Archangel's Kiss (Guild Hunter #2)(17)

“Raphael.”

Finally allowing her to turn, he crowded her against the railing. Instinct drove her to spread her wings over the metal that was all that kept her from falling to the rocks below. No, she thought, on the heels of that thought. Raphael would never let her fall. And if she fell, he’d fall with her. “Kiss me, Archangel.”

“As you wish, Guild Hunter.” His lips met hers, harshly masculine and earthy in a way that paid lie to any myths about angels being too “evolved” to indulge in such physical pleasures.

Moaning in the back of her throat, she wrapped her arms around his neck, rising on tiptoe to meet him kiss for tangled kiss. When his hand brushed the side of her breast, she shivered from the pleasure of it. Biting at his lower lip, she opened her eyes. “Now.”

“No.” Another hotly sexual kiss.

Breaking it, she ran her hand down the muscled plane of his chest, lower. He gripped it before she could close her fingers over the rigid length of him. “I’m not that weak,” she protested.

“You’re not that strong either.” Power ringed his irises. “Not for what I want.”

She stilled. “And what is that?”

Everything. The sea and the wind. Clean and wild . . . and inside her mind.

“I’ll give you my hunger, my heart,” she said, fighting to retain her independence, and more—to build a foundation for their relationship that would last an eternity. “But my mind is my own. Accept that.”

“Or?” The cool question of a being used to getting exactly what he wanted.

“I guess you’ll have to wait and see.” Leaning back against the balcony, her body aching, unfulfilled, she simply looked at him, at the exquisite balance of beauty and cruelty, perfection and darkness. His own hunger had turned his face acetic, that flawless bone structure dramatic against his skin. But he made no move to kiss her again.

“I’ll break you.”

The words he’d spoken earlier came back to her, an invisible wall between them. Knowing he was right, she blew out a breath. “I have a question.”

He waited without impatience—as if he had forever and she was the only woman in the universe. It threatened to take her breath away. How had she, Elena Deveraux, a common hunter according to her father, ended up with the right to ask questions of an archangel?

“What do you know about Lijuan’s pets?”

A slow blink was all the indication he gave that she’d surprised him. “Dare I inquire how you knew to ask that question?”

She smiled.

His expression changed, holding an intensity that seared her through and through. “As I said”—eyes turning to chrome—“you’ll make eternity far more interesting.”

That was when she noticed the light coming off his wings. Bright, lethal, just enough to make him seem precisely what he was—an immortal who held enough power in his body to level a city. Instinct had her muscles tensing in preparation for flight, the adrenaline rush so strong, it was difficult to form words. “You’re glowing.”

“Am I?” Fingers undoing her hair, threading through the strands. “Lijuan’s pets are the reborn.”

Startled at getting a straight answer, she sucked in air through lungs that protested the effort—struggling past the pressure of Raphael’s presence, his power. She didn’t call him on it, intensely conscious that he wasn’t doing it to intimidate her. He was simply being. And if she planned to dance with an archangel, she had to learn to deal. “Something to do with vampires?”

“No. As archangels age,” he said, the glow beginning to fade, though his eyes stayed that metallic shade no human would ever possess, “we gain power.”

“Like your mental abilities,” she murmured, her heart still racing. “And the glamour.” Paranoia would run rampant if it got out that some archangels could walk among the populace unknown, unseen.

“Yes. Lijuan is the oldest among us, and as such, has the greatest store of abilities.”

“So these reborn are something only she can create?”

A nod that sent the coal black strands of his hair sliding over his forehead.

Reaching up to push them back, she lingered, playing with the heavy silk. “What are they?”

“Lijuan,” he said in a voice touched with midnight, “can make the dead walk.”

Her heart stopped for a second as she read the truth in his eyes, processed the awfulness of what he was saying. “You don’t mean that she can somehow bring people truly back to life, do you?”

“I would not call it life.” He bent his head, pressing his forehead against hers.

Sliding her hand around to the back of his neck, she held him close as he told her things no mortal knew.

“They walk, but they do not talk. Jason tells me that for the first few months of their existence, they seem to have some semblance of sentience, that it’s possible they know what they are—but with no power over their reborn bodies. They are Lijuan’s puppets.”

“Dear God.” To be trapped in your own body, knowing you were a nightmare . . . “How does she keep them alive?”

“She awakens them with her power, but they then feed on blood.” Raphael’s voice twined around her, filling her cells with horror. “The old ones, the ones who went to the earth long ago, feed on the flesh of the recently dead to keep their own bones clothed in flesh.”