“I am an archangel.”
Lips tilting up at the corners, his hunter spread her wings so that the white gold of her primaries brushed his. “You’re also mine and I will hurt you if you dare go up against Lijuan on your own.” She slid out her crossbow. “Don’t mess with me.”
Pulling her close, the crossbow flat against his chest, he took her mouth. He’d fallen for her because she was a warrior, and over the time since they’d come together, he’d learned to accept that she would never stand on the sidelines. But this time—I need you to remain in the city, help hold it while I’m gone.
Elena broke off the kiss, scowled. “Dmitri is plenty tough enough to do that.”
“But you, hbeebti, are no longer just a hunter,” he said, speaking the word “beloved” in the language his consort’s grandmother had brought with her from a distant land. “You are a symbol—even if I am missed, so long as people can see you in the air, they’ll feel safe.” Because everyone knows I would not leave my consort in a city I didn’t feel was protected against all harm.
“Shit,” Elena muttered. “I hate it when you make sense.” Strapping her crossbow to her thigh once again, she walked to the edge of the roof and waited for him to come up beside her. “Symbols are necessary right now, aren’t they?”
Raphael answered by sliding his wing over hers, both of them aware the world was perched on a precipice that could give way without warning. Wind riffling through his hair, he looked toward the Tower, saw Dmitri step out onto a balcony with Aodhan. “I should only be away from the city for a short time, just long enough to protect Alexander during the most vulnerable part of his waking.”
Elena nodded, her eyes turned in the same direction as Raphael’s. “We going to talk about how you made it to Illium so fast? That was an impossible distance to cross even for you, Archangel.”
Raphael watched the light glitter off Aodhan, shards sparking in the air, and thought of that moment when he’d seen Illium drop from the sky. He’d thought it a game until Aodhan’s cry for help. “The Hummingbird can’t lose him. He’s her only link to a tenuous sanity.” Raphael loved Illium’s mother, had great respect for her, but he also understood that she was broken inside.
A slightly rough-skinned hand closing over his, his warrior-consort’s fingers strong. “You can’t lose him either.” Her eyes held knowledge of him that belied the briefness of their relationship in immortal terms. “He’s the heart of the Seven.”
Yes. Illium might be younger than several of the others and appear irreverent more often than not, but he was their glue, the piece that tied all the others to one another. “Before Mahiya, when Jason was yet lost in darkness, the only time I saw him close to a smile was after Illium challenged him to an old-fashioned duel.”
Raphael could see his spymaster’s impassive face in his mind, remember how Jason’s eyes had warmed from within. “Your Bluebell was a stripling whom Jason easily defeated, but Illium just laughed and asked if he could have a longer rapier next time so he could poke at Jason from a distance.”
Elena’s lips twitched. “That sounds like Illium.” Though he’d woken an hour past and appeared fine but for a little residual dizziness, terror still bled through her at what she’d witnessed that afternoon. It was pure chance she’d been close enough to help—she and the Primary had been flying toward the Legion building when she’d glimpsed the wild blue and shattered light of Illium and Aodhan high in the sky.
She’d smiled, remembering something Aodhan had said to her.
It was worth the risk to play a game with my friend again. Until I threw that ball at Illium over the river, I didn’t understand I hadn’t felt alive for over two hundred years.
When Illium had fallen, she’d shaken her head at what she’d believed to be a trick. Everything had changed the instant she saw Aodhan dive, heard Raphael’s alert to every angel in the vicinity. Only no one was close enough—least of all Raphael. “Your wings were afire,” she whispered, still unable to fully understand what she’d seen in those seconds stretched by horror into hours.
“Tell me what you saw,” Raphael said. “I felt my speed increase, but I put it down to the urgency of the incident.”
Blinking, Elena turned to face the archangel who’d branded her to the soul. The fact he didn’t know hadn’t occurred to her . . . but it had all happened so fast, his attention on saving Illium and Aodhan both. “The white fire that licks over your wings at times,” she said, touching her fingers to the shimmering white gold of his feathers, “it took over. It was like you had no physical wings—as if your wings were pure white flame.”
It had been a magnificent sight she’d only processed in the aftermath. “The effect disappeared as soon as you had Illium in your arms.”
Spreading out his wings and curling first one inward, then the other, Raphael examined the feathers before folding them back in. “No evidence of it now, but what you’re describing sounds almost like Lijuan’s ability to go noncorporeal. On the same continuum at least.”
Elena’s skin chilled. “Yeah, I guess.” Releasing his hand, she gripped the front of his white shirt and tugged him to her. “Don’t you dare ‘evolve’ on me.” She couldn’t follow him into that other state, though she’d kill herself trying.
Raphael’s lips curved. “Have no fear, hbeebti,” he said. “I am too fond of the flesh.” A caress of her hip, a luscious kiss.
Yet even as the crashing windswept sea of him infiltrated her senses, Elena knew even an archangel couldn’t hold back the possibly catastrophic changes wrought by the Cascade. “I’ll follow you,” she whispered against his lips. “No matter where you go, I’ll be right beside you.”
Eyes of endless blue burned with an incandescent flame. “Together, Elena-mine. Always.” Wrapping her in his wings, he held her until her heart calmed, the fear receding under a tide of furious determination: no one and nothing would steal her archangel from her.
“I heard a bit of gossip from Amanat,” she said once she could speak again.
“How can you hear gossip from Amanat? Unless you and my mother have become the best of friends?”
She elbowed him. “Very funny.” Elena and Caliane might have called a truce, but Caliane remained an Ancient and her freaking mother-in-law. “I made some other friends on our last visit.” Including a smart, funny maiden who danced as gracefully as Elena’s sister Belle had danced before a murderous vampire stole her life.
“Belle! Belle! Can I dance with you?”
“Come on, squirt. Stand like this.”
Chest achingly tight at the memory of a loss she would carry with her forever, she said, “Apparently, there’s a high chance Naasir and his scholar are no longer just colleagues.”
He looks at her as I’ve never seen Naasir look at anyone. As if she is a treasure he wants to keep, wants to protect.
“You catch your consort by surprise,” Raphael murmured. “Particularly as the scholar has taken a vow of celibacy.”
“We’re talking about Naasir here.” Elena grinned. “He has a certain charm. Just like his archangel—I never planned to be naked with you, either.” Deadly and inhuman, the Archangel of New York was not a man with whom Elena Deveraux, Guild Hunter, had ever intended to mess.
A glint in the eyes that held oceans, even in the darkness. “Plan it now,” he said, lifting off with her still in his arms. “We have not danced in the sky for too long, and today, I feel a need to celebrate life.” His jaw grew hard.
Stroking it as her skin turned electric, Elena pulled his head down to her own. “Life,” she whispered before their lips met in a storm of sensation.
30
Two hours of hiking later, Andromeda and Naasir found themselves on the outskirts of the village that was the last bastion of civilization before the cave system, the homes built around what, from the air, was a startlingly clear blue-green lake. A small jewel in the ocean of sand that surrounded the oasis on every side, the lake wasn’t a perfect sphere.