Archangel's Consort (Guild Hunter #3)(5)

“If you let the memory of her spoil this,” she said, refusing to back down, “spoil us, then it doesn’t matter if she is the Sleeper. The damage will have been done—by you.”

A long, still instant, but his attention was very much on her now. “You,” he said, his wings spreading out to block the rest of the room from her view,

“manipulate me.”

“I take care of you,” she corrected. “Just like you took care of me by not letting me answer my father’s cal earlier today.” At the time, she’d gotten snippy

—because she’d been afraid. And she hated being afraid. Especial y of the hurt that Jeffrey Deveraux meted out with such cruel ease. “That’s the deal, so learn to handle it.”

Raphael brushed his thumb across her cheekbone. “If I do not?” A cool question.

“Stop trying to pick a fight with me.” She knew what haunted him—that his parents’ madnesses would one day manifest in his own mind, turning him monstrous. Except Elena would never allow that to happen. “We fall , we fall together.” A soft reminder, a solemn promise.

Elena. One hand going down to curve around her ribs, just below her breasts, as he moved his other thumb over her lips, shaping and stroking her.

“If your mother does wake,” she murmured, her top suddenly abrasive against her nipples, “what will happen to her?”

“Some say a long Sleep cures the madness of age, so she could once more become Cadre.” Yet Raphael’s voice said that he didn’t believe such a thing possible.

“Will the others on the Cadre try to locate her, kil her beforehand?”

“Those who Sleep are sacrosanct,” Raphael told her. “To harm a Sleeper is to break a law so ancient, it is part of our racial memory. But there is no law that bars a search.”

She knew without asking that he’d be undertaking such a search, could only hope what he discovered wasn’t a nightmare made flesh.

“I’ll speak to Jason,” he added, “see if he has heard any rumblings on this subject that I have not.”

“Is he healed?” Raphael’s spymaster had been injured in the same violent explosion of power that had leveled a city and smashed Elena to the earth.

“Is Aodhan?” Both angels had refused to leave her and fly to safety, though they were far stronger and faster. Even as they fel to the unforgiving earth, the two males had attempted to shield her body with their own.

“If you are,” Raphael said, stroking his hand down to rest at her waist, “then of course they walk without injury.”

Because she was an immortal new-Made, while Jason was hundreds of years old. Aodhan, she wasn’t sure about—he was so very other, it was hard to judge—but the fact that he was one of Raphael’s Seven spoke for itself. “Beijing . . . are there any signs of recovery?” The city had ceased to exist in anything but memory after the events of that bloody night, so many dead that Elena couldn’t think about it without a sense of crushing weight on her chest, heavy and black and flavored with the taste of old death.

“No.” An absolute statement. “It may take centuries for life to take root there once more.”

The punishing might of power implied by that observation was staggering. It made her visceral y aware of the strength of the man who held her in an embrace she’d never be able to break if he decided to keep her prisoner. It should’ve scared her. But if there was one thing she knew, it was that with Raphael, any fight would be no-holds-barred. There would be no stilettos in the dark, no hurtful blades hidden behind a civilized facade ... unlike the cutting words of another man who’d once claimed to love her.

Her soul pinched in hurt. “I can’t avoid my father forever,” she said, leaning back against the window again, the cold of the glass almost painful against her wings. “What do you think he’ll say when he sees me?” As far as Jeffrey knew, Raphael had saved her broken and dying body by Making her a vampire.

Raphael gripped his hunter’s jaw with one hand, placing the other beside her head. “He will see you as an opportunity.” Honest words, for he would not lie to her. “A way to gain entry into the corridors of angelic power.” If Raphael had his way, Jeffrey Deveraux would even now be rotting in a forgotten grave, but Elena loved her father in spite of his cruelty.

Now, she wrapped her arms around herself, and her words, when they came, were jagged pieces of pain. “I knew that before I asked . . . but part of me can’t help hoping that maybe this time, he’ll love me.”

“As I can’t help hoping that my mother will rise, and will once again be the woman who sang me such lul abies that the world stood still .” Pulling her into a crushing embrace, he pressed his lips to her temple. “We are both fools.”

Thunder crashed at that moment, lightning flashing bril iant in the dark gloom of the world beyond the windowpane. It turned Elena’s hair to glittering silver, her eyes to mercury. Those eyes, he thought as he lowered his head, as he took her lips, would change over the centuries, until they might very well become what they appeared under storm-light. Come, Guild Hunter. It is late.

“Raphael.” An intimate murmur against his lips. “I’m so cold.”

He kissed her again, moving one hand down to close over her breast. Then he took them into the heart of a tempest far more demanding in its wrenching hunger than the winds that raged outside.