Archangel's Consort

33

His arms around her. “The creature’s poison was not as bad as Anoushka’s.”

“Not reassuring, Archangel.”

“Your wing was paralyzed, not damaged—the acid didn’t have time to eat through the tendon and bone. You’ll be able to fly again in a few minutes.”

So relieved that she was shaking, she pulled away to sit up—and got a good look at her side. Her clothing had been eaten away in spots large and small to expose her flesh. And it was flesh, the skin having been burned to nothingness by the acid. Bone gleamed white through one section and the sight of it made her want to retch.

Tensing her stomach against the urge, she wiped off her tears and blew out a breath. “Not as bad as it could’ve been.”

“They go for the eyes,” Illium said, sounding coherent and functional as he stood guarding the gaping hole in the stone below the dais, his sword in hand. “Good thing it was dark in there or your eyeballs would’ve been leaking down your face by now.”

Elena stared at him. “Thank you for that cheerful thought.”

The damn blue-winged idiot winked at her, those astonishing lashes closing over one golden eye.

“Raphael, can we kill him now?” she muttered, trying not to think about the fact that she had holes seared into her flesh.

Raphael’s bones cut against his skin as he helped her to her feet. “Not yet, Elena. We may have need of him.” It was said with such frigid calm that for a moment, she thought he’d taken her seriously.

Then she followed the direction of his gaze into the dark maw of the chamber where she’d been trapped. “No.” She gripped his arm. “You’re not going in there.”

A glance so arrogant, she knew most beings—mortals and immortals both—would’ve fallen to their knees in submission. “Leave me, Guild Hunter. Illium will take you to the roof, to safety.”

“Sire—” Illium began, no hint of laughter in his expression now.

“Illium.” A single word. A command.

Illium looked as if he wanted to argue, but in the end, he bowed his head. However, Elena wasn’t one of Raphael’s Seven. She didn’t have to obey his orders. Moving around to face him, she folded her arms. “If your mother is so powerful,” she said, “then she can meet us out here just as well as in that pit.”

“Caliane is not used to coming to anyone.”

She raised an eyebrow and hoped like hell her next words wouldn’t get them killed. “Or maybe she’s only powerful when she has her prey trapped and alone. You’ve never had trouble facing anyone down in the full light of day.”

The temple shook at her feet, trembling so hard she almost tumbled into Raphael. For a moment, she was afraid the entire structure would collapse, burying them. But she’d forgotten that Caliane was a goddess in Amanat—and that her people slept vulnerable beneath the stone roof.

When the trembling stopped, everything was as it had always been. Except that Raphael and Illium had their eyes trained on the dais. On what had appeared atop the stone.

Raphael strode up to what he now realized was an altar, aware of his consort and Illium coming to stand beside him, their swords drawn. But his attention was on the stone slab before him. Six feet long and three feet wide, perhaps as deep, it was a cool pale grey and free of ornamentation. Like the door below, the slab appeared seamless, but unlike the door, he didn’t know how to unlock this puzzle.

Raphael.

Placing his palm on the stone that should’ve been cold but instead held a lingering warmth, he dropped his shields a fraction. Mother.

There was no answer, but he knew . . . “She is awake.” It was too late to kill her while she lay weak and vulnerable.

Could you have done such a thing, Raphael?

Her voice, that beautiful, haunting voice, it penetrated to his very bones, stripped him bare. I am an archangel.

Yes. Such pride in that single word, a wonder of words unsaid. You are the son of two archangels.

He spread his fingers over the stone. Are you sane, Mother?

Laughter in his mind, painful in its familiarity. Is any immortal ever truly sane?

The temple shuddered again, but this time, it was different, dust and rock raining down from the ceiling. Raphael felt the touch of death an instant before he sensed the power of another archangel. “Lijuan is here.”

“Wait!” Elena grabbed his arm when he would’ve turned, headed out. “I can taste your mother’s scent in the air—exotic and rich and sensual. Black orchids.”

“I must go, Elena.”

“But it’s leavened with a strange, unexpected note of sunflowers.” Her fingers clenched on his arm. “There were no sunflowers on the body of the tortured girl, on the bridge, on the vampires who went mad in Boston. The scent was too pure, too much the essence. Do you see?”

Thank you, Guild Hunter. He was already moving, Elena and Illium running across the temple floor behind him.

They exited out into the streets of Amanat to see the Archangel of China in physical form, throwing arrows of power at the temple building. Each bolt was black. There was nothing inherently evil in black—all of Jason’s abilities manifested in that midnight shade—but Lijuan’s power was riddled through with a rotten core that made Raphael recoil.

Rising to face her in the air above the temple, he blocked one of her shots with the vivid blue that was the manifestation of his own power. “I did not ask for your assistance, Lijuan.”

Her hair whipped off her face. “She cannot rise, Raphael. You must not let your emotions blind you to the truth of her madness.”

He knew Lijuan spoke the truth—to a point. Blocking another arrow of power, one that slammed him back several feet through the air, he gathered angelfire in his palms. It might no longer do her mortal harm, but with her in her physical form, a direct hit would still cause significant damage. “The question of her insanity remains unanswered.”

“She took the young one,” Lijuan said, her hair electric with black strands that Raphael realized were streamers of pure dark energy. “And your consort looks injured. Those are not acts of sanity.”

Perhaps not, Raphael thought, but most archangels walked a fine line between sanity and insanity. “Any one of us may have done the same.” He spoke not to defend Caliane, but to oppose Lijuan—and because his mother, while she had acted with the cold arrogance of power, had done nothing as yet to speak of madness. Lijuan on the other hand ...

“What of the people she murdered around the world? The ones hanging from the bridge in your city?” A hail of black rain designed to gouge and kill.

He swept out of the way, throwing back a volley of angelfire that she swamped in black. “Those acts did not bear her touch, Lijuan. They bore yours.” It was a guess. The murders and torture could well have been orchestrated by Neha, but Lijuan was the one with the most to lose if Caliane rose.

A pause in the rain of black fire. Then a soft, girlish laugh. “You always were clever.”

He attacked her with angelfire while she was distracted. Lijuan raised a wall of black flame to block him, her power incomprehensible. And her voice, when it came next, was nothing the least bit human. “Good-bye, Raphael.”

There was no way to avoid it. The bolts came from everywhere.

He heard Elena scream as he took a direct hit to the chest. It was not angelfire, for Lijuan had never had that ability, but that didn’t matter. Bloated with her toxic power, it was a killing blow, even for an archangel. The blackness invaded his blood, spread through his cells until he could see his veins turn black under his skin, feel the crawling of it across his irises.

“I am sorry, Raphael.” Lijuan’s voice. “I always did like you. But you would protect her.”

He tried to speak to Elena, to tell her that she would be safe. Even after his death, his Seven would not break their vows. They would protect her. But Lijuan’s poison spread throughout his system, blocking his efforts to fight it with the cutting blue of his own power. And he fought. He fought with every ounce of will in his immortal heart, every ounce of the unnamable, unending emotion he felt for Elena.

Even dying, he managed to throw a final ball of angelfire, using his fading vision. It made Lijuan scream. That high-pitched sound ringing in his ears, he fell to earth, coming down hard on the temple roof, his wings crushed but not broken, his fall cushioned by a power that felt akin to that which had once been the standard against which he judged himself.

My son! My Raphael.

Too late, he thought, it was too late. Caliane had never been a healer, and his entire body was riddled with Lijuan’s black poison. Shoving outward with his own newborn gift, he tried to heal himself, but his ability was young, scarcely formed. It stood no chance against Lijuan’s brand of evil.

“Raphael!” Hands cupping his face, fierce determination in his hunter’s voice.

He wanted to order her to leave, to warn her that the infection that was Lijuan’s power could spread, as it had with the reborn, but he knew she’d never leave, his consort with her mortal heart. Elena mine.

Elena swallowed the tears and panic that threatened to take her over when she saw Raphael’s beautiful eyes overrun with tendrils of Lijuan’s evil, obscuring those irises of a haunting shade found in the deepest part of the ocean, intense and absolute. “No,” she said. “No!”

Above her, the sky fractured in a cataclysm of light, and when she looked up, Lijuan was no longer alone. An archangel with hair of tumbling raven black and wings of purest white faced her, her hands ringed by blue flame.

The template from which I was cast.

Snapping back her head, she squeezed Raphael’s hand, his golden skin pale above veins turned black and rigid. Archangel, can you hear me?

These words hold the last remnants of my power.

Focusing on the fact that he was still alive and refusing to consider anything else, Elena ducked as a piece of rock went flying past—spreading her body and her wings above Raphael.

Go, Elena! They will fight to the death.

Ordering me around even now, Archangel? She wouldn’t leave him. She’d never leave him. Looking up, she saw that Illium continued to stand guard, his face streaked with anguished fury. Bluebell will tell us when to duck.

A moment’s silence, and her heart almost stopped.

I should be dead.

Trembling, she pressed her forehead to his. Don’t say that. You survived Lijuan once. You’ll do it again. Except that his golden skin had turned cold and pale, his eyes now eerie blocks of black, and his wings ... She lifted a fisted hand to her mouth, biting down hard on her knuckles.

The evil was spreading out over his wings in a slow creep, turning the gold and white to an oily darkness that brought out every one of her most aggressive instincts. She wanted to fight it, to cut at it, but knives wouldn’t work here. Not when the canvas was Raphael’s body.

“Elena, cover!”

She moved with Illium’s first syllable, spreading her wings out over Raphael’s vulnerable body. Something hit her shoulder hard enough to bruise, but she held her position until Illium gave the all clear.

“What the fuck are they doing?”

I would like to know the answer to that question.

Realizing her archangel no longer had his sight, his beautiful eyes blinded by black, she looked up and felt the air leave her body. “Dear God, Raphael. They’re . . .” Swallowing to wet her throat, she focused on the two immortals in the sky. “Your mother’s managed to damage Lijuan’s wings, and it looks like she’s flickering in and out of her physical form.”

Then it must take power for her to maintain her other form. That, we did not know.

“Your mother doesn’t look injured, but she’s not avoiding Lijuan’s bolts fast enough.” Caliane was moving at phenomenal speed, but—“Next to Lijuan, she looks almost sluggish.”

I was wrong. She was not yet ready to awaken.

And Elena understood, her heart twisting. Caliane had woken for her son. “She’s holding her own.” But now that she was searching for it, she could see Caliane’s weakness and so, clearly, could Lijuan.

Looking down into Raphael’s face, she wanted to lie to him, to give him peace, but that wasn’t what they were. “I think your mother’s going to lose, Raphael.”

Raphael’s body shuddered, his wings pure black, his skin without life.

Archangel!

Raphael heard Elena, but he couldn’t answer her, his mind overrun with a searing burn so hot, it flared incandescent white against his vision, turning his world from cold black to a piercing conflagration.

The instincts of over a thousand years of survival urged him to fight the rage of flame . . . but then he saw what it was doing. Eating away at the black, obliterating it in a fury as wild as angelfire. As it did so, it left a lingering “taste” on his senses, one he couldn’t quite define, and yet knew to the depths of his soul.

Raphael, don’t you dare leave me. Together! Your promised me if we fell, it would be together!

Even in the midst of the brutal fight taking place in his body, her demand made him want to claim her lips with his own, to stroke his hand over those warrior’s wings in open possession.

A spear of lightning scored down his spinal cord and spread in a nuclear burst through his wings, blistering with such heat that he half expected his body to turn to ash. But when the burn faded to a dull, throbbing hum, when he lifted his lashes, he saw Elena’s face staring down at him, determination in every line of her. I won’t let you go, Archangel. I won’t! Then, heartbreakingly quiet, “I can’t do this without you, Raphael.”

Raising his hand, he cupped her cheek. “I am not so easy to kill, Elena.” Except he should be dead. He was an archangel, but Lijuan had evolved to another plane of existence. Her power was beyond that which was known, which could be fought. It tasted only of death to mortal and immortal alike.

Elena’s entire frame shuddered, and she pressed her forehead to his for a long, broken second. A single, painful droplet splashed against his cheek before she raised her head and he flowed to his feet beside her. Every part of his body ached, but he’d fought feeling far worse—even the violent heat that continued to spark within him, searching out and eradicating the final traces of Lijuan’s taint, was no longer the overwhelming inferno it had been.

Raphael. My son.

Looking up, he saw Caliane’s right wing crumple as Lijuan managed to slam her against the side of a building.