Archangel's Legion (29 page)

Every single channel had roped in a baseball commentator to discuss the angels’ technique, and speculation was rife about a possible rematch, with the Manhattan-based reporters smug as cats in the cream as they said, “Watch this space for further news about
our
angels.”

“I’d say Illium’s ploy was a success,” she said to Raphael later that night, in the privacy of the large bath in their Tower suite. “Aodhan’s appearance topped it off.”

“He surprised all of us.” Raphael no longer looked as “other” as he had after the river ran red, but every so often she’d hear a hint of those strange whispers in his voice. “Why are you sitting so far?” he asked now, his arms spread along the tiled edge of the tub the size of a small pool. “I assure you, I haven’t been overcome by the urge to make the dead walk.”

Floating across to him, she rested her hands on his thighs below the waterline. “The power, it’s holding?” No matter if it freaked her out, he needed to grow stronger if he was to stand against the others.

A darkness in the cerulean blue, shadows shifting under the sea. “No. It filled me to overflowing, but it has drained away ever since. I will return to myself by dawn.”

“Damn.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Yes, quite. If I need to wait for another extraordinary event to taste such strength, we may, as you put it, be screwed. Especially given the other factor.”

Eyes going to his right temple, she said, “Show me,” having kept her silence in Amanat for fear his enemies would get wind of what might be a sign of fatal weakness.

Raphael removed the mask of glamour to reveal the speck, except it was no longer a speck. It had spread in a fine line over the bone, become about an inch long. And—“Raphael.” Heart stuttering, she touched her finger to his skin. “It’s turned a deep, deep red.”

Terror sought to squeeze the breath out of her chest. Fighting it, she found her voice again. “It doesn’t look swollen or infected, though, more like ink beneath your skin.” Except, unlike his spymaster, Raphael didn’t have a facial tattoo. “Do you feel anything?”

“There is no weakness, no sense of sickness.” He ran the back of his hand over her breast, his knuckle touching her nipple. “It’s done no harm thus far.” Both hands sliding down her rib cage to her waist, he brought her over his thighs, his erection rubbing against her, the blunt steel making her nails dig into his shoulders.

Molten heat in her navel. “God, how can I be so ready for you so quickly?”

“Because you’re mine.” With those stark words of possession, he lifted her, then brought her down so the head of his cock pushed at the slick heat of her opening. “Fuck me, Elena.”

Even as she took him with a moan of exquisite pleasure, part of her scrabbled to fight the rising passion, to
think
. That was near impossible when Raphael hauled her lips to his, one hand fisted in her hair, the other molding her breast in a caress both bold and possessive as his tongue thrust deep into her mouth.

It wasn’t the roughness that had her brain scrambling. Raphael was often raw, and she loved it, loved that he didn’t hold back, but this, today . . . That was when she felt it, the “cold” in his kiss, the ice that penetrated her own blood through their intimate physical link. Even at his most sexually demanding, Raphael always made her feel unbearably cherished. Tonight his touch felt remote, for lack of a better word, and when she opened her eyes, she saw he watched her even as he played her body.

No way in hell.

She bit down hard on his lower lip, and when his hands dug into her flesh, his wings beginning to glow, she licked her tongue over the hurt and ran her lips down his throat, squeezing him with her internal muscles at the same time. His body went taut, his cock pulsing inside her.

Oh yeah, she knew exactly which buttons to press, too.

The instant she felt his hand fisting in her hair again in preparation for taking back the reins, she gripped the tendons along his neck between her teeth. A growl, the glow off his wings intensifying, but he let her control their next kiss, his tongue dueling with hers as she pressed her breasts to his chest, well aware he loved the feel of her aroused nipples rubbing against his flesh.

Flexing his hips, he urged her to go faster, harder. When she resisted, he tipped her back over his arm without warning and sucked one of her nipples into his mouth, rolling the taut little nub over his tongue like a succulent berry. The stab of sensation went straight to her womb. Pulling at his hair, she tried to stop the erotic torment, take back control.

The touch of teeth on her sensitive flesh.

She tightened around the thickness of him and was rewarded by a lavish lick, his mouth releasing her nipple only to brand the other with the scalding heat of his kiss. It was near impossible to think now, but she needed to know this was her Raphael. Clamping down hard on his cock, she held him possessively as he released her nipple to throw back his head, his jaw a brutal line.

Dangerous man. Gorgeous man. Her man.

Easing her sexual hold on him, she used her internal muscles to caress him again as she leaned in to kiss his throat, one hand on his chest, the fingers of the other rubbing at the highly sensitive inner edge of his wing. It was the final straw. Raphael gripped her jaw, bringing her in for a kiss that might as well have been sex, it was so untamed, so deep, so fucking hot.

Then there was no more strategy, no more battling for the reins, only a passionate engagement that had her screaming soundlessly as she orgasmed around the heated steel of his possession, her eyes locked with those of heartbreaking, unshadowed blue.

27

R
aphael patted Elena’s wings dry, his consort having
wrapped her body in a fluffy blue towel as she stood in the bathroom glaring at him via the mirror. “You were weird,” she said, succinct and to the point. “Like that time when you went Quiet.”

Raphael didn’t like who he became in the Quiet, that state of being where he acted with a cruelty driven by cold reason untempered by emotion. In the last and what he’d decided would be his final period of Quiet, he, who had once watched over angelic nurseries, had threatened a babe in pursuit of his goal. “Did I cause you harm?” he asked, dropping the towel to clasp his hand around her nape.

“Of course not.” An irritated scowl that to him was a kiss. “You did fuck my brains out, but since I did the same to you, I’m not complaining.”

Her temper the ultimate reassurance, he released her. As she walked out into the bedroom and found a robe, he followed to pull on a pair of black pants. He wouldn’t sleep this night; there was too much to do—the reason they were at the Tower, not the house—but he’d work from the bedroom until she was past the first problematic hours of sleep.

“I go into the Quiet when I expend a certain level and kind of power,” he said, “but this felt like something outside myself.” As if he stood in the deepest ocean, insulated from the world.

“An assault?” Curling tendrils of near white around her face where the strands had escaped the knot at the back of her head, Elena closed the short distance between them.

“One that drenched me with power? No.” He had a feeling it had been something far more dangerous. “If I am coming into my power, it appears it has the potential to fundamentally change me.”

“Never going to happen.” A stubborn glint in his hunter’s eye. “I’m not gonna lose my man.”

“I know.” Even in the strange cold, he’d tasted her fury, her passion, the searing depth of her love, and it had wrenched him back into her arms, all distance erased. “Now it’s time for my woman to go to bed.” She had circles under her eyes from the string of tension-filled days and interrupted sleep. “If you do not argue, I shall send you into slumber with bedtime tales of blood and death and annihilation from the last Cascade.”

“Yippee.” Slipping off the robe to reveal a body lithe and golden, she snuggled under the blankets.

He lay on his side atop those same blankets, tugging her hair from its knot to play with the wild silk of it. “Have you heard of the lost city of Atlantis?”

“Of course.” Her eyes widened, soft wonder in the silver-gray. “It was real?”

“My mother says the legend springs from a water city that existed millennia upon millennia ago—a city of remarkable artistry created by an archangel who had abilities such as those we now believe Astaad to have, except this archangel’s powers were at their height at the time.”

Bleak realization stole the wonder. “It was destroyed, wasn’t it?”

“Caliane is uncertain if some part of it does in truth lie below the ocean, protected by its archangel, but it fell victim to the last Cascade wars, as did many other great civilizations.”

“Such wonders lost forever, Raphael. Things that eclipse the creations of this modern world, until the boastfulness of today is that of children who have never seen true grace.”

Repeating Caliane’s judgment for Elena, he told her the rest, how the wars had circled the globe, soaking the earth in mortal and immortal blood both. “By the time they came to an end, a century after they began, half the world was gone and civilization had regressed by millennia.”

Elena shook her head, as if the knowledge was too terrible to bear. “These Cascades, there’s no way of telling how many have come and gone, how many times civilization has been all but erased only to start again.”

“Yes.” Shifting so his body covered her own, his hand in her hair, he told her the prelude to the final brutal fact. “Caliane has survived more than one Cascade.” That, he was certain, no one knew. “She says not all are equal, and that from the changes apparent in the Cadre so soon into the Cascade, this may be the strongest in all her eons of existence.”

Unhidden horror, his hunter’s arms holding him close. “If the last Cascade ended in the destruction of half the world . . .”

“Yes.”

•   •   •

G
iven Raphael’s ominous bedtime story, it was a miracle
Elena slept as soundly as she did. When she woke, however, to a haunting quiet that told her more snow had fallen overnight, it was with a blinding need to escape the madness of the immortal world for a fragment of time.

Sara had the morning off—as much as a Guild Director could ever have time off—so Elena hooked up with her best friend and Zoe at a small neighborhood eatery for brunch. The owner and most of the regulars knew Elena from before her transformation and, while there were a few people who snuck photos, no one bothered them.

An hour and a half later, they stood in Central Park, watching a giggling Zoe try to catch the pigeons. Bundled up like a little polar bear in an orange snowsuit, the tiny girl would sit down in the snow every so often to rest, then be off again after the birds. Elena’s breath frosted the air as she laughed in delight at Zoe’s antics, the temperature freezing enough that Elena, too, was dressed for the weather, wearing a long-sleeved top underneath her black hunting leathers. Her immortal body might be tougher than a mortal’s, but it had become clear she was too young to shrug off this kind of cold—especially in flight, where she had to deal with wind chill as well.

“How’s Vivek?” Sara said, after sending Deacon a photo of Zoe sitting in the snow.

“Aodhan is supervising his transformation.” Elena had made certain Vivek was in hands she trusted. “I haven’t been to visit him—he asked me not to. I don’t think he wants any of us to see him while he’s so vulnerable.” Paralyzed he might’ve been, but Vivek had never been helpless as long as Elena had known him. “You know how much he likes to be in control.”

“I get it, but he’s still a proud idiot,” Sara said, her tone deeply affectionate.

“Keir’s personally monitoring his progress.” Sara had met the healer during her visit to the Refuge, knew the deep respect with which he was held in the immortal world. “It’s been a long time since the Making of a mortal with such a significant long-term injury.”

“Mommy!” Zoe ran back to them in that wild, almost-falling-over-at-any-instant way. “Isses!”

Crouching down to snuggle her little girl in her arms, Sara smothered her adorable face in the requested kisses. The two looked so gorgeous together that Elena snapped a photo with her own phone, Sara’s deep purple coat vibrant against Zoe’s orange outfit, their faces creased in identical smiles. Zoe giggled when Sara pretended to tickle her, then gave her mom a smacking kiss on the cheek before holding up her arms to Elena, dark eyes bright. “Nantie Ellie!”

Laughing, “Nantie” Ellie lifted Zoe into her arms and, after sneaking a cuddle, threw her into the air, catching her in a firm grip on the downward flight. Zoe squealed happily, her hood falling off to reveal gorgeous curls of bronze threaded black tied in two neat pigtails. “Zoe fly, Nantie Ellie!”

“Yes,” she said, utterly besotted with Sara’s baby. “You’re flying, Zoe.”

Five goes later, the little girl was seduced by the sight of an angelic feather drifting to the snow from a passing squadron and raced off to snag it for her collection.

“I swear,” Sara muttered, “I have a heart attack every time you and Deacon decide to treat my tiny, tiny baby like she’s a damn basketball.”

Elena grinned. “She’s your kid—you’re the one who jumped off a building in pursuit of a vampire.” Leaving Elena swearing a blue streak as she stared down at the alley, fully expecting to see her friend’s broken body. “And you caught him, too.” Sara had calculated her jump to take her into a Dumpster full of food waste. Nasty, but safe.

Now, her best friend pointed a finger at her. “You do not tell stories like that within earshot of Zoe.”

“Give it up, Mama Bear. She has the ex-Slayer for a father and the kick-ass Guild Director for a mother, plus a totally awesome hunter-born for an aunt.” Patting Sara’s shoulder, she said, “Kid’s never going to be satisfied sitting at home doing jigsaw puzzles.”

“Deacon made her a miniature crossbow.” The look on Sara’s face was an odd mix between horrified and proud as she said, “Zoe’s a crack shot already. Thank God her ‘bolts’ have sponge heads or we’d all be dead several times over.”