Archangel's Prophecy (Guild Hunter #11)(51)

They’d barely reached Manhattan when she felt the crash of the wind in her mind, the whisper of the sea. Hbeebti, I see you have been playing with your Bluebell in my absence.

Elena’s clenched heart slammed into thudding joy as she searched for her archangel. Where are you?

A sweep of air, Raphael soaring down from the night sky far above. Spotting Raphael, Illium lifted a hand in a wave before zooming off in another direction. Now look, Elena said with a mock scowl, you’ve scared him off.

Your Bluebell is made of sterner stuff. I’ve asked him to check a border line. Winging down then up, Raphael grabbed her by the waist.

Elena folded her wings instinctively to her back and locked her arms around his neck. You remember.

Old memories on his face, of a love between a young angel and a mortal woman, of an archangel forced to make a cruel decision. It is a hard thing to hurt a boy you’ve watched grow to manhood.

Elena couldn’t imagine the horror of that day, Raphael and Illium both caught by angelic law and left with no way out. If Illium’s lover hadn’t spoken . . . But she had, and in so doing, sealed both her and Illium’s fate. Did you keep him busy most of the day on purpose? Illium had run down his packed schedule for her as they tried to stave off boredom while watching the security footage.

It is the one gift I can give him on this day. Holding her with one arm around her waist, he cupped her jaw and cheek with the other. Dmitri intended to set him another task when he saw the two of you together in Vivek’s domain.

“I’m glad he didn’t interrupt. We ended up having fun.” Perhaps enough to take the edge off the painful anniversary. “Do we have to brace for a volcano?”

“Not just now. I have left a team behind to monitor the geothermal activity—it should not exist, but it is mild in the scheme of things.” The pad of his thumb brushing over her cheekbone. “Your face speaks of exhaustion and yet you fly in the darkest hours before dawn. Why are you not in bed asleep?”

Unable to hold her need back any longer, Elena turned to kiss his palm. “You’ve been gone so many hours.”

Raphael bent his head toward her own. “Did you miss me, Elena-mine?”

Like the air from my lungs, like the blood in my veins. No shields between her and her archangel, no secrets. “Will you dance with me?” she whispered with her lips against his, the second cut on her forearm a dull pulsation in the background that she ignored with ferocious focus. “I missed you so much today.”

“Hbeebti.” Flame-blue eyes burning with archangelic power, each obsidian eyelash defined against the crystalline clarity. “What darkness holds you in thrall? Are your wings causing you pain?”

“Later.” The rest could wait—inside her was a hunger to feel real, feel strong, feel Elena. “I need you.”

In answer, he rocketed them up into the sky with violent power. She screamed out her delight, knowing that no one could hear them, no one could see them. Raphael had wrapped her in glamour, that skin of invisibility that only the archangels could produce—and not even all of them.

“To the river or the sea?” Raphael murmured the question in her ear, his breath hot, his arms strong, and his body a powerful haven.

Elena knew he’d never let her fall.

From the moment he’d become hers, Raphael had been there for her in a way no one else had been her entire life. Not even her mother.

Marguerite’s betrayal had been the most hurtful of them all.

“The sea,” she said. “I’m too angry for the city today.”

“You are thinking of your mother again,” Raphael said as he took them high across Manhattan.

“I love her till it hurts, and I’m so angry with her.” In that strange, sad dream, she’d told Marguerite she wasn’t afraid, but what she hadn’t spoken of was the other emotion that was a scalding heat in her psyche. “Sometimes I think I’ve forgiven her, then I remember the loneliness and the fear and how I found her. I saw my mother’s body hanging from the ceiling! How could she do that to me, Raphael?”

His answer held a knowledge that not many people would ever possess. “Caliane asks herself the same question and she cannot divine an answer. It is a thing of madness that causes a mother to forget her child.”

“That’s exactly what makes me want to find her and shake her and shake her.” Elena’s voice was crushed stones and coarse sand. “Mama was so lost in her grief over Belle and Ari that she forgot me and Beth. She forgot Jeffrey.” Marguerite had been no trophy wife. She hadn’t even been the “right kind” of wife for a man of Jeffrey’s wealth and standing.

No, she’d been a beloved wife.

“I can almost understand what he’s become,” Elena said. “The way he is now.” She ran her fingers through Raphael’s hair as the two of them flew on into the night. “It’d be as if you chose to leave me. I’d spend the rest of my life wondering why you couldn’t come to me, why you couldn’t trust me with your hurt and sorrow.”

I would never leave you, Elena. A lethal edge in every word. Such a thing is an impossibility.

“I know you’d never leave me, not by choice.” The Cascade shoving him full of power, other forces in the immortal world, sought to steal him from her, but Raphael would never make the choice Marguerite had made. “I was just using it as an example.”