Sipping her tea, Lijuan let out a sigh. “There is something to be said for the physical form.”
When they had last met in Beijing, she’d told him she no longer needed food for sustenance. “Have your needs changed?”
A soft smile that appeared innocent ... if you did not see the twisted shadows that lingered beneath. “Not my needs. My wants.” Another sip. “Some things power alone cannot duplicate.” Holding the teacup in an elegant hand, she met his gaze. “How do you stand it, Raphael?”
Raising an eyebrow, he waited.
“These mortals.” She flicked a hand in the direction of Manhattan. “All around you, everywhere you go. Like ants.”
Where Aodhan had asked a smiliar question with a deep, hungry curiosity in his tone, there was only contempt in the voice of the Archangel of China. “I have always lived in the world, Lijuan.”
A sigh. “I forget. You have not yet seen the millennia I have. I, too, once lived among mortals.”
He thought of the stories Jason had uncovered about Lijuan’s past, the horrors the other archangel had perpetuated. “You were a goddess always.”
A regal nod. “Will you kill her?”
The question didn’t throw him. He’d known the reason for Lijuan’s appearance the instant he saw her. “If my mother remains mad, she must be stopped.” Given the reports he’d received from Nazarach, Andreas, and Nimra this morning, telling of young vampires going murderously insane and killing in a way that bore Caliane’s stamp, that madness seemed a more and more a certain truth.
“Would it not be better to kill her where she Sleeps?” Lijuan put down her teacup with a sigh of pleasure. “She is not yet at her full strength. Once awake, she may well be unstoppable.”
The idea of Caliane raining pain and fire upon the world was a nightmare. But . . . “That is not our way.” Angelkind had very few laws. The only one that mattered most of the time was the absolute prohibition against harming angelic children. Neha’s daughter, Anoushka, had lost her life for breaking that law.
But there was a second, even more ancient law. To kill an angel in Sleep was considered an act of murder so heinous that the penalty was instantaneous and total death. Because even an archangel could die—but only at the hand of another archangel. “I will not be a coward and strike her while she is helpless.”
“Your mother is hardly helpless,” Lijuan argued. “You see the effects of her power all around—death drenches the landscape and even now, the molten core begins to boil with rage.”
Raphael thought of the bloodrage that had gripped him as Caliane’s power rippled around the world, of Astaad beating his concubine and—according to Jason’s most recent report—Titus executing the innocent. “Yes.” His mother had never been helpless.
“Then you agree. She must be killed before she wakes and terrorizes the world.”
“No, she must be woken.” Perhaps there remained within him a piece of the child he’d once been, but his decision was that of an archangel—this law could not be defiled, no matter the target. For once done, it could not be taken back. The slope would turn ever more slippery, as all those who Slept became fair game. “If we can rouse her before she is ready, she will rise weak. It’ll give us the advantage as we seek to learn whether or not she is sane.” Whether or not she would have to die.
Lijuan’s expression remained serene, but a ring of black appeared around her irises, a thick, oily color Raphael had never before glimpsed. Something in it whispered of the reborn, the corpses Lijuan had animated to mute, hungry life. “She escaped all those years ago,” the Archangel of China pointed out, the black ring shifting with an almost living awareness, “because the combined power of the Cadre wasn’t enough to keep her contained.”
“But they did not have you.” Raphael deliberately played to Lijuan’s vanity.
The other archangel’s gaze turned distant. “Yes. Caliane did not evolve as I have.” A small, satisfied smile. “You will walk me to the door, Raphael.”
“I am not your pet, Lijuan”—a soft reminder—“and never will be.”
Lijuan’s hair flew back in that eerie breeze that seemed to affect only her. “Pets are so easily disposable, Raphael. I have something far more permanent in mind for you.” A whisper of power licking around his face. “You could rule the world.”
All he’d have to do, he thought as he watched her take flight into the blue skies above his city, was give up his soul.
Rain drenched the city again that night, coming down so hard and fast that Elena wrapped her arms around herself as she stood by the flames of the fireplace in Raphael’s private study, staring out at the bleak landscape beyond. “Illium’s mother arrived safely?”
“Yes. We dine with her tomorrow eve.”
“I figured she’d want to rest tonight.” She shivered as a particularly brutal burst of rain hit the windows, but wasn’t sure it had anything to do with the rainstorm. Her skin had been creeping ever since Raphael told her of his meeting with Lijuan. “Could you fly in this?”
The archangel who stood looking at papers at a solid desk set in the center of the room, his wings sheened with amber light, nodded. “You could do it, too, but only for a short period. Your feathers are designed so as not to become waterlogged, but the pressure of the rain and wind would mean you’d have to push harder with every wingbeat to keep yourself aloft.”
Before, when she’d watched angels taking flight from the high balconies that ringed the Tower, she’d been filled with a quiet awe. Not the sickening and worshipful adoration that gripped the angelstruck, but a simple, deep appreciation for their otherworldly beauty and grace. “I never considered the mechanics behind flight until I grew wings.” Wings that gave her a freedom beyond anything so many people would ever know.
The Archangel of New York watched her as she walked to stand beside him in front of the desk, his eyes a crystalline blue licked with the yellow orange of the flames in the fireplace. “What is on your mind, Elena?”
“Does vampirism cure paralysis?” Blinded by the entitled idiots she hunted on the job, she’d never been able to figure out why anyone would want to sign up for a hundred years of slavery just to live longer. But Venom’s flip remark about his balls growing back had gotten the wheels turning enough that she’d done a bit of research at the Academy library. “I know the process heals a lot of other illnesses, but what about spinal damage?”
“It is not an instantaneous process,” Raphael said. “Depending on the severity of the injury, it can take up to five years for the vampirism to advance far enough in the cells to repair the damage. Not many angels are willing to wait that long.”
Elena bit her lower lip.
“You need to get his blood.”
She’d known he wouldn’t say no, but still ... her heart clenched. “I’ll have to steal it. I won’t give him the option unless he qualifies as a Candidate.” Vivek had been hurt quite enough. “Give me a while to figure out how to do it.”
Raphael’s hair caught the firelight as he nodded. “I heard you talking to Sam earlier.”
“He’s a chatterbox.” The kid had a way of getting to her. “He said Jessamy made him write an extra essay because he did something naughty, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was.” It had delighted her to hear him sounding so very much like himself. His memories of the trauma he’d suffered, she’d been told, would resurface slowly, giving him time to adapt.
“Have his parents begun speaking to him of it yet?” Raphael asked, following the train of her thoughts with piercing accuracy.
She leaned into the muscular warmth of his body. “He asks me the odd question at times, but mostly he’s interested in how everyone in the Refuge was looking for him. He thinks that’s amazing.”
“Clever of his mother and father,” Raphael murmured, his wings heavy against her own as he spread them out. “Even when the memories do rise, that search, the fact that he is so loved, is what will remain at the forefront, not the pain and terror.”
“Yes.” At that moment, her eye caught on the papers on his desk. “What’s this?” She picked up what appeared to be some kind of an expensive invitation, the paper heavy, embossed with an E and an H intertwined.
“Open it.”
Conscious of him watching with an enigmatic expression on his face, she lifted the flap and removed a card—to read words written in the most delicate calligraphy, the rich silver-black ink flowing faultlessly across the page.
We invite you and your consort to our home, Raphael. It will be a delight to have a meal with another couple who understand that love is not a weakness. Do come.
It was signed with a graceful signature, the H in the name curlicued with great care until it was a work of art. Elena smiled in delight when she found herself tracing the sinuous from of a mythical serpent. “Hannah,” she murmured, bringing the page closer to her eye so she could see the fine detail hidden within the single letter. “Amazing.”
“Hannah is an artist.” And the consort of the Archangel Elijah.
Elena looked up at him, her eyes shimmering dawn in this light. “Are there any other long-term couples in the Cadre I don’t know about?”
“Eris is Neha’s husband, but not consort.” Raphael had not seen him for three hundred years, and even before that, Eris had never been anything but Neha’s creature.
Elena placed the invitation back in the envelope and set it down. “I’d like to meet Hannah.”
“Elijah is the one archangel,” he said, sliding the papers on his desk aside and putting his hands on her waist to lift her onto the solid surface, “who I might one day trust.” Making a space for himself between her thighs, he placed his hands on either side of her hips on the desk. “But I will not take you into the heart of his territory. Not yet.”
His hunter’s expression shifted, became contemplative. “No,” she murmured. “Not yet. I’d make you too vulnerable. But I assume Hannah is powerful enough by now that Elijah doesn’t mind bringing her into your territory?”
Raphael closed one hand over the sleek muscle of her thigh. “I have never asked.” As the only archangelic consort before Elena, Hannah had always been considered off-limits, protected. It was a courtesy that hadn’t been extended to Elena, not just because she’d once been mortal—but because she was hunter-born . . . warrior-born.
Elena wrapped her arms around his neck. “Send the invitation. I want to talk to her—there’s so much I could learn from her.”
Settling his free hand on her rib cage, just below the curve of her breast, he spoke against her parted lips. “I cannot ask, Elena. The invitation was sent by Elijah’s consort, and must be responded to by mine. It is protocol.”
Elena scowled, brows pulling together. “How can it be protocol when there are only two consorts around?”
