Archangel's Prophecy (Guild Hunter #11)(17)

Slater Patalis’s singsong voice was a horror Elena carried in her soul and would to her last days, but it hadn’t surfaced for the past two years, her sleep free of that nightmare at least. It seemed tonight was her lucky night, complete with ghost owls and being stabbed by knives inside her own body.

“Sire.” Illium’s cheekbones cut white against the golden hue of his skin. “I’m meant to relieve Dmitri at the Tower within the half hour.”

“Go—and send Nisia here,” Raphael said. “Elena will tell you the outcome.”

She loved Raphael impossibly more for that, for understanding that, right then, Illium needed to know the people he loved were safe. He was having a hard time with Aodhan so far out of reach, the two yet struggling to come to a balance in their relationship—Illium had become used to being the stronger one in the partnership, the one who looked after a badly traumatized Aodhan. But Aodhan was coming out of his shell, and the man he’d become wasn’t the boy Illium remembered.

The blue-winged angel walked out of the greenhouse with them, taking off in a wash of wind that flicked up snow into the air in firefly sparks. Normally, Elena would’ve stood on the cliff edge and watched him fly across to Manhattan. She didn’t think she’d ever become jaded enough to not appreciate the sight of an angel in flight.

Tonight, however, she kept her hand linked to Raphael’s, and the two of them walked directly to the study entrance into the house. “Take off your boots,” she said at the doorway.

Raphael gave her that look, the one she called his Archangel look. But Elena wasn’t swayed. She needed this instant of domestic normality to fight the roar of fear at the back of her mind. “Montgomery will banish us if we destroy that gorgeous hand-woven rug with our wet boots.”

Raphael didn’t point out that he owned everything in the vicinity, rug included. He took off his boots. And she knew. He was fighting fear, too. She felt an ache deep inside her heart; she was the reason he understood fear, and she wished that weren’t true.

Together, the two of them walked to the large screen on one wall, and Raphael initiated the connection to Keir’s office in the Medica, deep in the mountainous landscape of the Refuge—a place hidden from human eyes, where angelic young were born, learned to fly, and grew to adulthood.

Nisia arrived midway through their conversation with the healer who’d watched over Elena’s transition from mortal to angel. Today, Keir—pretty face, slender body, unparalleled medical knowledge—watched from the screen while Nisia examined her.

Elena might’ve felt vulnerable sitting there dressed only in her pants and a thin camisole except that she may as well have been a horse when it came to the two healers’ interest in her body. What language are they speaking? she asked Raphael after trying and failing to pinpoint anything familiar in the words Nisia and Keir were exchanging.

Her archangel was a wall at her back, his hand a welcome weight on her shoulder. I believe it is a form of Old Ossetian intermingled with snatches of Laurentian and the angelic tongue. Also, now they’re throwing in Vietnamese.

You’re making that up, Elena said, though she had caught the odd word that made her think of the Southeast Asian country.

There is no humor in me today, hbeebti.

“Take a deep breath and hold it,” Nisia told her, switching to English with the fluidity of an immortal who’d seen empires rise and fall.

Elena did as instructed, reaching up her hand at the same time.

Raphael’s bigger hand closed around hers, the susurration of his wings as he opened then closed them, the sound of home, of family. Never would she associate it with anyone but him.

“Sire.” Nisia frowned, her brown eyes dark. “The shadows . . .”

Only a healer would dare tell the Archangel of New York to step out of her light. Elena’s lips quirked; she tipped back her head to whisper, “I think she’s saying you’re hovering, Archangel.”

Raphael moved at once out of Nisia’s light, for he would do nothing to diminish her ability to help Elena. He did, however, keep his hand linked with Elena’s. She was so brutally fragile. A truth he managed to forget most of the time else it would drive him mad. His consort was fierce, a warrior . . . and still so easy to harm.

Seeing her brought down by pain was a sight he wished never to relive. He had nearly lost her in battle, and in that first fall, when she’d lain broken in his arms; but those things could be foreseen in the context of their lives as hunter and archangel. But to be ambushed by an attack from within her own body?

No. Raphael would not lose Elena to such an insidious foe.

“I can find nothing.” Nisia rose to her full diminutive height, her simple gown a dark blue-gray and her pointed features shouting dissatisfaction. “The cut is clean, uninfected, and there are no marks on the surface of her skin to indicate an insect bite or other contagion. I see no signs that denote sickness in her blood or bones, but tests will be done for certainty.”

“We should use the human medical device.” Keir pushed back the black hair that framed his dusky face, his uptilted eyes intent. “Elena is unique. We cannot predict how her body will change as she matures.”

Raphael stirred. “You have no news on previous angels-Made?”

“Just so.” Keir’s delicate face was calm, but his hand fisted on the wood of his desk. “I have searched the oldest records in the Medica, spoken to healers far more aged than myself, all to naught. Our medical knowledge of ancient angels-Made appears forever lost.”