4

Elena’s instincts screamed.

Her first and most overwhelming reaction was to fight—then she realized her wing was dragging even more heavily, and the unknown force was pushing her out of the danger zone. After landing safely not far from the sobbing or preternaturally silent clumps of survivors, she turned to walk to the very edge of the tear in the fabric of the earth.

Thick liquid moved ponderously below, the color a glowing orange-red. Despite the movement, it seemed quiescent now, the land on which Elena stood stable. The heat that emanated from the sinkhole to hit her face, however, was a scorching burn that made it clear nothing and no one would survive contact with the molten magma.

Liquid bones, skin turned into crackling, burst eyeballs . . . Damian Hale hadn’t deserved such a fate for the crime of arrogance and conceit. “Rest in peace, Damian,” she murmured as she crouched down to examine the edges of the sinkhole, deeply conscious that Imani would mourn his loss. As Raphael had said, the angel might be a stuffy old stick, but she wasn’t unkind.

Elena. Salt and the sea, a crashing wave of violent power as familiar to her as her own breath. The ocean is turbulent and rising as a result of the recent earth tremor. Get away from the coast if you’re near it.

So, the quake hadn’t been localized to this region. I’m at the foot of the Catskills—and there’s a sinkhole filled with lovely bubbling lava in front of me.

The minutest pause. Guild Hunter, we must discuss your penchant for finding danger. I am on my way.

Any damage in the city? It was full of people she loved.

Wait. Thirty seconds later. Dmitri says no damage reported. The tremor was widespread but minor except by the mountains near where you stand.

The tightness in her chest easing, Elena rose from her crouch and had to fight back a wince—damn, she must’ve hurt her wing more than she’d realized. She took care to make sure she was holding it in the right position before she walked over to the survivors.

No point exacerbating the injury with messy muscle control.

Among the huddle of mortals and young vampires on vacation was a sandy-haired vamp with a laptop under his arm; he wore a brown polo shirt with a graphic logo on one side that looked vaguely like a set of cabins against a mountain backdrop. “You’re staff?” Elena asked the man who smelled like torn paper and crushed mint.

“Manager,” he said, the whites of his eyes yet showing and his glazed attention on the spot where the cabins had once taken center stage. His freckles stood out like islands against the bloodless hue of his tanned skin.

“I don’t suppose you have the guest list on that laptop?”

He stared blankly at her for a long second before blinking and jerking his head up and down like a broken marionette. But the action seemed to jolt him out of his shock, and he opened up the laptop without further nudging on her part. While he did a roll call, she responded to Vivek’s message asking if she was all right, then returned her attention to the roll call.

The only person who didn’t reply to their name was “John Smith.” Not rocket science to figure that had been Damian Hale, but Elena got a description out of the manager to be certain. It didn’t take much prompting—Hale had only recently checked in, and the manager even remembered the small scar on his eyebrow that Elena had noticed in the images she’d been sent of her target.

The marker in time.

Shaking off a shiver that threatened to crawl over her at the memory of that otherworldly voice in her head, Elena spread then tightened her wings to her back. It was an automatic action, one she often did when on the ground for long periods. It felt good to stretch out her wings.

Not today.

Stabbing twinges through her back. Razors shaped into long needles.

She sucked in a breath, breathed past the pain. At least she had no trouble keeping the survivors away from the lava sinkhole. No one wanted to end up with their flesh melted from their bones, the aural stain of Damian Hale’s chilling screams too recent to be ignored. When the manager offered to organize a bus to take his guests to temporary lodgings in the city, no one hesitated in agreeing.

Raphael arrived before the transport.

Elena heard a whimper from the knot of survivors as the magnificent spread of his wings came into view. Sunlight sparked off the white-gold filaments within his feathers, the midnight of his hair blowing back in the wind generated by his landing to reveal the clean lines of a face brutal in its masculine beauty.

“Archangel.” A soft whisper, an equally soft hand slipping into Elena’s.

Startled, she looked down to find a boy of maybe five standing there with a rapturous smile on his face. His coppery brown skin glowed, the wide and high bones beneath the baby fat of his face reminding her of a photo Ransom had shown her of his Cherokee great-grandfather. Of course it would be a child who wasn’t afraid; children never were of Raphael. You have an admirer, Archangel.

Raphael closed his wings to his back with warrior efficiency before turning to nod in greeting at the child. His eyes were a blue so pure that it nearly hurt to look at him, his skin sun-golden. He wore leathers today, a beaten-down brown that bore the nicks of past battles and sparring sessions. The tunic left his arms bare, revealing the sculptured muscle of his biceps. He had been a warrior before he became an archangel and a warrior he’d always stay.

On his left ring finger was a chunky platinum ring with a square piece of dark amber that had a heart of pure white fire. Her mark. Worn always by a being who’d lived a thousand five hundred years before she ever existed.

If the heat coming off the sinkhole was a pulse, Raphael’s power was a throb that beat deep in her bones.

He was deadly and he was beautiful.

Most of all, he was hers.

And he had enough heart in him not to crush that of a small boy.

Beside Elena, the boy’s eyes widened at being acknowledged, the silent connection more than enough to bring joy to his childish world. Beaming ear to ear, he ran back to his parents—who’d only belatedly realized he’d slipped away.

Elena walked over to join Raphael at the edge of the sinkhole, aware of the deathly quiet that had fallen behind them. People trying not to attract the attention of a lethal predator. All except for a small and bright-eyed little boy who was ignoring his desperate parents’ attempts to hush him; he wanted to tell them all about how the archangel had seen him!

“He is a strong one,” Raphael murmured, though his attention was on the lava hypnotic in its luxuriantly slow movements. “I will tell Dmitri to keep an eye on him as he grows.”

“Already thinking of recruiting him for the Tower?”

“An archangel’s work is never done.” He stretched his wings. One brushed across her back in a caress between lovers, between an archangel and his consort. “You are holding your wings with unusual rigidity.” Those piercing blue eyes formed of crushed sapphires and light caught the much more prosaic gray of her own gaze—prosaic but for the rim of silver that had appeared as she grew deeper into her immortality.

“I’ve wrenched the left one.” She made a face, reaching up with one hand to manipulate her shoulder in an effort to ease the discomfort. “I must’ve taken off at the wrong angle or something.” From the feel of it, she’d done a number on her poor wing. Hopefully the healers wouldn’t ground her while the wound healed.

But when Raphael frowned and began to raise his hand to her back, she shook her head. “Don’t waste your healing energy on me. I don’t want you at anything but full strength with all this going on.” She gestured to the deadly beauty of the hot, jeweled chasm in front of them. “Tower healers will fix me up.”

Frown not fading, Raphael nonetheless lowered his hand and returned his attention to the sinkhole. “I sense no aberrant energy from it.”

“Thank God.” She put her hands on her hips. “I can live with random lava, but I’d rather pass on zombies or other nasties crawling out.”

A whispering rustle, leaves shaking. The starlings rose en masse from the trees behind where the cabins had once stood, their tiny bodies a black cloud in the sky that swirled for a heartstopping moment into the shape of huge angelic wings. Then they were gone, scattering to all corners.

Elena looked to Raphael, saw his gaze remained skyward. Her own, however, locked onto the Legion mark on his right temple. The lines were complex, forming into the shape of a stylized dragon with no softness to it. It blazed a dangerous blue lit with searing white fire, an artifact of an ancient power that lived in Raphael.

Elena lifted her fingers to brush the mark. “It’s afire.”

The Cascade begins again. I wonder how long this cycle will last, and if it will be the final one before the cataclysmic crescendo the Legion warn us is coming. Raphael’s voice was the sea at its calmest while treacherous currents swirled underneath. “Look up.”

Elena shivered, not wanting to see whatever it was that had captured an archangel’s attention. Not wanting to know why Raphael’s skin was suddenly brushed with a light that held edges of crimson. At the same time, she had to see, had to know the threat looming on the horizon.

She looked up.

The sky boiled as red and angry as the lava at their feet.

And the rain, when it fell, was almost hot enough to burn. Minuscule bullets fired into the snow, creating tens of thousands of tiny tunnels and causing the survivors to run for the shade of the trees.

None of that, however, was as bad as the haunting and old, old voice in Elena’s head that wasn’t her own: Child of mortals, your time comes. For one must die for one to live. A sigh drenched with a terrible sadness. You must die.