8

“What of Jessamy?” Beloved of Raphael’s weapons-master, the angelic historian was Keir’s partner in the search for information on Elena’s predecessors.

“She has managed to speak with an Ancient one who eschews the world but does not Sleep.” Keir pushed back his hair again. “He is rumored to be five hundred thousand years of age. We may find an answer among his memories—but it will take much time for him to search the crevices and fissures where such memories might reside.”

Raphael’s free hand curled into a fist, but he knew there was no way to rush an immortal of that age. When a being got to be so old, his memories were stacked layer upon layer. Not forgotten but lost in a warehouse that held millions upon millions of recollections.

“The scan”—Nisia’s voice was crisp—“I will fly ahead and organize it. Sire, Elena, please follow.”

“I will call through there.” Keir logged off on those words.

“I feel up to the flight,” Elena said after Nisia had left and she’d pulled on clothing suitable for the cold.

“Guild Hunter, do you wish to make me watch you spiral down into the frigid Hudson because of another assault of pain or because your wing has failed?” The words came out cold, clipped.

Rather than responding with anger, Elena pressed her palm to the side of his face. “Hey. It’s Cascade weirdness. It’ll pass.”

“No one can predict the Cascade.” It followed its own rules, reshaping immortals and the world as it saw fit. “I will fly you across.”

A taut moment before his warrior consort’s lips tugged up. “One free pass,” she said firmly. “To be redeemed tonight.” She pressed a finger to his mouth before he could respond. “After that, you trust me to take precautions.”

Raphael couldn’t get the image of her plummeting from the sky as a result of a vicious slap of pain, out of his mind. That very horror had happened to Illium, though the reason for the blue-winged angel’s crumpled wings was apt to be very different from the hurt that had taken Elena to the ground.

Yet his living nightmare could not hold sway here, for he knew one thing about his consort: to clip her wings would be to kill her. “Tonight only,” he agreed, even as fear tore at his soul with clawed hands, leaving it shredded.

Scooping her up into his arms, her wings neatly pressed to her back and one of her arms around his neck, he carried her out into the snow then lifted off. Three barges made their laborious way along the Hudson, but the rest of the water was dark on this moonless night dotted with stars hard and cold.

Below them, snow haloed the world in a strange twilight seen only in winter, the effect muted the closer he winged to the brilliant heart of Manhattan. Only four days earlier, he’d flown with Elena through just such a twilight—for no reason but that he loved her and she’d wanted to wing through the winter landscape.

Tonight, the wind whistled past his skin with biting teeth, but he shrugged it off while curling Elena closer to the heat of his body, well aware she keenly felt the cold. She pressed her free hand over the archangelic heart on which she’d written her name and stayed silent as they flew to the soaring column of light that was his Tower.

Allowing a barely dressed Elena to be swallowed by the maw of the machine took teeth-gritting control on Raphael’s part.

But nothing went wrong and now his hunter—fully dressed once more—stood in front of him, leaning her back lightly against his chest. The contact soothed the serrated edges of his mood, but the change was temporary and would remain temporary until they had pinpointed the cause of Elena’s pain.

“So?” Elena said to Nisia and Keir. “Anything to see?”

“Nothing.” Lines marred Keir’s ageless face, his frown deep enough to create shadowed grooves on his forehead and at the corners of his eyes. “Other than a minor tear in your wing that’s well on the way to healing, there is nothing physically wrong with you.”

“Having eliminated all other possibilities”—Nisia folded her arms—“Keir and I believe it to be a Cascade effect. The timing is too coincidental.”

It wasn’t the answer Raphael wanted to hear. “Elena, has the cut on your forearm begun to heal?”

“It must have.” She pushed back her sleeve. “Drat, a piece of fluff caught on it.” Tugging off the lint, she stared thoughtfully at the wound. “It’s not as angry as it was before. No bleeding, either.”

Nisia was already reexamining the break in her skin. “I’m not happy with this progression. It should be close to sealed by now.”

Elena’s wings moved restlessly against Raphael. “Is it possible my body’s just funneling energy into something else and ignoring minor wounds? Because I’m starving again.”

“I understand your concern, Raphael,” Keir said, having followed along in Nisia’s examination. “But in this case, Elena may be correct.”

“I’ll continue to watch over it, regardless,” Nisia added. “Elena’s immune system is working—it’s simply slower than it should be.”

No, it was working at exactly the right speed for a mortal.

The problem was that Elena wasn’t mortal any longer.

Elena could feel Raphael vibrating with protective fury at her back. He was an archangel, unused—as he’d pointed out himself—to a lack of control. It was a big part of the reason she’d had to fight so hard at the start of their relationship to get him to treat her not as a cherished lover, cossetted and protected, but as a hunter, a warrior, his partner.

Not that she blamed him for backsliding tonight. She’d been fucking terrified, too. But the moment was past, and their relationship would crumble and die if she stopped being herself. Which was why she insisted on flying home under her own power.

Once airborne by gliding off a high Tower balcony, she didn’t only fly, she dipped and dived without breaching Nisia’s order of “no tricks,” and in so doing, succeeded in driving her archangel to insanity until he finally played with her. Spiraling up into the starlit sky together under Raphael’s breathtaking physical strength, they fell as one to the earth before separating and sweeping out toward the Enclave.

She was laughing when she landed on the snow, her wings dusted with flakes that had begun to fall from the sky as the clouds moved in. “Come on.” She grabbed his hand. “I’m so hungry I could eat my own arm.”

Eyes as blue as a high mountain lake held hers, Raphael’s hair flecked with snowflakes and his wings wrapping around her in an immortal embrace. “Elena.”

“I know, Archangel.” She and Raphael, they had been intimate friends with loneliness before their worlds collided. After that fateful collision, they’d made a promise to one another, to never fall one without the other.

To never leave the other alone.

“I know,” she whispered again, wrapping her arms around his body and holding on with desperate tightness.

He held her as fiercely in turn, but the cut on her forearm stayed unhealed, and one of her wings threatened to drop into the snow, an injured limb being dragged behind a healthy body.