30

Elena.

She nearly staggered at the faint echo of water crashing against rock, the sea winds in her mind. Excusing herself from the group with a mumbled statement that probably didn’t make sense, she made her way to the elevator. Raphael? Where are you?

Two hours from home. His voice was stronger now . . . and it held strange echoes.

Swallowing hard, Elena clamped her hand down on her cramping forearm and tried to breathe. You sound like the Legion. Sweat broke out along her forehead, the vein in her temple a hammer ringing down beat by beat. I’m not doing so good.

I am sending Nisia to you. Where are you?

Why hadn’t she gone to the infirmary herself or told the others to call a healer? She didn’t know. Her thoughts weren’t running in straight lines. It was difficult to think past the wall of pain.

ELENA. Where are you?

Corridor outside our suite. Stumbling out of the elevator, she just barely made it inside their suite before collapsing on the plush white carpet. It felt so soft against the side of her cheek, almost like a cocoon.

She curled up on it, a sleeping cat, her eyes fluttering.

Elena!

I’m so tired, Raphael. It took too much effort to speak.

The doors from the balcony shoved open to admit a whip of icy air; the power that swept in with it was violent and familiar. I’m hallucinating you now.

“Guild Hunter.” Raphael’s arms scooping her up, his wings burning white fire, the glow coming off him so blinding that she had to squint her eyes to see through it.

When she put her hand on his chest, his heart pounded in a beat that was far too fast for an archangel of his power. “Your skin burns.” Her brain struggled to comprehend what was happening. “Two hours . . .”

Elena went limp in Raphael’s arms on those confused words. But he felt the pulse of life in her veins, the rise and fall of the air in her chest. Taking her through to their bedroom, he put her down on the bed just as Nisia ran inside. The healer was flushed from her headlong flight . . . and came to a jagged halt at spotting Raphael.

Healer instincts kicking in a second later, she went straight to Elena. “Tell me what happened.” Already her hands were on his consort as Raphael explained Elena’s call to him, and the confusion and enervating sense of tiredness that had come with it.

“My apologies for the glow, Nisia,” he said at the end. “I cannot currently restrain it.” His body burned, as if his cells had boiled to an impossible intensity.

“It won’t affect my work, sire.”

Raphael tried to have patience as Nisia worked on the hunter who was his heart, but a kind of quiet fury ravaged his veins.

Raphael? Izak just reported that you dropped out of the sky onto a Tower balcony. I’d think the boy had been in the wine, but he sounded both earnest and astonished.

Glad for the distraction of Dmitri’s voice reaching for his mind, Raphael answered, I am in our suite. Elena is down.

Wounded? She left us with unexpected quickness but appeared fine.

Because his hunter hated showing weakness. I wait to hear from Nisia.

“She is out of energy,” the healer said a minute later, her tone dumbfounded. “There’s barely enough in her cells to keep her breathing.”

Raphael stared at the healer. “Has she not been eating?”

Frown dark, Nisia tugged at something sticking slightly out of one of Elena’s pants pockets. She had to unzip the pocket to get it out. “A chocolate bar wrapper . . . No, there are three.”

Nisia dropped the wrappers on the nightstand. “She’s eating and drinking but even with the potent and double-strength mix I made for her, she isn’t intaking enough energy to fuel the changes in her body.”

Raphael could literally see Elena’s bones becoming more prominent against the dark gold of her skin as her body consumed itself from the inside out. “Will my blood make any difference?” Elena wasn’t a vampire, formed to metabolize blood into energy.

“We have to try.” Taut desperation on Nisia’s face.

It thrust a cold dagger into his gut. The practiced healer never panicked.

Lifting his wrist to his mouth, Raphael went to tear open his vein when the taste of a haunting golden richness licked across his tongue, a richness he’d tasted only once before in his immortal existence.

His canines elongated.

Life filled him to overflowing.

He bent, scooped Elena into his arms, and lowered his mouth to her lips. You must live, he said into her mind, as he had once before, when they fell broken and bloodied to a New York that was jagged splinters and shattered buildings below them. She had been a dying mortal then, her body so badly damaged that her soul was barely clinging on. You must live, Elena-mine. I would rather die with you than walk into eternity without you by my side.

A sigh into his mouth before her body began to warm, and she raised a hand to wrap it around his neck, her fingers locking in his hair. Her eyes remained closed, but he saw a glow through her eyelids and it was silver. Like moonlight on water, a gift of light and shadow.

Their kiss went on for always . . . and it wasn’t long enough.

When they parted, his canines were the size they should be and Elena’s cheekbones were no longer threatening to cut through her skin, but when her lashes lifted, he saw the eyes he’d seen the day she first stood her ground against him, on the Tower roof. The ring of silver she’d developed since they’d become one was gone. All he saw was a clear, pristine gray.

Fear was an anvil falling on his heart.

“I know that taste.” She released his hair to brush her fingers over his lips. “We fell on that taste.”

“And we rose together.” He crushed her close. Go, Nisia. I must be with my consort.

The healer slipped away without a word.

Elena kissed him again, warm and languid and deeply alive. “Raphael,” she said against his lips when she broke the kiss this time. “I’m not hungry for the first time in days.” A nuzzle of his throat. “Put me down. My wings feel different.”

He did so with care. “More damage?”

“No.” She flared them out, a wonder of midnight and dawn. “No.” A smile brighter than the dawn. “No damage at all.”

He saw the strength of her, and when she snapped her wings to her back and turned so he could check her wing posture, that posture was precise. “No drag,” he told her. “No weakness.”

Laughing in a relief that gave her voice a sharp edge, she said, “I guess all I needed was the kiss of ambrosia.”

Raphael went to agree when a feather floated to the carpet. Indigo blue.

Then another. Midnight.

And a third. Violet.

Elena followed his gaze. Face stilling, she bent and picked up the three feathers. Neither one of them spoke for long minutes as they waited.

The rest of her feathers remained on her wings.

“Fuck.” Shuddering, Elena dropped the feathers she’d picked up and walked into his arms.

He held her tight to the blaze of his body. When she lifted her face to his, he kissed her with a passion that devoured. Elena’s response held no gentleness, either, only a primal need. He would’ve torn off her knife sheaths if he didn’t know how much she treasured the soft leather.

So he broke the kiss and forced himself to undo the straps that held the sheaths to her forearms.

Elena kissed the side of his jaw, her fingers settling on his face. “I love how you love me,” she whispered, raw need altering into a poignancy that was a knife thrust to the heart.

Kissing her fingertips when they brushed his face, he continued with his task. Both knife sheaths, then the crossbow and quiver, and the hunting blade she wore at one ankle. Her hair was down so he didn’t have to check for blade sticks hidden in her braid. “Any other sharp objects on your person today, hbeebti?”

A grin that seared his heart. “Down my back.”

Raphael couldn’t smile yet, the memory of her collapsed body too fresh, but he reached to her back. Sweeping the tangled near-white of her hair over one shoulder, she bent her head, and he pulled out the long blade she wore in a spine sheath. He placed it on the pile of discarded weapons . . . then slammed his mouth down on hers.

He had no memory of stripping her bare, but she was naked in his arms, all skin of dark gold and a determined strength. Her hands were on his own skin, his clothing abandoned. Covering her in angel dust, the intimate erotic flavor in every kiss, he captured her moan with his mouth and wrapped her up in wings of white fire that would never burn her.

Rubbing up against him, her nipples hard points, she whispered his name.

He spoke into her mind. Yours, he said, always yours.

They fell on the bed together, wings and limbs entangled. Her eyes reflected back the glow pulsing off him, luminous in their inhuman beauty, but the ring of silver that was a promise of her growing immortality, it hadn’t returned.

Her fingers in his hair, her mouth on his throat, she wrapped her legs around his waist. “Love me, Archangel.”

Raphael surrendered to his consort and to this coupling as rawly physical as it was imbued with a painful love he hadn’t understood until he met Elena. Hope, fear, need, the hunger to cherish, the twist of the heart when she laughed. His eternity was encapsulated in Elena’s not-yet-fully-immortal body. She was so easy to break, his consort, so easy to damage.

And she kissed him like the warrior that she was.

Raphael stroked her with rough hands, molding and shaping her breasts until her spine arched, a needy sound emanating from her throat. He kissed his way down her throat, lower, lower, and he made her scream his name while her fingers clenched in his hair.

She was quivering in the aftermath, her skin shiny with a light layer of perspiration and her breathing ragged, when he shifted position to brace himself over her. She stroked his chest with lazy fingertips that moved down to grasp his rigid cock.

Muscles stone, he gritted out, “I have no patience today, Elena.”

Slowly spreading her thighs, she guided him to the dark heat of her. “Me, either, Archangel.”

Her hands came around to his back on that husky admission—and he pushed into her. The musk of her was a deeply private caress against his senses, her nails sharp bites that anchored him to the physical even as dangerous archangelic energies seethed inside him. Their eyes locked as he sank home, and in the luminous gray, he saw forever.

Legs around his hips once more, she held him possessively tight as he began to move. All at once, it wasn’t enough to be braced over her. He lowered his body to hers but wrapped both arms around her upper back so he wouldn’t crush her. As close as two people could get, not a breath between them, they loved until there was no fear, no pain, no prophesied death, only Raphael and Elena. An archangel and his consort.

“You’re not glowing anymore,” his consort pointed out when she’d caught her breath.

The two of them lay together in bed, Elena on her front on one of his solid-once-again wings, Raphael on his back. She’d spread one of her wings over him, and he ran his fingers over her feathers, checking for any sign of weakness. “Good. I’m not used to having no control over my physical reactions.”

“Oh?” An arch sound. “I could’ve sworn you were swept up in uncontrollable passion not so long ago.”

“This is not a time to tease, Elena.”

Of course she just leaned over and kissed him on the jaw. “It’s exactly the time.” But her gaze was solemn. “You shouldn’t have produced ambrosia, should you? It’s only ever meant to be produced once, to turn a mortal into an angel.”

“That is the legend, but we have precious few facts.” No one, not even the oldest angels who walked the world, could remember the last angel-Made, it had been so long ago. The only thing that had survived was the legend of ambrosia. “It might be that the transition requires multiple doses.” Raphael traced the perfect beauty of a feather that graduated from deepest blue to violet.

Elena frowned. “Stage one, stage two, and so on.” Propping herself up on one elbow, she considered it. “I could see that. All my weird issues could’ve just been a signal that we were nearing the deadline for the next dose.” A dazzling smile. “At least we know your body will produce it when the time comes. No panic before dose three.”

Raphael couldn’t stop searching for the silver in her eyes. “What happened today?”

She told him all of it . . . then blinked. “Raphael”—her fingers spread on his heart—“you were two hours away. How are you here?”