Lijuan had killed the mortal who'd touched her that deeply.
Raphael had chosen to love, instead.
"I could feel what you felt." Exhilaration still sparked in Elena's eyes. "Is that what it's like when you're inside my mind?"
"Yes."
A pause, her expression intent. "You don't like it, do you? That I can slip beneath your shields."
"I've had over a thousand years to get used to being alone inside my head." He ran the back of his hand down her cheek. "It is . . . disconcerting to have another presence there."
"Now you know how I feel." A raised eyebrow. "It's not nice to know that nothing inside me is private."
"I've never taken your deepest thoughts."
"How do I know that?" she asked. "When you're so cavalier about your ability to enter whenever you want? How can I ever be certain that what I choose to share with you is truly a choice?"
For the first time, he felt a glimmer of understanding. "It'll be a much slower way of learning each other."
"Speed isn't everything." Her hands clenched on the railing.
He thought of her trust when she'd spoken of her mother, her compassion as she accepted the burden of his own memories. "I will try, Elena."
"I guess that's the best I'm going to get from an archangel." The words were softened by the amusement in her eyes. "The mind-talking doesn't bother me. That goes both ways.
This other thing - I have a feeling it's not something I'm going to be able to control for a long time yet."
"Did you catch any of my thoughts while we were linked?"
"Not really. I was too caught up by the flight - God but you can fly, Raphael." She whistled. "I know that's not easy, what you did."
Pride unfurled inside him, born from the heart of the youth he'd been before Caliane.
Before Isis. Before Dmitri.
"I did catch one name." Hesitant words. "Were you thinking about your father?"
"Yes." He watched the wind blow a few rebellious white blonde strands across her face, her body silhouetted against the diamond-studded night sky, and made a choice of his own. "I was thinking that in many ways, my father's madness was worse than Uram's."
Elena didn't interrupt, simply shifted forward so that she could tangle one hand with his.
He curled his fingers around hers, wondering at the tectonic shift in his life since the day he first met Elena Deveraux, Guild Hunter. So quickly she'd twined around his heart, becoming the most vital part of his existence.
"With Uram, though there was a little hesitation, in the end, the Cadre all agreed he needed to die." It was Lijuan who'd worried him the most - still worried him. "Lijuan wondered if perhaps the power that came with becoming bloodborn was worth it."
Elena shivered. "You should've showed her that room where Uram kept the remains of his victims." Her stomach lurched at the memory even now. "It was a slaughterhouse.
The smell alone would send most people screaming."
"You forget, Elena," Raphael said, his gaze almost black, "Lijuan plays with the dead."
"Hold the pendant still, Ellie."
"I'm trying."
"Shh, Mama will hear."
Breathing in the fresh bite of Raphael's scent, she swallowed the poignant whisper of memory and focused on the present. "Why was your father worse?"
Raphael's hair lifted in the night breeze, darker than the blackness that surrounded it.
"He didn't kill indiscriminately. For the longest time, they were all convinced he was simply driven by a hunger for power, for territory."
"Others joined him," she guessed.
A slow nod. "He was an emperor, but he wanted to be a god. When the murders began, they were stealthy, even political."
Elena reached up to push his hair off his face, needing to touch him, he'd become so suddenly remote. "What made people change their minds?"
He leaned into the touch, but his expression remained acetic, distant. "When he began incinerating entire villages in territories not his own."
The reading she'd done under Jessamy's guidance came to her aid. "A declaration of war."
"My father didn't see it that way. He expected the others in the Cadre to fall under his command - he'd come to believe hewas a god by then."
"How old were you when he died?"
"Mere decades into my existence."
A child, she thought, he'd been nothing but a child. "That means . . ." She stopped, couldn't continue.
"That he was well on the way to madness before I was born."
She slid her arms around his waist, laying her ear over his heart. "That's why the worry over your birth."
His own arms were steel bands around her.Sometimes, I wonder what he passed on to me. What my mother passed on.
Chapter 23
In that moment, Elena understood that the Archangel of New York had shared something with her he'd shared with no one else. How she knew, she couldn't say. But she knew. As she knew there were no words to answer Raphael's question. Only time could do that, but. . . "The course of your life has taken a direction I bet not even Lijuan could've foreseen.
Nothing is predestined."
Raphael didn't speak for several long minutes, and they stood there while the night winds played dark music across their bodies, stroked over their wings. Her archangel hadn't bothered with a replacement shirt, and his skin felt wonderful under her hands, her cheek. She was, she realized, oddly content in spite of the unsettling events of the day.
"The night is quiet," Raphael said at last, "the winds fairly calm. Visibility is clear in every direction."
"A good night to fly," she whispered.
"Yes."
She held on as he lifted off, shifting her hold to around his neck. The wind of takeoff whipped her hair off her face, then snapped it back to tangle around them both. "I need to cut this," she muttered, pulling strands out of her mouth with one hand, the other locked around Raphael.
Why did you not, even as a hunter? I would've thought it a vulnerability.
The wound was too close to the surface today, but she answered anyway.My hair's like my mother's. I was the only one of her four children to retain the color as I grew. Ari and Belle had both gone a golden blonde like Jeffrey, while Beth was a throwback to their paternal grandmother, her hair a gorgeous strawberry blonde.
So, we are both our mother's shadows.
Knowing that what she cherished might be to him a curse, she brushed her lips over his jaw in silent comfort. "Go faster."
Raphael swooped up and down without warning, making her laugh in sheer joy as she locked her legs around his. She didn't realize she'd expanded her own wings until they began to catch air. "Raphael!"
"Pull them in," he said. "Otherwise our landing will be rough."
Thinking it through step by step, she contracted her wings - her muscles gave a mild twinge at going against the wind, but nothing to worry about. "They want to open again."
"Instinct." Angling them lower, he flared out his own wings to their greatest width and brought them to a gentle, precise landing on a small mountain plateau overlooking a shallow valley filled with snow.
"This place looks different from the land close to the Refuge." Its edges softened by time, the valley appeared as if it would cradle rather than crush.
"The snow here tends to be soft," Raphael said. "That's why it's a good place for flight training."
Her heart skipped a beat. "Now?" She'd thought he planned only to take her flying in his arms.
"Now."
Excitement a tattoo against her ribs, she stepped to the lip of the plateau, and glanced down.
And down.
Vertigo had never been a problem, but - "It suddenly looks a lot farther away now that I know I'll be falling toward it."
"You, afraid?" The touch of his wings against her own, a shimmer of gold that she caught with the corner of her eye.
Her lips twitched. "Are you dusting me, Archangel?"
"Angel dust looks beautiful coming off wings in the dark." A kiss pressed to her jaw as he shifted to stand behind her, the aphrodisiac dust a taste of unadulterated sex. "As you fly, it'll sink into your skin, readying your body for me."
"You're all talk," she murmured, feeling him settle his hands firmly about her waist.
"So, what do I do now?"
"The only way to learn to fly, is to fly." He pushed her off the edge of the cliff.
Fear obliterated everything but the need to survive. Her wings spread, catching air, slowing her descent as her muscles screamed at the sudden strain. Raphael's shirt twisted around her, baring her stomach to the elements. She didn't care, more concerned about getting her wings to work. But it was too late, the ground rushing up at terminal velocity.
No snow was that soft - she was still going to hit hard enough to splinter bones.
Hands gripping her under her arms, lifting her up with effortless strength.Close your wings.
She obeyed, though the adrenaline pumping through her body made her want to do the exact opposite. The instant her feet touched the ground, she swiveled around to push him in the chest, her palms sizzling at the contact with his bare skin. "That's your idea of teaching? I could've been splattered from here to Manhattan!"
"You were never in any danger." His eyes gleamed with laughter and that just made her madder. "That's how young angels learn to fly - they're pushed out of the aeries before they have a chance to develop a fear of it."
Her fury came to a screeching halt, though her heart continued to ricochet violently in her chest. "You push babies out into thin air?"
"How do you think birds learn to fly?"
"Huh." She folded her arms, the shirt clammy against her sweat-soaked skin. "You know, I'm an adult - I already know fear."