Archangel's Consort (31 page)

Read Archangel's Consort Online

Authors: Nalini Singh

BOOK: Archangel's Consort
3.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“That’s a low blow.” She’d known it would come, just hadn’t expected it so soon and from
him
. Never from Santiago. “But yeah, if you want to draw a line in the sand—I’m not simply a hunter anymore. I’m an archangel’s consort.” It felt strange to hear the words fall from her lips, but she’d made her choices, would stand by them.
Straightening from his slouched position, the detective dropped his arms. “Guess that puts me in my place.”
She wanted to shake him. “Why are you being so unreasonable? You’ve always been happy to let the Guild handle vampiric incidents.”
“Something about this smells.” A stubborn line to his jaw, that salt-and-pepper stubble catching the light. “I don’t want the city to become a battleground like it did last time.”
“You think I do?”
“You’re not human anymore, Ellie. I don’t know your priorities.”
It hurt worse not just because they’d been friends for years, but because he’d been so accepting of her since her return. Clenching her fists, she gave him a deliberately expressionless face. “I guess that makes us even—I don’t know who you are anymore either.”
She thought he flinched and was almost certain he was about to say something, but then he got in the squad car, slamming the door shut. Only after he’d driven off did she double over, feeling as if she’d taken a punch to the gut. Breathing past it, she rose back to her full height and walked into the house to call Venom. She needed to pound her aggression out on someone, and the vampire had a way of provoking her past all reason—it was exactly what she needed today.
Venom wasn’t only free, he was in a hell of a temper. As a result, she fell into bed that night bruised and battered and exhausted. Raphael raised an eyebrow at her condition when he came to join her. “Why was the mortal here?”
Of course he knew. “He wanted to talk about the case.”
An ominous silence that spoke louder than words.
Thumping her fist into the pillow, she turned onto her side. “It’s not important, not with everything else that’s going on.”
“I could always ask the mortal.”
She scowled and turned to stare down at him where he lay on his back on the bed. “Blackmail doesn’t work well with me.”
Arms folded behind his head, he looked at her with blue eyes gone dangerously quiet. “I’m not making a threat.”
Her hands curled into tight, bloodless fists. “It’s nothing!”
An unblinking gaze.
“Fine.” Slamming down on her back, she stared at the ceiling. “It’s just ... hard being torn between two worlds.” With the words out, her anger disappeared, to be replaced by a far more hurtful emotion—tight and hot and abrasive in her chest.
Raphael rose up to lean on his elbow beside her, his hair falling over his forehead. It was impossible to resist the temptation to lift her hand, run her fingers through the midnight silk of it. “I didn’t tell you before,” she said, the words wanting out, “but Beth, she said something to me. That she’d die and I’d still be alive.” Emotion burned at the backs of her eyes. “I’m not supposed to outlive my baby sister, Raphael.”
“No.” A solemn answer. “But would you change this? Would you change us?”
“No. Never.” An absolute truth. “It still hurts to know that I’ll stand over her grave one day.” A single tear escaped her control to trickle down the side of her face.
Raphael leaned down until their lips brushed. “Your mortal heart causes you much pain, Elena—but it makes you who you are.” A kiss that stole her breath. “It will give you the strength to bear the costs of immortality.”
He had touched her in so many ways, but that night, he touched her with a tenderness that broke her heart. He kissed the salt of her tears away, his lips so firm, so gentle on her cheek, her jaw, her mouth. And his hands, those powerful, dangerous hands ...
Never had she been handled with such exquisite care. Never had she felt so cherished.
Yet, at the end, he called her, “Warrior mine,” this archangel who had seen her at her weakest. Those were the words she took into a deep, dreamless sleep, Raphael’s heartbeat strong and steady beneath her palm.
 
 
Raphael.
Elena jerked awake at the whisper, glancing over to see her archangel asleep on his front, his magnificent wings spread out until they covered her, too. He had a habit of doing that in bed, she thought, heart aching at the memory of his tenderness earlier. But even as she stroked the white-gold of his feathers with one hand, she retrieved the dagger she’d secreted down the side of the bed with the other.
If that was Lijuan whispering into the inky dark of the bedroom, then a dagger wouldn’t do much good, but Elena felt better with the kiss of steel against her skin. Pushing tangled hair off her face with her free hand, she searched the room with her gaze. There were no intruders, nothing that shouldn’t be there. But her heart continued to pound, as if—
Raphael.
Ice in her bloodstream, her eyes arrowed toward a rippling pocket of air at the bottom of the bed. Almost a mirage, but not quite. It was as if the fabric of the world itself was being twisted as something tried to take shape and failed. Throat dry, she reached out without taking her eyes off that thing and shook Raphael’s muscular shoulder. It amazed her that he’d slept through this—he tended to wake the instant she did, because the fact was, he didn’t
need
to sleep.
Solid muscle under her hand. But Raphael didn’t wake.
Archangel
, she said into his mind,
wake up
.
There’s something in the room.
Silence. Emptiness.
Her entire body went stiff, hand clenching on his shoulder. Nothing, but nothing, had ever stopped Raphael from responding to a mental plea from her. He’d found her in the middle of New York when Uram had held her captive in a charnel house of a room. He’d tracked her across the Refuge when Michaela went nuclear at the Medica. He’d broken a meeting of the Cadre itself to save her life in Beijing. There was no way he’d sleep through a call from her when she was sitting right next to him.
Staring at the strange near mirage, she set her jaw and lifted the steel in her hand. “Go to hell.” A soft whisper as she threw.
25
 
The knife sliced through the air to dig home in the op
posite wall, the hilt quivering at the impact. The mirage, though it didn’t disappear . . . sort of fractured. That was when she caught the whisper of a scent that shouldn’t have been there.
Lush, sensual, exotic.
Black orchids, but it was somehow different from what she’d sensed on the murdered girl’s body, on the men hanging from the bridge.
But there was no time for her to process the notes, because a split second after the fracture, a wing was rising under her touch. Moving so fast she couldn’t track him with her eyes, Raphael was up and standing beside the bed, the white-hot glow of him so vivid as to erase the lines of his form, to turn him into a blazing torch. Stunned, Elena threw a hand over her eyes and ducked her head in preparation for crawling out of bed so she could retrieve the weapons she’d hidden underneath, do what she could to assist.
But one blink and the blinding heat of his power was gone.
Looking up, hand itching for a weapon, she saw that the
thing
in the center of the room had disappeared, no hint of black orchids in the air. But she didn’t drop her guard until Raphael said, “My mother is no longer here, Elena.” There was a remoteness to his voice she didn’t like.
Pushing off the blankets, she began to slide out.
Raphael was already pulling on a pair of pants over that magnificent body. “I’ll be back before dawn. She will not return tonight.”
“Wait!”
He didn’t even pause at the balcony doors, pushing them wide open. She managed to cover the distance just in time to see him disappear into the starry night sky, flying so far and fast that she lost track of him in the space of a few piercing seconds. Anger stabbed through her, hot and determined. Damn if he was going to do this—especially after the intimacy of the moments they’d shared not only tonight, but since she’d woken from the coma, after the bonds they’d forged.
Stalking back into the bedroom, she pulled on her own pants, slapped on one of the supportive tank tops that had been designed to fit around her wings using straps, then slid on the warm, lined sleeves that fit snugly over her upper arms and left her hands free. She was back on the balcony bare minutes after he’d taken off, very conscious of the tendrils of dark chocolate and fur curling beneath the bedroom door as the male behind the scents got ever closer—Dmitri had come over for a late meeting with Raphael, opted to stay the night in one of the rooms reserved for the Seven.
Now, it was clear Raphael had told him to watch over Elena.
That, too, she thought with teeth-gritting focus, was going to stop.
Looking down, she realized she had no hope of making a flight from her current position, not with her concentration shot to smithereens. So instead, she jumped over the balcony, using her wings to slow her descent. Then she ran through the trees at the edge of the cliff to dive out over the Hudson, beating her wings—stronger, more resilient—hard and fast to sweep herself up off the choppy water and into the clear beauty of the night sky, the stars sparkling ice on black velvet.
The wind was cool against her skin, liquid soft over her wings. Below her, Manhattan was a midnight sea scattered with glittering jewels. New York. It could be a hard place, a hard city. Just like the archangel who ruled it.
But it was home.
As the archangel was hers.
Raphael.
She made the effort to arrow the thought only to him, having worked with him over the past few days to fine-tune what mental abilities she already seemed to have. According to Raphael, she’d gain other abilities with time, and she was happy with that—she had more than enough on her plate right now without having to deal with some unexpected superpower.
No response, but some tug in her soul made her turn, head roughly in the direction of Camden, New Jersey. Raphael had bonded to her on some level deeper than the heart. The hunter she’d once been would’ve scoffed at such thoughts, but that was before she’d tasted the golden pleasure of ambrosia as Raphael fed it into her mouth, as he kissed immortal life into her dying body.
Who was to say that such an act wouldn’t have even deeper consequences?
Go home, Elena.
Startled, she dipped and glanced over her shoulder to see Raphael in the sky high above her.
We’ll be going home together.
You can’t hope to keep up with me.
Such arrogance in those words, but that made them no less true.
Instead of answering, she continued to fly, riding the night winds to give herself a break when she could. Some time later, they left the last edges of the cityscape behind, the streetlights below them speaking of quiet neighborhoods locked up in the arms of sleep.
A sweep of air against her face as her archangel shot down in front of her before rising with heart-stopping speed. He’d shown off for her before. But this wasn’t play. This was an archangel pointing out how very puny she was in the scheme of things.
Newsflash, Archangel. I already know I’m as weak as a baby compared to you. Hasn’t stopped me from dancing with you anytime yet.
As the words left her mouth, she remembered something else, a sensual promise he’d made to her at the Refuge.
You said you would show me how angels dance.
I am in no mood to be gentle, Guild Hunter.
She raised an eyebrow.
Consort.
You’re tiring. I can see your wings beginning to falter.
Cursing under her breath because he was right, she looked for a place to land. When her eyes lit on a thick branch high above the ground, the tree situated in what looked like a deserted local park, she dropped without hesitation. Maybe she’d break some bones, but hell, she was training so freaking hard for a reason—playing it safe wasn’t it.
At the last minute, right when she knew she
was
assuredly going to break some bones, Raphael slipped into her mind and corrected her angle of descent so that she was able to grab the branch and pull herself up to straddle it without damage. She glared in his direction.
Stop taking over whenever you feel like it.
A dangerous pause.
Would you have preferred to spend the next few weeks in a cast?
I’d prefer to learn to do this myself.
Yet you attempt to pierce the clouds when you can barely fly in a straight line.
Anger bubbled through her bloodstream.
Come down here and say that to my face.
Her hair whipped back in a gust of wind an instant later, and then Raphael was hovering next to her branch, the angles of his face starkly masculine, his eyes blazing that metallic chrome that never augured anything good. “You shouldn’t be flying such long distances, much less hunting,” he said with the arrogance of an immortal who had lived well over a thousand years. “You need to spend another few years at the Refuge at the very least.”

Other books

Clarity by Claire Farrell
The Istanbul Puzzle by Laurence O'Bryan
Sworn Virgin by Elvira Dones
When You Were Here by Daisy Whitney
Flora's Very Windy Day by Jeanne Birdsall
Hostile Makeover by Wendy Wax
Arrow’s Flight by Mercedes Lackey
Mayhem by Artist Arthur