by Nalini Singh
Shivers raked up her spine, brushed across her nipples. “No, thanks.”
“The decision is no longer up to you.” He rose to his full height. “Are you hungry?”
Startled by the pragmatic question, she shook off the drugging aftereffects of his scent, and took a moment to think. “I’m starving.”
“Then you’ll be fed.”
Scowling at the way he’d phrased that, she said nothing as he disappeared out the door, only to return several minutes later with a covered plate. When he removed the lid, she found herself looking at what appeared to be a dinner of grilled fish in some kind of white sauce, teamed with lightly sautéed vegetables and baby potatoes. Her mouth watered. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” He grabbed another chair and moved it opposite her without effort, though it was the twin of the one she sat in, unable even to tilt. “What would you like first?”
She set her jaw. “I am not letting you feed me.”
He speared a piece of carrot. “The men who accompanied me to your apartment—do you know who they were?”
She kept her mouth shut, not trusting him not to shove food at her while her guard was down.
“Members of the Seven,” he said, answering his own question. “Those vampires and angels who protect Raphael with no thought to our own advancement.”
Curiosity was a flame inside her, enough for her to speak. “Why?”
“That’s for us to know.” He ate the carrot with every appearance of enjoyment. While vampires couldn’t gain sustenance from such food, she knew they could digest a certain amount without problem. It was why most low-level vamps were able to pass for human. “What you need to know is that we’ll get rid of anything, and anyone, who poses a threat to him, even if it means we forfeit our own lives.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel happy about you shoving a fork in my direction?”
He scooped up a piece of the fish, making sure to coat it with the sauce, which looked tauntingly delicious. “Until Raphael wakes, I’m constrained against hurting you. He gave me a direct order not to. The others aren’t subject to such orders. I hand them this fork and walk out that door, and you’ll understand a whole new meaning to the word ‘pain.’ ”
She blew out a breath. “Free my hands at least—you know I can’t hurt you without weapons.”
“I do that, you’re dead.” He lifted the fork toward her mouth. “You’re alive right now because I’m keeping the others from you. If they think you can manipulate me . . .”
She didn’t trust him an inch. But she was starving and she was a hunter—she knew a hunger strike would achieve nothing while weakening her. She opened her mouth. The fish was as delicious as it looked. But she held it in her mouth for almost a minute, tasting carefully. Only when she was satisfied it was clean, did she swallow. “No narcotics?”
“Unnecessary. It’s not like you can fly.” He fed her a bite of potato. “And Raphael will want to see you as soon as he wakes.”
“His wings?”
Dmitri raised an eyebrow. “You sound like you care.”
She couldn’t see any point in lying. “I do. I only meant to get away from him—he was acting really weird.” She ate. “I mean, he’s immortal. It should’ve just given me enough time to get a head start.”
“True.” He fed her another forkful, sliding out the tines more slowly than was warranted. When she narrowed her eyes, he gave her that cool, dangerous smile that never reached his eyes. “Which is why you’ve just gone from hunter to the number one threat to angels.”
“Oh, please.” She shook her head when he offered her broccoli. Smiling, he ate it, then fed her a forkful of peas instead. She ate, thought it over. “That kind of a gun’s been used before.” It couldn’t be a secret, not if it had been fired against angels.
“Yes. We know of it. It causes temporary damage.” He shrugged. “The archangels apparently find it a fair weapon, given that humans have few other ways to combat angels who get too pushy.”
“Maybe it was a bad angle,” she murmured. “Did I hit a major artery or something?” She knew all about vampire biology, but angels were another matter altogether. “Enough,” she said when he offered her another bite.
He put down the fork. “You’ll have to ask Raphael those questions—if you still have your tongue, of course.” Getting up, he disappeared a second time, returning with a bottle of water.
After drinking and managing not to dribble, she looked at him again. Still darkly sexy, still an inch away from ripping out her throat. “Thanks.”
His answer was to lay one finger against the pulse in her neck. “So strong, rich and sweetly potent. I look forward to my own dinner—too bad it’s not you.”
Then he was gone.
Elena watched the door with absolute focus as she began twisting in her chair, determined to get out of the ropes. Dmitri was protecting her against the others right now, but who knew how long that would last.
The only problem was, the ropes had been tied by an apparent master.
But with a master of the art, all pain is pleasure.
Bondage, that figured. Dmitri probably liked to tie his women up in all sorts of interesting positions. Her face flushed. She didn’t want him—not when he wasn’t throwing out that damn scent like a lure. But she melted the instant he turned on that talent of his.
She didn’t like melting against her own will.
Not even for an archangel.
Her jaw clenched at the memory of what had taken place in Raphael’s office. Now that she’d shot him, she felt a bit better about the whole incident. Like she’d evened the score. Of course, he probably took a dimmer view of the whole affair. He’d only tried to get her in bed—and try as she might to convince herself otherwise, she’d enjoyed the seduction . . . at least until it got to the mind-control part. In return, she might’ve crippled him.
Dear God, she’d destroyed half his wing.
Her eyes smarted and she realized she was horrifically close to tears. Blinking rapidly, she banished the unwelcome emotion. Hunters didn’t cry. Not even for an archangel. But—what if he didn’t recover?
Her guilt twisted into a heavy knot in her stomach, getting tighter and hotter and more destructive with every passing second. She had to get to him, see for herself how he was doing. “No hope in hell,” she muttered, knowing that if she’d been in Dmitri’s position, she’d have done the exact same thing in isolating the possible threat.
Arms straining and calf muscles aching, she gave up trying to undo the bonds and relaxed into the chair. She wasn’t going to be able to sleep but she could try to rest enough that when Raphael woke and the showdown began, she’d be ready. But just as her muscles began to loosen, she remembered the gaping hole in her apartment wall. “Dmitri!”
He appeared a minute later and, from the look on his face, he was in no way pleased. “You called, my lady?” Had the words been any sharper, they would’ve drawn blood.
Blood.
Was she trying to get herself killed? “I interrupted your . . . dinner. I’m sorry.”
He smiled, revealing no hint of the fangs she knew were there. “Are you offering yourself in reparation?”
“I want to know about my apartment—the wall, did you close it off?”
“Why should we?” He shrugged and turned away. “It’s only a human dwelling.”
“You piece of—”
He snapped around, face different, lethal, unearthly. “I’m hungry, Elena. Don’t make me break my word to Raphael.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Push me and I will. I’ll get punished, but you’ll still be dead.” Then he was gone.
Leaving her alone with a racing heartbeat and a lancing pain in her heart. Her home, her haven, her damn nest was being destroyed right this second by the wind, dust, and rain if the heavens opened. It made her want to curl up and bawl her eyes out.
It wasn’t the individual things in the apartment that she worried
about, it was the place itself. Home. She hadn’t had one for a very long time—after her father had thrown her out, she’d been forced to bunk permanently at Guild Academy. There was nothing wrong with the facility, but it wasn’t home. Then she and Sara had finished their training and shared an apartment for a while. That had been a home, a welcome one, but it hadn’t been hers. But the apartment, it was hers in every way.
A single tear streaked down her face. “I’m sorry,” she said, telling herself she was talking to her ruined home. But the truth was, she was speaking to an archangel. “I never meant to hurt you.”
A cool sea breeze in her mind. Then why were you carrying a gun?
20
Elena went utterly quiet, much as she imagined a small mouse might in front of a very big, very bad cat with large teeth. “Raphael?” she whispered, though she knew that fresh, clean, rainy scent as well as her own. And that was something that made no sense at all—how could he have a scent inside her head?
Go to sleep, Elena. Your thinking is keeping me awake.
She took a deep breath. “How are you—the injury?”
Are you bound?
“Yes.” She waited for an answer to her own question.
Good. I wouldn’t want you disappearing before we had a chance to talk about your penchant for weaponry.
Then the sense of him was gone from her head. She whispered his name again, but knew he was no longer listening. Her guilt soon morphed into anger. The bastard—he could’ve had her released, but he’d left her tied up. Her wrists were sore, her back hurt from the damn chair, and—“And he’s got a right to be pissed.” Raphael had terrified her on that ledge tonight, but he hadn’t actually harmed her. Meanwhile, she’d shot him. If the man was furious, he had reason. That didn’t mean she had to like it.
And there was still the matter of his compelling her to have sex.
Humiliating as it was, she’d told him the truth tonight—if he’d only waited, it was highly likely she’d have crawled all over him voluntarily at the first opportunity.
Her cheeks burned. She was going to have Idiot tattooed on her forehead as soon as she got out of here. From the start she’d told herself to be wary, to never forget that she was nothing but a throwaway source of entertainment for Raphael. Apparently that didn’t matter to her hormones.
The archangel made her burn.
The worst thing was, she couldn’t blame the fascination on lust alone. Raphael was far too intriguing a male for anything that simple. But tonight, tonight he hadn’t been right. Or maybe, another part of her whispered, he had been—what if the stranger she’d shot had been the real Raphael . . . the Archangel of New York, a creature capable of torturing another being until that person was nothing but a screaming, destroyed piece of monstrous art.
Raphael’s eyes were closed, but he wasn’t truly asleep. He was in a semiconscious coma, a condition for which humans or vampires had no equivalent. The angels knew it as anshara, a state of being that could be achieved only by those who had lived longer than half a millennium, and that allowed both reason and deep rest at the same time. Now, the conscious part of him was absorbed in knitting the wound Elena had made with her little gun, while the rest of him slept. A useful state. But not one that could be brought on by choice.
Anshara only came to pass when an angel had been badly injured. That had happened rarely in the last eight hundred years of Raphael’s existence. When he’d been young and inexperienced, he’d damaged himself—or been damaged—a few times.
Images of dancing in the sky before his wings tangled, and he plummeted to earth with the certain understanding that his blood would paint a red carpet across the meadow floor.
Ancient memories. Of the boy he’d been.
Broken arms, broken legs, blood spilling out of a shattered mouth.
And her. Standing over him, crooning. “Shh, my darling. Shh.”
Sheer terror racing through his bloodstream, his heart heavy with the knowledge that he was helpless to stop her . . . his mother, his greatest nightmare.
Black haired and blue eyed, she’d been the feminine image from which he’d been cast. But she’d been old by then, so very old, not in appearance but in the mind, in the soul. And unlike Lijuan, she hadn’t evolved. She’d . . . devolved.
In the present, he could see his wing knitting together filament by filament but it wasn’t enough to keep the memories at bay. During anshara, the mind disgorged things long locked away, covering the soul in a layer of opaqueness no mortal could hope to understand. These were the memories of a hundred different mortal lifetimes. He was old, so old . . . but no, he wasn’t ancient. These memories weren’t all his. Some were those of his race, the secret repository of all their knowledge, hidden inside the minds of their children.
Caliane’s memories rose to the surface.
And he was looking down at his bleeding and broken body from a crouching position, watching his/her hand stroke his hair off his face. “It hurts now but it had to be done.”
The boy on the ground couldn’t speak, drowning in his own blood.
“You will not die, Raphael. You cannot die. You are immortal.” Leaning down to press a cool kiss against the bloody ruin of the boy’s cheek. “You are the son of two archangels.”
The boy’s miraculously undamaged eyes filled with betrayal. His father was dead. Immortals could die.
Sadness shifted through Caliane. “He had to die, my love. If he had not, hell would have reigned on earth.”
The boy’s eyes grew darker, more accusing. Caliane sighed, then smiled. “And so must I—that is why you came to kill me, is it not?” Soft, delighted laughter. “You can’t kill me, my sweet Raphael. Only another of the Cadre of Ten can destroy an archangel. And they will never find me.”
A shocking transition into his own mind, his own memories. Because he had none of Caliane’s after that—she’d made the memory transfer as he lay so badly injured he hadn’t even been able to crawl for months. Nor had he been able to lift his eyes to watch her take flight. Instead, his last memory of his mother was of the sight of her bare feet stepping lightly across the verdant green of the meadow, a trail of angel dust sparkling in her wake.
“Mother,” he tried to say.
“Shh, my darling. Shh.” Then a gust of wind blew dirt into his eyes.
When he blinked awake, Caliane was gone.
And he was looking into the face of a vampire.
Blood born
He fed.
His parched bones swelled, filled with life.
But he needed more.
So much more.
This was the ecstasy the others had been trying to keep from him while bloating themselves with power. Now they would pay the price. Blood dripped from his canines as he screamed a challenge that shattered window glass on every building within a mile radius.
It was time.
21
Dmitri’s expression held pure relief. “Sire?”
“What time is it?” he asked, his voice strong. Anshara had done its work. But he’d have to pay the price it demanded soon.
“Dawn,” Dmitri answered in the old way. “Light is just touching the horizon.”
Raphael got out of bed and flexed his wing. “The hunter?”
“Bound in another room.”
The wing was back to normal except for one thing. He looked down at the inner pattern. The smooth brushstrokes of gold had been interrupted at the point where Elena’s bullet had torn through. Now the bottom half of that wing bore a unique pattern in gold on white—an explosion from a central point. He smiled. So, he would carry the mark of Elena’s burst of violence.
“Sire?” Dmitri’s voice was questioning as he noted the smile.
Raphael continued to look down at the wing, at the mark caused by the Quiet. It would serve as a useful reminder. “Did you hurt her, Dmitri?” He glanced at his second, noting the disheveled hair, the wrinkled clothing.
“No.” The vampire’s lips curved
upward in a feral smile. “I thought you’d enjoy that pleasure.”
Raphael touched Elena’s mind. She was asleep, exhausted from a night spent attempting to break her bonds. “This is a battle between me and the hunter. No one else will interfere. Take care the others know that.”
Dmitri couldn’t hide his surprise. “You won’t punish her? Why?”
Raphael answered to no one, but Dmitri had been with him longer than any other. “Because I took the first shot. And she is mortal.”
The vampire’s expression remained unconvinced. “I like Elena, but if she escapes punishment, others might question your power.”
“Make sure they understand that Elena occupies a very special place in the scheme of things. Anyone else who dares challenge me will soon wish I’d shown them the same mercy I showed Germaine.”
Dmitri’s face paled. “May I ask one question?”
He waited in silent permission.
“Why were you so badly injured?” Dmitri pulled out a gun he’d had tucked into the small of his back. “I checked the bullet she used—it should’ve only caused minor damage, given her a head start of ten minutes at most.”
Then she will kill you. She will make you mortal.
“I needed to be injured,” he responded obliquely. “It was the answer to a question.”
Dmitri looked frustrated. “Can it happen again?”
“I’ll make sure it doesn’t.” He took pity on the leader of his Seven. “Do not worry, Dmitri—you won’t have to watch the city shudder under the rule of another archangel. Not for another eternity.”
“I’ve seen what they can do.” The vampire’s eyes swirled with the rivers of memory. “I was under Neha’s tender mercies for a hundred years. Why didn’t you stop me when I rebelled against your authority?”
“You were two hundred years old,” Raphael pointed out, heading toward the bathroom. “Old enough to choose.”
Dmitri snorted. “Old enough to be cocky with no real knowledge to back it up. A damn pup with delusions of grandeur.” A pause. “Have you never wondered—if I’m a spy?”
