Nalini Singh: Archangel's Consort

“This was on my bed,” she said with a frown. “Until Jeffrey packed away everything of my mother’s one winter while I was away at boarding school, this quilt covered my bed. Slater never went into that room. There can’t be blood on here.” She didn’t want the evil to have defiled this, too.

“No, not his blood.” Dropping his fingers from the quilt, he touched her wing. “It is the blood of the maker.”

Elena ran a finger over the fine stitching. “She created it by hand, probably pricked herself.” That scent was long gone, buried under the ghosts of the gardenias she wanted to keep fresh.

When Raphael said nothing, a warning sensation skittered up the back of her spine. “Archangel? Talk to me.”

“This kind of blood,” Raphael murmured, “this kind of lingering power ... it is not a mortal thing.”

“My mother was very much mortal.” Elena had seen her dead, her face bleached of color, those beautiful, laughing eyes turned forever dull.

Raphael closed his hand over her nape. “As a human, you once pushed me out of your mind. It should’ve been an impossible task.”

“Raphael, she wasn’t an angel, or a vampire. Only one thing left.”

“Not quite.” Eyes on the quilt, he said, “Vampires under two hundred years old can sire children. Those children are mortal.”

Elena blinked, stared at the quilt, back at him. Her life shifted on its axis with a grinding screech. “You’re saying I’m part vamp?”

“No, Elena. You were mortal before you became an angel. But your mother carried within her blood something powerful enough that it survived her passing. There is a vampire somewhere in your lineage.”

“I need to sit down.” But what she did was lean against Raphael, the quilt clutched to her chest. “My father ... he can’t know.” Jeffrey hated vampires, only put up with Beth’s Harrison because of business ties with Harry’s family. “I think it might break him.”

“There is no reason he should know.” Raphael stroked her hair off her face. “I would see more of your childhood—there is time enough for other things.”

“Yes.”

Then, as the most powerful being in the city, in the country, knelt by her side, one of his wings spreading over hers with heavy warmth, she showed him shining, laughing pieces of her life before Slater Patalis broke it into a thousand bloody pieces. Along the way, he told her how he’d run wild through the flower-lined streets of Amanat, how he’d been the pet of an entire city. “Tell me more,” she said, enchanted.

Raphael had never spoken of these memories to any living being, but he told Elena all she wanted to know. In turn, she shared with him the joy she’d found in being the third daughter of four, the one who was young enough to get away with everything, and old enough to be allowed privileges her youngest sister was denied.

Much later, as they stood on the cliffs by their home, looking across at the stark beauty of the Manhattan skyline after nightfall, she kissed his jaw and gave him another gift. “She lives, Raphael. There’s hope.”

Hope. Such a mortal concept. For you, Elena, I will accept that this hope might not be a foolish thing.

“Ah, you know us mortals—or recent-mortals—have a tendency to be foolish.” A heartbreaking smile. “It makes life interesting.”

“Then come, Guild Hunter.” Putting his arms around her, he lifted them into the crisp night air. It is time to make your life very interesting.

She laughed, played, and later sighed as he took them into the ocean. Knhebek, Raphael.

And he knew no matter what happened when the pale rays of dawn hit the earth, it would not defeat them. Knhebek, hbeebti.

Psy-Changeling Series

SLAVE TO SENSATION

VISIONS OF HEAT

CARESSED BY ICE

MINE TO POSSESS

HOSTAGE TO PLEASURE

BRANDED BY FIRE

BLAZE OF MEMORY

BONDS OF JUSTICE

PLAY OF PASSION

Guild Hunter Series

ANGELS’ BLOOD

ANGELS’ PAWN

(A Berkley Sensation eSpecial)

ARCHANGEL’S KISS

ARCHANGEL’S CONSORT

Anthologies

AN ENCHANTED SEASON

(with Maggie Shayne, Erin McCarthy, and Jean Johnson)

THE MAGICAL CHRISTMAS CAT

(with Lora Leigh, Erin McCarthy, and Linda Winstead Jones)

MUST LOVE HELLHOUNDS

(with Charlaine Harris, Ilona Andrews, and Meljean Brook)

BURNING UP

(with Angela Knight, Virginia Kantra, and Meljean Brook)