Archangel's Kiss

"He wanted to live?"

"No." He held out a hand.

She took it and he led her out into the cool breeze of the balcony. They stood side by side, their wings touching in an intimacy she'd allow no one else. "Why didn't he run, commit suicide when he had the chance?"

"Lijuan has control over her puppets. I don't believe she has enough control to manipulate them over that distance, however, which makes me think she had someone else there whom Dmitri's men didn't find."

"Someone the reborn thought he had to follow." She blew out a breath, wondering what kind of an evil could scare the dead. "What did Dmitri do to him?"

"Gave him what he wanted."

Elena's hand clenched on the railing. "Good." She'd want that same mercy if she was ever turned into the horror of one of Lijuan's reawakened dead.

"Her games," Raphael said, "they're escalating. The act against your mother's grave came on my territory, violating our implicit agreement not to enter each other's lands without permission."

"Plausible deniability. She can always say she knew nothing about the actions of her underlings."

"We would all know it for a lie, but yes, she's far enough removed from the act to do so credibly." Raphael's wings spread, one sliding over her back in a quiet caress. "It's time for us to make our own move."

She glanced at him, saw the pitiless angle of his jaw, remembered that this was the archangel who'd executed another. "You've already made it."

His lips curved in a smile no mortal would ever want to see. "Lijuan shows signs of believing that her status as the oldest among us makes her untouchable."

"Could you kill her if necessary?"

"I'm not sure Lijuan can truly die." He said the terrifying words with quiet power. "It's possible she's lived so long, she's become the truest of immortals, straddling the line between life and death."

"Except," Elena said, feeling a ghost walk across her grave, "it looks like she prefers the dead over the living."

"Yes."

Chapter 27

"Fuck! " Illium dodged one knife, swiveled to find the tip of his opposite wing pinned to the wall. "Two knives is cheating!"

Something feral in Elena smiled in satisfaction - poor Illium was bearing the brunt of the turbulence incited by her father's call a day ago. "Strike one for the hunter."

The blue-winged angel reached over and pulled out the knife. Dropping to the earth, he handed it to her, hilt first. "Lucky hit."

"Sore loser."

"It was getting pathetic watching you fail."

"Look at that," she said with a mock gasp, "I think I nipped off a few feathers in the process. Poor, poor Bluebell."

He grinned, those golden eyes bright with mischief, with an ability to play that seemed to have been leached out of the other immortals. "Next time," he said, "I'm going to run you around so bad, they'll have to carry your whimpering body out of here."

Cleaning off the knife, she slid it back into her arm sheath before bringing her hand up to hide an exaggerated yawn.

"If you two have finished," Galen said in that humorless way of his, "we still have an hour to go."

She glanced at Illium's wing - to see that it was already almost completely healed. "I guess it's time to put a few more holes in you."

"Tell you what," Illium said. "If you manage to hit me three times in a row, I'll give you a diamond necklace."

"Make it a diamond-studded decorative knife sheath and you've got a deal."

Illium raised an eyebrow. "Not very practical."

"It is if you're planning to wear it with a ball gown."

"Ah." A gleam of interest. "Fine. And if you don't hit me three times, you have to take me along with you on a hunt."

"Why?" she asked, perplexed. "They're hot, sweaty, often exhausting."

"I want to see how you hunt."

A pulse of memory:Illium is fascinated by mortals .

Maybe that was why she liked him so much. He saw her former status not as a weakness but as a gift. "Alright."

He stuck out a hand. "Done."

She shook it. "Now do your job, butterfly."

He left the ground in a sweep of wind, a single blue feather floating to her hand. She put it in a pocket, saving it for Zoe. So far, she had several of Raphael's golden-tipped ones, two of Illium's, and a few of her own.

"Go!"

Eyes on the target, she balanced her throwing knives in hand and set her feet. Her sight was sharper than when she'd been human, but not by much - not yet.

In the end, she hit Illium twice more, missing a third strike by the barest flicker of a feather. Illium swooped down. "I get to go on a hunt."

"See if you're smiling when we end up in some mosquito-infested swamp."

"I'm not scared of mosqui - "

She was swiveling on her heel before Illium stopped speaking, having picked up the scents of three unfamiliar vampires. But it was an angel she found in the doorway, his exotic cheekbones and near- black eyes nowhere near as unusual as the wings she glimpsed before he folded them inward.

Dark gray patterned with streaks of vivid, striking red.

Stunning wings.

But instead of admiration, it was fear, primal and deep, that stabbed her in the gut, sharpening her senses, her reflexes. "Who is he?" She could feel his power pressing down on her, a crushing weight.

The metallic slide of sword leaving scabbard. "Xi belongs to Lijuan." Illium stayed by her side as Galen walked forward to greet the other angel. "He's nine hundred years old."

"Why isn't he an archangel?" He could topple cities with that power, erase thousands.

"As long as Lijuan lives, Xi will continue to gain power. Without her, his body wouldn't be able to hold what it does."

"Can all archangels do that?" she asked, feeling her skin creep when Xi's eyes shifted to stroke over the exposed portion of her wings. "Share power?"

"Only Lijuan."

Galen appeared to be arguing with Xi and finally, several minutes later, the Chinese angel snapped his feet together in an almost military salute and passed over a gleaming wooden box. But his eyes, they lingered on Elena for a long, chilling second.

She began to walk toward Galen the instant Xi left. The red-haired angel remained standing with his back to her, his eyes on the entrance. "It would be better," he said in a very precise voice, "if you wait for Raphael to return before opening this."

"Raphael's gone to meet with Michaela and Elijah. It could be hours."

"I'll inform the sire - "

"No." She put her hand on the box, almost flinched at the inhuman coldness of it. "The meeting's important - it has something to do with Titus and Charisemnon."

Illium touched her shoulder, his expression grim. "Lijuan is playing games, Elena. Don't open the box without Raphael."

She'd accepted that she was physically weaker though it galled, but there was only so much a hunter could take. "Give me a reason."

"I don't know what's in there," Illium said, his eyes shadowed in a way that turned the gold to something razor- sharp, a reminder that for all his playfulness, Illium hid a core as ruthless as the man he called sire, "but I know it's meant to weaken Raphael."

"You think she'd hurt me?" Elena stared at the carvings on the box, stared until the complicated patterns shaped themselves into the horror they truly were. "Corpses.

They're all corpses."

"I think," Illium said, placing both hands on her shoulders, his thumbs gentle against her nape, "there are many ways to hurt. Not all of them are physical."

Elena played with the latch, her lungs expanding as she took a deep breath. "I can smell them. Fresh grass crushed with ice, a warm woolen blanket sprinkled with rose petals, blood strained through silk." Her heart pounded in her chest, ready to hunt, to give chase.

Under her fingertips, the box grew warm, as if sucking in her very life force.

Shoving away the unsettling thought, she swallowed. "There are pieces of vampire in here. Organs. They always smell the strongest."

"It's time for us to make our own move."

She took her hand off the latch. "I don't need to open it. I know what's inside." Lijuan had simply returned what Raphael had sent her. And if part of Elena was horrified by the form of his warning, another part - a raw, primal part born in a blood-soaked room almost twenty years ago - was viciously glad. "Do whatever you want with it." Shifting on her heel, she broke Illium's hold and walked out into the biting cold of a mountain afternoon.

Venom was waiting for her by a stony crag that had been left untouched by angelic hands, an incongruously untamed background for a vampire who looked as if he'd stepped out of the pages of some high-class men's magazine. Her sweaty, tense face reflected off the black lenses of his sunglasses, his own as untouched as always. "How much wax does it take to keep your hair that perfect?" she muttered as she tried to walk past.

He blocked her with a single smooth move. "It's a natural gift."

"Today is not the time to mess with me." She wasn't going to fall into the trap Lijuan had designed, wasn't going to see Raphael as a monster, but . . . each time he did something that pushed the boundaries, it slapped her in the face with her new reality. A reality in which archangels played with immortal and mortal lives as if they were nothing but the most disposable of chess pieces.

Venom smiled, and it was a sight that would've sent many women to their knees, full of an erotic promise that said he'd make even death feel good. "I've been trying to figure out what he sees in you."

Elena swiped out with a knife in her right hand, missing his arm by the barest fraction of a hair. His dodge was impossibly fast. When Venom moved, it reminded her only of the creature Neha had chosen as her avatar - as if he'd never been human. But today, even that wasn't enough to compel her curiosity. She kept on walking.

The vampire appeared beside her again a moment later. "Dmitri now," he murmured, "I can see why he'd want to play with you. He's into knives and pain."

"And you're not?" She remembered all too clearly that scene in the garage - Venom prowling with silky grace toward a woman stunned to silence by his dangerous brand of sex. There'd been male appreciation in his expression . . . but there'd also been the primordial hunger of the much colder creature that marked his eyes. "You're the one who secretes poison."

"So do you."

She halted, blinked, braced herself with her hands on her knees. "Shit." How could she have let that go? Not asked Raphael about the consequences of becoming an angel?

A coolly honest part of her answered with a single word.

Fear.

She was scared. Scared to accept the irreversible truth of her new life. Scared to know that she might one day look into eyes as worshipful as Geraldine's, and understand too late that she was creating a victim. Prey for the immortals circling like sharks.

Feeling her cheeks flare with a hot-cold burn, she said, "When?"

Venom gave her a slow smile. "When it's time."