Archangel's Consort (Guild Hunter #3)(20)

“Raphael.” She appeared of the flesh as her image formed on the water, her face as ageless as always. Only the pure white of her hair, the pearlescent glow of her pale, pale eyes betrayed what she was, what she was becoming. “So you return to me after all .”

He didn’t react except to say, “Do you think to make me a pet, Lijuan?”

A tinkling laugh, girlish and all the more disturbing for it. “What a thought. I think you would be a most troublesome one.”

Raphael inclined his head. “You are home?” Lijuan’s palace lay in the heart of China, deep in mountainous territory Raphael had never traversed, though Jason had managed to work his way inside before Lijuan’s “evolution.” Raphael’s spymaster had returned from the clandestine visit with half his face torn off.

“Yes.” The other archangel’s hair whispered back in a breeze that he was certain affected nothing else in the vicinity. “I find,” she continued, “that there are certain pleasures of the flesh I do still enjoy after all , and where best to partake of them than in my palace?”

Raphael didn’t make the mistake of thinking she spoke of sex. Lijuan hadn’t been a sexual being for thousands of years . . . or not sexual in the accepted sense. “Are your toys surviving the experience?”

A finger rose up until he could see it, waved at him. “Such a question, Raphael. You would cal me a monster.”

“You would take it as a compliment.”

Another laugh, those eerie, near-colorless eyes fil ing with a surge of power that turned them wholly white, without pupil or iris. “An Ancient rises to consciousness.”

He wasn’t surprised she’d guessed at the reason behind this contact. Despite the nightmare she’d become, he’d never doubted Lijuan’s intel igence.

“Yes.”

“Do you know how old your mother was when she disappeared?” she asked without warning.

An image of startling blue eyes, a voice that made the heavens weep, and a madness so deep and true it mimicked sanity. “Just over a thousand years older than you.”

Lijuan’s lips curved in a smile that held a strange amusement. “She was vain, was Caliane. She liked to tell people that because it made her almost the same age as her mate.”

Raphael felt ice form in his chest, spread outward in jagged branches, threatening to pierce his veins. “How much older was she?”

Lijuan’s answer shattered the ice, turned it into shards of glass that spliced through his system, causing massive damage. “Fifty thousand years. Even that may have been a lie. It was whispered that she was twice that age when I was born.”

“Impossible,” he said at last, knowing he could betray none of his shock. To do so would be to tempt the predator that lived within Lijuan. “No archangel that old would have chosen to remain awake.” A hundred thousand years was an impossible eternity. Yes, they had old ones in their world, but except for a few notable exceptions, most of them chose to go into the Sleep for eons at a time, awakening only for brief periods to taste the changing world.

Lijuan’s smile faded, her voice echoing with a thousand ghostly whispers. “They say Caliane Slept before, more than once. But when she woke the final time, she found Nadiel.”

“Then I was born.” He thought of his laughing, singing mother, thought, too, of her descent into a madness that had seemed to come out of nowhere. But if she’d been alive for so many mil ennia ... “Do you lie to me, Lijuan?”

“I have no need to lie. I have evolved beyond even Caliane.”

On the surface, that certainly appeared true. Age had never been the arbiter of power among their kind. Raphael had become an archangel at an age unheard of among angelkind. And at just over five hundred years old, Illium was already far stronger than angels ten times his age. But that wasn’t why he’d contacted Lijuan. “Is it my mother who wakes?” he asked, holding that “blind” gaze.

“There is no way to know.” The whispers in her voice sounded almost like screams. “However, the magnitude of the disruption, the strength of the quakes and the storms, says that the one who wakes is the most ancient of Ancients.”

Raphael wondered what it was Lijuan saw with those eyes, if it was worth the sacrifice of a city . . . of what remained of her soul. “If this Ancient wakes without sanity, will you execute him or her?” Not before. Never before. To murder an angel in Sleep was to face automatic execution—no one was immune to that law. Even Lijuan, invulnerable though she might be to death, would find herself shunned by the entire angelic race if she crossed that line. Not something a goddess would enjoy.

Another girlish laugh, this one a giggle that was more disturbing than her appearance. “You disappoint me, Raphael. What need do I have to execute an old one? They can do nothing to me ... and perhaps they can teach me secrets I do not yet know.”

It was then Raphael realized that if one monster came to waking life, it might well strengthen another.




The conversation with Jeffrey, coming as it did on top of the painful visit to the morgue, left Elena feeling as if she’d been beaten by stone fists. It was tempting, so tempting, to go home and hide, just pretend that everything would be okay when she came out again.

Except, of course, that was a child’s ploy. Elena hadn’t had the luxury of believing in hopeless dreams since she’d been a scared ten-year-old slipping and falling in a family kitchen turned abattoir. “Do you know where Jason is?” she asked Dmitri when they exited the morgue.