38

When they spoke to Nisia, it was only to check if Elena could still fly.

The resulting scan showed a subtle weakness in the understructure of Elena’s wings.

“They’re weak but won’t collapse,” Nisia reassured Elena. “I will confirm with Keir, but this is likely what your wings looked like when you first took flight.”

Elena’s eyes locked with Raphael’s, and in her gaze lived the knowledge that one more step backward and she’d lose her wings, be earthbound once more. “I have to finish the investigation on Harrison,” she said with quiet determination once Nisia left the room, as if they had been in the middle of a conversation. “I need to know my sister and her child are safe.”

Even drenched in immortal power so violent that the small touch of human vulnerability in his heart threatened to be subsumed by it, Raphael understood her nightmares, understood why this was so important to her. Beth had lost nearly everyone she loved as a child. Only Elena and Jeffrey remained.

And Elena’s body was shedding its immortality.

“Finish it,” he said. “You have my wings and my hands. Use them and finish it.” Lightning crackled over Raphael’s skin as he curled his hands into fists. His skin split and closed in fine fractures.

His hunter walked to him. “Black clouds, darkness, it’s all gathering on the horizon.” A glance at the turbulence beyond the Tower windows. “If the omens were any more obvious, we’d be beating them off with a sharp stick.” She ran her hand firmly over the arch of his wing in a caress he’d permit no one else on this earth. “I know the promise we made, but I’m asking you not to keep it—if the worst happens, if I fall, you can’t fall with me.”

Raphael set his jaw. “You’d sentence me to eternity alone?” The lightning crackled over him again and again, the Legion mark on his temple brilliant with wildfire, until the space around them was blurred out by his power.

Elena stood unafraid in the midst of the storm. “You’re a burning sword, Raphael, a creature of endless light.” His energy twined up her arm, sparked in her hair, slid down the curve of her cheek. “If you fall, the world will stand no chance when Lijuan rises.”

A sudden, luminous gold in her eyes.

“Archangel of Death,” she whispered. “Goddess of Nightmare. Wraith without a shadow. Rise, rise, rise into your Reign of Death.”

Raphael’s power spiraled around her body.

“For your end will come.” Elena’s voice, Elena’s touch, but not Elena’s words. “Your end will come. At the hands of the new and of the old.” Tears shimmered in her eyes now. “An Archangel kissed by mortality.” Her lips pressing to his. “A silver-winged Sleeper who wakes before his Sleep is done. The broken dream with eyes of fire. Shatter. Shatter. Shatter.”

Elena’s breath on his skin, her eyes no longer unearthly gold. “This she saw,” she said, her voice a rasp. “The old one in my head. Cassandra. She saw this long, long ago.”

Cassandra.

Seer of nightmares and dreams, haunted by visions.

“Do you see, Raphael?” Elena raised her head to meet his gaze. “Come what may, you must live until Lijuan is vanquished, or her reign will murder this world and rewrite it in her image. Death and horror, that’s what our world will become.”

Raphael gripped both her upper arms, nearly lifting her off her feet. “How can I be kissed by mortality if you are not with me? I feel the power fighting to change me already—without you, I’ll sink into the cold arms of immortality until the Raphael you know is gone forever.” He and his Elena, they had been together for a firefly flicker of time, at the bare edge of their immortality together. Not enough time. Never enough time.

“No.” A single firm word. “No matter what, you’ll stay my Raphael.” A war in every word. “You won’t let eternity or Lijuan steal the humanity in your heart. You will protect that part of me you carry in you. Promise me this, Raphael. Promise.”

“We will alter destiny and you will live, Elena,” he said flatly. “That is the only option.”

A jagged smile. “I’m not about to give up, Archangel, but I’m also not arrogant enough to think it’ll be a slam dunk against forces that wrenched Cassandra from her Sleep.” A kiss so wild that their wings became entangled, their breaths one, his hand buried in her hair, hers bunched in his tunic. “Promise me.”

“No.” Raphael would give Elena anything on this earth, but he would not promise to be whole should she fall. “It would be a lie. I will become a monster without you.” This new Cascade-born power was too huge to allow for anything else; he could see how Lijuan had fallen to its seduction. It made a man feel good, his mind a vastness untrammeled by the physical.

Elena was the heart of them, the one who reminded him to never surrender to the seduction. For to surrender would be to lose her, lose the piece of her he carried protected inside his own heart. But when she was gone, no one would love him so fiercely that it was a force larger than the Cascade. No one would anchor him to life with the wildfire of her own. No one would teach him to be human. “Better I break than I become as Lijuan.”

A shudder ran through her at his uncompromising words. “Then,” she said, spine going stiff and face stubborn, “we figure out how to give the Cascade an ass-kicking.” Hauling him down with two hands bunched in his tunic, she said, “I am not leaving you to turn into a bad movie villain with a thwarted love in his past.”

Raphael didn’t smile, couldn’t smile, the coldness in him the spaces between stars. “I will undo the universe for you.” Tear it to pieces, leave it as broken as his heart would be if he didn’t have Elena. “Tell Cassandra I don’t believe in the predestination crap, either.”

The geothermal field that shouldn’t exist erupted into life two minutes later.

“Destiny is fighting back,” Elena said when Dmitri briefed them on the showers of lava and heated rocks.

“It’s building,” Raphael’s second said, his tone dark. “The team on duty is attempting to contain it, but the energy is too catastrophic.”

Raphael’s hand fisted at his side. “It attempts to separate us,” he said to Elena, while Dmitri looked from one to the other with a frown.

“Maybe,” Elena said, “but neither one of us can just ignore this when our people are fighting for their lives.” She pressed her palm over his heart again. “I can’t come with you.” She was too weak, would be a liability. “And you’re too scary to come along with me anyway—my informants would expire on the spot.”

She had to ensure he didn’t start making the wrong choices, didn’t start falling into the chill of immortality devoid of a little human vulnerability. “Go, do what’s right. Save those who look to us for safety.” Lowering her voice, she added, “The final marker is the last feather to fall. I have a lot of feathers left. I can’t lose them all in a day.”

Raphael’s face was like granite.

“Raphael.” She shook her head. “We are who we are. What is the use of surviving if we become monsters?”

It was the echo of his own words that fractured the granite. He left her with a kiss that seared her with its love and admonished her with its fury, flying to contain a disaster that needed archangelic power. Her own task was smaller, more intimate, relating only to a single broken family, but she had to finish it.

After that, she’d worry about lava and ice storms and geothermal fields.

She took three of the Legion with her, her first destination a rooftop not far from the Tower. She landed near a familiar food cart—and when she saw strands of the white not-lint on the back of her hand, she rubbed it off with a single hard brush.

With the rooftop currently clear of customers, the owner of the cart grinned at her. “Cream cheese bagel?”

“I’ll never say no.” Her hunger had returned overnight, was an even more vicious gnawing than before.

“You lost weight. Getting too skinny.”

“You think these wings move themselves?” she said with an inner melancholy.

“Eat more bagels,” Piero said. “Imma gonna put extra cream cheese on this for you.”

Accepting the treat he held out, Elena bit in then walked with the short, solid man to take a seat on one of the wide benches placed near the right edge of the roof. “How are you?” she asked, because to help her sister, she had to be human.

“Can’t complain.” His black curls shiny with hair product atop a cleanly shaven face with cold-reddened cheeks, Piero waved off the money she dug out from her pocket. “Least I can do is spot you a bagel now and then when you gave me a loan after no one else would. My old lady can’t believe I’ve gone legit, become a real-deal businessman.”

Neither could Elena, but it appeared to be true. “You said you had something for me.”

“I put out my feelers, like.” After first offering to pour her a lidful, he took a swig from a thermos of hot coffee. “You know about those two vamp hookers whose brains went kapow?”

Same old sensitive Piero. “Uh-huh,” she said around the last of the bagel.

“Them two pros worked the Quarter exclusive-like, didn’t step out of it.” He screwed on the lid of his thermos after a satisfied belch. “I’ve got friends there. Most of ’em don’t see the appeal of going legit.” A shrug. “What can you do? I tell them to keep me out of the shit, and we can stay on being friends.”

“What did your friends pass on?”

“Word in the low-bucks ‘vampire set,’” Piero said, “is that that Nishant Kumar dickweed had a hard-on for ‘nice’ young women—from good families, like. Once he had ’em, he liked to mess them up in the head until they started walking the streets.”

From his sour expression, Piero found that execrable behavior—probably because the reason for his turnaround from crook to cart owner was an orphaned eleven-year-old sister who had only Piero for family now. His “old ladies” tended to come and go. “Pros were to fill in the gaps if he couldn’t find a good girl who’d gone off the tracks.” A scowl. “Girls, you gotta work so hard to keep ’em safe.”

A faint tug at the back of Elena’s mind. She frowned, couldn’t quite grab hold of it. “You in debt for this intel?” Nothing was free in the gray underground.

A glint in Piero’s eye, but he resisted his inner thief. “Nah, fuckers gave me a freebie because they’re always coming up here and eating my bagels. Like bagels grow on trees.” Another grin. “Assholes are my friends, though, and they’re good to my kid sister, too. Bring her presents and shit. So we’re square.”

“Your friends have any details of the girls he might’ve targeted?”

Piero shook his head. “No one pays attention to the chicks, you know. Revolving door in the Quarter.” His tone wasn’t uncaring, just practical. “But my buddies said there was this one father who went after another of your vics. Would’ve been like a year back.”

Elena frowned. “What?”

“Yeah, exactly what I said. Why go after this Blakely character when Kumar was the one aiming to turn good girls bad? Boys say it’s because Kumar passed on his girls to Blakely. He didn’t like them after they weren’t so shiny, but Blakely got off on chicks who were broken.”

Elena wanted to murder both men herself. If not for the threat against Beth and Maggie, she’d say good luck to the assailant and leave him be. “So one girl had a father who came after her?”

“Yeah, bashed Blakely up pretty good.” Sincere approval in Piero’s tone. “Man hauled his daughter out of there, too—parents who care don’t hardly show, so yeah, folks did notice.”

A jolt of adrenaline, the connections all falling into place . . . while something stayed stubbornly out of reach. What was she forgetting? A year ago, Piero had said. She knew something important that had happened a year ago.

“Girl’s dad was human.” Piero rubbed his hands together, his breath fogging the air. “Shocker, right? I mean, this Blakely prick was a vampire. Word is the girl’s father turned him into hamburger even though he had that druggie vamp friend of his around.”

Elena whistled through her teeth. “Anything else on the father?”

“One badass motherfucker, that’s what my friends told me. No one saw his face. He ambushed Blakely at night, while the creep was in bed with the girl.” Going a little green, he quickly unscrewed the lid of his thermos and took another gulp.

“Man, that had to be tough,” he said after the coffee hit. “I hope to God my sister doesn’t grow up to sleep with assholes.” He crossed his chest, the words a prayer. “I’d probably end up in prison for life.”

Bagel finished and her stomach quiet for the moment, Elena stared into the distance, trying to catch that whisper at the back of her mind, but it remained elusive. “That all?” she asked Piero.

“Nah, I wouldn’t call you over unless I had solid stuff.” Rich brown eyes gleamed as he dropped his voice. “Word is there was another girl in the apartment the night the father came looking for his daughter. She did a runner when the human went psycho on Blakely Sack O’ Shit and his druggie roommate.”

Elena sat up straight. “Tell me you have a name for her.”

Piero beamed so hard his face would crack if he wasn’t careful. “China. On account of her skin being like that fancy stuff they use to make teacups and shit.” He twisted up his face. “I can’t see it, not in the Quarter. Even vamps show damage, and this girl’s human. But my one buddy swore to it on his dear departed ma’s life. Says China’s got perfect skin and big blue eyes, black hair cut like this.” He scissored his fingers across his forehead. “Real doll-like.”

“You know where she is now?”

He pulled out a wrinkled piece of notepaper from his pocket and handed it to her. “Never say Piero doesn’t pay his debts.”

“Consider this month’s loan repayment done.”

A gleeful rub of his hands. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

Not in a mood to smile, Elena memorized the address before shoving the paper into her pocket.

“Hey, wow, can I take those?” Peiro sounded like he was going to explode.

A knot in her gut, Elena didn’t want to look down, didn’t want to see.