Archangel's Consort (Guild Hunter #3)(6)

The nightmare came again that night. She should’ve expected it, but it pulled her into the bloody ruins of what had once been her family home with such speed that she had no chance to fight.



“No, no, no.” She closed her eyes in childlike defiance.

But the dream forced them open. What she saw made her freeze, her pulse pounding beat after panicked beat at the back of her throat.

There were no broken bodies on the floor slicked by a dark, dark red. Blood. Everywhere she looked, there was blood. More blood than she’d ever seen.

That was when she realized she wasn’t in the kitchen where Ari and Bel e had been murdered after all . She was in the kitchen of the Big House, the house her father had bought after her sisters . . . After. Gleaming pots hung on hooks above a long stone bench, while a massive fridge stood humming quietly in the corner. The stove was a shiny steel edifice that had always terrified her into keeping her distance.

Tonight, however, that steel was dul ed with a rust-red coating that made her gorge rise, made her stumble to look away. At the knives. They lay everywhere. On the floor, on the counters, in the wall s. All dripping thick, heavy gobs of deepest red . . . and other, fleshier things. “No, no, no.” Clutching her arms around herself, her thin, fragile body that of a child, she skittered her gaze across the nightmare room in search of a safe harbor.

The blood, the knives had vanished.

The kitchen lay pristine once more. And cold. So cold. Always so cold in the Big House, no matter how much she cranked up the heat.

A shift in the dream—she’d been wrong, she thought. This cold place wasn’t pristine after all . There was a single high-heeled shoe on the dazzling white of the tile.

Then she saw the shadow on the wall , swinging to and fro.

“No!”

“Elena.” Hands gripping her upper arms tight, the clean bright scent of the sea in her mind. “Guild Hunter.”

The snapped words cut through the remnants of the dream, wrenching her back into the present. “I’m okay. I’m okay.” The words came out jerky, disconnected. “I’m okay.”

He pulled her into his arms when she would’ve jumped out of bed. To do what, she didn’t know, but sleep never came easy after the memories hit her with such brutal force. “I need to—”

He shifted until she was half under him, his wings rising to encase them in lush, dark privacy. “Hush, hbeebti.” His body, heavy on her own, formed a hard shield against the softly swinging shadow that had chased her across time.

When he dropped his head and murmured more quiet, passionate words in the language that was part of her mother’s legacy, she lifted her arms and wrapped them around his neck, trying to pull him down. Trying to drown herself in him. But he squeezed her thigh and raised himself up on one arm so he could look down at her. “Tell me.”

Elena had always made sure to hug Beth after the day their family shattered, to ensure her younger sister didn’t ever feel the chill , but she’d never had anyone to hold her in turn, never had anyone to smash apart the block of ice that encased her organs for hours after a nightmare. So, the words took time to come, but he was an immortal. Patience was a lesson he’d learned long ago.

“It didn’t make sense,” she said at last, her voice raw—as if she’d been screaming. “None of it made sense.” Her mother hadn’t done what she had in the kitchen. No, Marguerite Deveraux had very careful y tied the rope to the strong railing that went around the mezzanine. Her pretty, shiny high heel had dropped onto the gleaming checkerboard tile of the hall way that was the grand entrance to the Big House.

A glossy cherry red, that shoe had made Elena’s heart fil with hope for a fractured second. She’d thought her mother had final y come back to them, final y stopped crying ... final y stopped screaming. Then she’d looked up. Seen something that could never be erased from the wall of her mind. “It was all just a big jumble.”

Raphael said nothing, but she had not a single doubt that she was the complete and total center of his attention.

“I thought,” she said, clenching her hands on his shoulders, “that the nightmares would stop after I killed Slater. He’ll never again hurt anyone I love. Why won’t they stop?” It came out shaky, not with fear, but with a tight, helpless rage.

“Our memories make us, Elena,” Raphael answered, in an echo of something she’d once said to him. “Even the darkest of them all .”

Hand splayed out on his chest, she listened to the beat of his heart, strong, steady, always. “I won’t ever forget,” she whispered. “But I wish they’d stop haunting me.” It made her feel like a traitor to say those words, to dare to wish for such a thing when Ari and Bel e had lived the nightmare. When her mother had been unable to escape it.

“They will .” Knowledge in his tone. “I promise you.”

And because he’d never broken a promise to her, she let him hold her through what remained of the night. Dawn was pushing its way into the room on slender fingers of gold and pink when the sweet nothingness of sleep took her under.

But the peace only lasted for what felt like a mere blink of time.

Elena. A wave crashing into her head, a fresh bite of storm.

Groggy with sleep, she blinked open her eyes to see that she was alone in the sun-kissed bed, the rain having cleared away to leave the sky beyond the windows a startling azure. “Raphael.” A glance at the bedside clock showed her it was midmorning. Rubbing at her eyes, she sat up. “What is it?”