Archangel’s Kiss (Guild Hunter #2)(68)
Author: Nalini Singh

Lijuan’s eyes went to Elena’s neck. "You wear no necklace."

Elena didn’t drop her gaze, though her stomach was a knot of fury. "I prefer Raphael’s gift."

"A knife – such ornamentation was popular in another age." Lijuan’s attention shifted, as if the necklace that had caused Elena so much pain no longer mattered. "Such beautiful wings. Will you show them to me?"

Elena didn’t want to show this creature anything, but the request had been polite. She wasn’t going to cause a political incident simply because Lijuan was so inhuman it defied understanding. Moving to give herself space, she spread out the wings her archangel had given her even as he gave her life. But when Lijuan raised a hand as if to touch, she snapped them back.

Raphael was already speaking. "It’s not like you to break protocol."

"My apologies." Lijuan’s hand dropped, but her eyes remained on the parts of Elena’s wings visible around her body. "My only defense is that they’re quite extraordinary."

Elena wished she could tighten her wings even further. "Thank you."

Lijuan took the acknowledgment as if it was her right. "My own, as you can see, are so very plain." She spread her wings.

They were a soft dove gray. Gentle. Utterly exquisite in their silky perfection. "Plain perhaps," Elena found herself saying, "but all the more beautiful for it."

Lijuan refolded her wings. "So honest. Is that why she intrigues you?"

Raphael answered with an implied question. "You care little for such earthly emotions."

"Ah, butyou intrigue me." Touching his hand, Lijuan gestured to her left. "I thought we could eat informally."

Elena about swallowed her tongue at that. This room might not be a dining room, but it was sumptuous beyond description, the back wall lined with mirrored panels bordered in ornate gold, the right wall hung with tapestries that surely cost in the hundreds of thousands, the front wall full of windows that looked out into the sparkling – and always elegant – revelry of the courtiers below. The left wall, the wall below which they were to sit, was where the butterflies lingered.

Moving reluctantly to stand beside a chair upholstered in a stunning jade, she couldn’t help but look up at the creatures frozen forever in stasis. "There’s no glass," she said almost to herself. "How do you keep them from decaying?"

Another tinkle of laughter. Her heart chilled as she realized what she’d said.

"Have you not told her my secret, Raphael?" Eyes that sparkled with girlish mischief.

Creepy.

Raphael touched his hand briefly to Elena’s back. "It isn’t such a secret any longer.

Favashi spoke to me about it yesterday."

"But you knew before them all." Lijuan took a seat on a chair that had been made to accommodate wings, having a central column for support, with the sides curving gracefully away. "How is the black-winged angel?"

Raphael waited for Elena to take a seat before taking one beside her. "Jason’s looking forward to the ball."

The civilized conversation masked an undercurrent of danger that licked at Elena’s ankles like a sentient fire. Raphael had told her that Jason had been injured by Lijuan’s reborn. Now she wondered if the attack had been on purpose. A warning?

Lijuan lifted a hand and the corpse of a bright blue butterfly fell from the wall into her hand, the pin dropping soundlessly to the carpet. "And the young one? The pretty one?"

"I decided it would be best if Illium didn’t join us," Raphael said without missing a beat.

"He might have proved too much of a temptation."

Dropping the butterfly onto the table, Lijuan laughed, and this time, it was darker, full of – if you could call it that – true humor. "Hmm, yes, those wings are rather magnificent." Her eyes tracked to Elena’s. "As unusual as yours."

"Unfortunately," Elena said, knowing she had to stand her ground, no matter if this archangel could crush her with a single thought, "I’m not a collectable, either."

"Oh, I don’t want to have your wings mounted," Lijuan said, her hair continuing to dance softly in that eerie breeze that touched nothing else. "I find you far too interesting alive."

"Lucky for me." Except she didn’t think so. Leaning back in her chair, she let Raphael and Lijuan carry on the conversation. As they talked, she watched, she listened . . . and she tried to figure out why Lijuan seemed so verywrong .

Yes, her power was one that made Elena’s skin crawl, but Raphael had once broken every bone in a vampire’s body and left him as a caution to others. And their conversation on the plane had made it clear he was as capable of that kind of brutality today as he’d been the day she first met him.

Yet she took Raphael to her bed night after night, clung to his embrace when the nightmares got too bad. Trust, there was trust between them. But even before, when he’d only been the Archangel of New York – hard, cruel, certainly without mercy – she’d never felt this creep across her skin, this sense that she was in the presence of something that simplyshould not be .

"Ah, here is the meal."

Elena had already turned her head toward the door, having scented the approaching vampires.

Jasmine and honey.

Sweet balsam wood dusted in cinnamon.

A kiss of sunshine touched with paint.

Odd combinations, strange scents, but vampires were like that. She’d asked Dmitri what they smelled like to each other. The vampire had given her that taunting smile he kept just for her. "Nothing. We save our senses for the mortals – for the food."

The three who came into the room were all male, but one alone bore the oil-slick black hair and almond- shaped eyes of Lijuan’s homeland. He was the balsam wood. Beside him was a Eurasian man with the solid shoulders of a boxer and the sky blue eyes of some boy from Kansas, his face not quite put together right, but arresting all the same despite, or perhaps because of, his unusual features. He was the jasmine. And the sunshine – her stomach twisted at the memories evoked by that scent, memories of blood and death, putrid flesh lying on every side as Uram squeezed her shattered ankle.

The sunshine shifted closer, laid a delicate setting of hand-painted porcelain on the low, carved table that was the only barrier between her and Raphael, and Lijuan. His hand was the lustrous darkness found at the heart of thempingo tree, so rich, so pure that furniture made from the heartwood went for thousands upon thousands of dollars.

His skin was so beautiful, so evocative of the months she’d once spent in Africa, that it took her a moment to look into his eyes, to realize that he was dead.