Archangel’s Kiss (Guild Hunter #2)(53)
Author: Nalini Singh

She waited, listened. He was moving around. She thought he might’ve gone upstairs, but her pulse was pounding too hard in her ears. She couldn’t trust the sounds, couldn’t run.

Not when he could be standing in the corridor waiting for her. Then it was too late. His footsteps came back into the room.

"I’ve got a suuuuurprise for you." A sly, scraping sound, the knob of the cupboard where she was hiding being twisted away. She pushed back into the wood but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to run.

"Boo!"A single perfect brown eye stared mischievously through the hole made by removing the knob. "There you are."

She stabbed out with the knitting needle she’d picked up from her mother’s basket in the living room, spearing that eye dead center. Liquid spurted onto her hand, but she didn’t care. It was his scream – high, piercing, agonized – that mattered. Giving a savage little smile, she pushed out of the cupboard as he stumbled back, darting past him and up the stairs.

She should have gone outside, found help. But she wanted her mom, needed to see that she was alive, was breathing. Shoving through her parents’ bedroom door, she slammed it shut behind her, turned the lock. "Mama!"

There was no answer.

But when she looked around, relief poured through her. Because Mama was just sleeping. Running over on feet that continued to leave fading red imprints on the carpet, she shook her mother’s shoulder.

And saw the gag around her mouth, the knives that pinned her wrists and ankles to the sheets. "Mama."Her lower lip quivered, but she was already reaching to undo the gag.

"I’ll help you. I’ll help you."

It was the terrified warning in her mother’s eyes that made her turn.

"Bad little hunter." Shaking the bedroom key at her, the monster pulled the needle out, and looked at it with a single curious eye, the other a bloody ruin down his cheek. "Do you think Mommy would like a present?"

"Wake up, Elena! "

She jerked into a kneeling position in one go, reaching for the knife she’d slipped under the pillow out of habit. Raphael looked up at her as she stared down at him, knife held high, ready to go for his throat.

Red hazed her vision, her tendons quivering with the need to strike out.

Elena.The scent of the sea, of the wind.You’re safe.

"I’ll never be safe." It came out a withheld scream, so taut, so painful it was barely sound. "He hunts me in my dreams."

"Who?"

"You know." She tried to lower the knife. Her muscles refused.

"Say it. Make him real, not a phantom."

Her mouth filled with the taste of bitter rage. "Slater Patalis." The most infamous killer vampire in recent history. "We were his last snack stop."

"The records say the hunters were able to capture him because you disabled him."

"I remember stabbing him through the eye, but that wouldn’t have stopped him." Her fingers finally unclenched, dropping the knife. It would’ve sliced into her thigh had Raphael not caught it midfall.

Placing it on the small bedside table, he said, "Your memories are incomplete?"

"They’re coming back more and more." She stared out at the wall, seeing nothing but blood. "I’ve always seen parts, but now I think they were jumbled up pieces of the whole.

What I saw tonight . . ." Her eyes burned, her hands fisting on her thighs. "The monster broke my mother’s legs, her arms, pinned her to the bed, made her listen as he killed Belle and Ari."

Raphael opened his arms. "Come here, hunter."

She shook her head, unwilling to surrender to weakness.

"Even an immortal," Raphael said quietly, "has nightmares."

She knew he wasn’t talking about her. Somehow, that made it easier. She fell into his embrace, burying her face in the warm curve of his neck, the clean, bright scent of him filling her lungs. "Later, I saw the streaks on the carpet, realized she’d tried to come to us even after he hurt her so badly. But he came back upstairs, put her in that bed again."

"Your mother fought for you."

"She lost consciousness soon after I found her. I was so scared then, so afraid to be all alone with him, but now, I think her lack of consciousness was a mercy." Her stomach twisted because in the most secret depths of her mind, she knew Slater had hurt her mother in other ways, made Elena watch. "I stayed awake because I knew Beth was coming home from her sleepover soon. I knew I couldn’t let the monster get her. But he was gone before that."

"So your youngest sister was saved from the horror."

"I don’t know," Elena said, remembering the lack of comprehension on Beth’s small face at the funeral ceremony for Ari and Belle. "It was her first ever sleepover, and I don’t think she’s spent a night away from home ever again. Somewhere deep inside, she’s afraid of what she’ll come home to."

"You, too, hold a hidden fear," Raphael murmured. "What is it that you’re so scared to speak of?"

"I think," she said through the haze of tears she refused to let fall, "he did something to me." Then he’d left both her and Marguerite alive, while Ari and Belle lay dead on the kitchen tiles.

"Tell me." Raphael’s voice was an icy breeze.

She welcomed the ice, wrapping it around herself like a safety blanket. "I haven’t reached that part of the day yet." Her heart squeezed off panicked beats at the idea but she held on to Raphael, his body strong beneath hers, and confronted the nightmare head-on. "Whatever it was, it was so bad, I blanked it from my mind all these years."

"It may have been the transition that resurrected the memories." His arms were granite around her, possessive, protective, immoveable. "Your coma may have unlocked the same part of your mind as that which opens in immortals duringanshara ."

He’d fallen into the deep healing sleep during the hunt for Uram, had returned to his childhood, to the heartbreaking beauty of his mother’s face looking down into his while he bled across a meadow floor. "It opens memories that have faded over time, until we believe that they are long gone."

"Nothing’s ever gone." A warm breath across his neck, fingers curling into his chest.

"We fool ourselves that things fade, but they never do."

Raphael brushed a hand over that brilliant near-white hair that had hung like a banner over his arm as they fell to earth in Manhattan. Some memories, he thought, were etched in stone.

"What do you dream of inanshara ?"

"It’s not something spoken of. Each angel’s journey is his own."