Archangel's Consort (10 page)
Read Archangel's Consort Online
Authors: Nalini Singh
“Raphael.” She appeared of the flesh as her image formed on the water, her face as ageless as always. Only the pure white of her hair, the pearlescent glow of her pale, pale eyes betrayed what she was, what she was becoming. “So you return to me after all.”
He didn’t react except to say, “Do you think to make me a pet, Lijuan?”
A tinkling laugh, girlish and all the more disturbing for it. “What a thought. I think you would be a most troublesome one.”
Raphael inclined his head. “You are home?” Lijuan’s palace lay in the heart of China, deep in mountainous territory Raphael had never traversed, though Jason had managed to work his way inside before Lijuan’s “evolution.” Raphael’s spymaster had returned from the clandestine visit with half his face torn off.
“Yes.” The other archangel’s hair whispered back in a breeze that he was certain affected nothing else in the vicinity. “I find,” she continued, “that there are certain pleasures of the flesh I do still enjoy after all, and where best to partake of them than in my palace?”
Raphael didn’t make the mistake of thinking she spoke of sex. Lijuan hadn’t been a sexual being for thousands of years . . . or not sexual in the accepted sense. “Are your toys surviving the experience?”
A finger rose up until he could see it, waved at him. “Such a question, Raphael. You would call me a monster.”
“You would take it as a compliment.”
Another laugh, those eerie, near-colorless eyes filling with a surge of power that turned them wholly white, without pupil or iris. “An Ancient rises to consciousness.”
He wasn’t surprised she’d guessed at the reason behind this contact. Despite the nightmare she’d become, he’d never doubted Lijuan’s intelligence. “Yes.”
“Do you know how old your mother was when she disappeared?” she asked without warning.
An image of startling blue eyes, a voice that made the heavens weep, and a madness so deep and true it mimicked sanity. “Just over a thousand years older than you.”
Lijuan’s lips curved in a smile that held a strange amusement. “She was vain, was Caliane. She liked to tell people that because it made her almost the same age as her mate.”
Raphael felt ice form in his chest, spread outward in jagged branches, threatening to pierce his veins. “How much older was she?”
Lijuan’s answer shattered the ice, turned it into shards of glass that spliced through his system, causing massive damage. “Fifty thousand years. Even that may have been a lie. It was whispered that she was twice that age when I was born.”
“Impossible,” he said at last, knowing he could betray none of his shock. To do so would be to tempt the predator that lived within Lijuan. “No archangel that old would have chosen to remain awake.” A hundred thousand years was an impossible eternity. Yes, they had old ones in their world, but except for a few notable exceptions, most of them chose to go into the Sleep for eons at a time, awakening only for brief periods to taste the changing world.
Lijuan’s smile faded, her voice echoing with a thousand ghostly whispers. “They say Caliane Slept before, more than once. But when she woke the final time, she found Nadiel.”
“Then I was born.” He thought of his laughing, singing mother, thought, too, of her descent into a madness that had seemed to come out of nowhere. But if she’d been alive for so many millennia ... “Do you lie to me, Lijuan?”
“I have no need to lie. I have evolved beyond even Caliane.”
On the surface, that certainly appeared true. Age had never been the arbiter of power among their kind. Raphael had become an archangel at an age unheard of among angelkind. And at just over five hundred years old, Illium was already far stronger than angels ten times his age. But that wasn’t why he’d contacted Lijuan. “Is it my mother who wakes?” he asked, holding that “blind” gaze.
“There is no way to know.” The whispers in her voice sounded almost like screams. “However, the magnitude of the disruption, the strength of the quakes and the storms, says that the one who wakes is the most ancient of Ancients.”
Raphael wondered what it was Lijuan saw with those eyes, if it was worth the sacrifice of a city . . . of what remained of her soul. “If this Ancient wakes without sanity, will you execute him or her?” Not before. Never before. To murder an angel in Sleep was to face automatic execution—no one was immune to that law. Even Lijuan, invulnerable though she might be to death, would find herself shunned by the entire angelic race if she crossed that line. Not something a goddess would enjoy.
Another girlish laugh, this one a giggle that was more disturbing than her appearance. “You disappoint me, Raphael. What need do I have to execute an old one? They can do nothing to me ... and perhaps they can teach me secrets I do not yet know.”
It was then Raphael realized that if one monster came to waking life, it might well strengthen another.
The conversation with Jeffrey, coming as it did on top of
the painful visit to the morgue, left Elena feeling as if she’d been beaten by stone fists. It was tempting, so tempting, to go home and hide, just pretend that everything would be okay when she came out again.
the painful visit to the morgue, left Elena feeling as if she’d been beaten by stone fists. It was tempting, so tempting, to go home and hide, just pretend that everything would be okay when she came out again.
Except, of course, that was a child’s ploy. Elena hadn’t had the luxury of believing in hopeless dreams since she’d been a scared ten-year-old slipping and falling in a family kitchen turned abattoir. “Do you know where Jason is?” she asked Dmitri when they exited the morgue.
Dmitri pressed the car remote to unlock the flame red Ferrari parked in the employees-only lot. “Tired of your Bluebell already?” A tendril of champagne circled around her senses, cut with something far harder.
Never had she felt that harsh edge in Dmitri’s scent. She pitied the woman he took to his bed today. “Yeah, that’s it. I’m building a harem.”
Opening the door to the Ferrari, Dmitri braced one arm on top. For a moment, his expression turned probing, and she had the feeling he was about to say something important. But then he shook his head, his hair lifting slightly in the dull breeze, and pulled out his cell phone, checked something. “He’s at the Tower.”
Surprised by the straight answer, she fought off the wickedness of champagne to say, “Can you ask if he’d mind meeting me at the house?”
Dmitri made the call. “He’s leaving now,” he said, snapping the phone closed. “Nowhere for you to take off from here.”
Elena looked up. “Hospital building is high enough. I’ll head up to the roof.” Suiting action to words, she made her way back into the building and up. It was an interesting journey. There were only a few hospital staff in the lower corridors, and the ones who did see her seemed to lose the ability to speak.
Deeply bothered by that reaction from the people of a city she considered home, she found her way to the elevator and pushed the button. Because the staff used it to move beds from floor to floor, the cage was plenty big enough for wings. Then the doors opened on the first floor.
Two nurses, chattering to each other, looked up. Froze.
Elena stepped back. “Plenty of room.”
Neither woman said a word as the doors closed on their stunned faces. Variations of the scene were repeated on the next four floors. It was funny ... except it felt wrong. This was New York. She needed to belong here—though she knew she would never again fit in the same way.
“Hmph.”
She glanced up at that sound to see that the doors had opened on the fifth floor to reveal an elderly man leaning on a cane. “Going up?”
He nodded and stepped in, making no effort to hide the fact that he was staring at her wings as he used his cane to push the button for his floor. “You’re a new one.”
“Very.” She stretched out her wings for him, the knots in her soul unraveling a little. “What do you think?”
He took his time replying. “Why are you taking the elevator?”
Smart man. “Felt like it.”
He laughed as the doors opened on his floor. “You sure sound like a New Yorker!”
Elena was smiling when the doors closed, something she would’ve never predicted minutes ago as she stood beside Dmitri. When the doors finally opened on the last level, she got out and made her way to the roof with firm steps, no longer feeling as if she’d been pummeled to screaming point.
The flight across the Hudson, assisted as she was by strong winds, went by fast. Jason was waiting for her in the front yard, his wings folded neatly back, his hair in its usual queue. It was the first time she’d seen his tattoo in full light, and the detail and intricacy of it made her suck in a breath.
Damaged by Lijuan’s reborn before Elena woke from her coma, the ink had been redone with such perfection after Jason healed that no one would ever know the difference. All curves and swirling lines, it spoke of the winds of the Pacific and the soaring beauty of the skies at the same time. “Where were you born?” she found herself asking, not expecting an answer.
8
“A small Pacific atoll that no longer exists.” There was
nothing in that statement. No pain, no sorrow, no anger. Nothing.
nothing in that statement. No pain, no sorrow, no anger. Nothing.
The very lack of emotion was another answer.
Letting Jason’s secrets lie, she said, “I was hoping you could teach me some tricks about flying in daylight without making myself too big a target.”
Jason narrowed his eyes, his attention going to her wings. “There are a few techniques you can use straight away, but for the rest, you’ll need to practice until you can pull yourself high above the cloud layer in a burst of speed.”
“Do you have time to give me a lesson now?”
A small nod.
“I flew a longer distance than usual today,” she admitted, “so I might be off the pace.”
“We’ll be moving slowly—it’s not about speed below the cloud layer, but about utilizing light and shadow to your advantage.”
Nodding, she fell into step beside him as he led her toward the cliffs. Evening shadows had fallen by the time he pronounced her proficient enough to continue the drills on her own. “I leave Manhattan tonight.”
“Take care, Jason.” As Raphael’s spymaster, he walked dangerous roads.
He looked at her straight on with those eyes as dark as the blade he carried along his spine. “What is it like to be mortal?”
Startled, she took a second to think, to consider. “Life is much more immediate. When you have a time limit, every moment gains an importance that an immortal will never know.”
Jason spread those amazing wings designed to blend into the night. “What you call a time limit, some might call an escape.” He was rising into the sky before she could answer; he was a shadowy silhouette against the first wash of night.
But his weren’t the only wings she spotted.
Does Jason want escape so very much, Archangel?
Does Jason want escape so very much, Archangel?
Yes. His sole tie to the living world is through his service to me.
“Was it a woman, like with Illium?” she whispered as he came in to land with a rush of wind that blew the hair off her face.
“No. Jason has never loved.” Closing his arms and his wings around her, he turned his head to look out over the Manhattan skyline as it flickered to glittering life. “It would be better if he had—then he may have had some good memories to fight the dark.”
Elena tried to hold on to that thought as she fell into sleep that night, tried to tell herself to remember the laughter and the joy. But it was a nightmare that came after her, choking her with the smell of rancid blood and the gurgling whispers of a dead child lying on a morgue slab, the sounds shaped as fine, sticky strands that were very much real. The cobwebby filaments wrapped around her until she lashed out in panic, tearing herself awake to jerk up into a sitting position.
Her hand, she realized after long moments, was clenched tight around the hilt of the knife she’d hidden under the mattress on her side of the bed, the metal cold against her palm. Adrenaline pumping, she turned her head—to see Raphael awake and rising from the bed.
“Come, Elena.”
It took conscious effort to release the knife from her white-knuckled grip. Placing it beside Destiny’s Rose, the diamond sculpture that was a priceless work of art ... and a gift from her archangel, she took the hand he held out, let him tug her to a standing position. “Are we going flying?” Skin jittery, heart pounding double-time, she felt as if she would break apart.
Raphael gave her wings a critical appraisal. “No. You strained them today.” A glance at the wall clock. “Yesterday.”
It was five a.m.; the world was still cloaked in night when Raphael led her outside. He’d dressed only in a pair of flowing pants that moved like black water over his form, while she’d pulled on sweatpants and a white silk shirt much too large for her frame. Raphael had said nothing when she’d taken it from his closet, simply sealed the wing slots with a minute flicker of energy so they wouldn’t flap around her.
It was crisp out, making her cheeks tingle. “Where are we going?” she asked as Raphael led her to the woods on the opposite side to the one that separated his home from Michaela’s.
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