Archangel's Consort (45 page)

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Authors: Nalini Singh

BOOK: Archangel's Consort
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He thought of her childhood, thought of the blood that had christened her. However, when he would’ve spoken, she surprised him. “But you’re the one man I could see myself having rug rats with—you’re bad-ass enough to reassure me.”
Cupping her cheek as she rose to her feet, he rubbed a thumb over her cheekbone. “It will likely take a long time.” Angels were nowhere near as fertile as humans. “We will have a chance to get used to the idea.”
“I’ll practice on Zoe. Poor kid.” With that laughing comment, she walked to another box, opened it.
And froze.
Coming to stand by her side, he saw her lift up an intricately patterned quilt to her nose, breathe in deep. “If I think hard enough, I can still remember her scent as she used to kiss me goodnight.” A whisper so quiet, he almost missed it. “Gardenias stroked with a hint of a richer, more sensual fragrance.”
Reaching out, he touched the quilt, felt a quiet hum of power. “Elena.”
Elena looked up at the strange tone in Raphael’s voice, the heavy weight of memory easing for a fraction of a second. “What is it?”
His eyes turned a stunning cobalt as he rubbed his fingers across the soft old cotton. “There is power in this, the kind of power that comes only with blood.”
“This was on my bed,” she said with a frown. “Until Jeffrey packed away everything of my mother’s one winter while I was away at boarding school, this quilt covered my bed. Slater never went into that room. There can’t be blood on here.” She didn’t want the evil to have defiled this, too.
“No, not his blood.” Dropping his fingers from the quilt, he touched her wing. “It is the blood of the maker.”
Elena ran a finger over the fine stitching. “She created it by hand, probably pricked herself.” That scent was long gone, buried under the ghosts of the gardenias she wanted to keep fresh.
When Raphael said nothing, a warning sensation skittered up the back of her spine. “Archangel? Talk to me.”
“This kind of blood,” Raphael murmured, “this kind of lingering power ... it is not a mortal thing.”
“My mother was very much mortal.” Elena had seen her dead, her face bleached of color, those beautiful, laughing eyes turned forever dull.
Raphael closed his hand over her nape. “As a human, you once pushed me out of your mind. It should’ve been an impossible task.”
“Raphael, she wasn’t an angel, or a vampire. Only one thing left.”
“Not quite.” Eyes on the quilt, he said, “Vampires under two hundred years old can sire children. Those children are mortal.”
Elena blinked, stared at the quilt, back at him. Her life shifted on its axis with a grinding screech. “You’re saying I’m part vamp?”
“No, Elena. You were mortal before you became an angel. But your mother carried within her blood something powerful enough that it survived her passing. There is a vampire somewhere in your lineage.”
“I need to sit down.” But what she did was lean against Raphael, the quilt clutched to her chest. “My father ... he can’t know.” Jeffrey hated vampires, only put up with Beth’s Harrison because of business ties with Harry’s family. “I think it might break him.”
“There is no reason he should know.” Raphael stroked her hair off her face. “I would see more of your childhood—there is time enough for other things.”
“Yes.”
Then, as the most powerful being in the city, in the country, knelt by her side, one of his wings spreading over hers with heavy warmth, she showed him shining, laughing pieces of her life before Slater Patalis broke it into a thousand bloody pieces. Along the way, he told her how he’d run wild through the flower-lined streets of Amanat, how he’d been the pet of an entire city. “Tell me more,” she said, enchanted.
Raphael had never spoken of these memories to any living being, but he told Elena all she wanted to know. In turn, she shared with him the joy she’d found in being the third daughter of four, the one who was young enough to get away with everything, and old enough to be allowed privileges her youngest sister was denied.
Much later, as they stood on the cliffs by their home, looking across at the stark beauty of the Manhattan skyline after nightfall, she kissed his jaw and gave him another gift. “She lives, Raphael. There’s hope.”
Hope. Such a mortal concept.
For you, Elena, I will accept that this hope might not be a foolish thing.
“Ah, you know us mortals—or recent-mortals—have a tendency to be foolish.” A heartbreaking smile. “It makes life interesting.”
“Then come, Guild Hunter.” Putting his arms around her, he lifted them into the crisp night air.
It is time to make your life very interesting.
She laughed, played, and later sighed as he took them into the ocean.
Knhebek, Raphael.
And he knew no matter what happened when the pale rays of dawn hit the earth, it would not defeat them.
Knhebek, hbeebti.
Turn the page for a special preview of
Nalini Singh’s next book in the
Psy-Changeling Series
Kiss of Snow
 
Coming June 2011 in hardcover from Berkley
Sensation!
 
X
 
1979.
The year the Psy race became Silent.
Became cold, without emotion, without mercy.
Hearts were broken, families torn apart.
But far more were saved.
From insanity.
From murder.
From viciousness such as unseen in the world today.
For the X-Psy, Silence was a gift beyond price, a gift that allowed at least some of their number to survive childhood, have a life. Yet over a hundred years after the icy wave of the Silence Protocol washed away violence and despair, madness and love, the X-Psy are, and remain, living weapons. Silence is their safety switch. Without it ...
There are some nightmares the world will never be ready to face.
1
 
Hawke folded his arms and leaned back against the solid
bulk of his desk, eyes on the two young females in front of him. Hands clasped behind themselves and legs slightly spread in the “resting” stance, Sienna and Maria looked like the SnowDancer soldiers they were—except for the fact that their hair straggled in a wild mess around their faces, matted with mud, crushed leaves, and other forest debris. Then there was the torn clothing and the sharp, acrid scent of blood.
His wolf bared its teeth.
“Let me get this straight,” he said in a calm tone that had Maria turning pale under skin that was a warm, smooth brown where it wasn’t bruised and bloody. “Instead of staying on watch and protecting the pack’s defensive border, you two decided to have your own personal dominance battle.”
Sienna, of course, met his gaze—something no wolf would’ve done in the circumstances. “It w—”
“Be quiet,” he snapped. “If you open your mouth again without permission, I’m putting both of you in the pen with the two-year-olds.”
Those amazing cardinal eyes—white stars on a background of vivid black—went a pure ebony that he knew full well indicated fury, but she clenched her jaw. Maria, on the other hand, had gone even paler. Good.
“Maria,” he said, focusing on the petite changeling whose size belied her skill and strength in both human and wolf form. “How old are you?”
Maria swallowed. “Twenty.”
“Not a juvenile.”
Maria’s thick black curls, heavy with mud, bounced dully as she shook her head.
“Then explain this to me.”
“I can’t, sir.”
“Right answer.” No reason they could offer up would be a good enough excuse for the bullshit fight. “Who threw the first punch?”
Silence.
His wolf approved. It mattered little who’d incited the exchange when neither had walked away from it, and the fact of the matter was, they’d been meant to be working as a team, so they’d take their punishment as a team—with one caveat.
“Seven days,” he said to Maria. “Confined to quarters except for an hour each day. No contact with anyone while you’re inside.” It was a harsh punishment—wolves were creatures of pack, of family, and Maria was one of the most bubbly, social wolves in the den. To force her to spend all that time alone was an indication of just how badly she’d blundered. “The next time you decide to step off watch, I won’t be so lenient.”
Maria chanced meeting his gaze for a fleeting second before those rich brown eyes skated away, her dominance no match for his. “May I attend Lake’s twenty-first?”
“If that’s the use you want to make of your hour on the day.” Yeah, it made him a bastard to force her to miss most of her boyfriend’s big party, especially when the two were taking the first careful steps into a relationship, but she’d known exactly what she was doing when she decided to engage in a pissing contest with a fellow soldier.
SnowDancer was strong as a pack because they watched one another’s backs. Hawke would not allow stupidity or arrogance to eat away at a foundation he’d rebuilt from the ground up after the bloody events that had stolen both his parents and savaged SnowDancer so badly it had taken over a decade of tight isolation for them to recover.
He turned his attention to Sienna—holding on to his temper by a very thin thread. “You were,” he said, the wolf very much in his voice, “specifically ordered not to get into any physical altercations.”
Sienna said nothing in response. It didn’t matter—her rage was a hot pulse against his skin, as raw and stormy as Sienna herself. When she was like this, the wildness of her contained by the thinnest of barriers, it was hard to believe she’d come into his pack Silent, her emotions blockaded behind so much ice, it had infuriated his wolf.
Maria shifted on her feet when he didn’t immediately continue.
“You have something to say?” he asked the woman, who was one of the best novice soldiers in the pack when she didn’t let her temper get in the way.
“I started it.” Color high on her cheekbones, shoulders tight. “She was just defending—”
“No.” Sienna’s tone was steady, resolute, the anger buried under a wall of frigid control. “I’ll take my share of the blame. I could’ve walked away.”
Hawke narrowed his eyes. “Maria, go.”
The novice soldier hesitated for a second, but she was a subordinate wolf, her natural instinct to obey her alpha too powerful to resist—even though it was clear she wanted to remain behind to support Sienna. Hawke noted and approved of the display of loyalty enough that he didn’t rebuke her for that hesitation.
The door closed behind her with a quiet snick that seemed shotgun-loud in the heavy silence inside the office. Hawke waited to see what Sienna would do now that they were alone. To his surprise, she maintained her position.
Reaching forward, he gripped her chin, turning her face to the side so that the light fell on the smooth lines of it. “You’re lucky you don’t have a broken cheekbone.” The flesh around her eye was going to turn all shades of purple as it was. “Where else are you hurt?”
“I’m fine.”
His fingers tightened on her jaw. “Where
else
are you hurt?”
“You didn’t ask Maria.” Stubborn will in every word.
“Maria is a wolf, able to take five times the damage of a Psy female and keep going.” Which was the reason Sienna had been ordered not to get into physical confrontations with the wolves. That and the fact that she didn’t have her lethal abilities under total control. “Either you answer the question or I swear to God I really will put you in the pen.” It would be the most humiliating of experiences, and she knew it, every muscle in her body taut with viciously withheld anger.
“Bruised ribs,” she gritted out at last, “bruised abdomen, wrenched shoulder. Nothing’s broken. It should all heal within the next week.”
Dropping his grip on her chin, he said, “Hold out your arms.”
A hesitation.
The wolf growled, loud enough that she flinched. “Sienna, I’ve given you a long leash since you came into the pack, but that ends today.” Insubordination from a juvenile could be punished and forgiven. In an adult, in a
soldier
, it was a far more serious matter. Sienna was nineteen-going-on-twenty, a ranked novice—letting her actions slide wasn’t even an option. “Hold out your fucking arms.”
Something in his tone must’ve gotten through to her because she did as ordered. A few small cuts on that creamy skin kissed gold by the sun, but no gouges that would’ve spoken of claws. “So Maria managed to rein in the wolf.” If she hadn’t, he’d have kicked her right back into training. Losing control of your temper was one thing; losing control of your wolf was far more dangerous.
Sienna’s hands fisted as she dropped them to her sides.
Looking up, he met those eyes of absolute, unbroken black. It was clear she was fighting the elemental impulse to go at him, but she continued to hold her position. “How far did you go?” Her control was impressive—and it irritated him in a way it shouldn’t have. But then, nothing about Sienna Lauren had ever been easy.

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