Archangel’s Consort (Guild Hunter #3)(4)
Author: Nalini Singh

“Yes.” His voice grew distant in a way that was the mask of an immortal who’d lived centuries beyond a millennium. “What we may be witnessing is the rebirth of an archangel.”

She sucked in a breath, understanding flickering at the corners of her mind. “How many archangels Sleep?”

“No one knows, but there have been disappearances throughout our history. Antonicus, Qin, Zanaya. And . . .”

“Caliane,” she completed for him, shifting so that she could see his face without craning her neck. He was so good at hiding his emotions, her archangel, but she was learning to read the minute shifts in those eyes that had seen more dawns than she could ever imagine, witnessed the birth and fall of civilizations.

Now, her back against the glassy cold of the window, she didn’t protest as he leaned in to place one hand palm-down beside her head. Instead, she ran her fingers down the muscled planes of his chest to rest at his hips, anchoring him to the present, to her as she asked him about a nightmare. “Will you know if your mother wakes?”

“When I was a child”—skin touched with heat, but his eyes, they remained that inhuman metallic shade—“we had a mental bond. But it burned away as I grew, and as she fell into madness.” His gaze looked past her, to the pitch-black of the night.

Elena was used to fighting for what she needed, what she wanted. She’d had to become that way to survive. It had toughened her. But what she felt for this male, this archangel, it was a stronger, more powerful need, one that gave her an insight the hunter alone would’ve never had. “Stop it.”

A silent glance rimmed with a thin frost made up of the myriad dark echoes that lingered in an archangel’s memories.

“If you let the memory of her spoil this,” she said, refusing to back down, “spoil us, then it doesn’t matter if she is the Sleeper. The damage will have been done—by you.”

A long, still instant, but his attention was very much on her now. “You,” he said, his wings spreading out to block the rest of the room from her view, “manipulate me.”

“I take care of you,” she corrected. “Just like you took care of me by not letting me answer my father’s call earlier today.” At the time, she’d gotten snippy—because she’d been afraid. And she hated being afraid. Especially of the hurt that Jeffrey Deveraux meted out with such cruel ease. “That’s the deal, so learn to handle it.”

Raphael brushed his thumb across her cheekbone. “If I do not?” A cool question.

“Stop trying to pick a fight with me.” She knew what haunted him—that his parents’ madnesses would one day manifest in his own mind, turning him monstrous. Except Elena would never allow that to happen. “We fall, we fall together.” A soft reminder, a solemn promise.

Elena. One hand going down to curve around her ribs, just below her br**sts, as he moved his other thumb over her lips, shaping and stroking her.

“If your mother does wake,” she murmured, her top suddenly abrasive against her ni**les, “what will happen to her?”

“Some say a long Sleep cures the madness of age, so she could once more become Cadre.” Yet Raphael’s voice said that he didn’t believe such a thing possible.

“Will the others on the Cadre try to locate her, kill her beforehand?”

“Those who Sleep are sacrosanct,” Raphael told her. “To harm a Sleeper is to break a law so ancient, it is part of our racial memory. But there is no law that bars a search.”

She knew without asking that he’d be undertaking such a search, could only hope what he discovered wasn’t a nightmare made flesh.

“I’ll speak to Jason,” he added, “see if he has heard any rumblings on this subject that I have not.”

“Is he healed?” Raphael’s spymaster had been injured in the same violent explosion of power that had leveled a city and smashed Elena to the earth. “Is Aodhan?” Both angels had refused to leave her and fly to safety, though they were far stronger and faster. Even as they fell to the unforgiving earth, the two males had attempted to shield her body with their own.

“If you are,” Raphael said, stroking his hand down to rest at her waist, “then of course they walk without injury.”

Because she was an immortal new-Made, while Jason was hundreds of years old. Aodhan, she wasn’t sure about—he was so very other, it was hard to judge—but the fact that he was one of Raphael’s Seven spoke for itself. “Beijing . . . are there any signs of recovery?” The city had ceased to exist in anything but memory after the events of that bloody night, so many dead that Elena couldn’t think about it without a sense of crushing weight on her chest, heavy and black and flavored with the taste of old death.

“No.” An absolute statement. “It may take centuries for life to take root there once more.”

The punishing might of power implied by that observation was staggering. It made her viscerally aware of the strength of the man who held her in an embrace she’d never be able to break if he decided to keep her prisoner. It should’ve scared her. But if there was one thing she knew, it was that with Raphael, any fight would be no-holds-barred. There would be no stilettos in the dark, no hurtful blades hidden behind a civilized facade … unlike the cutting words of another man who’d once claimed to love her.

Her soul pinched in hurt. “I can’t avoid my father forever,” she said, leaning back against the window again, the cold of the glass almost painful against her wings. “What do you think he’ll say when he sees me?” As far as Jeffrey knew, Raphael had saved her broken and dying body by Making her a vampire.

Raphael gripped his hunter’s jaw with one hand, placing the other beside her head. “He will see you as an opportunity.” Honest words, for he would not lie to her. “A way to gain entry into the corridors of angelic power.” If Raphael had his way, Jeffrey Deveraux would even now be rotting in a forgotten grave, but Elena loved her father in spite of his cruelty.

Now, she wrapped her arms around herself, and her words, when they came, were jagged pieces of pain. “I knew that before I asked . . . but part of me can’t help hoping that maybe this time, he’ll love me.”

“As I can’t help hoping that my mother will rise, and will once again be the woman who sang me such lullabies that the world stood still.” Pulling her into a crushing embrace, he pressed his lips to her temple. “We are both fools.”