Archangel’s Consort (Guild Hunter #3)(65)
Author: Nalini Singh

In the kitchen, Elena thought, they were always in the kitchen in the dreams. She was fooled into hope every single time—and then the blood would begin to seep down the walls, across the floor. Her mother always remained trapped in the room, no matter how much Elena begged her to run.

“I found her,” she said, speaking of a nightmare that continued to leave her trembling in panic in the coldest depths of the night. “I got home from school, and I walked inside the house.” That was when she’d seen it, that single high-heeled shoe lying on its side on the gleaming shine of the checkerboard tiles.

She should’ve walked back out that same instant, but she’d been happy. Mama hadn’t worn high heels for a long time—the child in her had thought that maybe it meant Marguerite was better now, that maybe she’d have her mother back. The illusion had lasted a few precious seconds.

“The shadow,” she said, her breath coming in short, shallow gasps. “On the wall. I could see it swinging so gently. I didn’t want to look up, didn’t want to see.” Even now, terror pulsed in her blood. “I could feel my heart freeze into a small, hard ball, and then I looked up and it just . . . shattered.” Sharp, vicious shards, they had cut into her, made her bleed. “I kept looking up at her, at the way she …” The words wouldn’t come, wouldn’t be formed. “The shadow,” she said instead, “it just kept swinging. The whole time my heart was bleeding out below her, the shadow just kept swinging.”

Raphael could feel his hunter breaking all over again in his arms, and it was unbearable. “Hers was a selfish act.”

“No, she—”

“She lost two daughters,” Raphael said. “She was tortured. But so were you. You saw your sisters murdered before your eyes, saw your mother suffer.”

“Not the same.”

“No. Because you were a child.” He crushed her to him, wishing he could turn back time, shake Marguerite Deveraux until she came out of the fog of her grief and saw the treasures she was about to throw away. “It is permissible to be angry with her, Elena. It does not make you disloyal.”

A ragged sob, so harsh that it sounded torn out of her, before a clenched fist pounded on his chest. “Why didn’t she love us as much as she loved Ari and Belle?” A child’s question. “Why did she leave us when she saw how Jeffrey was becoming? Why?” Wet against his chest, that fist halting as she whispered, “Why?”

Later, she asked him to spar with her, and he did, letting her work out her anguish, her pain, through hard physical combat. But she was distracted, not fighting at her best. Instead of letting up, he gave no quarter.

“If you won’t accept the protection I assign you,” he said when he put her on her back for the second time in as many minutes, “then you must be better than the best.”

A snarl that he far preferred over the haunted pain that had crumpled her spirit. “Beating me into the ground isn’t helping matters.” She flowed back to her feet.

He slammed at her again.

This time, she came at him like a fury, sorrow shifting into the most lethal anger.

Dancing with her, their blades moving like streaks of white fire, he couldn’t stop the smile of pride from spreading across his face. “Magnificent,” he said as she almost grazed his wing with those short swords of hers.

Hissing out something under her breath, she sliced out her arm in a move he hadn’t taught her—he had to lunge out of the way or he’d have been nursing an impressive cut in his side. That is more like it. A kiss pressed to her cheek as he disarmed her left hand and moved out of range of her right.

Eyes narrowed, she used her foot to kick up her lost sword. Then she circled him, much like Venom had a way of doing. She learned, he thought, very, very fast. Now, she made a move he only avoided because he’d sparred with the vampire more than once. Even then, her blade passed a bare quarter of an inch from his nose.

But she’d left herself open. He was behind her, his knife held to her throat the next instant. “That was foolish,” he snapped, furious that she’d let anger drive her into making a move that left her exposed and vulnerable. “You’re now dead.”

Reaching up, she gripped his wrist. “You made me angry on purpose.”

He drew back. “But you fell into it too far.”

Elena turned, chest heaving. “Yeah, I did.” She rubbed her face with one hand. “I won’t make the same mistake again.”

Raphael gave a short nod. “We will finish this later. I’m needed at the Tower.”

As they walked side by side, their wings brushing, she drew in a long, steadying breath. “Any further intel on where your mother might be?” Picking up her cell phone from where she’d placed it while they were sparring, she saw that she had a text message.

“Not as yet.” Tense words. “If we do not rouse her before she is ready, she’ll wake on her own and at full strength.”

There was no need to spell out what would happen if she awakened as insane as when she lay down to Sleep.

“Will you tell me more about her?” Caliane’s disappearance had marked him as surely as she’d been marked by her own mother’s death.

“The memories are old, will surface in their own time.” He ran the back of his hand over her cheek. “What do you do today?”

“I’m going to visit the perfumer I mentioned to you earlier.” She had no intention of letting her archangel handle those memories alone when they did rise, but they’d both had a tough morning already, so she let it go for now. “Do you know how difficult it is to track down that particular black orchid? I asked him right after I got back from Boston, but he only just received it.” She held up her cell phone.

“Ah. You seek the essence.”

“I want to know all the notes, make sure I’m not missing anything,” she said as they cleaned and stowed their weapons in a locker at the back of the house. “Archangel?”

His eyes were a clear, crystalline blue when he turned to her. “What would you have of me, Guild Hunter?”

“A good-bye kiss.”

An hour and a half later, Elena walked out of the outwardly disreputable shop that housed the best perfumer in the city—the tiny vial of essence wrapped in multiple layers of cushioning material and packed into a small box—to find that half of New York suddenly had something to do in the Bronx. No one approached her as she walked down the street, but she could hear the whispers gathering like a shock wave behind her.