“Tell me what you saw,” Raphael said. “I felt my speed increase, but I put it down to the urgency of the incident.”
Blinking, Elena turned to face the archangel who’d branded her to the soul. The fact he didn’t know hadn’t occurred to her . . . but it had all happened so fast, his attention on saving Illium and Aodhan both. “The white fire that licks over your wings at times,” she said, touching her fingers to the shimmering white gold of his feathers, “it took over. It was like you had no physical wings—as if your wings were pure white flame.”
It had been a magnificent sight she’d only processed in the aftermath. “The effect disappeared as soon as you had Illium in your arms.”
Spreading out his wings and curling first one inward, then the other, Raphael examined the feathers before folding them back in. “No evidence of it now, but what you’re describing sounds almost like Lijuan’s ability to go noncorporeal. On the same continuum at least.”
Elena’s skin chilled. “Yeah, I guess.” Releasing his hand, she gripped the front of his white shirt and tugged him to her. “Don’t you dare ‘evolve’ on me.” She couldn’t follow him into that other state, though she’d kill herself trying.
Raphael’s lips curved. “Have no fear, hbeebti,” he said. “I am too fond of the flesh.” A caress of her hip, a luscious kiss.
Yet even as the crashing windswept sea of him infiltrated her senses, Elena knew even an archangel couldn’t hold back the possibly catastrophic changes wrought by the Cascade. “I’ll follow you,” she whispered against his lips. “No matter where you go, I’ll be right beside you.”
Eyes of endless blue burned with an incandescent flame. “Together, Elena-mine. Always.” Wrapping her in his wings, he held her until her heart calmed, the fear receding under a tide of furious determination: no one and nothing would steal her archangel from her.
“I heard a bit of gossip from Amanat,” she said once she could speak again.
“How can you hear gossip from Amanat? Unless you and my mother have become the best of friends?”
She elbowed him. “Very funny.” Elena and Caliane might have called a truce, but Caliane remained an Ancient and her freaking mother-in-law. “I made some other friends on our last visit.” Including a smart, funny maiden who danced as gracefully as Elena’s sister Belle had danced before a murderous vampire stole her life.
“Belle! Belle! Can I dance with you?”
“Come on, squirt. Stand like this.”
Chest achingly tight at the memory of a loss she would carry with her forever, she said, “Apparently, there’s a high chance Naasir and his scholar are no longer just colleagues.”
He looks at her as I’ve never seen Naasir look at anyone. As if she is a treasure he wants to keep, wants to protect.
“You catch your consort by surprise,” Raphael murmured. “Particularly as the scholar has taken a vow of celibacy.”
“We’re talking about Naasir here.” Elena grinned. “He has a certain charm. Just like his archangel—I never planned to be naked with you, either.” Deadly and inhuman, the Archangel of New York was not a man with whom Elena Deveraux, Guild Hunter, had ever intended to mess.
A glint in the eyes that held oceans, even in the darkness. “Plan it now,” he said, lifting off with her still in his arms. “We have not danced in the sky for too long, and today, I feel a need to celebrate life.” His jaw grew hard.
Stroking it as her skin turned electric, Elena pulled his head down to her own. “Life,” she whispered before their lips met in a storm of sensation.
30
Two hours of hiking later, Andromeda and Naasir found themselves on the outskirts of the village that was the last bastion of civilization before the cave system, the homes built around what, from the air, was a startlingly clear blue-green lake. A small jewel in the ocean of sand that surrounded the oasis on every side, the lake wasn’t a perfect sphere.
No, it was an elongated teardrop.