Archangel’s Legion (Guild Hunter #6)(39)
Author: Nalini Singh

He realized he couldn’t allow her to remain blind to that toxic influence. I’m not your father, Elena.

Her breath coming fast and shallow, she shook her head. Jeffrey has nothing to do with this.

He has everything to do with it, Raphael countered, thrusting his hands into her unbound hair as she raised her own hands to grip at his arms, as if she would shove him away. We will not go through eternity with you expecting the worst from me.

A visible flinch, but his stubborn, furious consort refused to back down. That’s not what I’m doing. Her body trembling from the force of her emotions, she said, I know you, and I know how you see humans: as fireflies that live and die in a heartbeat, not worth anything.

I fell in love with a mortal! Until she was his eternity. Do you question that, too?

Her eyes widened at the enraged question. “No,” she whispered aloud, before returning to mental speech. Your love is the one constant in my life, but I’m so afraid of what immortality will demand from us, what it’ll steal.

It can take nothing we do not give.

Then you need to listen to me. Stubbornness again, her expression that of the warrior she was, one who’d fight to the death to protect those who had earned her loyalty. My friends, they’re my family. I need to be able to protect them—if you take that away from me, you may as well cut out my heart.

It had been an age since he’d seen mortals as she did, since he’d formed a friendship with a simple farmer who’d come to be a man he trusted not only with his life, but with Elena’s. I have forgotten, it seems, that I, too, once had a human friend I wished to protect. He’d failed, Dmitri’s life torn asunder—and the failing had marked Raphael, too, changed him in ways that could never be undone.

Then you understand. Elena’s hair shone white in the harsh light that lit up the donor doorway. It’s not safe for my friends to be drawn deeper into the immortal world. Not unless you trust them to keep—

No. Our laws exist for a reason. And it wasn’t simply because angels thought humans beneath their notice. The games immortals play would break mortals in a heartbeat.

Silence from his consort, followed by a simple, resolute declaration. Then he can’t be here.

He can’t be here, Raphael agreed, his mind playing back the memory of the day he’d found Dmitri gripping a blood-drenched knife, his chest a ruin, the other man having attempted to carve out his heart in an attempt to join his murdered family.

Raphael would never forget Dmitri’s grief and the horror that had preceded it . . . and he would not have Elena carry such memories for all eternity. I will not force you to drag your friends into our world.

• • •

Emotionally shaken as a result of an argument she knew had drawn a bright line in the sand of the life she was building with her archangel, their relationship coming out of it stronger rather than fatally damaged, Elena returned to the task of untangling the complicated murk of scents around the donor door.

Even so focused, she couldn’t forget what Raphael had said: We will not go through eternity with you expecting the worst from me.

She’d argued against his perception, but now found herself considering if it was true. Had her father scarred her so badly as a child? No, it was far more complicated than that. “The greatest breach of trust,” she found herself saying softly, having moved away from the area under surveillance, “was my mother’s.”

His eyes told her he knew her meaning. Understood the agony that had shredded her as she stood mute beside Marguerite’s grave, Beth’s tiny hand clasped in hers. Jeffrey had been behind them, his hands on their shoulders, his body their rock, strong and there.

“I was so angry at him for not stopping her.” Catching a suspicious concentration of scent, she went down into a crouch, her wings on the cold asphalt. “After the funeral, I struck out at him, screaming that it was his fault when I knew it wasn’t.” Her mother hadn’t survived Slater Patalis and what he’d done to her two oldest babies, no matter if her body had made it out alive.

“You were a child.”

Elena shook her head at Raphael’s response. “I was old enough to know better, but you know what? Jeffrey never, not once, argued against my irrational accusations. Because he blamed himself, too.”

She hadn’t thought about those first days after her mother’s suicide for years, only what came after, when Jeffrey’s broken heart had translated into a cold rage that had him erasing Marguerite from the house and their lives. “Every time I think I understand what we are—Jeffrey and I—I discover another facet and suddenly it’s not so sim—”

Putrid rot, the miasma of death, an undertone of burnt flesh.

“There’s something here.” Her senses hummed. “It’s faint, hard for me to sink my teeth into even though I can sense each of the notes.” Ugly, fetid, unnatural. “Possibly because it’s from a human.”

“Can you follow it?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I’ll keep watch from above.” Walking a short distance away so as not to disturb the scents, he took off and was lost behind a veil of glamour.

It took painstaking patience to tug on that one faint thread among the dozens that blanketed the area. Blood-for-Less might be on the fringe of the Vampire Quarter, but it apparently got plenty of business—unlike on her previous visit, Elena had heard the heavy murmur of voices from within that indicated Marcia had a full house tonight.

The deeper she got into the Quarter, the more heavily trafficked it became, the central section a favorite among hip young vamps—and suburbanites who wanted to walk on the wild side without going into the more dangerous parts of town. Leggy models, mortal and immortal, were as ubiquitous a part of the landscape as slickly dressed vampires on the prowl, everyone congregating around the clubs that opened their doors after nightfall.

No one dared get in her way.

Keeping her wings folded tight to her back, she made sure her blades were in full view as she tracked. Not that she was afraid of being tackled by a fashionista vamp, she thought with an inward snort. Then again, stilettos were f**king lethal weapons as far as she was concerned.

Ten more minutes of meticulous tracking and she passed out of the central zone and into the Flesh Market. Most tourist guidebooks told visitors to “exercise extreme caution” in this part of the Quarter. Because while the vamps in this area were as stylishly dressed and as urbane, they were older, with darker appetites. Club Masque, up ahead, had a sign at the top of the mortal queue that said, Fresh Meat.