“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.”
19
In answer came a sea of whispers, the actual words inaudible.
“Raphael.”
It was unexpected, that feminine voice. And it was one so familiar, he’d know it even in death, the wing that brushed over his own warrior black and vivid indigo kissed with midnight blue and the haunting shade of the sky just before dawn.
When he turned toward the sound of her voice, he saw that Elena’s body was translucent beside his, the colors of her like running water. Death rubies ringed her neck, cherry-dark gemstones created of his hardened blood.
That was wrong. Elena would never wear such.
“What the—” Reaching up, she tore off the necklace with a shudder, the blood gemstones falling soundlessly to the green, green grass. “Where are we?”
“The field where I fought my mother.” He took her hand, and it was warm, alive, though she remained formed of glass.
“It’s beautiful.”
Looking through her eyes as the dawn sun played over the verdant grass, bathing the trees in a golden glow and highlighting the flowers he’d watched bud, then bloom, he saw the truth of her words, but for him it remained—would always remain—a place of pain and death and loss.
“My mother walked away, her feet crushing the flowers, as the insects licked at my blood.” The tiny creatures had died, his blood too rich. Then had come the birds, curious about this winged being on the ground. “The birds sat with me for hours, brought me berries as if I were a fledgling fallen out of the nest.” He’d forgotten that under the weight of the horror. “I couldn’t eat for many days, my jaw and facial bones in splinters.”