The Archangel of Persia and the Archangel of India, Elena knew, had worked together on previous occasions. And now, when Neha hated almost everyone else in the Cadre, she seemed to be able to tolerate Favashi—perhaps because the other archangel was so much younger. “It means something, doesn’t it?” she said, turning to place her hand on the wild heat of Raphael’s chest, the shadowy raindrops whispering over her skin. “Al this extreme weather.”
“There is a legend,” Raphael murmured, his wings flaring out as he tugged her into the curve of his body—as if he would protect her. “That mountains wil shake and rivers overflow, while ice creeps across the world and fields drown in rain.” He looked down her at, his eyes that impossible, inhuman chrome blue. “Al this wil come to pass ... when an Ancient awakens.”
The chil in his tone raised every hair on her body.
2
Shaking off the bone-deep cold, she said, “The ones who Sleep?” Raphael had told her about those of his race who were so old they grew weary of immortality. So they lay down and closed their eyes, fal ing into a deep slumber that would break only when something compel ed them to consciousness.
“Yes.” A single word that held a thousand unsaid things.
She leaned deeper into him, sliding her arms around his waist. The backs of her hands brushed against the raw silk of his feathers, and it was a quiet, stunning intimacy between an archangel and a hunter. “This kind of a disruption can’t happen every time. There must be a few who Sleep?”
“Yes.” His voice grew distant in a way that was the mask of an immortal who’d lived centuries beyond a mil ennium. “What we may be witnessing is the rebirth of an archangel.”
She sucked in a breath, understanding flickering at the corners of her mind. “How many archangels Sleep?”
“No one knows, but there have been disappearances throughout our history. Antonicus, Qin, Zanaya. And . . .”
“Caliane,” she completed for him, shifting so that she could see his face without craning her neck. He was so good at hiding his emotions, her archangel, but she was learning to read the minute shifts in those eyes that had seen more dawns than she could ever imagine, witnessed the birth and fal of civilizations.
Now, her back against the glassy cold of the window, she didn’t protest as he leaned in to place one hand palm-down beside her head. Instead, she ran her fingers down the muscled planes of his chest to rest at his hips, anchoring him to the present, to her as she asked him about a nightmare. “Wil you know if your mother wakes?”
“When I was a child”—skin touched with heat, but his eyes, they remained that inhuman metal ic shade—“we had a mental bond. But it burned away as I grew, and as she fel into madness.” His gaze looked past her, to the pitch-black of the night.
Elena was used to fighting for what she needed, what she wanted. She’d had to become that way to survive. It had toughened her. But what she felt for this male, this archangel, it was a stronger, more powerful need, one that gave her an insight the hunter alone would’ve never had. “Stop it.”
A silent glance rimmed with a thin frost made up of the myriad dark echoes that lingered in an archangel’s memories.
“If you let the memory of her spoil this,” she said, refusing to back down, “spoil us, then it doesn’t matter if she is the Sleeper. The damage wil have been done—by you.”
A long, stil instant, but his attention was very much on her now. “You,” he said, his wings spreading out to block the rest of the room from her view,
“manipulate me.”
“I take care of you,” she corrected. “Just like you took care of me by not letting me answer my father’s cal earlier today.” At the time, she’d gotten snippy
—because she’d been afraid. And she hated being afraid. Especial y of the hurt that Jeffrey Deveraux meted out with such cruel ease. “That’s the deal, so learn to handle it.”
Raphael brushed his thumb across her cheekbone. “If I do not?” A cool question.
“Stop trying to pick a fight with me.” She knew what haunted him—that his parents’ madnesses would one day manifest in his own mind, turning him monstrous. Except Elena would never al ow that to happen. “We fal , we fal together.” A soft reminder, a solemn promise.
Elena. One hand going down to curve around her ribs, just below her breasts, as he moved his other thumb over her lips, shaping and stroking her.
“If your mother does wake,” she murmured, her top suddenly abrasive against her nipples, “what wil happen to her?”
“Some say a long Sleep cures the madness of age, so she could once more become Cadre.” Yet Raphael’s voice said that he didn’t believe such a thing possible.
“Wil the others on the Cadre try to locate her, kil her beforehand?”
“Those who Sleep are sacrosanct,” Raphael told her. “To harm a Sleeper is to break a law so ancient, it is part of our racial memory. But there is no law that bars a search.”
She knew without asking that he’d be undertaking such a search, could only hope what he discovered wasn’t a nightmare made flesh.
“I’l speak to Jason,” he added, “see if he has heard any rumblings on this subject that I have not.”