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Elena wouldn’t describe the Archangel of Persia as any kind of a fool, but she had to agree with Michaela that the long-term picture had to take priority.

“The children . . . It is difficult.” Michaela blinked rapidly, her throat moving. “All our troops are severely demoralized from having to cut down those we are programmed to protect. I kept seeing my own babe, kept thinking that each child was another woman’s heart.”

Elena couldn’t imagine the horror of facing infected child after infected child. She’d frozen when faced with a single infected child during the last battle, a sundress-wearing girl who’d come off an infected cruise ship. The idea of having that nightmare moment repeated in a continuous loop . . . Bile coated the back of her throat.

The sky boomed with a massive burst of sound without warning, a huge overwhelming force that was a roundhouse punch to the side of the head. Elena’s ears popped, her head ringing. Archangel, what the hell was that?

Eyes the most violent shade of blue in this world held hers. An archangel has died.

66

As Elena’s skin chilled at Raphael’s words, the sky began to fill with clouds pregnant with snow. That didn’t happen with Uram. He had died in a blast of pure white light that lit up the entire city before it faded out of existence, no trace left of the Archangel of Blood.

The impact is never the same, Raphael said. I am told that, only an hour after Uram’s death, while we were both unconscious, it began to rain across the entire world. It did not stop for three days.

Elena realized they’d never spoken about this. That time had been well past when she woke from her long sleep. The whole “I’m an angel” thing had taken up her attention, Uram a bad memory better left to the annals of history.

“Which one of us was it?” Michaela’s cheekbones were like knives against her skin, her wings held with vicious tightness. “Other than you and Lijuan, Titus and Charisemnon are the only two currently in battle with one another.”

Elena’s chest hardened to granite. Titus was one of her favorite archangels. She couldn’t countenance the idea of him being gone from this world.

“We will not know until the news filters out of the territory.” Raphael shifted so that his wing touched Elena’s. “Until then, we must believe that Titus has taken an enemy from the world.”

Elena caught another glimpse of the spreading black on Raphael’s wing and all at once nothing else was important; she had to get Raphael somewhere private. “You must be tired,” she said to Michaela, deliberately switching to a slight formality to hold with angelic etiquette in this kind of a situation.

She didn’t give a flying monkey’s ass about etiquette, her heart a staccato beat, but it got things done when it came to powerful angels used to certain modes of behavior. “Please,” she said, “make use of one of the suites in the Tower. It appears Lijuan’s troops are content to hold their territory and wait for her to rise. We’ll have a little time at least.”

“Thank you, Consort,” Michaela said with a sincerity that was almost real. “But if you do not mind, Raphael, I would speak to your second and gain a greater understanding of how this battle is being fought, and the enemy we face.”

“Elijah, too, will meet you in the war room,” Raphael said after a moment.

The three of them parted ways after showing Michaela to the war room. Elena caught Dmitri’s eye, then used Laric’s “silent tongue” behind Michaela’s back to quickly sign out a message. The corners of his eyes tightened at the news that Raphael was wounded, but he moved smoothly to intercept Michaela so she and Raphael could get away.

Dmitri had a dark sensuality to him even when he wasn’t trying, and Elena saw Michaela react with a slight softening. Her opening comment held a husky laugh to it. “You do get better with age, Dmitri.”

“And you get more ravishing,” he replied with a slow smile you’d take as real if you hadn’t seen him smile at Honor.

Elena took the chance and dragged Raphael away.

She all but tore his top off his body the instant they were in their quarters. The leather was cracked and smudged and dented, scorched in places, torn in others. When it stuck to his shoulders for a frustrating moment, she used a knife to just cut it off.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” His left shoulder was nearly all black and trickles of that blackness had begun to streak down his side toward his heart. The rib cage one was larger than the span of her hand—and it was sending lethal tendrils to his heart, too.

“I’m afraid I am not in the mood, hbeebti.

“I’m going to kill you in a second.” But her hand was gentle as she checked the area around his rib cage, then higher.

He gripped her wrist when she would’ve touched the blackened flesh. “No, Elena. We can’t take the risk it will jump to you. You are currently devoid of wildfire and Lijuan is becoming more powerful—we do not know the properties of this poison.”

Jaw set, she nonetheless nodded. “It hasn’t reached your eyes.” The blue was painfully clear, the color intense. “Your body’s holding it at bay.”

“No. It is growing, simply slower than before because of the depth of the initial hit. She didn’t get as much of the poison in me this time.”

Elena wanted to argue with him that he was wrong, that the poison wasn’t creeping over his body in a toxic wave, but she couldn’t. The stuff was determined to claw around his heart, eat him up.

“Amputation,” he said, “may be the best option.”

Elena’s entire self rebelled at the idea of Raphael being brutalized in such a way, but she nodded. As an archangel, he could heal an amputation—and this deadly poison would be out of him. “You’ll be crippled on the battlefield.”

“Yes.” A warrior’s acknowledgment. “We leave the rib cage infection, and remove the shoulder one. I can still fight with one arm and shoulder gone.”

Heart ice, she stared into his eyes; he was signing his death warrant. That patch on his rib cage would continue to eat away at him. And battling Lijuan as desperately as they were, meant he’d have no time or resources to fight back, heal. “Together,” she reminded him on a harsh whisper. “You take what you need.” Her body was a paltry battery at best, but she was still generating droplets of wildfire.

When she pressed her hand against a clear part of his chest, a pitifully thin crackle of wildfire tinged with an opalescence of midnight and dawn spread from her into him. Maybe she’d bought her archangel another thirty minutes.

He closed his hand over hers. “Together.”

Elena wanted to wrap her arms around him, hold on tight forever, but with the infection rampant in his body, she knew he wouldn’t permit it. So they simply stood there, exhausted, in love, and determined, until a voice entered their mind.

Aeclari.

Both she and Raphael turned toward the balcony doors. It was no surprise to see the Primary standing outside, framed by a Manhattan that had gone painfully dark against the night. Snow fell in soft flakes to lie against his hair, his shoulders, this being from the deep who now walked the world.

She and Raphael walked over together to open those doors, but when they gestured the Primary inside out of the cold, he shook his head. “It is time.” In his voice lived hundreds of others, all his brethren, including those whose bodies had been poisoned.