“You tempt a man into mortal sin.”
She sucked in a breath as she saw her archangel, his chest bare, his legs clad in formal black pants. “Look who’s talking.” He was beauty cut by time, a lethal blade honed through the ages.
Lifting the dress, she stepped into it. The material slid against her legs as she drew it up, the top half pooling at her hips. Raphael prowled to her, his eyes skating over the naked flesh of her breasts. Possession glittered in those eyes, and that was all the warning she got before the storm of his kiss, the touch of his fingers . . . the angel dust that filtered into her very pores.
She held the kiss when he would have broken it. “Not yet.” Then she took her archangel, drinking in the taste of him until it suffused her veins, infiltrated her cells.
“You,” Raphael said against her mouth when she finally set him free, “will kiss me like that tonight.”
It was an order she could live with. “Deal.”
Stroking both hands down over her breasts, Raphael lifted the two pieces of fabric that made up the top to her shoulders—after crisscrossing them below the neck—and began to tie a knot at her nape.
“I guess,” she said, licking her lips, feeling her thighs clench, “I don’t need makeup now.” Angel dust shimmered like diamonds on her skin.
Placing one hand on the naked plane of her stomach after ensuring the knot was secure, Raphael pressed a kiss to her nape, bared since she’d put her hair up in a tight bun. She’d considered spearing that knot with chopsticks, but her hair was too slippery to hold the ornamentation. Instead, she’d tucked in a small hairpin detailed with the image of a wildflower.
Simple. Perfectly adapted. Hard to kill.
It had been a gift from Sara, tucked beside the ring Elena had asked her best friend to order. The amber had come from a dealer who’d owed Elena a favor, the specific piece one she’d seen in his private collection. Balli had paid up the favor because it had been a matter of honor, but she knew it had to have hurt. Of course, once he saw where his amber had gone . . . The thought of his round face wreathed in smiles made her heart lighten.
Raphael played his fingers over her abdomen, his ring catching the light. “Your injuries?”
“Nothing to worry about.” Her thigh ached enough to remind her of Anoushka’s attack, but the cuts on her arms had scabbed over.
“Can you move?”
She spun out, reaching for the blades hidden in the butter-soft black leather arm sheaths she was wearing openly tonight, protocol be damned. The skirts of the dress parted like liquid, as if attuned to her every move. She lobbed a knife toward the archangel who watched her.
Catching it with lethal ease, he threw it back. She tucked it into the arm sheath, before testing how difficult it would be to get to the gun strapped to her left thigh. Not hard at all. “No problems.”
As she rose, the dress fell seamlessly around her body, all the slits elegantly concealed. “What are the chances I won’t need to use my weapons tonight?”
Raphael’s answer was terrifying in its starkness. “Lijuan’s reborn walk the halls.”
38
The ball was held outdoors in a massive courtyard framed by low buildings full of light, food, and musicians, the hypnotic strains of the ehru lingering in the air. Looking around, Elena couldn’t do anything but admire the stunning simplicity of it all—the thin, rectangular paving stones beneath the revelers’ feet had been washed until they gleamed a creamy white, the entire area lit with delicate lanterns in a thousand different hues, their light reflecting off the star-studded night sky.
Cherry blossom trees in full bloom—impossible—spread their lush pink arms over the courtiers, their limbs twined with lights that twinkled like diamonds. Elena picked a single perfect blossom from her hair. “I can feel the truth whispering beneath,” she said, scenting the barest hint of rot, of death, “but on the surface, it’s magical.”
“A queen keeps a court that is spoken about. A goddess keeps a court that is never forgotten.”
Wings filled her vision as angel after angel flew down for a graceful landing, all of them dressed in clothing that accentuated loveliness beyond mortal ken. Even the vampires, their own faces a study in the most sensual symmetry, stood enthralled. The few mortals who’d been invited or brought as dates fought not to stare, but it was a losing battle.
Elena might have had the same reaction—had she not been standing next to the most compelling man in the room. Raphael had chosen to wear black tonight, the severe color throwing his eyes into vivid focus. He was at once a being of unearthly beauty and a warrior king who wouldn’t hesitate to spill blood.
“I didn’t expect her to attend.”
Following his gaze, she saw Neha, a queen dressed in a silk sari of unembellished white, her hair pulled off her face in an austere bun. Those dark eyes burned with hatred as she stared at Michaela.
Michaela appeared unconcerned, her body caressed by an exquisite ankle-length gown in the colors of sunset, her fingers curled around Dahariel’s forearm. The male angel wasn’t smiling, his expression as detached as that of the predator brought to mind by his wings. But there was no mistaking the sexual heat between the two.
Elena looked away, her eyes colliding with Neha’s as the Archangel of India glimpsed her and Raphael. Elena froze at the contact. What lived in Neha was older than civilization, a cold, cold creature without soul or sentience. She watched, her blood turning to ice as Neha began to move toward them with jerky footsteps quite unlike her usual sensual grace.
Wings rustled as Aodhan and Jason emerged out of the night to flank them.
Neha ignored everyone but Raphael. “I will forgive you, Raphael.” Flat, toneless words. “Anoushka broke our greatest law. For that, she died.”
Raphael stayed silent as Neha turned and left without another word, heading toward a circle of vampires with brown eyes and skin that spoke of an ancient land of heat and a sleek, hidden violence, much like the tigers that prowled its forests.
“How much,” Elena said, withdrawing her hand from its position over the butt of her gun, “of that did she actually mean?”
“None and all.” Neha will act as an archangel, but hate is a poison in her soul.
Releasing the breath she hadn’t been aware of holding, Elena let her gaze drift forward, to the steps that led up to what was, without question, a throne. Lijuan sat on a masterfully carved chair of what was almost certainly ivory. Three men stood beside her—Xi, with his wings of red on gray; a Chinese vampire with a flawless face; and the reborn who’d served Elena and Raphael that first night. But he was no longer the sole one of his kind.
They stood on the edges of the crowd, a silent army with eyes that tracked all movement. There was an odd sheen to their gaze, a hunger that made her instincts rise in warning. Flesh, she thought, remembering the report she’d read sitting in Jessamy’s sunny classroom, they lived on flesh. “Her reborn surround us,” she said, wondering how the other guests couldn’t smell the rot, the musty smell of a grave desecrated.
Raphael didn’t shift his gaze off Lijuan, but his words told her he was conscious of everything around them. “An angel without wings is a creature maimed, prey brought to ground.”
She took a deep breath, mind awash with the images of that sunset in the wildflower garden, Illium’s sword a silver blur as he amputated the wings of Michaela’s guard. It was instinct to tighten her own wings even further before turning her attention toward the throne once more.
To find Lijuan looking straight at her.
Even from this far away, Elena felt the bone-crushing impact of that gaze. She wasn’t surprised when the archangel rose, and the gathering fell silent.