Archangel's Kiss (Guild Hunter #2)(102)

He felt one of the tendons in his left wing snap against the wake of a power that slapped into him over and over. Only Favashi, younger than him, was showing signs of similar damage.

“Then she will kill you. She will make you mortal.”

He was weaker than he should have been, but he was also stronger. Looking up into Lijuan’s face, the human mask stripped away to reveal the screaming darkness, he said, “Now,” speaking to the archangels ringing Lijuan, knowing she was far beyond hearing. Now!

A savage cascade of power, all of it focused on one central target. Lijuan’s body bowed as the power hit her, the sky turning to daylight for a single startling second. When night returned, Zhou Lijuan was simply gone, the Forbidden City nothing but a black crater, Beijing a memory in immortal and mortal minds.

The agony of the dying was drowned out only by the silence of the dead.

He found Elena buried under the wings of two of his Seven. Jason and Aodhan were unconscious, the bones in their legs twisted. But those injuries were nothing to immortals of their age. They’d survive. Elena was far, far younger.

But she had the will of a hunter-born.

He felt the stubborn flicker of her life even as he picked her crumpled body up from the hard earth where she’d been thrown. Her hands were torn open, her face bruised, but her body . . . Stroking his hand down it, he realized he felt only a few fractures. Minor. Even for such a young angel. He should have let her rest, but he couldn’t bear the silence.

Elena.

Her lashes fluttered.

He couldn’t hasten her healing, having burned out his power in the fight to hold Lijuan. It would take time to recover.

Hunter mine.

Pale silver eyes looking into his.

Love, he thought as he held her to his heart, was an agony beyond compare.





Epilogue




Raphael wasn’t surprised to see Lijuan’s image form in the clear waters of a rain-filled pool just beyond the Refuge. He knelt by its side as Elena sat swaddled in a blanket, her face uplifted to the warm rays of the rising sun. But he felt her look his way the instant Lijuan appeared, though the sending would be invisible to her.

“I live, Raphael.” Lijuan’s voice was a million screams and endless silence. “Are you not afraid?”

“You’ve evolved,” he said, seeing her hand fade into mist, her face half disappear before it returned. “You no longer need the flesh. Our concerns are not yours.”

A laugh, whispers, and something more, something that spoke of caresses under the cover of dark as blood flowed warm and rich. “I have killed the last of my reborn.” Her form solidified, until it appeared almost normal. “Sometimes, I have need of the flesh.”

“Why tell me?” he asked. “They are your weakness.”

“I like you, Raphael.” A smile that froze the water in the pond, her visage framed in frost. “And your hunter, yes, she intrigues me still.”

He met those eyes that were beyond immortal and wondered at the truth. “Did you need to die to evolve?”

“Ask me that question when we next meet. Perhaps I will answer.”

“You walk between life and death,” he said. “What do you see?”

“Mysteries, answers, yesterdays, and tomorrows.” An enigmatic smile. “We’ll speak again. I do so like you, Raphael.”

The words echoed in the air as her image faded. Rising, he took the hand Elena held out, brought her gently to her feet. Her eyes were troubled as she looked to him. “Lijuan?”

“She isn’t a threat.” He drew her deeper into his arms. “I think, for now, Lijuan has little interest in the concerns of the world.” Her face had held an eerily childish joy in her new life, her new sphere of existence.

“That’s good enough for me.” A long breath, Elena’s arms snaking out of the blanket to wrap around him. “I want to go home, Archangel.”

Stroking his hand over the warm curve of her hip, he wondered if New York was ready for a hunter turned angel. “We leave with the next sunrise.”





Turn the page for a special preview of Nalini Singh’s next book in the Psy-Changeling series



Bonds of Justice



Coming July 2010 from Berkley Sensation!



Justice



When the Psy first chose Silence, first chose to bury their emotions and turn into ice-cold individuals who cared nothing for love or hate, they tried to isolate their race from the humans and changelings. Constant contact with the races who continued to embrace emotion made it much harder to hold onto their own conditioning.

It was a logical thought.

However it proved impossible in practice. Economics alone made isolation an unfeasible goal—Psy might have all been linked into the PsyNet, the sprawling psychic network that anchored their minds, but they were not all equal. Some were rich, some were poor, and some were just getting by.

They needed jobs, needed money, needed food. And the Psy Council, for all its brutal power, could not provide enough internal positions for millions. The Psy had to remain part of the world, a world filled with chaos on every side, bursting at the seams with the extremes of joy and sadness, fear and despair. Those Psy who fractured under the pressure were quietly “rehabilitated,” their minds wiped, their personalities erased. But others thrived.