Archangel’s Kiss (Guild Hunter #2)(61)
Author: Nalini Singh

Brushing tangled strands of hair off her face, he repeated his command out loud.

"Elena."

Her eyes flicked open and for a single instant, they weren’t the silvery grey he’d become used to. Instead, they were almost midnight, filled with a thousand echoes of nightmare.

Then she blinked and it was gone. Staring up at him with a confused expression on her face, she rubbed at her forehead. "I feel as if I’ve been hit by a two-by-four. What happened?"

"I had to intervene when you decided to turn training into mortal combat."

Her hand dropped from her face. "I remember." A whisper. "Is Venom alright?"

"Yes." But his concern was for her. "The memories are starting to seep into your waking life."

She pushed up into a sitting position. "It was like I was a different person. Not even that – like I was a machine focused on only one thing."

"It sounds like the Quiet."

Elena shivered at the memory of what he’d become in the Quiet, the soulless creature who’d treated human lives like so many effortlessly snuffed out flames. "Do you think it’s the change – the immortality?"

"A factor." He nodded. "But it may be that it’s just time."

Time she remembered all the things she’d rather forget. "I want to speak to my father."

Chapter 30

"He has no right to your apologies."

Her head jerked up. "How did you know?"

"The guilt is a stain on your soul." Running his fingers down her face to close around her throat, he leaned in until their lips were a heartbeat apart. "You will not crawl for him."

Elena flinched. "ButI’m the reason Slater chose our family." That, nothing could change.

"And your father’s the reason that what remains of your family is broken in two."

She had no answer to that – because he was right. Jeffrey had splintered their family the day he threw her out, her things so much garbage on the manicured grass verge of the Big House. The neighbors on their tony street had been too well mannered to stare openly, but she’d felt their watching eyes. It hadn’t mattered. All that had mattered was that he’d destroyed what little remained of the relationship between them when he tried to break her.

"Get on your knees and beg, and maybe I’ll reconsider."

"It’s a festering sore between us," she said, placing a hand over Raphael’s heart. "I know now that he hates me because Slater was drawn to me." Like Dmitri, Slater had been able to entrance hunters with scent, but that hadn’t been his only gift. "Can Dmitri track me?"

she asked, something clicking into place inside her.

"Yes."

No mortal, she thought, no hunter knew that. "That’s what Slater did. He scented me somewhere and changed course toward our neighborhood." Slater shouldn’t have gained the scent ability – he’d been too young. But the vampire hadn’t been normal in any way, shape, or form. "I could feel him getting closer, taste his scent on the wind." She’d tried so hard to convince her father, begging, pleading, screaming at the end.

"Enough, Elieanora." An angry command. "Marguerite, I think you need to stop with the fairy tales."

"But Daddy – "

"You are a Deveraux." A steely gaze. "No one in this family has ever been a common hunter. You’re not going to be the first and telling me tall tales isn’t going to help your case."

Later, her mother rocking her, telling her she’d talk to Jeffrey. "Give him time,azeeztee.

Your father was brought up with tradition – it takes a while for him to accept new ideas."

"Mama, the monster – "

"Maybe you sense them, my darling. But they’re simply living their lives." A mother’s gentle teaching. "Being a vampire doesn’t equal being evil."

At ten, Elena hadn’t had the words to explain that she knew the difference, that what was comingwas evil. By the time she found the words, it was too late.

The remaining days passed in a blur – most of it spent in flight training with Raphael.

Any free time she had, she spent walking the Refuge, learning and listening. According to Jason’s intel, both Anoushka and Dahariel were unaccounted for during the time the Guild daggers were stolen, but there was no way to narrow it down to either one. On the good news side, the daggers had stopped turning up, and word was that Anoushka and Dahariel – along with Nazarach – had left for their territories, but she didn’t drop her guard.

The constant vigilance, added to the rigorous flight training, was exhausting, but she welcomed it, unable to think about, to accept, the truth of the part she’d played in her sisters’ – and ultimately, her mother’s – deaths. So she focused on the hunt, and on the upcoming ball, with regular visits to Sam. It was as she was heading down the corridor after one such visit that everything went wrong.

"Michaela." Her eyes widened as she saw the bodies strewn behind the archangel. At least one was the angelic version of a nurse, his hair matted with something slick, a line of red on the wall where he lay slumped.

"Hunter." The archangel began to move forward, her body clothed in a flowing burgundy dress that ran over her br**sts in a lush caress before parting a third of the way down her left thigh to display a sleek length of flesh. No one would ever call Michaela less than stunning.

But today . . . Elena swallowed. That dress wasn’t burgundy. It had been white. It was blood that drenched it, parts of it still wet enough to slick against Michaela’s flesh. The archangel’s face was clean, her hair straight and gleaming with health, but her fingernails, too, were encrusted with rust red. Death clung to her.

"I’ve come to see the child."

Elena didn’t make the mistake of thinking Michaela was explaining herself. No, what she was hearing was a decree. She should have let the archangel go, but – and quite aside from the insanity of her dress – there was something supremely vicious about Michaela right now, something that couldn’t be allowed near a defenseless child. "Has the visit been cleared?" Her hand closed around the butt of the gun she’d slipped into the side pocket of her pants.

Michaela flicked a hand at Elena as she had once before. But this time, Raphael wasn’t there to stop her. A line of wet seared across Elena’s cheek, her flesh parting as if it had been slit with a razor.

"I do not need anyone’s permission." A slow smile. "Did you know there are ways to scar even an immortal?"

Elena thought she saw something alien in those eyes for a second, a flicker of red. But when she looked again, it was to see only that bright, blinding green. "You may," she said, taking out the gun, "have had nothing to do with Sam’s injuries, but the boy is under Raphael’s protection. You’ll terrify him if you go in like this."