Archangel's Kiss

10

Raphael landed on the outer balcony of Elijah’s base in the Refuge, knowing Elena would have liked to meet Hannah. But she was still an immortal barely born—Raphael would never trust her life to the mercurial moods of his fellow archangels and angels. And it wasn’t coincidence that both Elijah and Michaela had chosen to come to the Refuge at this time.

The scent of magnolias preceded Hannah’s entrance onto the balcony. “Raphael.” She held out both hands. “It has been too long.”

He took those hands and bent his lips to her cheek. “Over five decades.” Hannah didn’t often leave her South American home. “You are well?”

Hannah’s ebony skin shimmered under the afternoon sunlight as she nodded, her hair a mass of black curls shot with embers that caught the sunlight. “I’ve come to meet your hunter.”

“You surprise me, Hannah.” He dropped her hands as she turned to lead him inside.

She laughed, and it was a warm, gentle sound. “I have my flaws. Curiosity is one of them.”

“Elena will be flattered to know she has drawn you from your home.”

Hannah went to a small, beautifully carved table and picked up a bottle shaped from the most delicate glass. “Wine?”

“Thank you.” He looked around the room, saw the touch of Hannah’s artistic hand in every painting, every piece of furniture. “You travel more than people know.”

A small, secret smile. “Elijah will be through soon. We arrived not long ago.”

“Thank you.” He took the golden liquid she held out, and the glow of it reminded him of another time, another place. A dying hunter in his arms, her hair a sheet of white. And a heart he’d thought long dead breaking open in anguish.

“What does it taste like?” Hannah asked.

Raphael shook his head. Ambrosia . . . that moment—it was indescribable . . . and utterly private.

After a second, Hannah bent her own head in silent acquiescence. “I’m happy for you, Raphael.”

He met her gaze, waited.

“I’ve always thought of you as a friend,” she said quietly. “I know that if the others decided to come after Elijah behind his back, you wouldn’t join in.”

“Where does your faith come from?”

“From the heart, of course.”

Elijah walked out at that moment, his hair damp. “Raphael. You didn’t bring your Elena?”

My Elena.

He wondered what his hunter would think of the way immortals spoke of her. “Not this time.” Perhaps one day, Elijah was the one archangel he might trust. But that day wasn’t today.

“Come,” Hannah said, “let us sit.” As he watched, she turned to Elijah, and Raphael knew some silent communication passed between them, for Hannah’s lips curved before she took her seat.

“So,” Elijah said as his mate poured him wine with a poise that held an elegant maturity, “I hear Michaela graces us with her presence.”

“It seems she finds the Refuge to her taste these days.”

A small smile from the other archangel. “Has Hannah told you about her newest painting? It’s extraordinary.”

“I’ve scarcely begun,” Hannah demurred. “But, it’s almost painting itself.”

The next half hour passed in such easy conversation, and though Raphael had guessed the shape the meeting would take, he found himself impatient. It wasn’t a feeling he was familiar with—after having lived so long, he’d learned the art of patience. But then he’d met a hunter, and everything had changed.

Finally, he stood with Elijah on the balcony, Hannah having discreetly excused herself. “Do you tell her everything?” Raphael asked.

“Such a personal question. Not what I’m used to from you.”

“Elena asked me about angelic relationships. I find I know very little.”

Elijah looked down at the river that rushed so far below, twisting in and out of crevices that had grown ever deeper with the passing centuries. “Hannah knows what I know,” he said at last.

“Then why does she not stand with us?”

“She knows because she is my mate. She has no desire to be caught up in the workings of the Cadre.” A pause. “You don’t understand because your hunter has always been entangled with the Cadre.”

“How can someone of Hannah’s power”—and she’d strengthened a great deal since he’d last seen her—“be content to remain in the wings?”

“Hannah has no taste for politics.” Elijah turned to glance at Raphael, his jaw granite. “Such as that which has another angel daring to use my name.”

“It displays an arrogance that’ll lead to a mistake,” Raphael answered, echoing something Elena had said to him after those taut moments when she’d held him so tight—as if she’d physically keep him from falling into the abyss. “He seeks glory. For that, he must be known.”

“I understand your anger, Raphael”—Elijah’s own fury was a violent heat—“but we can’t allow this to distract us from the true problem.”

“You’ve heard something.” It was there in the other archangel’s eyes, his voice.

Elijah nodded. “There are rumors Lijuan plans to openly show off her reborn at the ball.”

Raphael had guessed as much. Jason’s last report, delivered after Lijuan’s reborn managed to corner him long enough to claw off part of his face, had spoken of an ever-strengthening army of the reawakened dead. “We must prepare for the consequences should the extent of Lijuan’s evolution become known.”

“The world will shudder,” Elijah said, his voice soft in the dusk. “And they’ll learn to fear us a little bit more.”

“That isn’t always a disadvantage.” Fear stopped mortals from taking foolish chances, from forgetting that an immortal would always win any battle.

Elijah’s face was an aristocratic silhouette against the orange red glow of the setting sun, his golden hair aflame. “Do you think that applies in this case?”

“Mortals are unpredictable—they may brand Lijuan a monster, or they may call her a goddess.”

Elijah glanced behind him as Hannah stepped out to ask if they’d like more wine. “Raphael?”

Raphael shook his head. “I thank you, Hannah.”

“It’s my pleasure.”

“What Lijuan is becoming,” Elijah said after his mate left, “part of me fears that that’s what awaits us all in the end.”

“You know as well as I do that our abilities are tied to who we are.” Raphael still couldn’t understand his own unexpected new talent—where had it grown from, what seed, what act? “And you’ve never taken the firstborn child of every family in a village just to show your power.”

Elijah was visibly shocked. “I’ve never heard that of Lijuan.”

“She was ancient when I was born, when you were born.” And Elijah was over three thousand years older than Raphael.

“She’s done many things which have been hidden in the mists of time.”

“Then how do you know?”

Raphael simply looked at the other angel.

After a while, Elijah nodded. “It says little about our intelligence that we do not. What did she do with the children she took?”

“Some, she apparently raised as her mortal pets—kept alive so long as they amused her. Others, she gave to her vampires as a source of food.”

“That,” Elijah said, “I cannot believe.” His face was a mask of revulsion. “Children are not to be touched. It is our most sacred law.”

Angelic births were rare, so rare. Each child was considered a gift, but—“Some among us believe it’s only angelic children who matter.”

Elijah’s bones pushed up white against his skin. “Do you?”

“No.” A pause, brutal honesty. “I’ve threatened mortal children to leash their parents.” But no matter the parents’ transgressions, not once had he touched their young.

“I did the same in the first half of my existence,” Elijah said. “Until I understood that the threat is only a step distant from the act.”

“Yes.” A year ago, while in the grip of the Quiet—a cold, inhumanly emotionless state caused by a specific use of his power—the darkness in Raphael had weighed up the life of a mortal child like so much grain. It was a stain on his soul, a crime for which he’d never seek forgiveness—because it was unforgiveable. But never again would he hold a child’s life as ransom. “The one who discovered the atrocity committed by Lijuan,” he said, wondering once more what he’d have become without Elena, “witnessed things that make a mockery of any doubt.”

“I saw the bodies.” Jason’s voice strained to the breaking point, his tribal tattoo standing out vivid black against skin that was normally a healthy brown. “Tiny, shriveled things. She keeps them as souvenirs.”

“How are they still preserved?”

“After her vampires took their blood, killing them, she had them dried.” Jason’s dark eyes met his. “There are babies in that room, sire.”

Even now, Raphael couldn’t think of it without a feeling of profound abhorrence. There were some things you simply did not do. “Had Uram lived,” he said, speaking of the archangel he’d killed the night he tasted ambrosia, the night he made a mortal his own, “he may have been well on the road to Lijuan’s evolution. He butchered an entire town, even the young in their cribs, for giving offense to one of his vampires.”

“The angel who tried to break Noel”—Elijah’s rage a thousand steel blades—“he’s already on that road. We don’t need another on the Cadre.”

“No.” Because once an angel held that position, the Cadre wouldn’t step in—not so long as the angel in question limited his atrocities to his own territory, causing no problems on a global scale. No archangel would countenance interference within his or her sphere of power.

“Have you seen some of the girls Charisemnon’s taken to his bed?”

“Too young.” It was Venom who’d brought him that information, the vampire—with his skin that spoke of the Indian subcontinent—sliding smoothly into the desert heat of Charisemnon’s territory. “But he straddles the line just enough that it remains an internal matter.”

Charisemnon was careful not to take any girl under fifteen, his excuse being that he’d grown up in times where fifteen was considered more than old enough for marriage. Except the girls he chose were always the ones who looked far, far younger than their chronological ages. There were enough immortals—and mortals—who agreed with Charisemnon that the archangel could indulge his perversions unchecked.

Elijah looked to Raphael. “Titus is saying Charisemnon took and abused a girl from his side of the border.”

“I’ve been keeping an eye on the situation—it looks to develop into a border war.”

“Titus might have his flaws, but on this I agree with him. If Charisemnon broke the territorial boundaries, he must pay—he’ll not account for his crimes in any other court.”

Raphael agreed. But even Charisemnon, for all his repellent ways, wasn’t the threat coming inexorably closer. “I’m not certain Lijuan can be stopped.”

“No.” Elijah’s mouth was a grim line. “Even if we combined our strength, I don’t think we could end her life.” He took a deep breath. “But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Perhaps she’ll remain content to play with her reborn inside her court.”

“Perhaps.” And perhaps Lijuan would decide to unleash her armies, become the literal embodiment of the demigoddess she already was in her homeland. But this goddess would bring only death, her reborn feasting on the flesh of the living as she watched with smiling indulgence.

It was, Elena later thought, inevitable that she’d dream that night. She could feel the past pulling at her with hands dipped in blood. She fought, kicked out, but still they dragged her down that black corridor, down the curving path her father had laid stone by stone one hazy summer, and into the bright white kitchen her mother had kept spotless.

Marguerite was at the counter. “Bébé, why are you standing there? Come, I will make you chocolat.”

Elena felt her lower lip tremble, her feet hesitate. “Mama?”

“Of course, who else would it be?” A laugh, so familiar, so generous. “Shut the door before the cold gets in.”

It was impossible not to reach behind herself, not to close the door. Her hand, she was startled to see, was that of a child, small, marked with the nicks and cuts of a girl who’d rather climb trees than play with dolls. She turned back, terrified the miracle would fade, so scared that it’d be the monster looking back at her.

But it was Marguerite’s face she met, her mother’s eyes quizzical as she knelt before Elena. “Why so sad, azeeztee? Hmm?” Long, gifted fingers tucking Elena’s hair behind her ears.

Marguerite knew only a few words in Moroccan Arabic, faint remembrances of the mother she’d lost in childhood. The sound of one of those precious memories made Elena believe. “Mama, I missed you so much.”

Hands stroking down her back, holding her close until the tears passed and Elena could force herself to shift back a tiny step, to look down into that beloved face. It was Marguerite who looked sad now, her silver eyes wet with sorrow. “I’m sorry, bébé. So sorry.”

The dream fractured, bleeding at the edges. “Mama, no.”

“You were always the strong one.” A kiss pressed to her forehead. “I wish I could save you from what’s coming.”

Elena stared frantically as the room began to collapse, trails of dark red liquid creeping down the walls. “We have to go outside!” She grabbed her mother’s hand, tried to pull her through the doorway.

But Marguerite wouldn’t come, her face fierce with warning even as the blood dripped to touch her bare feet. “Be ready, Ellie. It’s not over.”

“Mama, outside! Come outside!”

“Ah, chérie, you know I never left this room.”

Raphael rocked his hunter as she cried into his chest, her vulnerability a knife in his heart. He had no words with which to assuage her grief, but he murmured her name until she seemed to see him, until she seemed to know him.

“Kiss me, Archangel.” It was a ragged whisper.

“As you wish, Guild Hunter.” He thrust his hand into her hair, pressed his lips to hers, and took her over. She still wasn’t strong enough to bear the savage depths of his hunger, but he could give her the oblivion she sought—even if the control required meant a violent amplification of the sexual agony already threatening to drive him to madness. He would not hurt her, would not take what she wasn’t ready to give.

Shifting on the bed, he pressed his body along hers, letting her feel the heavy weight of his possession. The nightmares have no claim on you, Elena. You belong to me.

Eyes of liquid mercury glittered back at him, filled with a roiling storm of emotion. “Then take me.”

“Or I could simply tease you.” And he did, driving her to a fever pitch with his kiss, with his fingers, with the unrelenting demand of his need to vanquish her nightmares.

Her body was slick on his fingers, her skin damp with perspiration, her eyes blind with arousal when he finally pushed her over. “Raphael!” Her spine went taut as pleasure rushed through her in an overwhelming wave, a pleasure all the more vicious for being denied so long.

He felt his own skin begin to burn with power, his cock pulsing with the need to drive into her until he was all she knew, all she saw. Gritting his teeth, he buried his face in her neck, fighting for control . . . and realized the brutal satisfaction of her body had shoved her into unconsciousness.