Archangel's Prophecy
(Book 11 in the Guild Hunter series)
A novel by Nalini Singh
Berkley titles by Nalini Singh
SLAVE TO SENSATION
VISIONS OF HEAT
CARESSED BY ICE
MINE TO POSSESS
HOSTAGE TO PLEASURE
BRANDED BY FIRE
BLAZE OF MEMORY BONDS OF JUSTICE
PLAY OF PASSION
KISS OF SNOW
TANGLE OF NEED
HEART OF OBSIDIAN
SHIELD OF WINTER
SHARDS OF HOPE
ALLEGIANCE OF HONOR
SILVER SILENCE
OCEAN LIGHT
ANGELS’ BLOOD
ARCHANGEL’S KISS
ARCHANGEL’S CONSORT
ARCHANGEL’S BLADE
ARCHANGEL’S STORM
ARCHANGEL’S LEGION
ARCHANGEL’S SHADOWS
ARCHANGEL’S ENIGMA
ARCHANGEL’S HEART
ARCHANGEL’S VIPER
ARCHANGEL’S PROPHECY
AN ENCHANTED SEASON
(with Maggie Shayne, Erin McCarthy, and Jean Johnson)
THE MAGICAL CHRISTMAS CAT
(with Lora Leigh, Erin McCarthy, and Linda Winstead Jones)
MUST LOVE HELLHOUNDS
(with Charlaine Harris, Ilona Andrews, and Meljean Brook)
BURNING UP
(with Angela Knight, Virginia Kantra, and Meljean Brook)
ANGELS OF DARKNESS
(with Ilona Andrews, Meljean Brook, and Sharon Shinn)
ANGELS’ FLIGHT
WILD INVITATION NIGHT SHIFT
(with Ilona Andrews, Lisa Shearin, and Milla Vane)
WILD EMBRACE
ANGELS’ PAWN
ANGELS’ DANCE
TEXTURE OF INTIMACY
DECLARATION OF COURTSHIP
WHISPER OF SIN
SECRETS AT MIDNIGHT
For Ashwini, who is one tough beta reader.
And who puts up with late-night calls from a certain writer who keeps vampire hours and wants to talk out the stories in her brain.
Also, who sat next to me on a plane and let me interrupt her every five minutes saying, “Read this and give me your opinion,” while I was working out a particularly tough scene.
Thanks for helping to make this book so awesome.
A time of death
A time of life
The drinker of blood lost
The agony of rebirth
The last feather to fall
Such eyes of wild fire, Such broken dreams
One must die for one to live
And the birds, ah, the birds always know
1
Elena noticed the sparrows with the periphery of her mind.
The small birds were dipping and dancing beyond the Tower windows, their wings nearly brushing the glass. For a second, she felt a chill on the back of her neck, but then the sparrows flew off to do sparrow business and she realized she was being paranoid. Just because the city’s birds had gone all creepy and otherworldly once didn’t mean every sparrow was a harbinger.
Sometimes a bird was just a bird.
She returned to her Scrabble death match with Vivek.
Ten minutes later, the two of them were taking an insane amount of pleasure in arguing over a word when Sara called to ask her to track a young vampire who thought he could skip out on his Contract. “Why?” she said to both Sara and Vivek, after putting the conversation on speaker.
“Because you’re a Guild Hunter, and we find and haul back runaway vampires,” was Sara’s dry response. “If you don’t know that by now, Ellie, there’s no hope for you.”
“No.” Elena leaned back in her chair across from Vivek. “Why do a certain percentage of baby vamps think that (a) all the nasty, terrible things they’ve heard about the old angels aren’t true, and (b)—after discovering that, in fact, all the previous knowledge they had is true, why do they think they’ll be the one wet-behind-the-ears idiot who’ll make it to freedom?”
Both of those things made zero sense to Elena. You’d have to be blind, deaf, and mentally unhinged not to realize that angelkind was not human in any way, shape, or form. To a being who had lived a thousand years, what were mortals and new-Made vampires but bugs to be crushed? Nothing but fragile fireflies. Pretty perhaps, if your tastes ran that way, but gone and forgotten in mere heartbeats.
That Elena was now the consort of the most powerful immortal in North America didn’t change her bone-deep understanding of that searing truth. Raphael was learning to act with more humanity because of the bond of love that tied them together, but he wasn’t human, and he never would be; it’d be like asking a ferocious tiger to turn tame. An impossibility—and a destruction.
Raphael was a glorious fury, a power.
As Elena was a newborn angel with a heart that would always be mortal, even should she live ten thousand years.
“I have an answer.” Vivek raised his hand, his sharply handsome face bearing a cheek-creasing grin, and the rich brown of his skin lit with good humor.
It had been a long time since Elena had seen any sign of the petulance and pettiness that had once been as much a part of him as his striking intellect. Then Vivek had controlled the Cellars, the hidey hole the Guild kept for hunters who needed to lie low for a while—such as a wayward hunter who might’ve slit the throat of a vampire so brutally powerful he was an archangel’s second.
Elena still wasn’t sorry about that. Dmitri had deserved to feel the lethal edge of her knife and more. And it wasn’t as if he’d been at any risk of dying. The arrogant fuck had blown her a kiss while his shirt was wet with darkest crimson, the blood loss nothing to a vampire that strong.
Not that his lack of injuries and twisted delight in the violent interaction had stopped him from stalking Elena—hence her need to disappear into the Cellars. In that underground world, Vivek had been king, and he’d relished his power. Piss him off and you’d say good-bye to air-conditioning, your room a sauna—and forget about fresh coffee. These days, however, the Cellars were someone else’s domain; and, like her, Vivek was growing into a strange new skin.
In the five years since he’d been Made a vampire, the formerly tetraplegic guild hunter had regained the use of his arms and most of his upper body. Even though his lower body remained numb to sensation and offered no way for him to get out of the wheelchair he’d been in since childhood, Vivek wasn’t complaining.
The healers had predicted it would take decades for him to regain even basic movement.
“Enlighten us,” Sara said in response to Vivek’s declaration, her tone distinctly amused. Whispers coming through the line told Elena her best friend was clearing paperwork while she spoke to them; the Guild director’s job was never finished.
“The transition to vampirism,” Vivek said in an ostentatiously pompous tone, “causes a reaction in a small percentage of vampires that turns on the idiot gene.” He held up a finger in a “pay attention” stance. “Said gene is located on chromosome pair twenty-four, colloquially known as the vampire chromosome.”