Archangel's Consort (Guild Hunter #3)(4)

Raphael looked up at that moment, his gaze glittering with an earthy hunger that said he’d sensed her arousal. Deciding to save the talking for later, she was raising her fingers to tug off her own top when rain—no, hail—hit the windows in staccato bul ets that made her jump. She’d have ignored it, except the hard little pel ets of ice kept smashing into the glass over and over again. “Must be a storm.” Dropping her hands, she walked to one of the windows after glancing over to ensure the French doors to the balcony were secure.

Lighting flashed in vicious spikes in front of her as savage winds began to pound the house with unremitting fury, the hail turning to torrential rain between one blink and the next. “I’ve never seen it come in this hard, this fast.”

Raphael walked to stand beside her, his naked upper body patterned with the image of the raindrops against the window. She looked up when he didn’t say anything, saw the shadows that had turned his gaze turbulent in an unexpected reflection of the storm. “What is it? What am I not seeing?”

Because that look in his eyes ...

“What do you know of recent weather patterns across the world?”

Elena traced a raindrop with her gaze as it tunneled across the glass. “I caught a weather update while we were at the Tower. The reporter said a tsunami had just hit the east coast of New Zealand, and that the floods in China are getting worse.” Sri Lanka and the Maldives had apparently already been evacuated, but they were starting to run out of places to put people.

“Earthquakes have been rocking Elijah’s territory,” Raphael told her, speaking of the South American archangel, “and he fears that at least one major volcano is about to erupt. That is not all . Michaela tells me most of Europe is shuddering in the grip of an unseasonable ice storm so vicious, it threatens to kil thousands.”

Elena’s shoulder muscles went stiff at the mention of the most beautiful—and most venomous—of archangels. “The Middle East, at least,” she said, forcing herself to relax, “seems to have escaped major catastrophe from what I saw on the news.”

“Yes. Favashi is helping Neha deal with the disasters in her region.”

The Archangel of Persia and the Archangel of India, Elena knew, had worked together on previous occasions. And now, when Neha hated almost everyone else in the Cadre, she seemed to be able to tolerate Favashi—perhaps because the other archangel was so much younger. “It means something, doesn’t it?” she said, turning to place her hand on the wild heat of Raphael’s chest, the shadowy raindrops whispering over her skin. “All this extreme weather.”

“There is a legend,” Raphael murmured, his wings flaring out as he tugged her into the curve of his body—as if he would protect her. “That mountains will shake and rivers overflow, while ice creeps across the world and fields drown in rain.” He looked down her at, his eyes that impossible, inhuman chrome blue. “All this will come to pass ... when an Ancient awakens.”

The chill in his tone raised every hair on her body.





Chapter 2





Shaking off the bone-deep cold, she said, “The ones who Sleep?” Raphael had told her about those of his race who were so old they grew weary of immortality. So they lay down and closed their eyes, falling into a deep slumber that would break only when something compel ed them to consciousness.

“Yes.” A single word that held a thousand unsaid things.

She leaned deeper into him, sliding her arms around his waist. The backs of her hands brushed against the raw silk of his feathers, and it was a quiet, stunning intimacy between an archangel and a hunter. “This kind of a disruption can’t happen every time. There must be a few who Sleep?”

“Yes.” His voice grew distant in a way that was the mask of an immortal who’d lived centuries beyond a mil ennium. “What we may be witnessing is the rebirth of an archangel.”

She sucked in a breath, understanding flickering at the corners of her mind. “How many archangels Sleep?”

“No one knows, but there have been disappearances throughout our history. Antonicus, Qin, Zanaya. And . . .”

“Caliane,” she completed for him, shifting so that she could see his face without craning her neck. He was so good at hiding his emotions, her archangel, but she was learning to read the minute shifts in those eyes that had seen more dawns than she could ever imagine, witnessed the birth and fall of civilizations.

Now, her back against the glassy cold of the window, she didn’t protest as he leaned in to place one hand palm-down beside her head. Instead, she ran her fingers down the muscled planes of his chest to rest at his hips, anchoring him to the present, to her as she asked him about a nightmare. “Will you know if your mother wakes?”

“When I was a child”—skin touched with heat, but his eyes, they remained that inhuman metal ic shade—“we had a mental bond. But it burned away as I grew, and as she fel into madness.” His gaze looked past her, to the pitch-black of the night.

Elena was used to fighting for what she needed, what she wanted. She’d had to become that way to survive. It had toughened her. But what she felt for this male, this archangel, it was a stronger, more powerful need, one that gave her an insight the hunter alone would’ve never had. “Stop it.”

A silent glance rimmed with a thin frost made up of the myriad dark echoes that lingered in an archangel’s memories.