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Authors: Nalini Singh

BOOK: Archangel's Consort
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That was when a massive hellhound of a dog came around the corner, heading straight for Elena. “Slayer!” Laughing as he jumped on her, intent on loving her to death, she looked up to see Zoe giggling.
It made her want to tug the girl into her arms and pepper that precious face with kisses, but she was a stranger to Zoe right now. A stranger with bribes. “I have presents for you,” she said after Deacon pulled Slayer off with one hand.
Eyes the same dark color as Sara’s went wide with interest.
Giving Slayer a final scratch that had his tail wagging triple-time, Elena went to her bag and took out the handcrafted doll she’d bought from one of the artisans at the Refuge. Zoe took it with careful hands, rising away from her father’s shoulder to pat at the doll’s thick curls.
“What do you say, baby girl?” Deacon prompted.
Zoe’s “Thank you” was shy.
Elena said, “You’re welcome,” and retrieved the collection of angel feathers she’d been saving since she woke from the coma. Startling gold and white, blue edged with silver, midnight and dawn, shimmering gray, a sweet, beautiful brown, and an incredible crystalline white, they made Zoe hold her breath. When Elena lifted her hand, her goddaughter stared in wonder ... then closed one fist gently around the feathers. “Papa. Down.”
Obeying the order, Deacon bent to put her on the floor. Feathers in hand, Zoe toddled over to the coffee table and put her treasures on the glass so she could admire them one by one, the doll held close to her side. Slayer, having been banished to sit by the mantel, sidled around to stand next to his favorite human being.
Sara touched her hand to Deacon’s heart when he wrapped a heavily muscled arm around her shoulders. “Didn’t you have something for Ellie?”
“Let me go grab it.” Kissing his wife on the nose, the former bogeyman of the Guild prowled out of the room after ruffling Zoe’s tiny curls.
“I got you and Deacon gifts as well,” Elena said. “From the Refuge. Found a gorgeous collar for your monster dog, too.”
Sara took her hands, squeezed. “The best gift is you, here. I missed you so much.”
Elena had to look down for a second to blink away the surge of emotion. Sara wasn’t her blood, but she was her sister in every other way that mattered. “I had a run-in with Jeffrey.” It spilled out, the one subject she hadn’t been able to talk about when they’d met earlier, the wound too raw. “He’s furious that the girls have been targeted because of me, and I can’t blame him.”
Sara’s jaw tensed. “That’s—”
“He’s right this time, Sara.” Guilt twisted through her, a hard, abrasive rope. “But at least that’s something I understand. What I don’t know is why he wants to meet me tomorrow.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No, I—” That was when she felt a small, baby-soft hand patting at her feathers with unhidden wonder. “Hey, sweetheart.” Looking down into that adorable face, she decided to push Jeffrey, the murders, her frustration with Raphael’s protectiveness, out of her mind and just enjoy spending time with the family of a friend who’d opened her heart to Elena when she’d been nothing but a scared girl without home or hope.
I’ll watch over you
, she promised Zoe silently, though the thought of surviving her best friend was an aching sorrow in her heart.
Over you and all who come after you.
Sara’s blood.
 
 
Having received the message of Aodhan’s arrival, Raphael
swept down across the sparkling nightscape of Manhattan to land on the wide Tower balcony outside his office—where the angel stood waiting. Unlike Illium, who even with his remarkable wings and eyes of gold, managed to walk among mortals, Aodhan would never fit easily into this world. He was cut in sparkling ice, his wings so bright as to almost hurt human eyes, his face and his skin seeming to be created from marble overlaid with white-gold.
Michaela, that devourer of men, had once said of Aodhan, “Beautiful—but so very cold, that one. Still, I would like to keep him as I would a precious gem. There is no other like Aodhan in the world.”
But Michaela saw only the surface.
Raphael walked to the edge of the space that had no railing, running his eyes over his city. “What did you discover?”
Aodhan tightened his wings to avoid any contact as he came to stand on Raphael’s left. “I cannot understand,” he said instead of answering, “how you can live surrounded by so many lives.” A stark curiosity underlay his every word.
“Many cannot understand your preference for solitude.” He watched as a number of angels came in for landings on lower balconies, their wings silhouetted against the night sky. “You surprise me with this visit, Aodhan.” The angel was one of Raphael’s Seven for a reason, but he was also damaged.
“It is . . . difficult.” Aodhan’s expression was haunted in a way that not many would’ve understood. “But your hunter ... She is so weak, and yet she fought the reborn with unflinching courage.”
“Elena will find it amusing that she is an inspiration.” Yet she would also understand what it meant for Aodhan to take this step, his hunter with her mortal heart.
Aodhan was silent for another long moment. “East,” he said at last. “Naasir and I both believe the Ancient Sleeps in the Far East.”
With Galen in charge at the Refuge, Raphael had set Aodhan and Naasir the task of searching for clues as to the location of the Sleeper who might well be his mother. However, he hadn’t expected any kind of an answer so soon. “Why?”
“Jessamy tells me that when an Ancient awakens, it is not a process of a few days or even weeks. It can take up to a year.” His crystalline eyes, fractured outward from the pupil, reflected a thousand shards of light as he spoke. “Yet not one of the Cadre sensed this.”
Raphael understood at once. “Because the region falls in Lijuan’s shadow.” Any fluctuations in power in that area had been attributed to Lijuan’s evolution. “Keep searching.” The temptation to join the hunt was strong, but after having been absent from his Tower for so long, he couldn’t leave it for what might turn out to be weeks—too many covetous eyes were trained on his domain.
Aodhan bent his head. “Sire.”
As the angel began to expand his wings in preparation for flight, Raphael stopped him with a single touch on the shoulder. Aodhan froze.
“Talk to Sam.” Knowing the demons that tormented the angel, Raphael broke the contact. “Elena gave him a dagger. Legend says the ruby in the dagger was a gift from a sleeping dragon. It may be nothing—”
“But it may denote knowledge of an Ancient.” Aodhan’s wings glittered in a stray shaft of moonlight as he hesitated. “Sire, I would come to this city again.”
“Are you certain?”
“I have acted the coward for centuries. No more.”
Raphael had been there when Aodhan was found, had carried the other angel in his arms the hours it took to reach the Medica and Keir. “You are no coward, Aodhan. You are one of my Seven.”
Aodhan glanced back toward the office, in the direction of the wide shelves of deep ebony that lined one wall. “Why do you not display one of my feathers? My wings are as unusual as Bluebell’s.”
Raphael raised an eyebrow. “Illium is a performer.” While Aodhan, like Jason, preferred the shadows.
As he watched, Aodhan pulled out a perfect, glittering feather and walked inside to place it beside the heavenly blue that was Illium’s. Raphael inclined his head when the angel returned. “After this task is done, you will move here.” Manhattan was still reeling from Elena’s return—Aodhan’s presence might just bring the city to a standstill. But that was a problem for another day. “If you and Naasir are able to narrow the search area to a specific locality, call and wait for me. Do not approach.”
“If it is her . . . you believe she will kill.”
“My mother is the specter in the dark, Aodhan, the nightmare that whispers in the hindbrain.” And he was her son ... the son of two archangels gone insane.
11
 
It was after Zoe had been put to bed, and the adults had
finished dinner that Elena opened the box Deacon had brought down and saw the weapon he’d created for a hunter with wings.
“Ooooh.” Delirious with pleasure, she picked up what seemed to be a modified crossbow, so small and light that—“It’s meant to be strapped to my leg?”
“Yeah.” Deacon grabbed the harness and got her to stand so he could buckle it around her thigh. “I decided it would be problematic on the shoulder—your wings would be too close, too easy to damage.”
Nodding in agreement, Elena checked the weapon. “Balance shouldn’t be an issue in flight, given its weight. But what the heck is this?” She pulled out a small, circular blade, its serrated edges razor-sharp and felt her eyes widen. “It shoots these things? Like the weapon you’ve got?” The weapon she’d lusted after since the day she’d first seen it, in the middle of a junkyard crawling with vampires.
“Yep. It’s also designed so you can use it one-handed if required.” He tightened the harness. “Slot it in.”
Flipping the safety, Elena did so, then took a few steps. “Light, portable.”
“He tested it on me,” Sara said from where she was curled up on the couch, bowl of strawberry ice cream in hand. “Since I’m shorter and not as strong, I thought you’d have no problem.”
Elena stroked the weapon, felt her hunter instincts sigh. “It’s perfect. Deacon, come here.”
When he stepped close, she reached up and smacked a kiss on his beautiful lips. “You’re wonderful.”
“Hey,” Sara said from the couch, waving a spoon in the air. “Mine.”
Grinning, Elena shifted the harness a fraction higher as Deacon went to sit beside Sara and steal her ice cream. The moment was so
normal
that for an instant, she could almost believe she’d never left New York, never fallen into the arms of an archangel.
Then her cell phone rang.
 
 
Having followed Illium to the location, Deacon’s gift
strapped to her thigh, Elena took extreme care as she angled in to land—tired, she was liable to make mistakes, and this was not the time for a broken arm or leg. Below her, the green heart of Manhattan lay swathed in darkness but for the old-fashioned lamps along the pathways that meandered through the park.
“Oof.”
Coming down hard, with a power that made her knees ache, she closed the distance to where another one of Raphael’s Seven stood beside an indistinct lump on the ground.
Poison, the pungent stink of bowels evacuated, viscera
...
and below it, the whisper of violets dipped in ice.
Gorge rising, she nonetheless made herself look at the body. The male—a vampire from his scent—had been beheaded, but that had been done last if she was any judge, after his organs had been ripped out then thrust back into his body
in the wrong places
. As far as brutality went, it wasn’t as bad as anything Uram had done, but the bloodborn archangel had made a vicious art form out of murder.
“Who is he?” she asked Venom.
The male had been at death’s door not long ago, but you couldn’t tell that from his current appearance. Dressed in his usual black on black suit, his reptilian eyes shaded by wrap-around sunglasses even in the darkness, he looked like he’d stepped out of the pages of some exclusive magazine. “The accountant Raphael sentenced to go to ground.”
Elena didn’t need him to spell out the fact that someone was playing games here. “Where’s Raphael?”
Venom continued to give her straight answers for once. “At the site where this man was supposed to be buried tonight. Since this murder is unlikely to be a chance event, the killer may have staked out the other location. But this site is your best bet of catching a scent.”
“Yes.” From the pattern of blood, the churned up dirt and grass, this was where the victim had been murdered, which meant the killer’s scent should be a violent stain across the entire area.
Filtering out Venom’s vampiric signature, she picked up the scent of violets and crushed ice again ... but with this much carnage, there was no way to be certain it was the victim’s at a distance. Girding her stomach, she went to her knees—careful to avoid the splatter—and bent. But she couldn’t reach the body without placing her hands in blood-soaked evidence. “Venom, hold me at the waist.”
Strong, cool hands around her waist an instant later. She fought the instinctive urge to throw off the intimate hold and, trusting him to keep her from falling on the body—and yeah, that trust came hard—leaned in close enough to sniff at a patch of unravaged skin.
Violets. Ice. And a hereto hidden undertone of something light, fruity. Watermelon?
“Enough.”
The vampire’s hands tightened for an instant, and she almost hoped he’d attempt to drop her. But he behaved, and she was on her feet moments later. “I have his scent,” she said, gesturing to the body, “and I’ve weeded out yours. Anyone else been on the scene?”
He pointed up. “Just Illium and he hasn’t landed.”

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