Archangel's Kiss

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.

“Tonight,” Lijuan said, her voice carrying effortlessly on the eerily warm air currents, “we celebrate a new beginning for our race, the Making of an angel.”

Heads turned, following Lijuan’s gaze, until Elena felt the weight of stares from every side. Some were curious, some angry, others malevolent. And one . . . Her nape prickled. Evil. It stroked over her, a malignant kiss she wanted to reject with every breath in her. But she stayed silent, unmoving. Let them think her unaware, let them believe her an easy target.

“Elena,” Lijuan continued, beginning to move down the steps and toward them, “is a unique creation, an immortal with a mortal heart.” The crowd parted in front of her, watching her progress . . . except for an awestruck human/vampire couple who didn’t get out of the way fast enough. “Adrian.” It was less than a whisper.

The reborn male—the one with skin that spoke of the savannah—tore out the human woman’s heart, sinking his fangs into her neck at almost the same instant to tear open her jugular. She was still standing when Adrian reached over to rip out the male’s throat, wrenching the vampire’s body apart with his hands until the unfortunate male was nothing but a pile of discarded meat. The dead human female lay beside the lumps of flesh, steam rising from the viscera as Adrian—hesitating for a second, as if tempted to lick up the blood that had soaked into his skin—took out a handkerchief and began to wipe off the mess.

Moving past the butchered couple as if nothing had happened, Lijuan came to stand in front of Elena. “That mortal heart, some would say, is a weakness that will steal the gift Raphael has given you.”

“Better a mortal heart,” Elena said in a quiet voice, “than a heart that feels nothing at all.”

A smile, almost girlish, and all the more terrible for it. “Well said, Elena. Well said.” A single clap of her hands, an unspoken command. “To mark this occasion, this meeting between the ancient and the barely born, I’d like to present you with a remembrance—a gift from the old to the new, one so special, so unique, that I have kept it hidden even from my own court.”

The pain caused by Lijuan’s last gift was still a burn on her soul, but Elena steeled her spine, held her place, knowing this was a test she had to pass—or she’d be discounted for the rest of her existence as nothing but Raphael’s once-mortal toy.

“Phillip.” A glance at the Chinese vampire with that heartbreakingly beautiful face.

Phillip melted away into the crowd.

“It will be but a moment.” Lijuan turned her attention to Raphael. “How is Keir? I haven’t seen him in centuries.”

It was an attempt at small talk but it fell oddly flat, as if Lijuan was putting on a mask that didn’t quite fit. Elena heard Raphael respond, but her eyes were locked on the shadows where Phillip had disappeared, her heart pounding one sluggish beat at a time as a single drop of sweat rolled down her back.

The evil whispered nearer with every beat that passed, until she could almost taste it on her tongue.

Dirt, that sweet rot that accompanied all of the reborn.

A spice for which she had no name, a hint of ginger, warm golden sunlight.

She knew what the horror would be before Phillip reappeared with a handsome mahogany-haired man who’d been blessed with eyes of darkest brown, eyes that invited a woman into temptation. He’d been a movie star before being Made. Young girls had put posters of him on their bedroom walls, giggled as they whispered his name.

His eyes locked with hers.

“Come here, little hunter. Taste.”

The words were a husky whisper inside her head, a thousand screams rolled into one. She knew Lijuan was speaking to her, but all she heard was that singsong voice that had haunted her for almost two decades.

“Run, run, run.” A giggling parody of Ari’s dying attempt to help Elena. “She won’t run. She likes it, you see.”

Elena felt the nightmare spiraling out beneath her, a bottomless pit from which she might never escape. It sucked at her, tinged with the laughter in the monster’s eyes, the nauseating joy in his expression—as if they were bound, as if he had a claim on her. She felt her legs begin to tremble, her heart jerk as she found herself back on that floor, scrabbling back on bloody tiles with hands that kept slipping, kept holding her prisoner. It was wet, cold, but Ari’s eyes—

A rush of rain in her head, untainted and strong, a scent that thundered of the sea, of the wind. Elena, I stand with you.

It was a sudden, sharp realization flavored with the relentless strength of the tide—she wasn’t alone in that room. Not anymore. Buoyed by that truth, she stepped back from the abyss, walked into the present, and saw the repugnance that was Slater Patalis standing beside Lijuan.

The vee of his shirt revealed smooth, unblemished skin, free of the ugly scar created by the Y incision cut into his flesh during the autopsy performed by a Guild pathologist. Elena had watched the video over and over, until she’d convinced herself that he was dead. It had been too little justice for what he’d stolen from her, but it had been justice. Lijuan had no right to erase that, no right to use Belle’s and Ari’s deaths as part of a game that would hold Lijuan’s interest for no more than a flicker of time.

Her entire body filled with anger, clean and bright. It sang with a kind of purity she’d never before known. The monster was smiling while her sisters lay dead in their graves, while her mother’s body hung forever in the wall of her mind, creating a shadow she’d never forget.

Her spine turned to iron forged in the fires of grief. “Aodhan,” she said, knowing Lijuan wouldn’t guess her intent—wouldn’t imagine she’d dare, “would you mind kneeling for a second?”

The angel went down in a graceful kneeling position an instant later, his head bowed . . . to allow her to reach the swords that lay flush against the center of his back. Sliding one lethally sharp blade from its sheath, she sliced off Slater Patalis’s grinning head with a single clean stroke, her strength fueled by decades-old anguish.

Blood fountained in an arterial spray that wet her face, turned the cherry blossoms black, but she was already shoving the blade into his heart and twisting it into so much pulp. His twitching body fell to the ground with a thud as she removed the red-slick blade. “Will she be able to make him rise from this?” she asked Raphael, her voice without inflection, without mercy. Slater didn’t deserve her emotions, didn’t deserve anything but the cold hand of a long-delayed justice.

“Perhaps.” Blue fire ringed Raphael’s hand. “But this should ensure a permanent death.”

A dark gray ash replaced what had remained of the worst killer vampire in living memory.

The entire thing had only taken a few seconds. Still holding the sword, she met Lijuan’s eyes. “My apologies,” she said through the heavy blanket of silence, “but the gift wasn’t to my taste.”

The Chinese archangel’s hair whipped back in that ghostly breeze as she walked to stand opposite Elena, the ashes of Slater’s body between them. “You cut my amusement short.”

“If death is truly the only thing that amuses you any longer”—Raphael’s knife-edged voice—“perhaps it’s time you stopped interfering in the world of the living.”

Lijuan met his eyes, her own so pale that there were no irises, no pupils, just an endless spread of pearlescent white. “No, it is not my time to Sleep.” Raising a hand, she ran the back of it along the face of the dark-skinned reborn who’d come to stand beside her. “Adrian is not ready to die, either.”

Power filled the air, until the electricity of it sparked along Elena’s skin. She felt Raphael begin to glow, heard Aodhan rise, unsheathe his remaining sword as Jason moved out of the shadows, and she knew this battle might end them all. Death will be an easy price to pay to stop her, she thought to Raphael.

So brave, my hunter. It was a kiss.

As she handed his sword back to Aodhan, taking out the gun that wouldn’t stop a vampire, but might just slow down an archangel if only for a fraction of an instant, she saw a flare of power on Raphael’s right, a power she’d tasted before. Michaela. Standing beside Raphael.

Another flare of power. Then another, and another, and another.

Elijah, Titus, Charisemnon, Favashi, Astaad.

Whatever drove the other archangels to unite against Lijuan, their combined power was a blast of heat, one that would have shoved her out of the circle had she not been pinioned between Raphael and Aodhan.

A cool, cool wind. Power, such power. All of it touched with death.

Lijuan laughed. “So, you would all stand against me.” Amusement in every syllable. “You cannot imagine what I am.”

Lijuan’s power was cold, frigid against the heat of the others . Raphael had been right, Elena realized with horror, the oldest of the archangels might just have become the truest of immortals, going beyond the hand of death. It was as that thought passed through her head that her eyes met Adrian’s.

Liquid dark, those eyes were so calm, so patient, and . . . so full of pain. He knew, she thought, he understood now what he was. Yet in spite of it all, his devotion burned a steady flame, until it hurt to witness it. As she watched, he shifted behind Lijuan, lifting her hair away from her neck. The archangel seemed not to notice—or maybe it was that he was so much her creature, she simply accepted him.

So when Adrian bent his head and placed his mouth on Lijuan’s skin, Elena thought it only a macabre kiss, a prayer to his goddess. Then she glimpsed the single, bright tear sliding down Adrian’s midnight skin—he loved Lijuan, she thought with an ache in her own heart, but trapped inside the silent shell that had been the Chinese archangel’s gift to him, he also saw her for the horror she was. Lijuan began to bleed before that tear reached his jaw, two thin trails of red snaking down her body to sink into the diaphanous fabric of her gown, a stark wash of color in the white heat of power.

Lijuan staggered. “Adrian?” She sounded almost mortal in her surprise. “What are you doing?”

“He’s killing you,” Raphael said. “You’ve created your own death.”

Lijuan shoved with a single hand. Adrian’s body flew to hit Favashi, taking them both down. The Persian archangel rose to her feet after bare seconds, but the reborn stayed down.

“I am death,” Lijuan said, her voice regaining its strength even as blood continued to seep into her gown. “You have no claim to this land. Leave and I will spare you.”

Elijah shook his head. “Your reborn are infectious.”

Elena followed his gaze, her own widening in horror as she realized the human female Adrian had killed was now struggling to get to her feet, her fingers scrabbling on the tiles as the people around her watched in disbelief.

Dear God.