Archangel’s Consort (Guild Hunter #3)(74)
Author: Nalini Singh

“Yes.” He returned his attention to the ruins. “My mother was Cadre. She is adept at games, may well be trying to lure me away from here because it is her resting place.”

Glancing around, Elena frowned. “Where’s Illium? Inside already?”

“I cannot hear him.” Raphael’s tone was sharp.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Elena said, hand tightening on the hilt of her dagger. “Not here, with the static.” But her heart thudded double-time. Not Illium, she thought, not the angel who’d become one of her closest friends.

“Wait.” Raphael held her back when she would’ve headed down to where she’d last seen the blue-winged angel. “I will go first—there are things here you have no hope of defeating.”

“Go.” She wasn’t stupid, no matter that worry for Illium had her frantic. The angel had become one of her people, someone she’d fight to the death to save. “Be careful Archangel.” Because if she loved Illium, what she felt for Raphael was beyond words, beyond her ability to describe. A huge, powerful, near-painful emotion, it simply was.

“Death holds no allure for me, Elena.” The power of him cut against his skin, a cold white fire. “Not when I have yet to sate my hunger for you.” Turning, he walked not to where she’d last glimpsed Illium, but into the bowels of the shrine. “He came in here.”

Following, her entire body on alert, she paused by a long, pitted column that bore flecks of what appeared to be rust-colored pigment and checked in the shadows around its side. Seeing nothing, she continued on, the rustle of her and Raphael’s wings the only—“Wait.” Gripping Raphael’s arm, she stopped him when he would’ve gone farther into the depths of the building.

When he glanced back at her, she leaned forward to brush the dirt off a cracked but still-standing column using her fingers. “Do you see?” It was a whisper.

Raphael reached out to trace the shape of the dragon carved into the eroded surface. “This should not be part of this shrine. Everything about it is wrong.”

“Do you think … ?”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps she is simply remembered as legend in these parts.” Turning again, he walked a few steps into what had been the main room—the roof of which was now almost entirely gone, the sky covered with a filigree of green—and stopped three feet in. “Illium.” Bending, he picked up one startling blue feather edged in silver.

There was a drop of crimson on the very tip.

Half an hour later, they’d combed every single inch of the shrine and the surrounding area and found no further sign of Illium. “You said your mother liked beautiful things,” she said to Raphael as they stood beside the gnarled old root she’d vaulted over not long ago.

Raphael gave a slow nod. “And Illium is very much a man many have desired to collect over the years.”

“He’s not helpless despite the fact that he appears decorative, so that’ll be a surprise.” Folding her arms, she turned toward the being for whom she would walk into hell itself. “You’re also far stronger than you were when she last saw you—you can reach Illium.”

Raphael looked at her for a long, long moment before raising his hand to touch her cheek. “Such faith in me, Elena.”

She closed her fingers over his wrist, his pulse strong and steady under her touch. “I know your heart, Archangel. It gives you more power than you believe.”

Raphael felt a tug of urgency at Elena’s words, a flare of understanding that he couldn’t quite grasp. It was tempting to chase, but experience told him that would only send the whisper of thought further into hiding. Allowing it to fade away for the moment, he focused on the facts at hand. “She took Illium for a reason.”

Elena’s eyes glittered with intelligence, that thin ring of silver luminous in the muted forest light. “A warning.”

“That may be.” However, his mother wasn’t like other mothers. “Or it may be that she grows impatient.”

“She wants you to find her?” Elena frowned and parted her lips … but the words never came, blades gleaming in her hands even as Raphael sensed the intruder at his back and turned.

A shift in the air, as if something was trying to take shape. For a fraction of a second, he thought it was Caliane, but then the formless being turned into an angel with hair of ice and irises of a strange pearlescent shade that almost melded into the whites of her eyes, giving her the look of an eerie blindness. Her wings were the last part of her body to appear, a silken dove gray that was as exquisite as Lijuan was dangerous.

“Raphael.” Her voice held the same faint echo he’d sensed before, as if there were other voices within her, ghosts trying to reach out. Trying to scream.

“What are you doing here, Lijuan?”

The Archangel of China smiled, and it was nothing even remotely of the world. What Lijuan had become, what she’d “evolved” into, was a nightmare even the Cadre couldn’t quite comprehend. But Raphael understood. Because he’d looked into the face of madness as a child, felt it touch him with featherlight fingers . . . and knew it might one day crash over him in an overwhelming wave.

Elena’s wing brushed his in a silent caress, as if she’d read his thoughts. As if she was reminding him of her promise.

“I won’t let you fall.”

Lijuan’s eyes flickered over Elena’s wings, and there was a faint avarice in her gaze. The most ancient of archangels had a fondness for the exotic and unusual—unfortunately, she liked to pin them up as trophies on her walls. “Your hunter’s wings are exceptional. Unique. Did you know that, Raphael? In all my millennia of existence, I’ve never seen wings like hers . . . or like the young one’s.”

The “young one” was Illium—and Lijuan’s fascination with him was such that Raphael made sure Illium was rarely in her vicinity, and never, ever alone. “You did not come here to talk of wings.”

“In a sense.” Settling her own wings, Lijuan looked around with those eyes that appeared blind. “I remember this place. It was an ancient shrine known only to its disciples. Legend said they worshipped a sleeping dragon.” A shake of her head, her hair blowing back in a wind that touched nothing else. “I didn’t pay it much mind.”

Because a goddess, Raphael thought, had little to fear from small mortal gods. But now, he thought, looking at that ageless visage, she did know fear. Lijuan had evolved … but Caliane had been millennia upon millennia older than her when she lay down to Sleep. Who was to say that his mother could not vanquish the nightmare that was the Archangel of China?