Angels' Blood (41 page)

A snapshot of memory—the golden, melting heat of his kiss, the delicate sweetness, the lush sensuality, the taste that was an erotic sensation and whispered caress in one. “The mythical food of the gods?”

“Every myth holds a grain of truth.”

She couldn’t help it, she kissed him again. And the taste of him rushed over her in a tumultuous wave. He was the one who broke the kiss.

The aches inside her were a testament to that truth. That didn’t mean she had to like it. “Tell me about ambrosia then.” A bad-tempered command.

“Ambrosia,” he said against her mouth, “is produced instinctively at a single point in an archangel’s life.”

Images of his shredded wings, the living burn of angelfire. “Near death?” She touched him, checking, exploring, convincing herself he was alive.

“We’ve all been near death more than once.” He shook his head. “No one has ever been able to pinpoint the trigger.”

“But?”

“But it is legend that ambrosia only rises when—”

She held her breath.

“—an archangel loves true.”

The world stopped. The air particles seemed to still above her, the molecules suspended as she stared at the magnificence of the man who held her in his arms. “Maybe I was just biologically compatible.” It came out a ragged whisper.

“Perhaps.” The possession of lips against her neck. “We have eternity to discover the truth. And in that eternity, you will be mine.”

She thrust her hands into his hair, feeling heat spread through her body in a rolling wave. But she couldn’t surrender. Not until they got one thing straight. “Fine—so long as you don’t think that gives you the right to rule my life.”

He came over her as she lay back down. “Why not?”

She blinked at the cool arrogance of that question, and realized that her existence had just become a whole lot more interesting. Forget about hunting an archangel, she was about to learn how to dance with one without losing herself in the process. Exhilaration spiked through her bloodstream. “This is going to be some ride, Archangel.”

Elena had had visions of flying in through Sara’s window
and startling the heck out of her best friend, but that was before she realized that while she might be awake, actual movement was a whole other story. Which was why she was still in bed when a blindfolded Sara was shown into her room at the Refuge.

Raphael had moved her to the angelic stronghold soon after his own recovery, but had managed to keep her hidden. Only the Seven and trusted healing and medical personnel knew about her. However, he hadn’t even tried to argue when she asked to see Sara.

Her friend folded her arms and gritted her teeth as she was led across the carpet by Dmitri, who seemed to take perverse pleasure in wrapping his scent around Elena while she was too weak to defend herself. To everyone’s surprise, she’d come through the transformation with both her hunter abilities
and
weaknesses intact.

She and Raphael were continuing to “discuss” her status as Guild Hunter.

The lush caress of liquid satin across her skin, tempting and inviting. Rubbing her arms, Elena scowled at Dmitri and was about to speak when Sara blew out a breath. “I don’t know what your boss thinks he’s going to achieve by abducting me. We’re not going to end the strike.”

Strike?
That explained Raphael’s cheery mood this morning. If the hunters were refusing to do their job, vampires had to be reneging on their Contracts left, right, and center. “Now my head’s really swollen.”

Sara froze, then scrabbled to pull off her blindfold as Dmitri slipped out of the room, closing the door behind himself—but not before encasing Elena in another decadent wave of scent. She was still getting her breath back when Sara’s blindfold dropped to the floor.

Her friend’s eyes went wide. Then she turned sheet white under the exotic beauty of her skin.

“Christ, Sara, don’t faint!” Elena yelled, reaching out as if to catch her.

Sara braced her weight against a chair. “I’m hallucinating. Or that fish they fed me on the plane was laced with LSD.”

“Sara, if you don’t come and hug me, I’ll shoot you.” That gun Sara had put under her pillow had saved not only her own life, but Raphael’s as well. “It’s me, you idiot!”

Sara swallowed, then rushed to the bed. Their arms wrapped around each other so tight that breathing became optional. Elena didn’t care. Blubbering, they started to talk at the same time, laughing and crying.

“Thought you were—”

“—Raphael said—”

“I said, no way in hell—”

“Damn straight—”

“—and Ransom was ready to come up—”

“—woke up and I had wings!”

They both stopped, stared at each other, giggled, then drew back.

“Holy crap, you have wings.” Sara took the cup of coffee on Elena’s bedside table and chugged it. “Is that what I think it is?”

Destiny’s Rose glittered from its position on her bedside table. “Raphael’s being stubborn.”

Choking, Sara put down the empty coffee cup and thumped her fist on her chest a few times before saying, “Now, explain to me why you have wings.”

“I don’t know if I can. I’m learning as I go here—but what the heck is this about a strike?”

Sara grinned. “Got me here, didn’t it?” Her smirk was very satisfied. “They’ve been keeping you from us, Ellie, telling us you were alive but nothing more. We thought you’d been paralyzed—” Her breath hitched and suddenly her hurt was a living, breathing entity between them. “Couldn’t you have called me, Ellie? A
year.
Didn’t you trust me?”

Elena squeezed her friend’s hands. “I woke up exactly twenty-four hours ago. The first person I asked to see was you. But don’t tell Ransom, or he’ll get jealous.”

“You were in a coma for a year?” Sara’s mouth dropped open. “How come you’re mobile? Are you? Your muscles—”

“Yes,” she said before Sara’s fears could take root all over again. “I don’t know. They said something about healers and exercise but I’m sorta stuck on the wings.”

Sara shook her head, reached out to touch, then snapped back her hand. “Angels don’t like it when—”

Elena grabbed her friend’s hand, put it on the sleek feathers that were her own. “I’m still me.”

Sara’s hand whispered over her wing, and though the sensation was nothing like when Raphael touched her, it
was
a kind of intimacy—the kind between friends. “Ransom still with Nyree?”

Sara nodded, laughter in her eyes as she dropped her hand back down to the sheets. “I don’t think he can believe it himself. So, you have wings.”

“Yes.”

“Angels don’t Make other angels.”

“Then what am I? Chopped liver?” A disturbing tendril of thought wormed its way into her brain. She’d said she was still the same, but was she really? Could she share everything with Sara now when to do so might be to expose the secrets of an entire race? Later, she told herself, she’d think about that later. “So, do you like my wings? Aren’t they the most exquisite things you’ve ever seen?”

Sara started laughing. “Vanity, thy name is Elena.”

“Thank you very much,” she said on a wave of determination. Losing Sara’s friendship wasn’t an option. And if she had to fight an archangel to keep it, so be it. “Now, tell me all the goss.”

 

 

Outside, on the jagged rocks that guarded the Refuge,
Raphael stood shoulder to shoulder with Dmitri. “A human sits in the Refuge,” he said, his hair whipped back by the wind. “It breaks one of our deepest taboos.”

“She has no idea of the location—you can wipe her mind to ensure she can’t betray what little she does know.” Practical words from the leader of his Seven.

“Yes.” But he wouldn’t and that was the change that was his. “Or I could trust Elena’s word on Sara’s sense of honor.”

Dmitri nodded, and when he next spoke, his tone was quiet. “Elena will change us.”

“She already has.” As wild and relentless as these fierce mountain winds, his hunter would never simply accept the way of things. And for a race of immortals, that might be the rudest of awakenings. Anticipation hummed in his blood.

“Jason’s returned,” Dmitri said, pulling him back to the present.

“When?”

“Two days ago. Some of Lijuan’s reborn managed to injure him, but he’ll recover within the week.”

Raphael nodded, knowing that more changes were afoot than the Making of an angel. “So it begins.”

 

Change can kill.

Devastate.

Destroy.

But it can also save. The Psy know this better than any other race on the planet. With the imposition of Silence, the protocol that wiped their emotions even as it saved their minds, this race of telepaths and telekinetics, foreseers and healers, a race both gifted and cursed, clawed its way back from the edge of the abyss.

As they stood looking down into the horror they’d escaped, they shivered and turned away.

Years passed. And when the Psy Council declared that their once catastrophic rate of insanity had lowered to negligible levels, that there was no longer any violence in the PsyNet, they knew they’d made the right decision. The only decision.

Love. Happiness. Joy. What did any of that matter when the flip side was murderous rage, blood-soaked anarchy? The Psy preferred to leave such things to the “animal” races—and while the humans and changelings buried themselves in the viciousness of emotion, the Psy evolved into the most powerful beings on the planet.

Cold. Pitiless. Silent.

But now, in the year 2080, more than a hundred years after the “miracle” of Silence, the animal races are beginning to rise. And change is pulling the Psy back into the abyss. Into emotion and chaos . . . and nightmare.

Mercy kicked a dry branch out of her way and glared.
“Stupid stick.” Of course
,
it wasn’t the defenseless stick she was mad at—it just had the bad luck to be in her path as, shoulders hunched, she made her escape from the Pack Circle and the continuing revelry of Dorian’s mating ceremony.

It was sickening how much her best friend was in love with his mate. In fact, all the other sentinels were starting to make her gag. “Clay making goo-goo eyes at Tally, and don’t get me started on Luc and Sascha.”

Then there were the worst offenders of all—Nathan and Tamsyn. How dare they still be so crazy for each other after all these years! “Should be against the law,” she snarled. She wasn’t even going to think about Vaughn and Faith.

She decided to go for a run instead.

An hour later, and deep enough in the pack’s heavily forested territory that she couldn’t hear anything beyond the cautious whisper of nocturnal creatures moving about in the dark, she sat down on the smooth trunk of a fallen tree and blew out her breath. The truth was, she wasn’t mad at any of the sentinels or their mates. Damn, she was so crazy-happy for them it hurt. But she was jealous, too. Everyone was paired up now. Except her.

“There,” she muttered. “I admitted it. I’m a big ole jealous baby.”

Being a dominant female wasn’t a bad thing in changeling society. Female alphas were as common as male ones. But being a dominant female in a leopard pack where none of the dominant males pushed her buttons, that was bad. And being a dominant female in a state controlled by leopards and wolves—of whom only the
wrong
one pushed her buttons—was extra-cherry-on-top bad.

Not that she was limited to their territory—Dorian had been nudging at her to go out of state, see if she couldn’t find someone in one of the other packs, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave DarkRiver, not when things were so dicey. Sure, life had calmed down a little since the failed kidnapping attempt on Dorian’s mate, Ashaya, but it was an edgy sort of calm. Everyone was waiting for the next ripple in the pond—whether it would come from the suspiciously quiet Psy Council or the newly violent Human Alliance was anyone’s guess.

That it would, was certain.

As a DarkRiver sentinel, she should’ve been considering their defense strategy, working out possible scenarios. Instead, she was going so insane with need she couldn’t think of anything but the fever in her body, the hunger in her throat, the clawing
want
in every cell, every breath. Inimate touch was as necessary to her predator’s soul as the forest she called home, but things might not have been so bad if she hadn’t also been trying to cope with the impact of a conversation she’d had with the pack healer, Tamsyn, a few days ago.

Mercy was the one who’d said it. “There’s a strong possibility I’ll remain unmated.”

“You don’t know that,” Tammy had begun, frown lines on her brow. “You could mee—”

“It’s not that. I might not be
able
to be with anyone. You know that happens.”

Tammy had bent her head in a reluctant nod. “The chances are higher with dominant females than males. It’s an inability to give in . . . to surrender. Even to your mate.”

And that was the hell of it, Mercy thought. She might want a mate with everything in her, but if he appeared, and he was the strong, take-no-shit partner she knew she needed, she might refuse to acknowledge him on the level necessary for a true mating bond. Oh, the mating urge would probably overpower her into taking him for a lover, perhaps more . . . but if the leopard in her didn’t truly
accept
his right to her, then she might go roaming for months at a time, coming back to him only when she could no longer fight the need.

It was a special kind of torture reserved for those female leopards who got tangled up at the mere idea of giving a male any kind of control over them. And put it any way you would, unless her mate turned out to be a weak submissive—and she’d never be attracted to someone like that, so that was a no-brainer—he
was
going to try to dominate her.