Archangel's Kiss

22

Elena saw Raphael’s lips shape into the barest hint of a smile at her bad-tempered words, but he didn’t comment. Instead, he walked to a cabinet in the corner, the muscles of his back shifting with a fluid strength that made every female hormone in her sit up in begging attention.

Staving off the lingering echoes of the past with the sensual pleasure of watching her archangel move, she walked to stand beside him as he opened the cabinet to reveal a small black box about the right size and shape for jewelry. She recoiled, taking a physical step backward, her words coming in a hard rush. “Throw that thing into the deepest pit you can find.”

Raphael glanced at her. “What do you feel?”

“It gives me the creeps.” Hugging herself, she rubbed her hands up and down her arms, ice forming in the hollow of her stomach. “I don’t want it anywhere near me.”

“Interesting.” Reaching in, he picked up the box. “I sense nothing, and yet even without blood, it sings to you.”

“Don’t touch it,” she ordered between gritted teeth. “I told you to throw it away.”

“We can’t, Elena. You know that.”

She didn’t want to know it. “Power games. So what? We tell her thanks and send back a bauble or something. You must have a few lying around.”

“That will not do.” Eyes that had shifted to the shadowed color found in the deepest, darkest part of dawn, before the sun rose to the horizon. “This is a very specific gift. It’s a test.”

“So what?” she said again. “Archangels play power games. Who the fuck says I have to?”

Raphael put the box on a corner of his desk, his wings whispering against hers. “Like it or not, by becoming my lover, you’ve accepted an invitation to those games.”

Her skin felt as if it was being touched by a thousand spidery fingers. “Can we throw it away after I open it?”

“Yes.”

“That won’t be bad politics?”

“It’ll be a statement.” He held out his hand. “Come, hunter. I need a drop of your blood.”

“See? Creepy?” Shuddering, she took out one of her knives and pricked her left index finger. “Anyone who gives gifts locked by blood isn’t ever going to give you a bath set.”

Taking her hand, Raphael held it over the box, squeezing her finger just hard enough to release a single, luminous drop of blood. She watched it hang on her skin for a frozen moment, as if loathe to touch the velvet box, before it fell in a slow, soft splash. The box seemed to consume it, a voracious blackness that hungered for the taste of life. Her hand clenched around the knife. “I really don’t want to go to this ball.”

Raphael kissed her fingertip before releasing her hand. “Do you want me to open it?”

“Yes.” She wasn’t going to touch that thing if she could help it.

He flipped it open. She couldn’t see what was inside at first, her view blocked by his hand, but then he moved . . .

Her gorge rose. Dropping the knife, she spun and headed for the door she hoped led to the bathroom. Her relief was overpowered by the retching that ripped through her as she stumbled into the tiled enclosure. Dropping her head above the toilet, she brought up her lunch in a hard, rough pulse that felt like it was peeling off the lining of her stomach itself.

Sometime in the middle, she became aware that she was on her knees, Raphael beside her, his hand holding her hair away from her face, his wings spread to enclose her in white-gold. Trembling as the muscle spasms quieted, she pushed the flush button and sat back.

Raphael got up, bringing her a cold cloth. She wiped it over her face, very aware of him hunkering in front of her, his anger a blistering flame. “What,” he said in that frigid tone she’d heard him use with Michaela once, “does that necklace mean?”

“It has to be a copy,” she choked out. “We buried the real one. I saw.” The lid of the coffin closing, her last glimpse of Belle’s face.

Hands cupping her cheeks, beautiful wings spread wide. “Don’t let her win. Don’t let her use your memories against you.”

“God, the bitch.” Anger rose in a blinding wave. “She did it on purpose, didn’t she?” It wasn’t truly a question, because she knew the answer. “I’m no threat to her, she’s just doing this because it’s fun. She wants to break me.” For no reason than that it would give her a few moments amusement.

“She obviously doesn’t know you.” He tugged her to her feet.

Walking to the washbasin, she put the cloth on the counter and rinsed out her mouth with near-scalding water. “Belle,” she said after she felt clean at last, “would’ve ripped out Lijuan’s throat for daring to use her against me.” The memory of her sister’s sweet, wild nature had her straightening her spine. “Let’s go.”

This time, though she continued to refuse to touch it, she looked very carefully at the necklace Lijuan had sent her. “It’s a copy.” Relief rocked through her, her legs threatening to collapse until she braced her hand on the desk. The Chinese archangel hadn’t desecrated Belle’s final resting place. “We decided to engrave Belle’s name on the back one year with a heated metal wire. We only got a wobbly B on there before Mama caught us.” The memory made her smile, wiping out the ugliness. “She was so mad—that pendant was nine carat gold.”

Putting the necklace back in the box, Raphael closed it. “I’ll make sure it’s disposed of.”

“Do it . . . but make me a copy first.” She bared her teeth in a savage smile. “Bitch wants to play games, let’s play games.”

“Her spies will report it,” Raphael said. “It’s a good move, but I won’t allow it.”

She jerked up her head. “What?”

“This was meant to hurt you. Wearing that pendant will only remind you of the past.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’ll remind me of how Belle punched out the neighborhood bully even though he was three years older and fifty pounds heavier. It’ll remind me of her strength, her will.”

Raphael looked at her for a long moment. “But those memories come wrapped in darkness.”

She couldn’t disagree. “Maybe it’s time I embraced the darkness instead of running from it.”

“No.” Raphael’s jaw was a brutal line. “I won’t let Lijuan pull you into a waking nightmare.”

“Then you’re letting her win.”

A hard, unexpected kiss. “No, we’re letting her believe she has won.”

Raphael disposed of Lijuan’s gift and flew back to the Refuge cloaked in the black shadows of night. What he’d said to Elena had been the truth—but it had hidden other, deeper truths.

He’d done it to protect her.

And she’d known. But she’d let him convince her. Which told him more about the depth of her scars than anything else. Once, when Uram had been sane, when he’d still remembered a little of the youth he’d been, he and Raphael had had a conversation.

“Humans,” the other archangel had said, “they live such flickering lives.”

Raphael, not yet three hundred years old, had nodded. “I have human friends. They speak of love and hate, but I wonder, how much do they truly know of such emotions?”

To this day, he could recall the look Uram had given him—that of an older male amused with the pretensions of youth. “It’s not quantity that matters, Raphael. We flitter away our lives because they’re endless. Humans must live a thousand lifetimes in one. Every hurt is keener, every joy more incandescent.”

Raphael had been surprised—even then, Uram had been dissolute, careless in his pleasures, open in his cruelty. “You sound as if you envy them.”

“Sometimes, I do.” Those vivid green eyes had stared down at the human village that sheltered below the ancient castle they’d called home at the time. “I wonder what I would’ve been had I known I only had five or six paltry decades to make my mark on the world.”

In the end, Uram had made a huge mark on the world, but it hadn’t been what that younger self would’ve wished for. Now, he’d be forever remembered among most as the archangel who’d lost his life in a battle for territory, for power. Only a rare few, even among the angels, knew the truth—that Uram had turned bloodborn, bloated by a toxin that had turned his blood to poison. Raphael’s father had never fallen into that kind of bloodlust. But Nadiel’s lust for power had been, in many ways, worse.

Seeing Elena standing on the balcony of their home still clothed in his shirt, her magnificent wings spread as if in hunger for flight, he dived hard and fast.

Raphael! It was a cry filled with equal amounts of wonder and fear.

Feeling something long asleep awaken within him, an echo of the cocky boy who’d amused Uram, he rose up in a hard vertical climb, before twisting into a spiraling plummet that could send the inexperienced smashing onto the rocks below.

It was at the midpoint that he felt it—Elena’s mind locking with his, her mental gasp as she experienced the dangerous ecstasy of the fall. Then he was sweeping out and upward. She stayed with him until he coasted down on a luxurious air current to land on the balcony.

She stared at him for a moment, her own wings closing. “What”—a shake of her head—“just happened?”

“You linked to me.” It should have been impossible—he was an archangel, his shields impenetrable. But, he remembered, she’d done it once before—as a mortal. He’d lost himself in her that day, sunk so deep into the wild perfume of her hunger that he’d ceased to think. Later, he’d suffered her rage at what she’d believed had been an attempt at coercion on his part. His hunter hadn’t understood what she’d done.

“There are some humans—one among half a billion perhaps—who make us something other than what we are. The barriers fall, the fires ignite, and the minds merge.”

Lijuan had killed the mortal who’d touched her that deeply.

Raphael had chosen to love, instead.

“I could feel what you felt.” Exhilaration still sparked in Elena’s eyes. “Is that what it’s like when you’re inside my mind?”

“Yes.”

A pause, her expression intent. “You don’t like it, do you? That I can slip beneath your shields.”

“I’ve had over a thousand years to get used to being alone inside my head.” He ran the back of his hand down her cheek. “It is . . . disconcerting to have another presence there.”

“Now you know how I feel.” A raised eyebrow. “It’s not nice to know that nothing inside me is private.”

“I’ve never taken your deepest thoughts.”

“How do I know that?” she asked. “When you’re so cavalier about your ability to enter whenever you want? How can I ever be certain that what I choose to share with you is truly a choice?”

For the first time, he felt a glimmer of understanding. “It’ll be a much slower way of learning each other.”

“Speed isn’t everything.” Her hands clenched on the railing.

He thought of her trust when she’d spoken of her mother, her compassion as she accepted the burden of his own memories. “I will try, Elena.”

“I guess that’s the best I’m going to get from an archangel.” The words were softened by the amusement in her eyes. “The mind-talking doesn’t bother me. That goes both ways. This other thing—I have a feeling it’s not something I’m going to be able to control for a long time yet.”

“Did you catch any of my thoughts while we were linked?”

“Not really. I was too caught up by the flight—God but you can fly, Raphael.” She whistled. “I know that’s not easy, what you did.”

Pride unfurled inside him, born from the heart of the youth he’d been before Caliane. Before Isis. Before Dmitri.

“I did catch one name.” Hesitant words. “Were you thinking about your father?”

“Yes.” He watched the wind blow a few rebellious white blonde strands across her face, her body silhouetted against the diamond-studded night sky, and made a choice of his own. “I was thinking that in many ways, my father’s madness was worse than Uram’s.”

Elena didn’t interrupt, simply shifted forward so that she could tangle one hand with his. He curled his fingers around hers, wondering at the tectonic shift in his life since the day he first met Elena Deveraux, Guild Hunter. So quickly she’d twined around his heart, becoming the most vital part of his existence.

“With Uram, though there was a little hesitation, in the end, the Cadre all agreed he needed to die.” It was Lijuan who’d worried him the most—still worried him. “Lijuan wondered if perhaps the power that came with becoming bloodborn was worth it.”

Elena shivered. “You should’ve showed her that room where Uram kept the remains of his victims.” Her stomach lurched at the memory even now. “It was a slaughterhouse. The smell alone would send most people screaming.”

“You forget, Elena,” Raphael said, his gaze almost black, “Lijuan plays with the dead.”

“Hold the pendant still, Ellie.”

“I’m trying.”

“Shh, Mama will hear.”

Breathing in the fresh bite of Raphael’s scent, she swallowed the poignant whisper of memory and focused on the present. “Why was your father worse?”

Raphael’s hair lifted in the night breeze, darker than the blackness that surrounded it. “He didn’t kill indiscriminately. For the longest time, they were all convinced he was simply driven by a hunger for power, for territory.”

“Others joined him,” she guessed.

A slow nod. “He was an emperor, but he wanted to be a god. When the murders began, they were stealthy, even political.”

Elena reached up to push his hair off his face, needing to touch him, he’d become so suddenly remote. “What made people change their minds?”

He leaned into the touch, but his expression remained acetic, distant. “When he began incinerating entire villages in territories not his own.”

The reading she’d done under Jessamy’s guidance came to her aid. “A declaration of war.”

“My father didn’t see it that way. He expected the others in the Cadre to fall under his command—he’d come to believe he was a god by then.”

“How old were you when he died?”

“Mere decades into my existence.”

A child, she thought, he’d been nothing but a child. “That means . . .” She stopped, couldn’t continue.

“That he was well on the way to madness before I was born.”

She slid her arms around his waist, laying her ear over his heart. “That’s why the worry over your birth.”

His own arms were steel bands around her. Sometimes, I wonder what he passed on to me. What my mother passed on.