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She made a sound, but it wasn’t a complaint, so he continued to explore.
Last night . . . She’d been magnificent. Stronger, faster, more willing than he’d ever expected. He hadn’t meant for her introduction to that most intimate of dances to be so sensually rough, but when she’d ridden every wave with him without flinching, he’d given in to temptation and taken her in a way he’d never have chanced with another woman.
Because immortal or not, they would’ve been terrified.
“Hey. ” A sleepy grumble as she shifted closer to him, until his knee brushed against her body, her wings spreading till one lay across his hip and thighs.
He ran a hand over the sleek indigo of her primary covert feathers with proprietary pleasure. “Good morning. ”
Her hand came to rest on his thigh below the sheets, perilously close to the part of him that had the most unquenchable hunger for her. “Careful, Guild Hunter. ”
A drowsy curve of her lips, but her eyes were very much alert. “So, you going to tell me what happened last night?”
He’d known she’d push. That was who she was. As he’d said, it would have been easier were she malleable—but he’d never have taken her for his consort then. “I told you my mother and I always shared a strong mental bond. ” He fought the pull of memory, of a time when Caliane had been exactly that—his mother. “It seems that bond did survive. She can reach me even through the vestiges of Sleep. ”
Elena stroked her hand over his thigh, anchoring him to the earth, to the present. “What did you see?”
“The past and the future. ”
“Raphael. ” A whisper so quiet it was almost not sound. “Raphael. ”
A prick of consciousness, of awareness. “Mother?” Eyes opening, he found himself standing on a verdant green field, the sky above him the brilliant shade of a blue jay’s wings, the air perfumed with a thousand unnamed flowers.
He frowned. This place, it was hauntingly familiar . . . right down to the droplets of dew that sparkled like gemstones against the jade green stalks of grass. But his mind, it was playing games with him, refusing to divulge the name of the field where he stood.
Crouching down, he broke off one of the stalks, touched his finger to the dew.
A sigh on the wind . . . and her fine, delicate feet walking across the grass, the edge of a long white gown flirting with her ankles.
His heart stopped beating as he watched her come toward him, an archangel of such piercing beauty that she’d spawned legends and caused empires to fall. Her hair was a waterfall of ebony down her back, thick and wild with silken curls his father had loved to fist in his hands as he kissed her, her eyes a piercing hue that he saw in the mirror every single day of his life.
Caliane had given him her eyes, her power . . . perhaps her madness.
But his height he’d gained from his father.
Rising to his feet, he saw her smile as she came to a halt before him, a woman who barely reached his breastbone. “My Raphael,” she whispered. “My darling boy. How you’ve grown. ”
He towered above her, but even now, he felt the child. When she put her fingers on his chest, he couldn’t move away, his heart aching with a sense of loss that had followed him through time. “You broke me on this field. ” He’d remembered at last, remembered the blood and the agony. Remembered the sight of her walking away.
Sorrow in her gaze, the blue turning to midnight. “I was mad, Raphael. ” Said with a clarity that reminded him of the stunning power of a song that had once held the world in thrall. “But I fought for you. ”
He thought of his shattered bones, his body crushed and broken into so many pieces that it had taken a long, long time for him to become whole again. “Did you?”
Raising her hand, she touched her fingers to his jaw in a maternal caress that threatened to send him back to his youth. “The madness whispered that I should kill you, that you carried within you the potential to transcend my power. ”
Raphael knew his own strength, but he also knew that the archangel in front of him was millennia older, her abilities unparalleled. “You are an Ancient, mother. I am yet young. ”
“The youngest angel to ever become an archangel. ” There was a pride in her tone that cut him to the quick. “I watched over you even as I Slept, my darling boy. And I see a future in which you will fly far higher than either I or Nadiel ever dared to dream. ”
He was her son. He’d mourned who she’d once been even as he’d tried to execute her. It was impossible for him not to step forward and take her slender body into his arms, to bury his face in her hair and inhale the sweet woodsmoke of home. “You are Sleeping. ”
“No, I am Waking. ” Damp against his cheek, a mother’s tears as she stroked her hand over his hair. “I sense a vein of mortality in you, Raphael. ”
He blinked, pulled away, shook his head. Elena. He’d forgotten Elena. How was that possible when she was the most important element of his life? “What are you doing to me, Mother?”
Her eyes blazed the color at the heart of the sun, so pure it burned. “Reminding you of who you are. The son of two archangels. The most powerful child ever born. ”
Shaking his head, he met that brilliant, blinding gaze. “I have made myself. I will never be your creature. ”
The fire flickered with searing blue. “I will not permit you to be hers, either. You are far too magnificent to belong to an immortal with a weak mortal heart. ”
He knew then that Caliane would kill Elena if she could.
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Elena couldn’t pretend every hair on her body wasn’t standing up on end by the time Raphael finished, but she had other priorities right now. “You broke her hold,” she said, knowing he needed to hear it said aloud. “She couldn’t keep you in that dream or vision or whatever it was. ”
Midnight shadows crossed his face. “It was difficult—perhaps would’ve been impossible if I hadn’t had you to draw me back. She is my mother, and as such, has known me since I was born. She understands how to circumvent my every shield. ”
“Maybe she did once,” Elena rose to her knees, shoving her hair impatiently off her face, “but she’s been asleep for over a thousand years. She might’ve known the boy you were, but she doesn’t know the man you’ve become. And she has no concept of the bonds that tie us together. ”
Raphael’s expression shifted again, and she knew he was calculating matters with that inhuman logic he sometimes displayed. “Yes,” he said at last. “That may be her only weakness. ”
Elena had to fight her instinctive negative response to his expression, his words. He’d never be human and to expect it of him was to lie to herself. “Do you need to know her weakness?” she asked.
“She threatened you, Elena. ”
He didn’t have to say anything else. She knew very well what Raphael would do to protect her—and if her hunter instincts scowled at the idea of being protected, the heart of her understood that to love this male was to accept his need to hold her safe.
“A lot of women have trouble with their mothers-in-law. ”
Raphael’s look was priceless. “My mother is an insane archangel. ”
She almost laughed—or perhaps that was hysteria rising to the surface. “She was. Maybe these bursts of violence were a result of her being in a half-dream state. It may still be that Sleep has cured her—from what you’ve told me, she acted normal in the dream, or as normal as someone of her power and age can be. ”
You do not know how much I wish that to be true.
“I know it down to the last heartbreaking glimmer of hope,” she whispered, swallowing the knot of emotion in her throat. “Every day, I wish I could’ve somehow reached through my own mother’s sorrow and convinced her that life was worth living. Every day. ”
Raphael tugged her down into his arms. “You speak rarely of those events, and yet you call out to her in your nightmares. ”
In the kitchen, Elen
a thought, they were always in the kitchen in the dreams. She was fooled into hope every single time—and then the blood would begin to seep down the walls, across the floor. Her mother always remained trapped in the room, no matter how much Elena begged her to run.
“I found her,” she said, speaking of a nightmare that continued to leave her trembling in panic in the coldest depths of the night. “I got home from school, and I walked inside the house. ” That was when she’d seen it, that single high-heeled shoe lying on its side on the gleaming shine of the checkerboard tiles.
She should’ve walked back out that same instant, but she’d been happy. Mama hadn’t worn high heels for a long time—the child in her had thought that maybe it meant Marguerite was better now, that maybe she’d have her mother back. The illusion had lasted a few precious seconds.
“The shadow,” she said, her breath coming in short, shallow gasps. “On the wall. I could see it swinging so gently. I didn’t want to look up, didn’t want to see. ” Even now, terror pulsed in her blood. “I could feel my heart freeze into a small, hard ball, and then I looked up and it just . . . shattered. ” Sharp, vicious shards, they had cut into her, made her bleed. “I kept looking up at her, at the way she . . . ” The words wouldn’t come, wouldn’t be formed. “The shadow,” she said instead, “it just kept swinging. The whole time my heart was bleeding out below her, the shadow just kept swinging. ”
Raphael could feel his hunter breaking all over again in his arms, and it was unbearable. “Hers was a selfish act. ”
“No, she—”
“She lost two daughters,” Raphael said. “She was tortured. But so were you. You saw your sisters murdered before your eyes, saw your mother suffer. ”
“Not the same. ”
“No. Because you were a child. ” He crushed her to him, wishing he could turn back time, shake Marguerite Deveraux until she came out of the fog of her grief and saw the treasures she was about to throw away. “It is permissible to be angry with her, Elena. It does not make you disloyal. ”
A ragged sob, so harsh that it sounded torn out of her, before a clenched fist pounded on his chest. “Why didn’t she love us as much as she loved Ari and Belle?” A child’s question. “Why did she leave us when she saw how Jeffrey was becoming? Why?” Wet against his chest, that fist halting as she whispered, “Why?”
Later, she asked him to spar with her, and he did, letting her work out her anguish, her pain, through hard physical combat. But she was distracted, not fighting at her best. Instead of letting up, he gave no quarter.
“If you won’t accept the protection I assign you,” he said when he put her on her back for the second time in as many minutes, “then you must be better than the best. ”
A snarl that he far preferred over the haunted pain that had crumpled her spirit. “Beating me into the ground isn’t helping matters. ” She flowed back to her feet.
He slammed at her again.