Archangel's Consort

6

Shuddering, she broke the kiss. He refused to let her go, pulling her mouth back to his with the hand he had fisted in her hair. It should’ve scared her, but all it did was make her more determined to win this battle, to bring Raphael back from the abyss she could see in the wintry black of his eyes. She’d seen many colors in those eyes, but never that vast, forsaken darkness.

Archangel, she whispered into his mind, trying to keep her sanity as he plucked at the taut peak of her nipple with fingers that knew her every weakness. Raphael.

No response, the icy caress of his power so strong that she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer. She shoved her hands into his hair as her world became dark, squeezing her thighs around him at the same time. Something was very, very wrong, but she wasn’t about to be scared away, even if fear was a tickle at the back of her throat, a jangling accent to the hunger that turned her body damp and ready.

Because lethal as he was, he was still hers, and her body knew him, knew the pleasure he could give. Today, however, that pleasure might well be spiced with a little sensual cruelty. It was tempting to surrender, to allow him to play her body with consummate skill, but instinct told her that that would be the quickest way to lose this battle. To lose him—to the demons that had turned the agonizing blue of his eyes to a harsh, unforgiving midnight.

My lovers have always been warrior women.

He’d said that to her at the start.

Ripping away her lips from his with force, she turned her head to the side, gasping for air. He took a firmer grip on her hair, threatening to wrench her back. She blocked his arm with her own.

A blaze of arctic white around them, so potent and blinding it felt as if her eyes were open, not closed. “Raphael,” she said, fighting to breathe past the press of it, so pure, so cutting, “either turn off the power, or give me my weapons.”

A pause.

Why would I give you your weapons? A silken whisper in her mind.

“Because,” she said, feeling as if her lungs were being squeezed to emptiness, “you don’t get off on women who can’t fight back. You like warriors, remember?”

Laughter in her head, tinged with a kind of ruthlessness that made her fear turn knife-edged. There is, I find, something exquisitely pleasurable in having a warrior helpless and spread before me.

It was dread that licked through her veins now. There wasn’t any hint of the lover she knew in him at this moment, nothing she could reach or touch or reason with. “It’s hardly a challenge, though, is it?” she murmured, fighting the hunter within her, the part that told her to claw at those amazing eyes, rip at his wings, anything to get away. “I walked into your arms.”

Lips along her neck, the fist in her hair tugging her head farther to the side. She felt teeth ... and lower, the rigid push of his erection. That, she understood. It was real and earthy and wild. Making a snap decision, she whispered, “Take me, Raphael. Take your warrior.” The words were deliberate, a reminder of the bonds between them.

He froze against her. Giving in after all?

Pulling up his head with the hands she’d clenched in his hair, she kissed him her way. All wet heat and wild passion . . . and a love that was becoming ever more intertwined in her heart. This power stuff is sexy, but I want you inside me, thick and hard and now.

Raphael squeezed her thigh. Elena.

Her heart skipped a beat. Because that voice, that tone, she knew it. Raphael. I need you. He was the only man she’d ever said that to in her adult life, the only man who’d won that trust from her. “I need you.”

A shudder in the big body that held her pinned to the wall, the frigid bite of his power turning into a molten caress that was a thousand featherlight kisses over her skin, and then the blunt tip of his erection nudging against the entrance to her body. Sucking in a breath before he reclaimed her lips, she held on tight as he pushed into her with a slow, measured intensity, not stopping until he was buried to the hilt within her.

Her body arched at the near-violent shock of pleasure. He took advantage of her position to play with her breasts, to bite and lick and suck until she rolled her hips in urgent movements, nails biting into his shoulders. “Stop teasing, Archangel.”

Another pause, and suddenly he was pure male demand, his body slick and hard and very, very physical under her hands. Opening her eyes, she looked into his ... and saw endless, relentless blue right before he ground against her with the sexual experience of a being who had lived centuries upon centuries, and he sent her hurtling to the stars.

Crying out, she gripped him with her body, claiming him, taking him with her.

She came to lying on the bed on her front, with Raphael leaning on his side beside her, his gaze focused inward. “Hey.” She reached over to touch his thigh. “Don’t go away again.” It came out huskier than she’d intended, tangled with the fears of the child who’d been abandoned long before she’d been thrown out of the hollow elegance of the Big House.

His thigh flexed under her touch. “Did I cause you any bodily injury?”

She remembered what he’d said once. About breaking her. Knew that she had the power to savage him—but that wasn’t who she was. Who they were. “No. You just scared me a little.”

Apologies, Elena. He ran his hand over the arch of her wing. I was not . . . myself.

It was an admission she’d never expected, because though they’d been together this long, they were still learning each other. And the Archangel of New York had long ago learned to keep secrets—his own, his race’s, his Seven’s.

And now, his consort’s.

“I know.” Shifting up onto her elbow, she closed her hand over the muscle of his shoulder, needing the raw physicality of the connection. “Something is wrong, Raphael. That vampire might’ve appeared sane, but he didn’t act in any way rational when he attacked the school, and you should’ve seen that. But you didn’t.”

“I remember little of my actions during that time.” A question without being a question as he nudged her down onto her back, one big hand warm on her abdomen.

Knowing the loss of control had to be a vicious beast tearing him apart, she recapped the events. “Do you remember executing Ignatius?”

“Yes.” He dipped his head a fraction, and she took the invitation to stroke her fingers through his hair. “When you speak of the events, I do recall them—but there is a red haze over it all.”

Thick and silky, the vivid black strands of his hair kissed a cool caress over her skin. “If I had to put a name to what I saw in your expression, I’d call it rage.”

“Yes.” Moving his hand over her stomach, he settled it low on her hip. “But I have lived long enough that I can handle rage. This was ... other.”

She went motionless, worried by his choice of words. “Outside of yourself?”

His eyes gleamed adamantine blue beneath lowered lashes. “Impossible to confirm.”

Elena wasn’t about to let it go at that. “Talk to me.” She knew what he was, understood that he held more power in his body than she would probably ever know, even if she lived ten thousand years. Equals, they weren’t. Not on that playing field—but when it came to the emotions that could tear a heart apart... “Raphael.”

Nadiel, he said into her mind, exhibited such extreme rage.

His father had also gone inexorably insane.

“No,” she said, not even needing an instant to evaluate the thought. “You’re not going insane.”

“So certain, Guild Hunter.” Formal words, a tone that told her he considered her statement nothing but a platitude.

Lifting up her head, she nipped at his lower lip. “The taste of you is ingrained into my very cells. You’re the rain and the wind and at times the clean, wild bite of the sea. I’d know the instant something changed.”

He rose off her, allowing her to sit up as he shifted to sit with his legs over the side of the bed, his back to her, his magnificent wings spread out. Each filament of each feather was tipped in gold, glittering even in the dull light whispering through the windows. A lethal temptation to mortals—and former mortals.

Elena was reaching out to indulge her desire to touch when he said, “You lie to both of us.”

Frowning, she wrapped the sheet around herself—letting it gape low at the back to accommodate her wings—and scrambled off the bed to stand in front of him. “What are you talking about?”

He raised his head, his face so very clear of emotion that the pristine beauty of it felt as if it should draw blood, it was so sharp, so pure. “Did Uram’s scent change?”

Acid and blood and . . . sunlight.

She shivered at the memory of the bloodlust-driven archangel, her ankle aching in sympathetic memory where Uram had crushed it—simply to hear her scream. “I only met him after he’d already crossed the line into insanity,” she said, knowing this conversation was beyond important. “I have no way of knowing what he would’ve been to my senses beforehand—it’s possible that the blood, the acid in his scent was because of what he became, not what he once was.”

Raphael didn’t look convinced. However, neither did he dismiss her argument as he rose to his feet and pulled on his pants. “It can no longer be avoided. I must speak to Lijuan—”

An eerie cold in the room, a prickle of fear along the back of Elena’s neck. “It’s almost as if she can hear it when you speak her name.”

Raphael didn’t tell her she was being a superstitious twit. Yes, he said instead, we have no way of knowing what Lijuan hears on the winds now. “I cannot disregard the fact that my ... rage comes at a time when an Ancient appears to be stirring to wakefulness. As the oldest among us, Lijuan is the only one who may have some kind of an answer.”

“I’ll come with you.” Not long ago, as Beijing trembled around her, Elena had stood face-to-face with the shambling empty-eyed shells who provided irrefutable proof of the dark heart of Lijuan’s strength. The Archangel of China had bought the dead back to life—whether they wished to return or not.

They’d been monsters, feasting on the flesh of those Lijuan did not favor to clothe their own emaciated forms. But they’d also been victims, mute and unable to scream. Elena had heard them all the same, and everything in her rebelled at the idea of Raphael alone in the presence of the being who’d created those “reborn.” “It’s—”

A brush of strong fingers against her jaw. “She does not see you yet, not truly. I would keep it that way.”

Elena set that jaw. “My safety isn’t enough to compromise yours.” Lijuan was a nightmare, and her power came from the same dark place. There was nothing remotely human in her, nothing that even hinted of a conscience.

Raphael shook his head. “She will not kill me, Hunter.”

“No but she wants to ...” Had Lijuan been another woman, it would’ve been a simple equation. But the oldest of the archangels had no desires of the flesh—she didn’t even eat, much less take lovers. “Possess you,” she completed.

A look that made her feel as if she’d been stripped to the skin, laid out before him like a feast. “But I wish to possess you, hbeebti. The two desires are not compatible.”

Hbeebti.

A beautiful word from the Moroccan half of her mother’s lost heritage. “I’m not letting you sweet-talk me.”

A curve to his lips, her archangel finding dangerous humor in her stubbornness. “Then let logic persuade you. She is as apt to take offense at your presence as ignore it. If I am to do this, I want to get something out of it.”

Her hand scrunched the fabric of the sheet. “Damn it.” She knew he was right. Lijuan was unpredictable—she might decide to take the presence of Raphael’s “pet” as an insult. “Do it fast. Don’t let her get her hooks into you.”

A nod that sent his hair sliding across his forehead in a wash of gleaming midnight. “You asked me once what you should call me.”

Elena scowled. “I think you said something like ‘master,’ but I’ve decided I had to be hearing things.”

“What would you like to call me?”

That made her pause. “Husband” was too human, “partner” factually wrong for a being as powerful as an archangel, “mate” . . . perhaps. But none of it was quite right. “Mine,” she said at last.

He blinked, and when he raised his lashes again, the blue was liquid fire. Yes, that will do. “But for public consumption, you are my consort.”

“Consort,” she murmured, tasting the word, feeling its shape. “Yes, that fits.” A consort was more than a lover, more than a wife. She was ... someone with whom an archangel could discuss the darkest of secrets, someone he could trust to speak only the truth, even if it wasn’t something he wanted to hear. “If that crazy-ass bitch tries anything,” she said, referring to Lijuan, “and being in my mind would help anchor you, then do it.”

Raphael closed his hand over her bare shoulder, stroking to curve his fingers around her nape, his thumb playing over her pulse. “You fight so hard for your independence, and yet you would give me such entry?”

“I know you won’t abuse it.” Not now, not when he knew how very important it was to her that her mind be her own.

“I thank you for the offer, Elena.” It was an oddly formal statement, almost as if he was making a vow, his expression so intent she could do nothing but wrap her arms around him. The sheet slid to the floor at the same moment that he moved his free hand down her spine to her lower back, pressing her against him, his wings rising to curve slightly around her.

“The painting,” she said, stealing a moment to simply be with her archangel. “When was it done?”

“During the time you trained with Galen.” He answered her next question before she could ask it. “It is Aodhan’s work, done at my request.”

Elena thought of the angel with his eyes of shattered glass and wings that glittered diamond bright in the sun. “I never saw him.”

“He is adept at being unseen.”

“Most men would choose a painting of a nude for the bedroom,” she teased. “You chose a hunter with knives.”

“You are the only woman allowed in my bedroom, Elena.”

That she was loved . . . it was wonder enough. That she was loved by this man, it was beyond wonder. And it gave her the will to step back into the darkness. “I need to tell you what I found at the school.”

He listened in quiet. “You plan to liaise with Dmitri, confirm if they located the second body?”

“Yes.” Frustrated anger had her fisting her hand against his back. “It wasn’t a coincidence that the vampire picked that school was it, Raphael?”

His answer destroyed her final ephemeral hopes. “No. It cannot be.”