Archangel's Prophecy (Guild Hunter #11)(25)

The Legion crouched all around her, watching, waiting, eerie but unthreatening.

Hand still clutched to her chest, she clenched her jaw and rode the pain. Scarlet waves, black nothingness, crushing stone in every breath, this attack went on and on.

It was instinct to reach for Raphael, but she held off with grim will. There was no reason to remind him again of the mortality that lingered in her bones. Even now, the pain was fading, the edges softening until she could breathe again without the air slicing her lungs.

Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

She shook her head at the rising swell of echoes. “It’s all right. It wasn’t you.”

The becoming, the Legion said. The becoming.

Elena rubbed at her chest again. Finding the Primary in the sea of faces, she said, “Have you been through a second becoming before?”

“The Cascade does not always surge.”

Instead of tearing out her hair at the cryptic answer that intimated the “second becoming” only came into play when the Cascade cycled from active to dormant, she asked another question. “Am I in danger of dying from this pain?”

A long pause during which she could hear a million whispers at the back of her head but couldn’t make out the words. The Legion consulting among themselves.

“The pain will not kill you,” the Primary said at last. “We have not seen this in our past wakings, but we have felt the energies. The pain energy will not kill you.”

It was, she realized, a highly specific answer. “What about the reason behind the pain? The root cause? Is that energy dangerous?”

Another wave of background whispers, cresting and falling.

It is not known to us, was the ominous final response.

Gut tight, Elena hooked her arms around her raised knees and stared. The Legion had been around since before vampires; for them to so bluntly say they had no knowledge of what was happening to her, it hit a solid ten on the terror meter. “I guess this Cascade will be one for the books.”

They tilted their heads to the side all at once, a comical row of fairground clowns whose paint had washed off. We do not keep books.

Finding a laugh inside her, Elena said, “If you remember anything about this”—she tapped the internal bruise left behind by the attack—“let me know, okay?”

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Hidden in the echo of their final yes was another voice, old and heavy with sleep: Child of mortals. Vessel unawakened. You step closer to your destiny. For one must die for one to live.

Who are you? Elena said inside her mind.

No answer. No sense of a presence. Just a promise of death.

Fuck it, she thought. If death was coming for her, she’d face it with teeth bared and weapons unsheathed.

The pain down to a dull throb, she said her good-byes then left the Legion to transfer the potted plants across the river. At least she didn’t have to climb down the slippery ropes of vine. Flaring out her wings, she floated easily to the ground, but she’d only taken five steps when her phone began to buzz with an incoming call.

Retrieving it, she stared at the name that flashed on the screen. Great, this was exactly what she didn’t need. “Father.”

“Elieanora, I need you at Beth and Harrison’s home,” Jeffrey Deveraux said in a curt tone. “Harrison is badly injured. Do I give him blood?”

Elena was already running toward the Tower. “No, it’s too dangerous.” If Harrison was so badly hurt that Jeffrey was calling Elena, he could fall into a blood fog and drink Jeffrey dry. Elena’s father was strong and in good shape, but Harrison was both younger and a vampire—in a physical fight, he was the one who’d reign supreme. “I’ll bring a healer.” Her bruised lungs fought to keep up with her pace. “Beth and Maggie—”

“Eve has messaged Beth,” Jeffrey interrupted. “Both are safe.”

“Stanch the blood loss as well as you can. I’m on my way.”

Shoving the phone into a pocket, Elena ran full-tilt. Every second that passed felt like an eternity.

After reaching the infirmary floor, she found only Laric in attendance. No one had expected the badly scarred and emotionally wounded young healer to accept Raphael’s invitation to visit his Tower, but eight months after they’d first met, Laric had surprised everyone by coming to New York to visit Aodhan.

And somehow, he’d stayed.

He never ventured to the ground and kept his scarred face hooded even among friends. However he seemed to find fascination in sitting on the Tower balconies and watching the colorful life of the city, and he flew in the skies above New York. The violent archangelic energy that had burned him down to the bone had done catastrophic damage to his wings—but a long-overdue examination had found that enough of the crucial substructure remained to offer hope.

It turned out that Keir had, in his records, designs for pair upon pair of prosthetic wings that he’d worked on as a young man in an effort to find something to help his friend Jessamy take flight. None had proved suitable for the historian’s congenital malformation . . . but one pair, when modified, extended and supported Laric’s devastated wings enough to give him back the sky.

He couldn’t fly for long, but he could fly.

And from afar, his wings looked like any other angel’s.

“Can you make it to my sister’s home?” Elena asked, telling him the distance. “You’ll be dealing with a severely wounded vampire.” Laric was in training under Keir, with Nisia his tutor while he was in New York.