Archangel's War

22

Maggie’s words rang in Elena’s head that night as she got ready for bed. No one but her niece had asked about her wings. Not her hunter friends. Not her family. She’d noticed the soft pats on the back and the gentle smiles, so they weren’t ignoring it. Rather, they’d chosen to focus on the joy of her return rather than what she’d lost.

Muscled arms wrapping around her from behind, Raphael’s naked chest pressing to her back, her camisole and panties a thin barrier between them. He was still wearing his pants, but it did nothing to hide the power and hard strength of him. “I feel so weak against you now.” Her fingers clenched on the edge of the bathroom counter.

The dangerous blue of his gaze met hers in the mirror. “You’ve never been weak, Guild Hunter, not even at your most wounded.”

Elena wanted to kick the cabinet. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Everyone was so wonderful to me today. I should be happy.” But she wasn’t, she was angry and that anger was threatening to turn toward the man who had torn out his heart for her.

“The Cascade stole your wings.” Raphael’s voice held that edge of cold power that was slowly becoming familiar. “You are determined to push that to the past and move on, but you have a right to your anger.” White fire licked over the arch of his wings, the dancing energy seeming to taunt her.

Turning in his arms, she shoved at his chest. “I can’t even be properly angry at you!” And that made her angry. “I love you too much!”

“I am here, Elena, for your anger and your love both.” He closed his hands over her wrists. “Together. Always.”

“But we can’t now!” The hot ball of lead in her stomach exploded into a conflagration. “I can’t fly with you! I can’t dance with you in the sky, not like before!” Everything had changed and they couldn’t ignore that, not between the two of them. She couldn’t ignore it, couldn’t keep on pretending she was over it.

“When I fed you ambrosia, I didn’t know you would wake as an angel.” His hands tightened on her wrists. “I didn’t even know what it was I tasted in my mouth. I expected to have to face your wrath when you woke as a vampire. Wings do not make you my lover. That has always been your heart, your spirit, your courage—and your fury.”

“But we built a life together in which I could fly beside you. It’s gone now!” No more midnight flights where they played together in the sky. No more tangled wings while they slept.

“Then we build a new life together.”

“What if it’s not like before? What if it’s worse?”

“What if it’s better?”

“Argh! I need you to get angry and fight with me!”

A startled smile on Raphael’s face. It made him look incredibly young. She could’ve never imagined him this way when they’d first met on the Tower roof what felt like a lifetime ago. He’d been so inhuman then, a being of power and cruelty who’d made her close her hand over a blade to prove a point.

Her blood had dropped to crash against the rooftop on which they stood, small brutal paintings.

Now he was her lover and her eternity . . . and he wouldn’t be this man if he hadn’t been so foolish as to fall in love with a mortal.

Hauling down his head, she kissed him hard. Maybe she couldn’t play with him in the skies—and yeah, that would piss her off forever—but she’d fly with him in this way. Their bodies entwined, their hearts beating as one. Because he was hers and she was the only one who could break them. So screw the anger and the self-pity.

Breaking the kiss just as she was really getting going, Raphael gathered her up in his arms and strode out the bathroom door. She slapped his gorgeous shoulders when she realized he was heading toward the balcony doors. “Don’t you dare!” It was freezing out there.

He didn’t stop.

“Raphael! I’m only wearing a camisole and panties.” A new set that fit her thin frame and that she’d had delivered herself because she and Montgomery had an unspoken agreement—he could do what he liked with her wardrobe, but her underwear drawer was off-limits. “I’ll turn into an icicle.”

“Such a lack of faith in my abilities, Elena-mine.” He shook his head, a look of mock sadness on his face; there was no cold in him now, no distance. “Has my glamour ever before let you down?”

She fought not to laugh. “Your glamour is fantastic,” she said in her most adoring tone, fluttering her lashes at the same time. “It’s the best glamour in the world. I still don’t want to be bare-ass naked above New York. Part of me keeps expecting the Cascade to come back for another go.”

Raphael kissed her, and it tasted of angel dust. The special blend created for Elena alone, erotic and luscious and toe-curling. Her nipples tightened to hard little points. “That’s not playing fair,” she breathed against his lips.

“Your taste addicts me,” was the rough-voiced response.

Another slow kiss. “I know you love me,” she said in the aftermath. “I know it was never about wings.” She struggled to explain the feelings tearing at her. “But before, I felt like a partner. Now . . . I’ve never been so weak.” Even as a mortal, she’d been stronger than most—a consequence of being hunter-born. “I’ve never been fragile, not even as a child.”

Unwavering eye contact, the chrome blue alive with lightning. “I could’ve killed you at any point during that time. Ripped you limb from limb without breaking a sweat.”

She sat up in his arms, scowling. “Really, that’s your idea of a pep talk?”

“You have stood your ground against me from the first time we met, when I saw no value in humanity and could’ve crushed you with no thought to what I was destroying. Power and strength have never been what makes us equal, hbeebti.”

The words hit hard.

Her lover was an archangel, one of the Cadre of Ten. The only being that could kill an archangel was another archangel. Elena stood no chance and never had. Yet they’d fought together, flown together, battled the reborn together, sent Lijuan to hell together.

“I feel dumb now.” And light inside, as if the bubbles she’d blown with Maggie were in her veins. “Can we forget this ever happened?”

His smile was dawn on the horizon . . . dawn edged with frost. The sheer violence of his new power cracked his skin with gold when he kissed her. She locked her arms around him and took the ice, took the lightning, took him. And when they hit the night skies above Manhattan, she felt not even a touch of cold, Raphael using his power to both shield them from the world and cocoon her in warmth.

They flew above a city of steel and light and color, and out to the ocean beyond. “I barely have any well-fitting underwear as it is,” she murmured against his mouth when he incinerated her camisole and panties before they could fall into the ocean. “Don’t let this go to your head but you’re so sexy that, right now, I don’t even care.”

The archangel who held her was lethal beyond compare . . . and his smile, it closed its fingers around her heart and made her breath catch. His kiss was raw heat and furious demand, the hand he ran over her body rough with possessiveness and hot with need. One muscled arm kept her locked to him as he squeezed her breast with the other.

Elena’s entire body clenched. She felt no fear, even high above the Atlantic; Raphael would never let her fall. They kissed, touched, tasted, their skin heating from the friction. Breath coming in hard pulses, Raphael said, “Dive?”

“Go.”

He angled them down . . . and folded back his wings, turning himself into an arrow headed toward the water. Elena screamed and laughed . . . then gasped in wonder as they crashed into the ocean encased in a protective shield alive with lightning. Legs wrapped around Raphael as they floated down and down into the fathomless dark, she felt wild and alive and real.

Raphael ran his nails down her back.

She shuddered hard. “The sensations are back.” Of an intimate caress on her wings, of contact she’d permit only one being in this world.

One hand going to her nape, the other repeating the touch. Groaning, she closed her hands over the arches of his wings, and massaged down at just the right pressure to make him insane. The kiss was all teeth and sex this time, their bodies hot and sweaty as they slid against one another.

She rubbed against him before reaching down between their bodies to close her hand around the thickness of his cock. Rigid steel covered in silk, he thrust into her hand. Already wet for him, she kissed her way desperately down his neck while continuing to torment him.

His wings began to glow. Her core pulsed.

When he put his hands on her hips and hauled her into exactly the right position to take him, she laughed the husky laugh of a woman who knew she was irresistible to her lover. Moaning as he thrust into her, she dug her nails into his flesh, coming around him on the first stroke.

He wasn’t holding back.

It was an aphrodisiac beyond compare.

Had anyone been able to see through the glamour, they would’ve witnessed the ocean explode with a hidden sun.

The next day, Elena took her knives and walked into a small practice ring low down in the Tower—she didn’t need the massive space of the main ring. Not today. It was time she got back to strength training—and figured out her current body. She could compensate for weak muscles and shaky arms, but she had to see if her hand-eye coordination had survived the chrysalis.

She was only ten minutes into it when Dmitri walked in dressed in black cargo pants and a black T-shirt decorated with the faded logo of a metal band. “Space is taken,” she said with a scowl. “I booked it last night.”

“Came to see if you needed any help.” A smirk. “I’m feeling sorry for you since you’re so skinny and pathetic right now.”

Elena gave him her most fake smile. “Want to act as my target? I’m sure it’ll improve my accuracy one hundred percent.”

Dmitri raised both eyebrows, then smiled, slow and sensual. “Why not?”

And so began the craziest throwing session of Elena’s life. Dmitri was a deadly fast vampire and her muscles remained wobbly, but it turned out that her hand-eye coordination was just fine. So was her ability to think on her feet. Ten minutes. Twenty. Thirty.

She threw a second blade on the heels of the first, after he’d already committed to his avoidance strategy.

It slammed home in Dmitri’s shoulder. The hilt quivered from the impact.

They both froze for a taut, silent second. Until the wet patch on his T-shirt began to spread. “Fuck! Get that out right now! Honor will goddamn murder me.” She’d never expected to score such a solid hit—Dmitri was too fast, too experienced. “I’m getting you some blood.”

Elena ran to the fridge just outside the training ring, grabbed a bottle. Powerful as he was, the infusion of blood should cause the wound to heal in a matter of minutes. Well before Honor laid eyes on it. Because it was one thing to threaten her friend’s bastard of a husband, quite another to wound him badly.

Hilts didn’t quiver that way unless the blade had hit bone.

Dmitri had finished pulling out the knife by then. Flipping it around, he lobbed it back to her. “It’s just a scratch. Like being bitten by a mosquito.”

“Shut up and drink this.” She thrust the bottle into his hand.

“Such solicitude. I’m touched.”

Tendrils of fur and champagne wrapped around her, decadent chocolate sinking into her taste buds at the same time. Gritting her teeth, she backed off. “Scent games? You want me to stab you again?”

Having finished half the bottle, he lowered it and shrugged. “I’m the one bleeding.” He touched the wet patch—which had stopped its terrifying spread at last. “No more mollycoddling you, sweet Elieanora.”

“You’re an asshole,” she said past the avalanche of drugging scent, though her lips wanted to kick up. The asshole happened to be the most powerful vampire in Raphael’s territory, brutal and deadly—and he’d just told her that he was taking off the kid gloves.

As a compliment, it was a damn fine one.

Shit, she owed him now. He’d been nice to her. It was an utterly horrifying thought. But not enough to stifle her grin. Her hands closed on the hilts of her blades. “Ready for round two, or does bubby-wubby need another bottle?”

Dark eyes gleamed, champagne spun in her head, and Dmitri moved.

Her blades flew like silver fire, streaking through the air with lethal accuracy.