Archangel's Kiss

Stupid. She'd forgotten she had wings to worry about now.



Flicking a quick glance at the wing to ensure the damage wasn't serious, she twirled one blade, making it sing in the cold mountain air, and turned her attention to those eerie eyes again. Take those out and he'd go down. It was an utterly emotionless thought.



Venom's eyes contracted at that instant, his blades coming up in a defensive posture as he blocked her attempts to do him mortal harm. But Elena was past the point of thinking, moving with the speed and strength that made her hunter-born. Venom yelled something at her but all she heard was a cold hiss.



She went for his eyes.



A slam of black exploding in her head. Then nothing.



Raphael landed next to Elena's fallen form, his rage finely honed. "Did you incite this?"



he asked as he picked her up in his arms, careful, so careful.



Venom wiped blood off his face. "Nothing worse than I've said to her before." The vampire's gaze lingered on Elena. "I think I made some quip about tasting her."



"You know I'd kill you for the attempt."



"Our task is to protect you from threats - especially those you might not recognize."



Venom met his eyes. "Michaela, Astaad, Charisemnon, each will attempt to kill her at some stage, knowing it'll shake you. Better to get rid of the problem now."



Raphael spread his wings in preparation for flight. "She's more important to me than all of you. Don't ever forget."



"And you're an archangel. If you fall, millions will die."



Unsaid were the words - better for a once mortal, new angel to die in his stead. But that wasn't a bargain Raphael would ever make. "Choose your loyalty, Venom."



"I made my choice two centuries ago." Those slitted eyes flicked to Elena. "But if she courts death, it'll find her."



Well aware of what the vampire was speaking about, Raphael rose to the sky, holding Elena close to his heart. It was inevitable he'd remember the last time he'd held her so limp in his arms. Immortality hadn't made her safer, only more likely to survive the hurts sure to come her way. But he could do nothing to protect her from the memories that haunted her.



Galen's mental call had almost come too late. If Elena had managed to touch Venom's eyes, the cold-blooded creature that lived within the vampire would have struck out, sinking its fangs into her unprotected flesh.



It would've left her paralyzed, in agony.



And while in the grip of the cobra's hunger, it was quite possible Venom would have cut off Elena's head before Galen could intervene, causing true death.



Laying her on their bed, he reached into her mind.Elena.



Her head shifted from side to side as she moaned, as if fighting a savage internal battle.



His promise to her - to keep his mental distance - warred with the protectiveness that clenched around his soul. The urge was even stronger today than it had been yesterday. It would be so very easy to reach in and erase what hurt her.



"I would rather die as Elena, than live as a shadow."



Brushing tangled strands of hair off her face, he repeated his command out loud.



"Elena."



Her eyes flicked open and for a single instant, they weren't the silvery grey he'd become used to. Instead, they were almost midnight, filled with a thousand echoes of nightmare.



Then she blinked and it was gone. Staring up at him with a confused expression on her face, she rubbed at her forehead. "I feel as if I've been hit by a two-by-four. What happened?"



"I had to intervene when you decided to turn training into mortal combat."



Her hand dropped from her face. "I remember." A whisper. "Is Venom alright?"



"Yes." But his concern was for her. "The memories are starting to seep into your waking life."



She pushed up into a sitting position. "It was like I was a different person. Not even that - like I was a machine focused on only one thing."



"It sounds like the Quiet."



Elena shivered at the memory of what he'd become in the Quiet, the soulless creature who'd treated human lives like so many effortlessly snuffed out flames. "Do you think it's the change - the immortality?"



"A factor." He nodded. "But it may be that it's just time."



Time she remembered all the things she'd rather forget. "I want to speak to my father."



Chapter 30



"He has no right to your apologies."



Her head jerked up. "How did you know?"



"The guilt is a stain on your soul." Running his fingers down her face to close around her throat, he leaned in until their lips were a heartbeat apart. "You will not crawl for him."



Elena flinched. "ButI'm the reason Slater chose our family." That, nothing could change.



"And your father's the reason that what remains of your family is broken in two."



She had no answer to that - because he was right. Jeffrey had splintered their family the day he threw her out, her things so much garbage on the manicured grass verge of the Big House. The neighbors on their tony street had been too well mannered to stare openly, but she'd felt their watching eyes. It hadn't mattered. All that had mattered was that he'd destroyed what little remained of the relationship between them when he tried to break her.



"Get on your knees and beg, and maybe I'll reconsider."



"It's a festering sore between us," she said, placing a hand over Raphael's heart. "I know now that he hates me because Slater was drawn to me." Like Dmitri, Slater had been able to entrance hunters with scent, but that hadn't been his only gift. "Can Dmitri track me?"



she asked, something clicking into place inside her.



"Yes."



No mortal, she thought, no hunter knew that. "That's what Slater did. He scented me somewhere and changed course toward our neighborhood." Slater shouldn't have gained the scent ability - he'd been too young. But the vampire hadn't been normal in any way, shape, or form. "I could feel him getting closer, taste his scent on the wind." She'd tried so hard to convince her father, begging, pleading, screaming at the end.



"Enough, Elieanora." An angry command. "Marguerite, I think you need to stop with the fairy tales."



"But Daddy - "



"You are a Deveraux." A steely gaze. "No one in this family has ever been a common hunter. You're not going to be the first and telling me tall tales isn't going to help your case."



Later, her mother rocking her, telling her she'd talk to Jeffrey. "Give him time,azeeztee.



Your father was brought up with tradition - it takes a while for him to accept new ideas."



"Mama, the monster - "



"Maybe you sense them, my darling. But they're simply living their lives." A mother's gentle teaching. "Being a vampire doesn't equal being evil."



At ten, Elena hadn't had the words to explain that she knew the difference, that what was comingwas evil. By the time she found the words, it was too late.



The remaining days passed in a blur - most of it spent in flight training with Raphael.



Any free time she had, she spent walking the Refuge, learning and listening. According to Jason's intel, both Anoushka and Dahariel were unaccounted for during the time the Guild daggers were stolen, but there was no way to narrow it down to either one. On the good news side, the daggers had stopped turning up, and word was that Anoushka and Dahariel - along with Nazarach - had left for their territories, but she didn't drop her guard.



The constant vigilance, added to the rigorous flight training, was exhausting, but she welcomed it, unable to think about, to accept, the truth of the part she'd played in her sisters' - and ultimately, her mother's - deaths. So she focused on the hunt, and on the upcoming ball, with regular visits to Sam. It was as she was heading down the corridor after one such visit that everything went wrong.



"Michaela." Her eyes widened as she saw the bodies strewn behind the archangel. At least one was the angelic version of a nurse, his hair matted with something slick, a line of red on the wall where he lay slumped.



"Hunter." The archangel began to move forward, her body clothed in a flowing burgundy dress that ran over her breasts in a lush caress before parting a third of the way down her left thigh to display a sleek length of flesh. No one would ever call Michaela less than stunning.



But today . . . Elena swallowed. That dress wasn't burgundy. It had been white. It was blood that drenched it, parts of it still wet enough to slick against Michaela's flesh. The archangel's face was clean, her hair straight and gleaming with health, but her fingernails, too, were encrusted with rust red. Death clung to her.



"I've come to see the child."



Elena didn't make the mistake of thinking Michaela was explaining herself. No, what she was hearing was a decree. She should have let the archangel go, but - and quite aside from the insanity of her dress - there was something supremely vicious about Michaela right now, something that couldn't be allowed near a defenseless child. "Has the visit been cleared?" Her hand closed around the butt of the gun she'd slipped into the side pocket of her pants.



Michaela flicked a hand at Elena as she had once before. But this time, Raphael wasn't there to stop her. A line of wet seared across Elena's cheek, her flesh parting as if it had been slit with a razor.



"I do not need anyone's permission." A slow smile. "Did you know there are ways to scar even an immortal?"



Elena thought she saw something alien in those eyes for a second, a flicker of red. But when she looked again, it was to see only that bright, blinding green. "You may," she said, taking out the gun, "have had nothing to do with Sam's injuries, but the boy is under Raphael's protection. You'll terrify him if you go in like this."



Michaela ignored the last part of Elena's statement. "Are you waiting for Raphael to rescue you?" A tinkling laugh. "He's with Elijah, flying over the opposite end of the Refuge. Apparently, there was word of an angelic body found there."



"Was there?" Consigning pride to Hades, she sent out a mental call for help, hoping her archangel wasn't out of range.Raphael!



A lithe shrug. "I will see the child now."



Elena found herself smashed against the wall, her teeth slamming down on her lower lip as her head snapped back, hitting the wall hard enough to make her vision blur. She struggled against the invisible bonds holding her to the stone, even as she tried to blink the dizziness from her eyes. The gun fell to the floor with a dull thud.



"Oh, you're bleeding." Michaela pressed her lips softly against Elena's, a macabre kiss flavored with malice . . . and something else.



Musk and orchids . . . touched by a jagged bite of acid.



Horror spread its wings inside her. Because that last note, the acid flavored by sunlight wasn't Michaela's scent. It belonged to an archangel who'd been executed above a pitch-black Manhattan. But Uram had had Michaela alone long enough to remove her heart.



The question was - what had he put in her?



"I could kill you now," the female archangel murmured against Elena's mouth, "but I think it'll be rather amusing to watch you after Raphael tires of you." Another line carved into Elena's opposite cheek, the scent of iron filling the air as Michaela's words drew heart's-blood. "You'll just be meat then, easy prey for anyone who wants to taste an angel-Made. We'll have lots of time to play."