She pulled it on and rolled up the sleeves. It was much too big for her, of course, but she left the ends hanging. When he commented on that, a touch of color streaked across her cheeks. "It's comforting, okay. Now where's this stupid gift?"
Chapter 22
Elena saw Raphael's lips shape into the barest hint of a smile at her bad-tempered words, but he didn't comment. Instead, he walked to a cabinet in the corner, the muscles of his back shifting with a fluid strength that made every female hormone in her sit up in begging attention.
Staving off the lingering echoes of the past with the sensual pleasure of watching her archangel move, she walked to stand beside him as he opened the cabinet to reveal a small black box about the right size and shape for jewelry. She recoiled, taking a physical step backward, her words coming in a hard rush. "Throw that thing into the deepest pit you can find."
Raphael glanced at her. "What do you feel?"
"It gives me the creeps." Hugging herself, she rubbed her hands up and down her arms, ice forming in the hollow of her stomach. "I don't want it anywhere near me."
"Interesting." Reaching in, he picked up the box. "I sense nothing, and yet even without blood, it sings to you."
"Don't touch it," she ordered between gritted teeth. "I told you to throw it away."
"We can't, Elena. You know that."
She didn't want to know it. "Power games. So what? We tell her thanks and send back a bauble or something. You must have a few lying around."
"That will not do." Eyes that had shifted to the shadowed color found in the deepest, darkest part of dawn, before the sun rose to the horizon. "This is a very specific gift. It's a test."
"So what?" she said again. "Archangels play power games. Who the f**k says I have to?"
Raphael put the box on a corner of his desk, his wings whispering against hers. "Like it or not, by becoming my lover, you've accepted an invitation to those games."
Her skin felt as if it was being touched by a thousand spidery fingers. "Can we throw it away after I open it?"
"Yes."
"That won't be bad politics?"
"It'll be a statement." He held out his hand. "Come, hunter. I need a drop of your blood."
"See? Creepy?" Shuddering, she took out one of her knives and pricked her left index finger. "Anyone who gives gifts locked by blood isn't ever going to give you a bath set."
Taking her hand, Raphael held it over the box, squeezing her finger just hard enough to release a single, luminous drop of blood. She watched it hang on her skin for a frozen moment, as if loathe to touch the velvet box, before it fell in a slow, soft splash. The box seemed to consume it, a voracious blackness that hungered for the taste of life. Her hand clenched around the knife. "I really don't want to go to this ball."
Raphael kissed her fingertip before releasing her hand. "Do you want me to open it?"
"Yes." She wasn't going to touch that thing if she could help it.
He flipped it open. She couldn't see what was inside at first, her view blocked by his hand, but then he moved . . .
Her gorge rose. Dropping the knife, she spun and headed for the door she hoped led to the bathroom. Her relief was overpowered by the retching that ripped through her as she stumbled into the tiled enclosure. Dropping her head above the toilet, she brought up her lunch in a hard, rough pulse that felt like it was peeling off the lining of her stomach itself.
Sometime in the middle, she became aware that she was on her knees, Raphael beside her, his hand holding her hair away from her face, his wings spread to enclose her in white-gold. Trembling as the muscle spasms quieted, she pushed the flush button and sat back.
Raphael got up, bringing her a cold cloth. She wiped it over her face, very aware of him hunkering in front of her, his anger a blistering flame. "What," he said in that frigid tone she'd heard him use with Michaela once, "does that necklace mean?"
"It has to be a copy," she choked out. "We buried the real one. Isaw ." The lid of the coffin closing, her last glimpse of Belle's face.
Hands cupping her cheeks, beautiful wings spread wide. "Don't let her win. Don't let her use your memories against you."
"God, thebitch ." Anger rose in a blinding wave. "She did it on purpose, didn't she?" It wasn't truly a question, because she knew the answer. "I'm no threat to her, she's just doing this because it'sfun . She wants to break me." For no reason than that it would give her a few moments amusement.
"She obviously doesn't know you." He tugged her to her feet.
Walking to the washbasin, she put the cloth on the counter and rinsed out her mouth with near-scalding water. "Belle," she said after she felt clean at last, "would've ripped out Lijuan's throat for daring to use her against me." The memory of her sister's sweet, wild nature had her straightening her spine. "Let's go."
This time, though she continued to refuse to touch it, she looked very carefully at the necklace Lijuan had sent her. "It's a copy." Relief rocked through her, her legs threatening to collapse until she braced her hand on the desk. The Chinese archangel hadn't desecrated Belle's final resting place. "We decided to engrave Belle's name on the back one year with a heated metal wire. We only got a wobblyB on there before Mama caught us." The memory made her smile, wiping out the ugliness. "She was so mad - that pendant was nine carat gold."
Putting the necklace back in the box, Raphael closed it. "I'll make sure it's disposed of."
"Do it . . . but make me a copy first." She bared her teeth in a savage smile. "Bitch wants to play games, let's play games."
"Her spies will report it," Raphael said. "It's a good move, but I won't allow it."
She jerked up her head. "What?"
"This was meant to hurt you. Wearing that pendant will only remind you of the past."
"Yeah," she said. "It'll remind me of how Belle punched out the neighborhood bully even though he was three years older and fifty pounds heavier. It'll remind me of her strength, her will."
Raphael looked at her for a long moment. "But those memories come wrapped in darkness."
She couldn't disagree. "Maybe it's time I embraced the darkness instead of running from it."
"No." Raphael's jaw was a brutal line. "I won't let Lijuan pull you into a waking nightmare."
"Then you're letting her win."
A hard, unexpected kiss. "No, we're letting her believe she has won."
Raphael disposed of Lijuan's gift and flew back to the Refuge cloaked in the black shadows of night. What he'd said to Elena had been the truth - but it had hidden other, deeper truths.
He'd done it to protect her.
And she'd known. But she'd let him convince her. Which told him more about the depth of her scars than anything else. Once, when Uram had been sane, when he'd still remembered a little of the youth he'd been, he and Raphael had had a conversation.
"Humans," the other archangel had said, "they live such flickering lives."
Raphael, not yet three hundred years old, had nodded. "I have human friends. They speak of love and hate, but I wonder, how much do they truly know of such emotions?"
To this day, he could recall the look Uram had given him - that of an older male amused with the pretensions of youth. "It's not quantity that matters, Raphael. We flitter away our lives because they're endless. Humans must live a thousand lifetimes in one. Every hurt is keener, every joy more incandescent."
Raphael had been surprised - even then, Uram had been dissolute, careless in his pleasures, open in his cruelty. "You sound as if you envy them."
"Sometimes, I do." Those vivid green eyes had stared down at the human village that sheltered below the ancient castle they'd called home at the time. "I wonder what I would've been had I known I only had five or six paltry decades to make my mark on the world."
In the end, Uram had made a huge mark on the world, but it hadn't been what that younger self would've wished for. Now, he'd be forever remembered among most as the archangel who'd lost his life in a battle for territory, for power. Only a rare few, even among the angels, knew the truth - that Uram had turned bloodborn, bloated by a toxin that had turned his blood to poison. Raphael's father had never fallen into that kind of bloodlust. But Nadiel's lust for power had been, in many ways, worse.
Seeing Elena standing on the balcony of their home still clothed in his shirt, her magnificent wings spread as if in hunger for flight, he dived hard and fast.
Raphael!It was a cry filled with equal amounts of wonder and fear.
Feeling something long asleep awaken within him, an echo of the cocky boy who'd amused Uram, he rose up in a hard vertical climb, before twisting into a spiraling plummet that could send the inexperienced smashing onto the rocks below.
It was at the midpoint that he felt it - Elena's mind locking with his, her mental gasp as she experienced the dangerous ecstasy of the fall. Then he was sweeping out and upward.
She stayed with him until he coasted down on a luxurious air current to land on the balcony.
She stared at him for a moment, her own wings closing. "What" - a shake of her head -
"just happened?"
"You linked to me." It should have been impossible - he was an archangel, his shields impenetrable. But, he remembered, she'd done it once before - as a mortal. He'd lost himself in her that day, sunk so deep into the wild perfume of her hunger that he'd ceased to think. Later, he'd suffered her rage at what she'd believed had been an attempt at coercion on his part. His hunter hadn't understood what she'd done.
"There are some humans - one among half a billion perhaps - who make us something other than what we are. The barriers fall, the fires ignite, and the minds merge."