Elena.A caress across her mind as he dropped his head to the curve of her neck.

Heart thudding at the knowledge that the danger had passed, she stroked her hands through his hair, nuzzled her face against him. "You have your own nightmares," she said, understanding coming to her in the clarity after the storm. "They were bad today."

Both arms around her, he tugged her even closer. She went, needing the warmth of him as much as he needed her. And wasn't that a kicker? The Archangel of New York needed her? Her, Elena Deveraux, Guild Hunter and unwanted daughter. Squeezing him with a fierce tenderness, she pressed her lips to his temple, his cheek, any part of him she could reach.

"Must be something in the air," she found herself saying in a voice so quiet, it was almost not sound. "I can't seem to stop thinking of my mother, my sisters." It was the first time she'd ever spoken of her nightmares aloud. Even her best friend didn't know the truth of her childhood, of the evil that haunted her until some days she could hardly breathe.

"Tell me their names." Warm breath against her neck, his arms so strong around her.

"You know."

"It's only fact."

"My mother," she said, holding on, holding tight, "her name was Marguerite."

Elena.A mental kiss, his scent enfolding her as protectively as his arms.

Her lip quivered until she caught it between her teeth. "She'd been in the States since she married my father, but she still spoke with a Parisian accent. She was this fascinating, lovely butterfly with her laughter and her quick hands. I used to just love sitting in the kitchen, or in her work room, watching my mother talk as she worked."

Marguerite had made quilts, beautiful one-of-a-kind pieces that had sold for enough money that she'd built up a small nest egg. Nothing in comparison to her husband's fortune, but hers had been passed on to her daughters with love, while Jeffrey . . . "She'd never have let my father do what he did."

"He lives only because I know you love him."

"I shouldn't, but I can't stop myself." That love was rooted too deep, so deep that even years of neglect hadn't snuffed it out completely. "I used to wish he'd died instead of my mother, but I know my mom would've hated me for thinking that."

"Your mother would've forgiven you."

Elena wanted to believe that so much it hurt. "She was the heart of our family. After her death,everything died."

"Tell me of your lost sisters."

"If Mama was the heart, then Ari and Belle were the peace and the storm." They'd left a gaping hole in the Deveraux family when their blood slicked across the floor.

Slater's handsome face, his lips painted a glistening red.

She clung to Raphael, shoving away the hated image with desperate hands. "I was the middle child and I liked it. Beth was the baby, but Ari and Belle let me do things with them sometimes." No more words would come, her chest tight with lack of air.

"I didn't have siblings."

The words were unexpected enough that they broke through her anguish. Staying in place, wrapped around Raphael like ivy, she listened.

"Angelic births are rare, and my parents were both thousands of years old when I was born." Each birth was a celebration but his had been particularly feted. "I was the first child born of two archangels in several millennia."

Elena, his hunter trusting him to hold her safe, lay quiet against him, but he could feel her attention, her palm warm through the linen of his shirt. Sliding one of his own hands down her naked back, slow and easy, he continued to talk, to share things he'd not spoken of in an eternity. "But there were some who said I shouldn't have been born."

"Why?" She raised her head, clearing her eyes with hard swipes of her knuckles. "Why would they say that?"

"Because Nadiel and Caliane weretoo old." Holding her close enough that her breasts brushed his chest with every breath, he moved his hands up over the curve of her waist, her rib cage, savoring the feel of her skin against his own. "There was concern that they'd begun to degenerate."

Elena frowned. "I don't understand. Immortality is immortality."

"But we evolve," he said. "Some of us devolve."

"Lijuan," she whispered. "Has she evolved?"

"That's what we say, but even the Cadre wonders what it is she's evolving into." A nightmare, that was certain. But a private one, or one that would lay waste to the world?

Elena was in no way stupid. She understood in bare seconds. "That's why your mother executed your father."

"Yes. He was the first."

"Both?" Pain - forhim  - arced through those expressive eyes.

"Not at the start." He saw the last moments of his father's existence as clearly as if the scenes were painted across his irises. "My father's life ended in fire."

"That mural," she said, "on the hallway in our wing - it's his death."

"A reminder of what might await me."

She shook her head. "Never. I won't let it happen."

His human, he thought, his hunter. She was so very young, and yet there was a core of strength in her that fascinated him, would continue to fascinate him through the ages.

She'd already changed him in ways he didn't understand - perhaps, he thought slowly, there was a chance she might save him from Nadiel's madness. "Even if you fail," he said, "I have every confidence that you'll find a way to end my life before I stain the world with evil."

Rebellion in those eyes. "We die," she said, "we die together. That's the deal."

He thought about his final thoughts as he'd fallen with her in New York, her body broken in his arms, her voice less than a whisper in his mind. He hadn't considered holding onto his eternity for a second, had chosen to die with her, with his hunter. That she would choose to do the same . . . His hands clenched. "We die," he repeated, "we die together."

A moment of utter silence, the sense of something being locked into place.

Releasing the pain of memory, he pressed a kiss to the pulse in her neck. "We must see what Lijuan has sent you."

She shivered. "Can I have your shirt?"

He let her scramble off his lap, her body beautiful and lithe . . . and strong. Gauging her muscle tone with a critical eye as she turned to look at something on his desk, he made a decision. "Flying lessons begin tomorrow."

She spun around so fast, she almost tripped on her wings. "Really?" A huge grin bisected her face. "Are you going to teach me?"

"Of course." He'd trust her life to no one else. Sliding off his shirt, he gave it to her.

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 fuck 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.