“Put that way,” Elena said, leaning down to steal a kiss just because she could, “it’s not absurd but totally rational. How else would anyone ever have a party, with the way certain archangels are always trying to backstab others.”
A smile curving his mouth, her archangel nodded. “Even Lijuan couldn’t bear such a shunning. She might be able to compel obedience through brute force, but she’d lose the respect that is as much her lifeblood as power.” Fingers idly caressing the lower curves of her body. “Can you guess the true irony of this particular situation?”
Screwing up her face, she was about to say no when it hit. Laughing so hard she had to wait until she could catch her breath enough to shape words, she said, “Lijuan isn’t invited”—not after trying to murder Caliane and her son—“but she’s such a stickler for the old ways, the others know they’ll have her on their ass if they break the rules.”
“Exactly.”
“I wonder if there’s an Angelic Etiquette handbook some—” Breaking off, she touched her fingers to Raphael’s right temple.
“What is it?” Incisive intelligence in his gaze.
“Wait.” She switched on the lamps that bathed the top half of the bed in a gentle light. Leaning back down, she went close to Raphael’s face, rubbed her thumb over the spot, his hair brushing against her fingertips. “There’s something on your skin.” Unable to let it go, she got out of bed to grab a wet facecloth.
Raphael was in the bathroom doorway when she turned from the sink. Asking him to bend down so she could wipe at the tiny speck, she tried twice, the second time with a dab of soap on the cloth in case he’d somehow been touched by the tip of a permanent black marker . . . except even as the thought crossed her mind, she knew she would’ve noticed it earlier.
The speck hadn’t been there before, and now—“It’s not coming off.” Her voice sounded even, despite the horrible feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Shifting into the bathroom, Raphael examined his face in the mirror. Elena came up beside him, wanting to believe it had been a trick of the light. It hadn’t. So tiny, the speck would go unnoticed by most, but it shouldn’t be there. “Maybe it’s an insect bite,” she began, trying not to think about dead vampires and disease.
“No, we heal too fast for a bite to have any impact.” Expression grim, he turned to her. “Can you see it now?”
“No, it’s gone.” Crushing relief. “What did you do?”
“It is still there,” he said, and the relief curdled. “I’ve concealed it using the barest hint of glamour.”
“I wish Keir was still here.” The healer had had to return to the Refuge to deal with other matters, would meet them again in Amanat. “What if . . .” She couldn’t say it, couldn’t even imagine it, her horror too violent.
“What if it is the harbinger of disease?” Raphael said for her. “If it is, Keir would be unable to do anything, so telling him is a moot point. I am an archangel, Elena. We may go mad with age and time, or because of the toxin, but we do not get sick.”
His blunt words forced her to face the cold, hard fact that an archangel sick was a tear in the fabric of the world. That didn’t mean she was about to give up. “Jessamy,” she said. “She’d never betray you—we can ask her to search the Archives, see if there’ve been any similar cases in angelic history.”
“There is nothing to tell her yet,” Raphael answered with impossible calm. “It is but a single dark spot—if it’s the sign of a disease created by a new archangelic power, my body should be able to fight it off.”
“Of course, your healing ability.” She turned to go throw some water onto her face in an effort to still her racing heart, her hands trembling, but Raphael tugged her into his arms and against his chest, his wings enclosing her in a silken prison.
“It is all right, hbeebti.” His heartbeat strong and steady under her cheek as he spoke, his arms muscled steel. “I have no intention of leaving you to face immortality alone.”
“If this is death, Guild Hunter, then I will see you on the other side.”
He’d said that to her as she lay dying in his arms. Now, she whispered, “Wherever you go, I’ll follow.” She’d lost too many people she loved, survived too much death. “I can’t keep going. I can’t.” As if she’d turned a nightmare key, she heard the sound that had haunted her since the day Slater Patalis walked into her childhood home.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
There’d been so much blood, her feet sliding in it to send her to the floor with bruising force.
“Come, Elena.” Raphael’s voice held a gentleness that told her he saw her terror, understood it. “Do you think I am so weak? Such a belief is a blow to my ego indeed.”
Elena tried to smile, to not permit the fear to consume her, but it raged within, born of a childhood where everyone she loved had been taken from her. Jeffrey and Beth might have survived the massacre, but they’d been lost to Elena all the same. She couldn’t lose Raphael, too. She couldn’t.
The panicked thoughts ran in a loop inside her mind until it was all she was.
Then the rain-lashed sea was there, cutting through the dark clouds of memory. Reaching for Raphael with body and mind both, she drowned herself in the sheer powerful life force of the archangel who was the only man she would ever love.
• • •
Holding Elena when she finally fell into an exhausted sleep, his strong consort who had a ragged wound in her soul that had torn open with vicious force tonight, Raphael watched over her, standing sentinel against the darkness. And though he wasn’t tired, he realized he slept when he began to dream.
Of that forgotten field where his blood had been glistening rubies scattered on the grass, the red liquid crystallizing into faceted gemstones that fascinated the birds who were his constant companions as the sun moved across the sky and the seasons changed from spring to summer. Flowers grew around him, over him, the grass shading his face, and still he lay there, waiting to heal enough that he could make it to the Refuge.
Archangel. Archangel. Archangel.
The voices around him continued to repeat that single word until he said, “Silence!” in a tone no one except Elena had ever disobeyed.
The voices cut off.
Rising above the field once more, his body unbroken and of the adult he now was, that splintered, scared boy long gone, he gave a second order. “Show yourselves.”