Dmitri hissed out a breath. “I’ll put the Tower on alert.”
Spreading his wings, Raphael rose into the air above this chaotic, beautiful city of steel and glass and humanity that had been the center from which he’d claimed al the territory he now held. Lijuan was waiting for him in the high reaches, where the air was thin enough to kil a mortal—backlit by the cutting intensity of the sun, she was as eerily inhuman as ever, with those strange pearlescent eyes and hair of purest white.
He came to a stop across from her, noting that she wore flesh today. “I’m honored.” After the destruction of Beijing and Lijuan’s “evolution,” no one had seen her except in the pools of water she seemed to enjoy utilizing for contact.
“Of course I would come to you,” she murmured in that voice that screamed the truth of her descent. “None of the others are of any interest.”
Elena, where are you?
On my way to Guild Academy to see Eve. Do you need me?
Stay away from the house until I say otherwise. I don’t want you in Lijuan’s line of sight.
A pause, but she didn’t argue—though he knew very wel she didn’t like him anywhere near the Archangel of China. Be careful, Archangel.
Having handled the conversation at the same time that he exchanged meaningless pleasantries with Lijuan, he angled his body toward the serene waters of the Hudson, light refracting off its surface in a thousand broken shards. “Come, we wil speak at my home.”
“So very civilized of you, Raphael.” She laughed, the sound incongruously sweet for a woman who had made the dead rise, whose power was tinged with a putrid darkness. “Is it any surprise I prefer you above the others?”
Raphael said nothing, and neither did she, not until Montgomery closed the library doors behind himself after serving the tea. Lijuan had chosen one of the armchairs in front of the fireplace, and Raphael sat opposite, acting the host—with Lijuan, the smal courtesies must always be observed. If they were, she would fol ow her own peculiar code. There would be no bloodshed, not while she was a guest in his home.
Sipping her tea, Lijuan let out a sigh. “There is something to be said for the physical form.”
When they had last met in Beijing, she’d told him she no longer needed food for sustenance. “Have your needs changed?”
A soft smile that appeared innocent ... if you did not see the twisted shadows that lingered beneath. “Not my needs. My wants.” Another sip. “Some things power alone cannot duplicate.” Holding the teacup in an elegant hand, she met his gaze. “How do you stand it, Raphael?”
Raising an eyebrow, he waited.
“These mortals.” She flicked a hand in the direction of Manhattan. “Al around you, everywhere you go. Like ants.”
Where Aodhan had asked a smiliar question with a deep, hungry curiosity in his tone, there was only contempt in the voice of the Archangel of China. “I have always lived in the world, Lijuan.”
A sigh. “I forget. You have not yet seen the mil ennia I have. I, too, once lived among mortals.”
He thought of the stories Jason had uncovered about Lijuan’s past, the horrors the other archangel had perpetuated. “You were a goddess always.”
A regal nod. “Wil you kil her?”
The question didn’t throw him. He’d known the reason for Lijuan’s appearance the instant he saw her. “If my mother remains mad, she must be stopped.” Given the reports he’d received from Nazarach, Andreas, and Nimra this morning, tel ing of young vampires going murderously insane and kil ing in a way that bore Caliane’s stamp, that madness seemed a more and more a certain truth.
“Would it not be better to kil her where she Sleeps?” Lijuan put down her teacup with a sigh of pleasure. “She is not yet at her ful strength. Once awake, she may wel be unstoppable.”
The idea of Caliane raining pain and fire upon the world was a nightmare. But . . . “That is not our way.” Angelkind had very few laws. The only one that mattered most of the time was the absolute prohibition against harming angelic children. Neha’s daughter, Anoushka, had lost her life for breaking that law.
But there was a second, even more ancient law. To kil an angel in Sleep was considered an act of murder so heinous that the penalty was instantaneous and total death. Because even an archangel could die—but only at the hand of another archangel. “I wil not be a coward and strike her while she is helpless.”
“Your mother is hardly helpless,” Lijuan argued. “You see the effects of her power al around—death drenches the landscape and even now, the molten core begins to boil with rage.”
Raphael thought of the bloodrage that had gripped him as Caliane’s power rippled around the world, of Astaad beating his concubine and—according to Jason’s most recent report—Titus executing the innocent. “Yes.” His mother had never been helpless.