One hand gripped her under her left arm, the other under her right. She snapped her wings together in the nick of time. Jason and Aodhan took off even as a massive lack of sound filled the air—power being sucked into a vacuum before expanding outward. It threatened to crush, but somehow, the two angels managed to get airborne.
“Go!”
But Jason and Aodhan waited three more seconds before releasing her. Her wings spread instinctively, the tips curling away from the death racing toward them. Heat waves licked across the air, each more dangerous than the last. She saw vampires fall even as they ran, heard screams as human homes went up in flames, saw angels flying ever higher in an attempt to escape. But Jason and Aodhan stayed stubbornly by her side, though she was weaker, far slower.
Fire singed her nape. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the edge of the inferno mere seconds behind them. “Drop!” she screamed. “Drop!”
The blast hit with the force of a two-ton truck, crumpling their wings and slamming them to earth like pieces of glass.
Killing Lijuan was impossible. Raphael realized that with the first wave of her power. She tasted of death and life intertwined, a being who straddled worlds.
Blood continued to streak down her shoulder, black and viscous, but still her power grew, her wings backlit by the glow until they ceased to exist. The rest of the Cadre rose with her, holding back the blinding wave that might destroy the world itself. Already, thousands had likely died. If they stopped, if they let her release the unmitigated fury of her strength, that death toll would reach millions. Billions.
But that wasn’t why his fellow archangels fought. Human life meant little to most. They fought for their own lives, and because Lijuan had made a mistake. He’d felt their shock as Adrian tore apart the vampire who’d had the ill fortune to be enthralled by Lijuan. The blood, the death, was nothing new. But the control she had over her reborn, the strength of those reborn against the vampires . . . no archangel wanted to face that kind of an army. The fact that that army was a plague that held the potential to end them all was the final nail in the coffin.
I will not be contained. I cannot be contained.
Lijuan’s voice in their heads, the seeming sanity of it more disturbing than Uram’s viciousness had been in those last minutes above New York. Now Beijing burned below them and in that rubble lay Elena. The primal core of him raged to go to her. But he held his position. Because his warrior with her mortal heart would expect nothing less.
He felt one of the tendons in his left wing snap against the wake of a power that slapped into him over and over. Only Favashi, younger than him, was showing signs of similar damage.
“Then she will kill you. She will make you mortal.”
He was weaker than he should have been, but he was also stronger. Looking up into Lijuan’s face, the human mask stripped away to reveal the screaming darkness, he said, “Now,” speaking to the archangels ringing Lijuan, knowing she was far beyond hearing. Now!
A savage cascade of power, all of it focused on one central target. Lijuan’s body bowed as the power hit her, the sky turning to daylight for a single startling second. When night returned, Zhou Lijuan was simply gone, the Forbidden City nothing but a black crater, Beijing a memory in immortal and mortal minds.
The agony of the dying was drowned out only by the silence of the dead.
He found Elena buried under the wings of two of his Seven. Jason and Aodhan were unconscious, the bones in their legs twisted. But those injuries were nothing to immortals of their age. They’d survive. Elena was far, far younger.
But she had the will of a hunter-born.
He felt the stubborn flicker of her life even as he picked her crumpled body up from the hard earth where she’d been thrown. Her hands were torn open, her face bruised, but her body . . . Stroking his hand down it, he realized he felt only a few fractures. Minor. Even for such a young angel. He should have let her rest, but he couldn’t bear the silence.
Elena.
Her lashes fluttered.
He couldn’t hasten her healing, having burned out his power in the fight to hold Lijuan. It would take time to recover.
Hunter mine.
Pale silver eyes looking into his.
Love, he thought as he held her to his heart, was an agony beyond compare.
Epilogue
Raphael wasn’t surprised to see Lijuan’s image form in the clear waters of a rain-filled pool just beyond the Refuge. He knelt by its side as Elena sat swaddled in a blanket, her face uplifted to the warm rays of the rising sun. But he felt her look his way the instant Lijuan appeared, though the sending would be invisible to her.
“I live, Raphael.” Lijuan’s voice was a million screams and endless silence. “Are you not afraid?”
“You’ve evolved,” he said, seeing her hand fade into mist, her face half disappear before it returned. “You no longer need the flesh. Our concerns are not yours.”
A laugh, whispers, and something more, something that spoke of caresses under the cover of dark as blood flowed warm and rich. “I have killed the last of my reborn.” Her form solidified, until it appeared almost normal. “Sometimes, I have need of the flesh.”
“Why tell me?” he asked. “They are your weakness.”
“I like you, Raphael.” A smile that froze the water in the pond, her visage framed in frost. “And your hunter, yes, she intrigues me still.”
He met those eyes that were beyond immortal and wondered at the truth. “Did you need to die to evolve?”
“Ask me that question when we next meet. Perhaps I will answer.”
“You walk between life and death,” he said. “What do you see?”
“Mysteries, answers, yesterdays, and tomorrows.” An enigmatic smile. “We’ll speak again. I do so like you, Raphael.”
The words echoed in the air as her image faded. Rising, he took the hand Elena held out, brought her gently to her feet. Her eyes were troubled as she looked to him. “Lijuan?”
“She isn’t a threat.” He drew her deeper into his arms. “I think, for now, Lijuan has little interest in the concerns of the world.” Her face had held an eerily childish joy in her new life, her new sphere of existence.
“That’s good enough for me.” A long breath, Elena’s arms snaking out of the blanket to wrap around him. “I want to go home, Archangel.”
Stroking his hand over the warm curve of her hip, he wondered if New York was ready for a hunter turned angel. “We leave with the next sunrise.”