Archangel's Kiss (40 page)

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.

 

 

K
illing 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.

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.

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.

 

 

H
e 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.

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.

Pale silver eyes looking into his.

Love, he thought as he held her to his heart, was an agony beyond compare.

R
aphael 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.

“That’s good enough for me.” A long breath, Elena’s arms snaking out of the blanket to wrap around him. “I want to go home, Archangel.”

Stroking his hand over the warm curve of her hip, he wondered if New York was ready for a hunter turned angel. “We leave with the next sunrise.”

Turn the page for a special preview of Nalini Singh’s next book in the Psy-Changeling series

Coming July 2010 from Berkley Sensation!

W
hen the Psy first chose Silence, first chose to bury their emotions and turn into ice-cold individuals who cared nothing for love or hate, they tried to isolate their race from the humans and changelings. Constant contact with the races who continued to embrace emotion made it much harder to hold onto their own conditioning.

It was a logical thought.

However it proved impossible in practice. Economics alone made isolation an unfeasible goal—Psy might have all been linked into the PsyNet, the sprawling psychic network that anchored their minds, but they were not all equal. Some were rich, some were poor, and some were just getting by.

They needed jobs, needed money, needed food. And the Psy Council, for all its brutal power, could not provide enough internal positions for millions. The Psy had to remain part of the world, a world filled with chaos on every side, bursting at the seams with the extremes of joy and sadness, fear and despair. Those Psy who fractured under the pressure were quietly “rehabilitated,” their minds wiped, their personalities erased. But others thrived.

The M-Psy, gifted with the ability to look inside the body and diagnose illnesses, had never really withdrawn from the world. Their skills were prized by all three races, and they brought in a good income.

The less powerful members of the Psy populace returned to their ordinary, everyday jobs as accountants and engineers, shop owners and businessmen. Except that what they had once enjoyed, despised, or merely tolerated, they now simply
did
.

The most powerful, in contrast,
were
absorbed into the Council superstructure wherever possible. The Council did not want to chance losing its strongest.

Then there were the Js.

Telepaths born with a quirk that allowed them to slip into minds and retrieve memories, then share those memories with others, the Js had been part of the world’s justice system since the world first had one. There weren’t enough J-Psy to shed light on the guilt or innocence of every accused—they were brought in on only the most heinous of cases, the kinds of cases that made veteran detectives throw up and long-jaded reporters take a horrified step backward.

Realizing how advantageous it would be to have an entrée into a system that processed both humans and, at times, the secretive and pack-natured changelings as well, the Council allowed the Js to not just continue, but expand their work. Now, in the dawn of the year 2081, the Js are so much a part of the justice system that their presence raises no eyebrows, causes no ripples.

And, as for the unexpected mental consequences of long-term work as a J. . . well, the benefits outweigh the occasional murderous problem.

Circumstance doesn’t make a man. If it did, I’d have committed my first burglary at twelve, my first robbery at fifteen, and my first murder at seventeen.

 

 

 

I
t was as she was sitting, staring into the face of a sociopath that Sophia Russo realized three irrefutable truths.

One: In all likelihood, she had less than a year left before she was sentenced to comprehensive rehabilitation. Unlike normal rehabilitation, the process wouldn’t only wipe out her personality, leave her a drooling vegetable. Comprehensives had ninety-nine percent of their psychic senses fried as well. All for their own good of course.

Two: Not a single individual on this earth would remember her name after she disappeared from active duty.

Three: If she wasn’t careful, she would soon end up as empty and as inhuman as the man on the other side of the table . . . because the
otherness
in her wanted to squeeze his mind until he whimpered, until he bled, until he begged for mercy.

The echo of Detective Max Shannon’s words pulled her back from the whispering temptation of the abyss. For some reason, the idea of being labeled evil by him was . . . not acceptable. He had looked at her in a different way from other human males, his eyes noting her scars, but only as part of the package that was her body. The response had been extraordinary enough to make her pause, meet his gaze, attempt to divine what he was thinking.

That had proved impossible. But she knew what Max Shannon wanted.

Shutting the door on the darkness inside of her, she opened her psychic eye and reaching out with her telepathic senses, began to walk the twisted pathways of Gerard Bonner’s mind. She had touched many, many depraved minds over the course of her career, but this one was utterly and absolutely unique. Many who committed crimes of this caliber had a mental illness of some kind. She understood how to work with their sometimes disjointed and fragmented memories.

Bonner’s mind, in contrast, was neat, organized, each memory in its proper place. Except those places and the memories they contained made no sense, having been filtered through the cold lens of his sociopathic desires. He saw things as he wished to see them, the reality distorted until it was impossible to pinpoint the truth among the spiderweb of lies.