Archangel's Legion (Guild Hunter #6)(98)

The sky turned as red as the Hudson had done in a pulsing wave, the birds swirling a constellation above the Tower. Fighting the wind, Raphael lifted off, heading directly to those birds, called by an ancient power that licked over his skin. The tiny winged creatures parted to let him in, and so he became the center of the constellation as the bloodred sky pushed down on him and the warm rain was drops of blood on his skin, his face, his hair.





36





Elena looked up from the roof of the building where she’d landed when the wind turned murderous, her crossbow gripped in one hand and her heart kicking against her ribs. Raphael! she cried out with her mind, able to see him in the center of the fury of birds that circled black against a crimson sky.

He didn’t answer, and the rain, it was blood that tasted of the sea and the wind and of Raphael, but below that was a chill old and inhuman. No, no, no! The cold power can’t have him! Jaw clenched, she strapped on the crossbow and ran over the edge of the roof, intending to ride the wind up to Raphael, but the force of it threatened to throw her against a building, smashing her to pieces.

Gritting her teeth, she fought against the violence, but her wings had begun to crumple when a flash of blue appeared under her, holding position with a strength that made his growing power clear. Realizing what Illium was trying to do, she allowed herself to drop. He twisted at the last second to catch her, spiraling down to another rooftop in a controlled descent.

As soon as they landed, Elena looked up again and saw that Raphael remained in the center of the bloodstorm, his mind distant from hers. “Can you reach him?” she said, screaming to be heard over the rising wind.

His own hair whipping off his face, arms tight around her, and eyes glowing gold, Illium shook his head. “Something is blocking me, blocking all of us!”

No, she thought again, this time not in panic but in resolute fury. No one was ever going to separate her from Raphael. He was hers. Focusing through the bloody rain that slashed at her face and turned the world crimson, she looked only for the archangel who was her own, her mind reaching for his, powered by a connection that was the sum of both of them.

It was as if a great wall stood between them, but Elena wasn’t about to give in. Hacking at it until it felt as if her mind was as bloody as the rain, she smashed a hole big enough to thrust her hand through. Raphael!

? ? ?


He heard Elena’s voice in his mind, cutting through the whispers that surrounded him, whispers that weren’t words but that he understood all the same. This was a test, the voices said, as had been the others. But who would dare test an archangel? That was a question to which he had no answer, but he knew one thing: no power in the universe could separate him from his hunter.

Smashing through the gray wall of whispers, he grabbed hold of her hand. I am here, Elena, he said, the connection between them pure and unhindered. Fly to me.

The wind—

It won’t stop you. Nothing had the right to touch his consort without his permission. Illium, he said to the member of his Seven who held her safe, release her.

Parting the wind with a blade of agonizing power, he watched her take off, her wings a spread of midnight and dawn streaked with indigo and twilight blue, resplendent against the bloody rain that soaked the city. That rain parted for her as the wind had done—as the birds now did. Until her body aligned with his, her hands on his shoulders, her wings folding in silent trust, his arm around her waist.

Bright eyes of silver-gray searching his own. “You’re here.”

“Yes.” The power, cold and beautiful and dangerous, had threatened to swallow him, but in his refusal to be cut off from Elena, he’d found the clarity to understand once more that he couldn’t hope to control the vicious strength of it . . . but even a mere taste had been potent. If he could just find a way to hold a fraction of it, no other immortal would dare turn his or her eyes to his territory.

Elena’s fingers digging into his shoulders. “Hey, hey, your eyes are going black again.”

“So much power, Elena,” he said, burying his face against her hair as the cold fingers of it snaked through his veins. The whispers urged him to accept what he was given, as the scent of age, of time, filled his senses, as if this power had slept an eon and woke only for him. “I would be the most powerful archangel in the world.”

Shivering at the ice in that whisper, in her awareness that his heart no longer beat, his breath frigid, Elena tugged back his head to look into those inhuman eyes. “You would be a monster,” she reminded him. “I’d be nothing to you, my life one you’d snuff out without thought.”

“You are everything.” His kiss was so cold it threatened to shock her own heart into halting its beat. Unlike him, she wouldn’t survive.

Raphael, my . . . she managed to get out through the searing cold, her breath frozen in her chest when he broke their kiss. I’m dying, Archangel. It took all her strength to force that out past the ice in her brain.

A blink, incandescent blue flaring outward from his irises as one of his hands flattened over her breastbone. “NO!”

A punch of violent white-hot power that made her scream, her back bowing and her heart stuttering back to life. Somehow finding the will to think, to get her frozen hands to his cheeks to cup his face, she said, “Let it go,” through chattering teeth. “The power isn’t worth the price.”