a steady flame, until it hurt to witness it. As she watched, he shifted behind Lijuan, lifting her hair away from her neck. The archangel seemed not to notice—or maybe it was that he was so much her creature, she simply accepted him.

  So when Adrian bent his head and placed his mouth on Lijuan’s skin, Elena thought it only a macabre kiss, a prayer to his goddess. Then she glimpsed the single, bright tear sliding down Adrian’s midnight skin—he loved Lijuan, she thought with an ache in her own heart, but trapped inside the silent shell that had been the Chinese archangel’s gift to him, he also saw her for the horror she was. Lijuan began to bleed before that tear reached his jaw, two thin trails of red snaking down her body to sink into the diaphanous fabric of her gown, a stark wash of color in the white heat of power.

  Lijuan staggered. “Adrian?” She sounded almost mortal in her surprise. “What are you doing?”

  “He’s killing you,” Raphael said. “You’ve created your own death.”

  Lijuan shoved with a single hand. Adrian’s body flew to hit Favashi, taking them both down. The Persian archangel rose to her feet after bare seconds, but the reborn stayed down.

  “I am death,” Lijuan said, her voice regaining its strength even as blood continued to seep into her gown. “You have no claim to this land. Leave and I will spare you.”

  Elijah shook his head. “Your reborn are infectious.”

  Elena followed his gaze, her own widening in horror as she realized the human female Adrian had killed was now struggling to get to her feet, her fingers scrabbling on the tiles as the people around her watched in disbelief.

  Dear God.

  39

  “I will not allow the plague to spread to my lands.” Neha, Lijuan’s closest neighbor, stepped into the circle at last, her rage finding a target.

  Lijuan whipped out a hand and every single archangel in the circle began to bleed from cuts on their faces, their chests. “Perhaps it’s time the world had only one archangel.”

  Elena wondered if anyone realized that Lijuan herself was still bleeding. And that her blood was turning dark, almost black. Elena’s eyes went to Adrian’s lifeless body. A vampire was Made by being pumped full of a toxin noxious to angels. In the normal scheme of things, that toxin turned human into vampire, then became harmless to all. But—What happens to the toxin if a vampire is brought back from the dead? I
f he is reborn?

  Raphael’s wing brushed hers in silent acknowledgement. It seems the toxin, too, was reborn. And it was reborn in a stronger, more deadly form.

  Will it kill her?

  No. But it may make her easier to defeat. A touch against her mind. You won’t survive this fight. Get out of the blast zone and take the others with you.

  Elena’s heart threatened to break. You die, I’ll make her bring you back.

  You would not do that to me, Elena. A brush of the sea, of the wind, across her senses. But I have no intention of dying—we have not yet danced as angels dance.

  Then he was gone from her mind. Blinking back her worry, her pain, she jerked her head at Aodhan, ready to do what her archangel had asked of her. Working with Jason and incredibly, Nazarach and Dahariel, they managed to light a fire under the courtiers. Most left. The reborn lingered.

  “Kill them,” Elena ordered, slamming her pity into a dark corner. “If she thinks enough to call them . . .”

  “She could disable Raphael and the rest of the Cadre.” Jason looked at the gun in her hand. “The quickest method is beheading.” He slid out a gleaming black sword from a sheath she hadn’t seen until that moment, hidden as it was in the curve of his back. “Take out their hearts, Elena. We’ll do the rest, ensure full death.”

  “Works for me.” She began shooting. Turned out that the gun meant to shred angelic wings wasn’t as effective as a normal gun would have been on reborn hearts—vampiric and human—but it did the job. When she ran out of bullets, she switched to knives.

  The task was grim . . . and sad. Without Lijuan’s active guidance, the reborn didn’t know what to do. So they mostly just stood there. A few tried to run but even that was a weak effort. Elena didn’t feel good about doing what she was doing, but it had to be done. Because if the reborn began to feed, if they left their victims dead, but whole, those victims would rise. And the reborn would creep a murderous tide across the world.

  If even one of them realized that . . .

  A pair of tired blue eyes met hers as her arm lifted. There was only gratitude in them as her knife hit home. Jason’s sword cut off his head an instant later, the black blade rippling with a fire that reduced the reborn to embers in less than ten seconds. Elena stared at that blade, at the angel who seemed kin to the dark.

  “It is done.” Aodhan sheathed his swords, having cut those Jason hadn’t burned, into several neat pieces.

  Nazarach and Dahariel had used their own methods, but the end result was a courtyard empty of life but for the Cadre, and their small group.

  “I believe it’s time to leave.” Nazarach offered her his hand. “A dance at last.”

  “I can fly myself out.” She’d slit her own throat before going anywhere with him.

  The amber-eyed angel bowed his head. “Then I hope you’ll save me a dance the next time we meet.” He lifted off.

  Dahariel waited until Nazarach had gone to say, “If Raphael survives, tell him he can have the vampire he wished to buy into his service. The boy’s too broken to be of much use to me any longer.” He rose into the sky even as the last word left his lips.

  “We must go,” Jason said, his voice so tight, she could hardly understand him.

  Elena glanced back, saw nothing but a blaze of white heat, a wall of static blocking her attempts to reach Raphael with her mind. Her heart clenched. But she left. Because her archangel had asked her to. And he’d be pissed to survive—and he would survive—only to find her dead. Power began to increase behind them at an exponential rate as they ran, an inferno that shoved at them with waves of searing fire.

  Jason and Aodhan ran beside her as she climbed up a small flight of stairs. “It’s too low!” she yelled, knowing she’d never make it up.

  One hand gripped her under her left arm, the other under her right. She snapped her wings together in the nick of time. Jason and Aodhan took off even as a massive lack of sound filled the air—power being sucked into a vacuum before expanding outward. It threatened to crush, but somehow, the two angels managed to get airborne.

  “Go!”

  But Jason and Aodhan waited three more seconds before releasing her. Her wings spread instinctively, the tips curling away from the death racing toward them. Heat waves licked across the air, each more dangerous than the last. She saw vampires fall even as they ran, heard screams as human homes went up in flames, saw angels flying ever higher in an attempt to escape. But Jason and Aodhan stayed stubbornly by her side, though she was weaker, far slower.

  Fire singed her nape. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the edge of the inferno mere seconds behind them. “Drop!” she screamed. “Drop!”

  The blast hit with the force of a two-ton truck, crumpling their wings and slamming them to earth like pieces of glass.

  Killing Lijuan was impossible. Raphael realized that with the first wave of her power. She tasted of death and life intertwined, a being who straddled worlds.

  Blood continued to streak down her shoulder, black and viscous, but still her power grew, her wings backlit by the glow until they ceased to exist. The rest of the Cadre rose with her, holding back the blinding wave that might destroy the world itself. Already, thousands had likely died. If they stopped, if they let her release the unmitigated fury of her strength, that death toll would reach millions. Billions.

  But that wasn’t why his fellow archangels fought. Human life meant little to most. They fought for their own lives, and because Lijuan had made a mistake. He’d felt their shock as Adrian tore apart the vampire who’d had the ill fortune to be enthralled by Lijuan. The blood, the death, was nothing new. But the control she had over her reborn, the strength of those reborn against the vampires . . . no archangel wanted to face that kind of an army. The fact that that army was a plague that held the potential to end them all was the final nail in the coffin.

  I will not be contained. I cannot be contained.

  Lijuan’s voice in their heads, the seeming sanity of it more disturbing than Uram’s viciousness had been in those last minutes above New York. Now Beijing burned below them and in that rubble lay Elena. The primal core of him raged to go to her. But he held his position. Because his warrior with her mortal heart would expect nothing less.

  He felt one of the tendons in his left wing snap against the wake of a power that slapped into him over and over. Only Favashi, younger than him, was showing signs of similar damage.

  “Then she will kill you. She will make you mortal.”

  He was weaker than he should have been, but he was also stronger. Looking up into Lijuan’s face, the human mask stripped away to reveal the screaming darkness, he said, “Now,” speaking to the archangels ringing Lijuan, knowing she was far beyond hearing. Now!

  A savage cascade of power, all of it focused on one central target. Lijuan’s body bowed as the power hit her, the sky turning to daylight for a single startling second. When night returned, Zhou Lijuan was simply gone, the Forbidden City nothing but a black crater, Beijing a memory in immortal and mortal minds.

  The agony of the dying was drowned out only by the silence of the dead.

  He found Elena buried under the wings of two of his Seven. Jason and Aodhan were unconscious, the bones in their legs twisted. But those injuries were nothing to immortals of their age. They’d survive. Elena was far, far younger.

  But she had the will of a hunter-born.

  He felt the stubborn flicker of her life even as he picked her crumpled body up from the hard earth where she’d been thrown. Her hands were torn open, her face bruised, but her body . . . Stroking his hand down it, he realized he felt only a few fractures. Minor. Even for such a young angel. He should have let her rest, but he couldn’t bear the silence.

  Elena.

  Her lashes fluttered.

  He couldn’t hasten her healing, having burned out his power in the fight to hold Lijuan. It would take time to recover.

  Hunter mine.

  Pale silver eyes looking into his.
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  Love, he thought as he held her to his heart, was an agony beyond compare.

  Epilogue

  Raphael wasn’t surprised to see Lijuan’s image form in the clear waters of a rain-filled pool just beyond the Refuge. He knelt by its side as Elena sat swaddled in a blanket, her face uplifted to the warm rays of the rising sun. But he felt her look his way the instant Lijuan appeared, though the sending would be invisible to her.

  “I live, Raphael.” Lijuan’s voice was a million screams and endless silence. “Are you not afraid?”

  “You’ve evolved,” he said, seeing her hand fade into mist, her face half disappear before it returned. “You no longer need the flesh. Our concerns are not yours.”

  A laugh, whispers, and something more, something that spoke of caresses under the cover of dark as blood flowed warm and rich. “I have killed the last of my reborn.” Her form solidified, until it appeared almost normal. “Sometimes, I have need of the flesh.”

  “Why tell me?” he asked. “They are your weakness.”

  “I like you, Raphael.” A smile that froze the water in the pond, her visage framed in frost. “And your hunter, yes, she intrigues me still.”

  He met those eyes that were beyond immortal and wondered at the truth. “Did you need to die to evolve?”

  “Ask me that question when we next meet. Perhaps I will answer.”

  “You walk between life and death,” he said. “What do you see?”

  “Mysteries, answers, yesterdays, and tomorrows.” An enigmatic smile. “We’ll speak again. I do so like you, Raphael.”

  The words echoed in the air as her image faded. Rising, he took the hand Elena held out, brought her gently to her feet. Her eyes were troubled as she looked to him. “Lijuan?”

  “She isn’t a threat.” He drew her deeper into his arms. “I think, for now, Lijuan has little interest in the concerns of the world.” Her face had held an eerily childish joy in her new life, her new sphere of existence.