Nalini Singh - Archangel's Kiss

The pain caused by Lijuan’s last gift was still a burn on her soul, but Elena steeled her spine, held her place, knowing this was a test she had to pass—or she’d be discounted for the rest of her existence as nothing but Raphael’s once-mortal toy.

“Phillip.” A glance at the Chinese vampire with that heartbreakingly beautiful face.

Phillip melted away into the crowd.

“It will be but a moment.” Lijuan turned her attention to Raphael. “How is Keir? I haven’t seen him in centuries.”

It was an attempt at small talk but it fell oddly flat, as if Lijuan was putting on a mask that didn’t quite fit. Elena heard Raphael respond, but her eyes were locked on the shadows where Phillip had disappeared, her heart pounding one sluggish beat at a time as a single drop of sweat rolled down her back.

The evil whispered nearer with every beat that passed, until she could almost taste it on her tongue.

Dirt, that sweet rot that accompanied all of the reborn.

A spice for which she had no name, a hint of ginger, warm golden sunlight.

She knew what the horror would be before Phillip reappeared with a handsome mahogany-haired man who’d been blessed with eyes of darkest brown, eyes that invited a woman into temptation. He’d been a movie star before being Made. Young girls had put posters of him on their bedroom walls, giggled as they whispered his name.

His eyes locked with hers.

“Come here, little hunter. Taste.”

The words were a husky whisper inside her head, a thousand screams rolled into one. She knew Lijuan was speaking to her, but all she heard was that singsong voice that had haunted her for almost two decades.

“Run, run, run.” A giggling parody of Ari’s dying attempt to help Elena. “She won’t run. She likes it, you see.”

Elena felt the nightmare spiraling out beneath her, a bottomless pit from which she might never escape. It sucked at her, tinged with the laughter in the monster’s eyes, the nauseating joy in his expression— as if they were bound , as if he had a claim on her . She felt her legs begin to tremble, her heart jerk as she found herself back on that floor, scrabbling back on bloody tiles with hands that kept slipping, kept holding her prisoner. It was wet, cold, but Ari’s eyes—

A rush of rain in her head, untainted and strong, a scent that thundered of the sea, of the wind. Elena, I stand with you.

It was a sudden, sharp realization flavored with the relentless strength of the tide—she wasn’t alone in that room. Not anymore. Buoyed by that truth, she stepped back from the abyss, walked into the present, and saw the repugnance that was Slater Patalis standing beside Lijuan.

The vee of his shirt revealed smooth, unblemished skin, free of the ugly scar created by the Y incision cut into his flesh during the autopsy performed by a Guild pathologist. Elena had watched the video over and over, until she’d convinced herself that he was dead. It had been too little justice for what he’d stolen from her, but it had been justice. Lijuan had no right to erase that, no right to use Belle’s and Ari’s deaths as part of a game that would hold Lijuan’s interest for no more than a flicker of time.

Her entire body filled with anger, clean and bright. It sang with a kind of purity she’d never before known. The monster was smiling while her sisters lay dead in their graves, while her mother’s body hung forever in the wall of her mind, creating a shadow she’d never forget.

Her spine turned to iron forged in the fires of grief. “Aodhan,” she said, knowing Lijuan wouldn’t guess her intent—wouldn’t imagine she’d dare, “would you mind kneeling for a second?”

The angel went down in a graceful kneeling position an instant later, his head bowed . . . to allow her to reach the swords that lay flush against the center of his back. Sliding one lethally sharp blade from its sheath, she sliced off Slater Patalis’s grinning head with a single clean stroke, her strength fueled by decades-old anguish.

Blood fountained in an arterial spray that wet her face, turned the cherry blossoms black, but she was already shoving the blade into his heart and twisting it into so much pulp. His twitching body fell to the ground with a thud as she removed the red-slick blade. “Will she be able to make him rise from this?” she asked Raphael, her voice without inflection, without mercy. Slater didn’t deserve her emotions, didn’t deserve anything but the cold hand of a long-delayed justice.

“Perhaps.” Blue fire ringed Raphael’s hand. “But this should ensure a permanent death.”

A dark gray ash replaced what had remained of the worst killer vampire in living memory.

The entire thing had only taken a few seconds. Still holding the sword, she met Lijuan’s eyes. “My apologies,” she said through the heavy blanket of silence, “but the gift wasn’t to my taste.”

The Chinese archangel’s hair whipped back in that ghostly breeze as she walked to stand opposite Elena, the ashes of Slater’s body between them. “You cut my amusement short.”

“If death is truly the only thing that amuses you any longer”—Raphael’s knife-edged voice—“perhaps it’s time you stopped interfering in the world of the living.”

Lijuan met his eyes, her own so pale that there were no irises, no pupils, just an endless spread of pearlescent white. “No, it is not my time to Sleep.” Raising a hand, she ran the back of it along the face of the dark-skinned reborn who’d come to stand beside her. “Adrian is not ready to die, either.”

Power filled the air, until the electricity of it sparked along Elena’s skin. She felt Raphael begin to glow, heard Aodhan rise, unsheathe his remaining sword as Jason moved out of the shadows, and she knew this battle might end them all. Death will be an easy price to pay to stop her , she thought to Raphael.

So brave, my hunter. It was a kiss.

As she handed his sword back to Aodhan, taking out the gun that wouldn’t stop a vampire, but might just slow down an archangel if only for a fraction of an instant, she saw a flare of power on Raphael’s right, a power she’d tasted before. Michaela. Standing beside Raphael.

Another flare of power. Then another, and another, and another.

Elijah, Titus, Charisemnon, Favashi, Astaad.

Whatever drove the other archangels to unite against Lijuan, their combined power was a blast of heat, one that would have shoved her out of the circle had she not been pinioned between Raphael and Aodhan.

A cool, cool wind. Power, such power . All of it touched with death.

Lijuan laughed. “So, you would all stand against me.” Amusement in every syllable. “You cannot imagine what I am.”

Lijuan’s power was cold, frigid against the heat of the others . Raphael had been right, Elena realized with horror, the oldest of the archangels might just have become the truest of immortals, going beyond the hand of death. It was as that thought passed through her head that her eyes met Adrian’s.

Liquid dark, those eyes were so calm, so patient, and . . . so full of pain. He knew, she thought, he understood now what he was. Yet in spite of it all, his devotion burned a steady flame, until it hurt to witness it. As she watched, he shifted behind Lijuan, lifting her hair away from her neck. The archangel seemed not to notice—or maybe it was that he was so much her creature, she simply accepted him.

So when Adrian bent his head and placed his mouth on Lijuan’s skin, Elena thought it only a macabre kiss, a prayer to his goddess. Then she glimpsed the single, bright tear sliding down Adrian’s midnight skin—he loved Lijuan, she thought with an ache in her own heart, but trapped inside the silent shell that had been the Chinese archangel’s gift to him, he also saw her for the horror she was. Lijuan began to bleed before that tear reached his jaw, two thin trails of red snaking down her body to sink into the diaphanous fabric of her gown, a stark wash of color in the white heat of power.