19
In answer came a sea of whispers, the actual words inaudible.
“Raphael.”
It was unexpected, that feminine voice. And it was one so familiar, he’d know it even in death, the wing that brushed over his own warrior black and vivid indigo kissed with midnight blue and the haunting shade of the sky just before dawn.
When he turned toward the sound of her voice, he saw that Elena’s body was translucent beside his, the colors of her like running water. Death rubies ringed her neck, cherry-dark gemstones created of his hardened blood.
That was wrong. Elena would never wear such.
“What the—” Reaching up, she tore off the necklace with a shudder, the blood gemstones falling soundlessly to the green, green grass. “Where are we?”
“The field where I fought my mother.” He took her hand, and it was warm, alive, though she remained formed of glass.
“It’s beautiful.”
Looking through her eyes as the dawn sun played over the verdant grass, bathing the trees in a golden glow and highlighting the flowers he’d watched bud, then bloom, he saw the truth of her words, but for him it remained—would always remain—a place of pain and death and loss.
“My mother walked away, her feet crushing the flowers, as the insects licked at my blood.” The tiny creatures had died, his blood too rich. Then had come the birds, curious about this winged being on the ground. “The birds sat with me for hours, brought me berries as if I were a fledgling fallen out of the nest.” He’d forgotten that under the weight of the horror. “I couldn’t eat for many days, my jaw and facial bones in splinters.”
“This is a very sad place.” A single tear rolling down his consort’s cheek. “You should wake up now.”
His lashes lifted to see the skylight above their bed, the moonless sky luminous with stars, but that wasn’t what he wanted in his sight. Turning, he wiped away the tear that marked Elena’s golden skin as she lay with her eyes open beside him, and he thought he should be surprised that so young an angel had managed to invade the dream of an archangel—but this was his hunter, who had never done what she should.
“You were in my dream.”
She spread her wing so it covered him, her hand on his shoulder. As if she would protect him. “It was sad and terrible and beautiful, what I saw in you there.”
“It was like that the day I fought my mother. Sad and terrible . . . and beautiful. She sang to me in the sky, did I tell you?”
A shake of his consort’s head, her hair wild silk under his hand.
“Her voice is a gift and a weapon, a sound so pure it can break a heart or heal it.” He’d seen angels fall to their knees, overcome with the wonder of Caliane’s song, their eyes shining wet. “That day, she sang a song she used to sing to me in childhood and I wanted to forget the reason I had tracked her.”
For that haunting fragment of time, he’d seen not the monster Caliane had become, but the mother who had kissed away his childhood hurts. “The sky fractured with wonder . . . then it fractured with power.” It had been an uneven battle from the start, the child not yet full-grown against an Ancient.
Elena pressed her lips to his biceps, her body a warm kiss against his own. “The whispers in your dream, did you hear them as you fought your mother?”
“No, I was alone with Caliane.” Then simply alone.
“I wonder who they are?”
He didn’t remind her it had been but a dream, for that would’ve been a lie when he felt the strangeness of it in his blood. “Sleep, Elena. We have a long journey ahead.”
She didn’t speak, but he knew she didn’t sleep, either, not until dawn touched the horizon. And he understood she continued to fence with the bone-chilling fear he’d seen in her eyes as she stood in the bathroom attempting to wipe away a spot of dirt that couldn’t be erased. It was a fear sad and terrible in what it demanded from her . . . and beautiful in what it said of who he was to her.
? ? ?
The first thought in Elena’s mind when she woke was of the speck on Raphael’s temple, fear a dull gnawing in her heart. Shoving the ugly feeling into a tiny corner where it didn’t threaten to paralyze her, she concentrated on making a mental list of Raphael’s strengths. He’d executed an archangel millennia older and Made an angel, for Christ’s sake—no disease would ever get the better of him.
“Damn straight,” she muttered to herself as she sat in the luxurious cabin of Raphael’s private jet, using her silent conclusion as a shield against the helplessness that had regressed her back to the ten-year-old she’d once been, scared and bloody and alone with a monster.
“Did you say something, hbeebti?”
It was a gentle question—he’d been careful with her all morning and, given the way she’d freaked out the night before, she couldn’t exactly complain, but it was time to let her archangel know she’d patched up the wounds. “Every time I board this thing,” she said, “I’m reminded of how filthy rich you are.” Raphael could’ve completed the journey on the wing without problems, but her flight endurance was pitiful yet. “It’s like a flying mini-Tower.”
An amused look, no hint of the awful sadness she’d sensed in him as they hovered over the field where he’d lain broken and bloodied. “Would you like me to go through that?” He nodded at the folder in front of her that held Marcia Blue’s financial statement and business plan.
Handing it over because she had no idea what half of it meant and wasn’t too proud to admit it, she said, “I, too, am on the path to becoming filthy rich.”
“With such a soft heart as yours”—he opened the file—“it’ll be a challenge for me to ensure you do not end up penniless.”
Elena squirmed in her deliciously comfortable seat. “Okay, okay, so I felt sorry for her. At least I asked for the business info—that should get me some credit.”
“Hmm.”
Leaving him to the documents, she hooked her phone into the jet’s high-tech communications network and made a visual call to Sam, the sweet, funny little boy who’d become her friend and guide while she’d been in the Refuge. He told her about his recent adventures, made her promise to hold a position in her Guard for him until he was “growed up,” and showed her the present he was secretly making for his mother.
“Sam,” she said toward the end, “does Galen really teach you flights skills?”
“Uh-huh.” A strong nod. “He’s strict but not in a mean way. We like him.” Smiling, he proceeded to regale her with the story of his last lesson with Raphael’s weapons-master—where Galen had actually ended up laughing at the antics of his baby squadron.
By the time the call ended, Elena was conscious that she’d only ever glimpsed one narrow aspect of Galen’s personality. “Your weapons-master appears to have an actual, beating heart,” she said to Raphael. “Who knew?”
“Jessamy.”
“I concede that point.” Logging in to check her e-mails as Raphael continued to read over the file, she saw one from Sara asking her opinion on an antique weapon Sara was considering getting Deacon as an anniversary gift.
She’d just finished shooting her best friend a reply when a new e-mail popped into her in-box. It was from Aodhan, the subject line making Elena’s fingers clench convulsively around the phone and her mind hurtle two months into the past.
? ? ?
Elena swallowed, the paper crinkling in her hand the only sound as she stood in front of the elevator that would drop her down into the Cellars, the protected area under Guild HQ. She’d taken advantage of the underground safe house when she’d slit Dmitri’s throat during the hunt that had forever altered the course of her life—though, in her defense, he had provoked the action.
It was Vivek, the hunter who ran the Cellars, who’d given her a gun meant to injure an angel long enough to give a mortal a chance to run, to escape. That gun had done far more, Raphael’s blood pooling on the broken sheet of glass that had been the outer wall of her apartment.
“Do it, Ellie,” she ordered, knowing the trip through memory lane was nothing but procrastination at its finest.
Reaching out, she stabbed the button to summon the elevator and, when the doors opened, input the special code on the hidden auxiliary touchpad so the cage would move downward, rather than up into Guild HQ. That code changed on a daily basis and since she’d contacted Vivek directly to get it, he was expecting her.
“I am so whupping your ass today,” he’d predicted, in reference to their continuing Scrabble battle.
They’d always played a game or two anytime Elena was in town for more than twenty-four hours. Now that she was based in New York, she made it a point to come by at least once a week—because Vivek wouldn’t come to her. He was capable of it, his wheelchair state-of-the-art, but hunter-born like her, Vivek found it difficult to be outside when he couldn’t exercise his hunting abilities. The constant bombardment of vampiric scents scraped his senses raw, left him bleeding on the inside.
Exiting the elevator into the pitch-black area under the building, she navigated it without turning on the small flashlight she had in one of the pockets of her cargo pants. It had taken her some time to find a workable pathway after she’d returned to the city with wings, but she now moved through the darkness with confidence, easily avoiding the heavy pillars that were the foundations of the building.
Reaching the scarred and graffitied metal door meant to discourage any intruder who got this far, she coded herself in using another concealed keypad, then put her eye to the retinal scanner. The door slid open seconds later, inviting her into a solid metal cubicle where she was scanned three ways to Sunday in a new layer of security, her weapons noted.
“That way,” Vivek had told her, the first time she’d visited after the upgrade, “if you turn out to be a bad guy, I can gas you, and bye-bye, Evil Elena.”
“Funny,” she’d said at the time, thinking about just how much trust they put in Vivek down here—all of them dead certain that trust would never be broken. He might be occasionally petty, but Vivek was nothing if not loyal to the Guild.
When the doors opened to release her from the steel cubicle, she knew it hadn’t been an automatic action; Vivek personally cleared all incoming and outgoing traffic.
“Ohayoˉ, Vivek,” she said to the air.
“Gozaimasu, Elena.” A pause. “Seriously? That one was so easy even Ransom would’ve got it.”
“I’m going to tell him you said that.” She waited patiently as she was scanned a second time, wondering what other tricks he had up his sleeve; she wouldn’t put it past him to have had automatic gun ports built into the walls.
“Hey, I think I might have to double-check your identity.” Vivek’s voice came out strong and resonant through the speakers. “You usually start bitching about how long the scan takes the second after you walk in.”
Fingers tightening on the piece of paper she’d crushed beyond any hope of repair, she rolled her eyes. “Next time you complain about the bitching, I’m going to remind you of this little conversation.”
A chest-deep laugh, an unexpected sound when it came to the often moody hunter, before the final doors opened in front of her. She headed straight to the reinforced core from where Vivek held court, his steel hand controlling all aspects of the Cellars. That, however, was only a sideline—his true job was keeping watch on anything and everything that might affect the Guild or its hunters.
Today, he buzzed her into his inner sanctum without making her jump through any further hoops. “You’re in a good mood,” she said, when she entered to see him grinning from ear to ear.
“I just had dirty, dirty cybersex with a smoking-hot brunette from Italy. Let’s hear it for intimate international relations.”
“Too much information.” Grabbing a chair, she swiveled it around to sit with her arms braced along the back. In front of her was the large wall-mounted screen where they most often played Scrabble, below it a sleek bank of computers, merely one set of the many that filled the core.
“I go to the trouble of getting a chair constructed to support wings,” Vivek complained, “and you always do that.”
“If you ever get rid of that chair, I’ll never forgive you.”
Pretending to think about it, he brought up a game. “I hope you have tissues—because I plan to make you cry like a widdle baby.”
He was in such a good mood, she thought again. Vivek was often sarcastic, sometimes sulky, more than a few times curt, but truly happy? It was an uncommon thing. She didn’t want to change the tone of this conversation, wanted to leave him as happy as she’d found him.
“You want the first move?” he asked, after the computer allocated their letters.
Shaking her head and knowing a delay would only make this more difficult, she reached out to put her hand over the one on the arm of his wheelchair, though she was conscious he couldn’t feel the contact. He saw it, though, curiosity alive in those dark brown eyes. “What’s the matter, Ellie?”
“I have a question to ask you.” Shifting her hand from his, she used it to grip her chairback. “It’s a question that might piss you off. If it does, I’m sorry—but know I’m only asking because I love you.”
Smile fading, he turned his wheelchair around to face her. When he didn’t say anything, just waited, she thought about simply showing him the crushed paper in her other hand, but that would be a cowardly act, not worthy of their friendship. “If you were a viable Candidate,” she said into a silence underwritten with the quiet hum of Vivek’s computers, “would you want to become a vampire?”
Blinking quickly, he swiveled back to the game. “Your move.”
Elena made that move on autopilot, somehow ending up with a triple word score. Where her luck would’ve normally made Vivek scowl and promise retaliation, today, he made a three-letter word that wouldn’t have challenged a seven-year-old. In return, she added four letters to the board to deliberately create a nonexistent word—and waited for Vivek to challenge her.
He didn’t.
Five moves later, he said, “You’d never have asked me that question unless you already knew I was a viable Candidate.”