Archangel's Heart

3

“Well,” he said, “this is interesting.”

Elena’s lips twitched, the ache of memory retreating under the brilliant life of today. “Give those to me and touch the dried flowers I haven’t yet cut off.”

Nothing happened.

And the next time she put dried up blooms in his hand, they stayed dry. It wasn’t a surprise—from what they’d been able to gather, all the Cascade-born abilities seemed to come and go without warning, like a signal that only transmitted in intermittent bursts. Even Elijah couldn’t always call animals, though the ones with whom he’d already bonded tended to hang around even when he couldn’t “speak” to them.

“Ah well,” she said with a sigh. “You’ll be useful again one day.”

Flexing his hand after dropping the dry blooms in a garden she’d created in one corner of the greenhouse, Raphael made a blue flame dance on his palm. “As always, I am glad to be of some use to my consort.”

Elena grinned. “Maybe while you’re meeting with the Cadre,” she said, “I can do some research on my roots.” She shrugged. “I don’t have much to go on, but there can’t be too many local families with this”—she gestured to herself—“combination of hair and skin, right?”

Her mother’s coloring had been very similar; she’d told Elena once that the near-white of her hair as well as the dark gold of Elena’s skin came from her grandmother. The memory unfurled like a film reel inside her mind . . .

“I had a photograph of my maman.” Marguerite cut up fabric for a sparkly black skirt Belle wanted. “The nun who helped me in the first days after my mother died had saved it, kept it in a secret place, only giving it to me when I was eighteen and no longer a foster child.”

A sadness to her face that made Elena reach out to her. Her mother was a butterfly, colorful and bright and happy. She smelled like flowers. She didn’t get sad, didn’t cry.

Smiling, her mother leaned in to kiss Elena’s cheek, the familiar scent of gardenias swirling around her. “Ah, chérie, you and your sisters make my life a joy.”

The tight thing inside Elena’s chest melted away. “Why did the nun keep your photo?”

“She knew that such treasures get lost when a child is passed from hand to hand.” Marguerite paused. “Sister Constance, she had kind eyes—I think she would’ve raised me as her own if only she was able. But she watched over me from a distance, and found me the day I moved into my own tiny apartment, gave me that photo and another one that she’d taken the day I saw my mother for the last time.”

A smile. “I was wearing such a pretty dress and coat, and clean, shining shoes. Sister Constance told me I had a bag of snacks and toys with me.” Laughing, she added, “I was maybe a little spoiled, I think, but sweet girls should be spoiled, non?”

“That was the day your mama died?” Elena didn’t like thinking about that, didn’t like to imagine that maybe, one day, her mother would die, too.

“Oui,” Marguerite said, her attention on the pattern for Belle’s skirt. “She asked Sister Constance to watch me while she went out of town for a work interview, but her bus, it crashed off a jagged ravine. Sister Constance did not know anything about us except that we lived in Paris, were alone in the world but for one another, and came often to her church.”

Elena’s mother looked up when Elena didn’t respond.

Touching her hand to Elena’s hair, she shook her head. “My strong baby, with such a heart. Do not be sad—it was so long ago, in another life.” Marguerite gave Elena a piece of the sparkly fabric to touch. “My mother’s eyes were the same color as Ariel’s and her skin was darker than yours—like she had soaked in more of the sun, but other than that, you are a pretty little copy of her.”

“That’s why my name is Elena.” It wasn’t her real name, but it was the name she liked best other than Ellie. Elieanora was so long and complicated.

“Yes, just like my maman. Elena was her home name, too.” Lines forming between her eyebrows, Marguerite said, “I know it was not her true name, but I cannot remember people calling her anything but Elena.” A smile, a shake of her shoulders. “No bébé knows her mama’s true name.”

“Beth is too small but I know. It’s Marguerite Deveraux,” Elena said proudly from where she sat atop the bench attached to the old-fashioned sewing machine her mother preferred over the new one Elena’s father wanted to buy her; she kicked her legs as she watched her mother while Beth played with her toys on the blanket Marguerite had spread out on the floor.

Belle and Ariel were at school but Elena had been allowed to stay home because she had a cough. Actually, she could’ve gone to school, but Marguerite had smiled and cuddled her and said, “So, my chérie wants her maman today. We will be naughty and let you play hooky, oui?”

Elena loved her mother’s accent, loved the lyrical beauty of it, loved how gentle Marguerite always sounded. She tried to speak that way sometimes, but her accent was plain old American, her voice that of a child, not Marguerite’s husky gentleness. Now her mother laughed. “You are smart, my baby.”

Smiles filled her insides. “Can I see the photo?” Elena asked, excited to know something about her grandmother.

Marguerite’s smile was soft, a little sad again. “It was lost in a fire that burned my apartment building not long before I met your papa.” She moved the scissors with a graceful hand, the fabric falling cleanly away on either side.

Belle was going to wear the skirt with a white shirt she’d got for Christmas. Elena had helped pick the shirt and her papa had bought it. It made her happy her big sister liked it so much.

“Oh,” she said, really sad for her mama that she didn’t have a picture of her own mama. “Do you remember the photo?”

“Oui, of course.” Sparkly eyes met Elena’s, so much delight in them that she felt as if the bubbles of happiness would lift her right up.

Her mother was full of sparkles, full of happiness. When Elena was around her, she just wanted to dance, wanted to laugh. Clapping her hands today, she held out her arms. Marguerite laughed and came over to lift her up and smack a kiss on her mouth. “You are a petite monkey, Elena,” she said when Elena wrapped her arms and legs around her and refused to let go.

Then Beth got up on her plump little legs, held up her own arms.

“I think this little bébé wants a kiss, too.” Going down to the blanket after Elena released her, Marguerite picked up Beth and sat with her in her lap.

Elena took a cross-legged position across from her and made funny faces at Beth.

Her baby sister giggled, tiny hands pressed to her mouth.

“When I see you, Elena, I see my mother,” Marguerite said. “The same hair”—she ran the strands through the fingers of one hand—“the same kind of bones in the face, the same smile.” A deep smile of her own, though the sparkles were gone. “You carry my Jeffrey in you, too. His expression, so serious at times.”

Laughter again, bubbling out of Marguerite as if it simply could not be contained. “I had to teach your papa to laugh, chérie. He was such a solemn man when I met him—but I could see the goodness in his heart, and I knew he was mine, this quiet American who sat in one corner of the café where I waitressed.”

A secret light in her face that made Elena want to smile, too, this story one of her favorites to hear her mother tell. “He never ordered anything until I came to take his order, your papa. It used to annoy the other waitstaff until they decided to find it romantic, and then of course, it was all right. A man can be foolish in Paris if he is being romantic also.”

Elena didn’t quite understand all of what her mother was telling her, but she could feel the joy radiating through her mother’s words and that was enough. “What did Papa order?”

“Always the same.” Marguerite shook her head, putting Beth back down on the blanket when she started to wriggle. “A black coffee and toast.” She threw up her hands. “I started ignoring him and bringing him whatever I felt like. Croissants fresh from the oven, eggs so exquisitely flavored, bacon smoked with apples, special cereals that we created fresh every morning. And he ate each thing.”

Marguerite laughed. “Until one day, he ordered for two—black coffee and a frothy chocolat with hazelnut. My favorite, you see.”

Her mother cupped Elena’s face in her hands, her expression oddly solemn all at once. “I remember—in the photograph, my mother is holding me and I’m a bébé wrapped up in a soft blanket.” A sudden frown between her eyebrows. “There was a mark on one edge, azeeztee. A monogram it is called in English, I think: M.E.” A sudden smile. “So perhaps my last name was an E word.”

They’d had so much fun coming up with possible last names that started with E. At the time, Elena had thought it the best day ever, but there had been other days as wonderful.

Marguerite had been a dazzling butterfly who loved pretty clothes, coffee dates with friends, and going out to dance with her husband, but she’d also been an affectionate, loving mother. For all her interests and wide circle of friends, her husband and children had been the center of her existence.

“M.E.,” she murmured to Raphael, her heart trying to hold on to the echo of those bubbles of joy. “I have initials to explore as well as just the unique nature of my grandmother’s looks.”

“You may be in luck,” her archangel said. “The Luminata, when they aren’t engaged in the quest for luminescence, seek to gather wisdom, so you may discover something in their archives. And your bloodline does have a vampire in it somewhere. Perhaps it was in the time of your grandmother.”

It still sent a shiver up Elena’s spine to know she had a vampire relative; Raphael had scented power in the blood that had soaked into the quilt Marguerite had lovingly sewn for her daughter, the kind of power that wasn’t a mortal thing. That blood had been mere drops from where her mother had pricked herself while sewing, but it had carried enough strength to hum to Raphael’s senses.

“Weird to think that one of my ancestors might still be out there, living their life.”

Raphael shook his head. “A vampire strong enough to have sired a bloodline that carried a certain level of power through time wouldn’t normally drop all contact with those he sired. But of course, there are always exceptions.”

And vampires, Elena knew too well, weren’t true immortals. They could die. “I know my vamp great-grandma or -grandpops is probably long dead, but still, it’d satisfy my curiosity to unearth the truth.”

A sudden chill shook her, her skin pebbling.

“Elena?”

Shaking her head, she joined Raphael at the door, the two of them due at the Tower for a meeting with Dmitri. “Nothing. Just someone walking over my grave.”

She and Raphael flew to the Tower without playing in the sky today. When they landed on a high balcony, the wind lifted up Raphael’s hair like a lover that couldn’t stay away. She didn’t blame it. Some nights, she just lay there and played with the midnight silk of it, her wing draped over him with unhidden possessiveness.

“Come, hbeebti,” he said, folding back his wings. “Let us speak to Dmitri, then return home. Montgomery may stop feeding us if we keep sleeping in the Tower.”

They’d only done that the past week because Dmitri had been out of state, having taken Honor to their private cabin for a break. He’d returned today, ready once more to take up his responsibilities as Raphael’s second.

Slipping her hand into Raphael’s, Elena walked with him into the Tower. Her lips tugged up at the contact, the eerie chill having faded during the flight over the red-gold waters of the Hudson, the first edge of sunset spectacular today.

Raphael caught the change in her mood, glanced over. “What amuses you?”

“Why do you sound so suspicious?”

“Because your favorite things are sharp and draw blood.”

“Funny, Archangel.” Laughing because he was guilty of feeding her addiction to the most beautiful blades, she said, “We’re holding hands. I never held hands with anyone before you, and when we first got together, I never thought we ever would.” He’d been so hard, so dangerous.

“In this, Elena, I, too, was a virgin.” His fingers tightened on hers, his wings outlined with a glow that would’ve terrified her once.

And she realized he was exactly as hard and even deadlier than he’d been when he made her close her hand over a blade, when he made her bleed—but she was no longer a mortal hunter meeting one of the Cadre. Nor was she the new consort still learning the man she loved beyond life, beyond reason. Oh, he’d keep surprising her for centuries, millennia, of that she had no doubt. But the one thing she no longer had any question about was that they were an impregnable unit.

The world might attempt to tear them apart, but the only way it would ever succeed would be through death.

If this is death, Guild Hunter, then I will see you on the other side.

Her heart squeezed.

No, not even death would separate them. “I like holding hands,” she declared, moving their clasped hands slightly back and forth as they walked down the wide hallway in which Dmitri had his office, the walls newly painted an elegant gray, the thick carpet beneath their feet a darker gray.

Raphael’s response was silent, his wing brushing hers as he . . .

“Raphael!”

The damn archangel had dusted her.

Glittering, sparkly stuff stuck to her, delicious beyond compare when she parted her mouth and it licked onto her tongue. Her thighs clenched. “This is not funny!” She glared at him even as arousal flooded her system, but he was laughing too hard to care.

Her heart, it just stopped.

Even now, the Archangel of New York rarely laughed and never like this. Until she could see the youth he must’ve once been, with eyes of a wild, astonishing blue that asked a woman to laugh with him. She’d never before seen him as truly young. How could she? He had so much power that it pulsed in his every touch, burned in his skin.

Hauling him close to her with her hands fisted in the cream linen of his shirt, she took a kiss, took him. He sank into her, his wings sweeping up to wrap around her until all she could sense was Raphael, all she could taste was him. And angel dust. The special blend he’d created just for her.

He pushed one hand into her hair, fisting it as he wrapped his other arm around her waist and backed her up against a wall. Something fell with a dull thud. Maybe the vivid painting of wildflowers that had just been put up, all the art having been taken down during the repainting.

Elena loved that simple piece Honor had found in a thrift shop, but right now, it could’ve been a priceless artwork by the Hummingbird and she wouldn’t have cared. She was far too happy to be pressed up against the hard warmth of her archangel tip to toe after spending the previous night on watch. No time for shenanigans with Dmitri away and Illium off-shift, Aodhan assigned to patrol the sea border, and Raphael dealing with the overall security situation.

She’d flown a proper defense grid, both to stay in practice and because none of them could afford to be blasé with the Cascade an unpredictable foe that could unleash itself at any moment, smashing the world back into chaos and, possibly, war.

Today, however, the others were on-shift and she could kiss her lover. He burned hot, Raphael, but he was a crashing sea in her mind, a tumultuous, passionate storm that swept her up and thundered through her veins.

We can talk to Dmitri later, she sent to Raphael, sliding her hands up the ridges and valleys of his chest. Let’s go upstairs to our suite.

“A-hem.”

She tried to ignore that pointed cough that held a biting amusement.

Raphael’s lips smiled against hers. I think my second has other ideas. Pulling away with a kiss that promised more to come, he folded back his wings to reveal the vampire who leaned against the wall about ten feet down the corridor, beside an open door.

Dmitri was dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt, his arms crossed to reveal well-defined biceps. His only ornamentation was the gold wedding band on his left ring finger; he never took off that ring, no matter what. And sometimes, Elena almost liked him because of that. The rest of the time, she thought him a pain in the ass—especially as he still liked to jerk her chain with his scent games.

Hunter-born were highly sensitive to scents, particularly vampiric scents; that was what made them such good trackers. The flip side was a vulnerability to those same scents that certain vampires could exploit. Just her damn luck that Raphael’s second was one of them.

Now the vampire, his sensually handsome face carved in strong lines overlaid with skin of bronze, his eyes a rich brown, and his natural scent as darkly seductive as chocolate and champagne and all things sinful, raised an eyebrow. “I knew she was going to be a bad influence from the first.”

Elena gave him the finger.

He grinned, and suddenly, she was drowning in the chocolate and champagne of him while fur rubbed over her skin. Gritting her teeth, she’d pulled a blade from her forearm sheath and thrown it at him before she consciously thought about what she was going to do.