Angels' Dance (16 page)

Galen’s response was simple.
He’s strong. He’ll survive.
Then he added something that broke her heart.
I’m not that strong.

Tears rolling down her face at the words he gave her, this warrior who was her own, she wrote to him of her adoration, because never again would she raise any self-protective barriers when it came to Galen. He would always,
always
know of her love. “Galen, mine.”

Autumn had fallen by the time a response arrived with Dmitri, who’d come via a swift seagoing vessel before hitching a ride with a wing of angels, so Illium could spend time at the Tower. Jessamy met the vampire’s gaze. “It’s no coincidence he’s been recalled so soon, is it?”

The sensual curve of Dmitri’s mouth was a thin line as he shook his head. “Raphael is worried about his relationship with the mortal girl. He may cross lines that cannot be crossed, speak secrets no mortal must know.”

Knowing the punishment that would fall upon the angel if he did divulge angelic secrets, Jessamy watched him go with a pained heart. “There’s no choosing safety in love, is there, Dmitri?”

“No.” A single word that held a thousand unsaid things.

Again, she wondered what lay in the vampire’s past, but those were not her questions to ask. “Raphael’s troops?”

“They profess to hate Galen on a daily basis, but would follow him to their deaths if he ordered it.” Curiosity overtook his expression. “I was wrong about the result of his courtship, and I still can’t determine why.”

Laughing, she touched Galen’s missive, hidden in a secret pocket of her gown.

It was in her next letter that she wrote of the one thing she hadn’t raised thus far—not out of fear, but because he made her forget that she was imperfect.
I will never have a child, Galen. Keir cannot promise me I will not pass on my disability.
And while she had found her happiness, it had been a road paved with broken dreams and haunting loneliness. It would destroy her to see such sorrow in the eyes of her child.

Galen’s response came in the hands of a beautiful warrior with the wings of a butterfly.

I would fly our child wherever she needed to go.

The words blurred. Wiping off the moisture on her cheeks, she continued to read.

The flitterbies might have air in their heads, but Titus has done a great thing in raising them. Bonds can be formed not only by blood. And Jess? I have no need to build empires and dynasties. I want only to build a home with you.

Her barbarian did know poetry after all, she thought, watching the ink smudge under a rain of tears that held no pain, only the ache of a love so true, it had forever changed her.

16

I
llium told Galen of the things Jessamy didn’t write in her letters—that several other men, angels and vampires both, had made repeated attempts to court her. The only reason Galen didn’t beat the blue-winged angel bloody for being the messenger was that Illium conveyed the news with a scowl, adding, “Jessamy’s too polite to tell them to cease plaguing her, but each male knows if he pushes too hard and makes her uncomfortable, he’ll be dealing with Dmitri.”

Galen had the sudden understanding that until Illium left the Refuge, he was the one who’d been Jessamy’s champion. “Thank you.”

A glare, bared teeth. “Do you know how many people are calling me Bluebell now?”

Galen laughed, realized this pretty angel who looked like an ornament and fought like a gleaming, elegant blade had grown into a friend when he hadn’t been looking. “Come, then. I’ll let you attempt to knock me to the ground in recompense.”

As he continued to work with Raphael’s people through the crisp bite of autumn, the earth covered in a hundred shades of red, brown, and ochre, he thought of his precious store of letters, and of delicate feathers of blush and cream. Such beautiful words Jessamy wrote to him. Still, he was too honest to lie to himself—one fact nothing could change: that he’d been the first man to take the woman she’d become into the skies. By the time he returned, others would have . . . and so his historian would have a choice.

It might crush him to imagine her flying in the arms of another man, but he wanted her to have that choice, wanted her to never regret being with him. Because rough edges and all, every part of him bore Jessamy’s name. He needed her to be his in the same way.

* * *

W
atching autumn glide into a brittle, harsh winter, Jessamy opened her histories and wrote of all that had passed in the previous season. The peace had held, with the archangels too busy with keeping an eye on the spectacle of Michaela’s ascension to the Cadre to play politics. Jessamy had to admit, the new archangel had come to power with awe-inspiring splendor.

In the far north,
she wrote,
the skies dance with color in winter, but when Michaela rose to her full strength, the skies danced across the world, whether in the tropics or in the Refuge, whether it was night or noon. Rich indigo, vivid ruby, iridescent green, colors that turned the world into a dream.

There had been other developments, of course, smaller in comparison but not unimportant. She noted them with a historian’s distance, even as her soul cried silent tears at some of what she had to write. But theirs was a long-lived race, loss and sadness as much a part of their history as joy.

Her own aching need continued to grow. She watched the skies for Galen’s distinctive striated wings each and every day, even knowing that he’d taken Raphael’s men and women on a winter march, so that they would be prepared for the harshest of conditions.

“Jessamy.”

She halted with her quill held above the page, finding herself looking into the lean face of an angel who was older than her by five hundred years. Not a pretty man, but one who had the kind of compelling presence that came with being honed by time and experience. “Yes?”

He held out a hand. “I would take you into the sky.”

* * *

G
alen wanted to force spring out of the earth, not that it would do any good. He had to remain in the territory for another season, to ensure everything he’d taught had sunk in. “I’ll return when needed,” he said to Raphael, pacing across the cliffs that afforded a clear view of the Tower rising from the island on the other side of the powerful crash of the river. “But I’d like to be based at the Refuge.”

“I have no argument with that,” Raphael said. “I need at least one of my trusted senior people in the Refuge at all times.”

Trust had not only deepened, but become rooted between them. Still, Galen wondered if he’d have a subtle watch on him in the Refuge now that he’d have so much power. It was what he’d have done, and he told Raphael that. The archangel raised an eyebrow. “You make me stronger, Galen. That makes you a target. Be careful.”

“No one will ever take me unawares.” It wasn’t arrogance— he knew his strengths as he knew his weaknesses. Thanks to Jessamy, Dmitri, Jason, and Raphael, he was no longer a novice when it came to sensing and swiftly strangling subtle political intrigues that could steal even an immortal’s life.

Raphael’s hair blew back in the breeze. “Illium returns with you. He fades with the sorrow of being far from his mortal.”

“Would it not be better to keep him here?”

“Is that the choice you’d make?”

Galen thought of his tearing need to see Jessamy, considered what it would be like to know she would disappear from existence in but a mere whisper of time. “No. It would be cruel.” If Illium had only a whisper, that whisper should be his.

Raphael said nothing, but Galen knew the archangel was in agreement. There was cruelty in Raphael, that of immense power, but there was also a capacity for loyalty that spoke to the warrior in Galen. There would be no knife in the back from this archangel.

“Tanae,” the archangel said some time later, “has asked permission to enter my territory.”

“I see.” Meeting eyes of a blue Galen had seen on no other, mortal or immortal, he knew the request had been granted.

His mother, when she arrived at the Tower, was the same woman, the same warrior, she had always been, but he saw her through different eyes now.

She found herself facing a man who has no need of her support in any sense,
he wrote to the woman who had taught him that he was worth loving exactly as he was,
and she floundered, returned to Titus’s territory. But perhaps it is a start. We may yet find a new path.

Closing the letter, he didn’t write the one thing that screamed inside of him.

Wait for me, Jess.

* * *

J
essamy saw the silhouettes of two angels far in the distance, backlit by the setting summer sun. She shaded her eyes, trying to glean their identity, but the sun’s blaze turned their wings a uniform fire, except . . . she knew. She
knew
. Running toward the edge of the cliff with little care for the treacherous ground, she waited with her hands fisted in the sides of her gown.

A beam of sunlight, hitting the pure red of hair that felt like silk against her palms.

Tears rolling down her cheeks, she was barely aware of Illium peeling off to head down toward the human village some distance away. Her eyes were only for the lover who had finally come back to her. Flying to the edge of the cliff, he caught her as she jumped without hesitation, and spiraled down the gorge to the edge of the river that foamed over rocks and ran sweet and clear in the shallows.

“You’re home. You’re home.” She kissed his mouth, his cheeks, his jaw, any part of him she could reach. “I missed you so.”

It undid Galen, the depth of joy in the brown eyes awash with tears that met his gaze. Crushing Jessamy to him, he took her mouth, took her words, took
her
. “I don’t care,” he whispered, hoarse, rough, demanding, “who courted you while I was gone. I’ll be the only one courting you now.” He’d thought to give her a choice, but found he didn’t have that in him. “I’ll love you until my dying breath, give you anything and everything you want.”

“Poetry again. It’s not fair.” A trembling laugh, slender hands petting his chest as she was wont to do. “I have not flown since you left.” Tender words spoken with an intimate smile. “Will you court me in the skies?”

Stricken, he said, “I would never ground you.” Regardless of his jealousy.

“I know. Oh, I know.” Rubbing her wet cheek against his chest, she said, “I couldn’t bear to be in anyone’s arms but yours.”

“Jess.”

It wasn’t until much, much later, with the night soft and warm around them that Jessamy rose from the tangled sheets of the bed, and walked to the dresser in the corner. “What are you doing?” he asked, lying on his front watching the woman who was his own with possessive eyes. Her moon-shadow was as slender as a reed, her skin shimmering pearl bright, her feathers lush, strokable, exquisite.

Unashamed of her nakedness, she gave him a sweet, shy smile as she returned to the bed. “I have something for you.”

When he went to get up, she shook her head. “Stay. I like looking at you.”

“Good.” He bared his teeth. “I would keep you naked if I could.”

“Primitive!” Laughing, she slid something under his bicep and brought it around to click it shut. “Too tight?”

Looking down at the thin metal band that circled his upper arm, he shook his head. “I’m already tied to you, my demanding Lady Jessamy.” By bonds nothing would ever break. “Now you use manacles on me?” It was a tease, because he’d discovered he enjoyed teasing his historian.

“Hush.” She petted the metal. “There’s amber in the amulet.”

Wrenching her down below him, he covered her body with his own. “Are you claiming me, then?” Amber was for the entangled, a warning to others to keep their hands off.

Huge brown eyes met his. “Yes.”

He’d never been more delighted in his life. “Does the amulet have any other meaning?”

She blushed. “It’s silly . . . a mortal thing. A wish to keep you safe.”

Stroking her hair off her face, he nuzzled at her, and knew he’d never again wander forsaken, looking for a home. “Will you wear my amber, Jess?”

A smile that told him he was loved, was hers. “Always.”

Read on for a preview of Nalini Singh's Guild Hunter novel

ARCHANGEL’S STORM

Now available from Berkley Sensation!

1

S
tanding on velvet green grass still sparkling with dew, Jason watched Dmitri cup the face of the hunter he had just made his wife, the dawn sunlight kissing her skin, lighting up eyes that saw only the man in front of her.

The grounds of the archangel Raphael’s home, Jason thought, the Hudson rushing past beyond the cliffs and a mass of fragrant roses in full bloom climbing the walls of the house itself, had seen centuries pass, but a scene such as this, they had never witnessed and perhaps never would again. A scene in which one of the most powerful vampires in the world took a Guild hunter for his bride.

That Honor loved Dmitri was in no doubt. It didn’t take a spymaster to read the incandescent joy in her every breath, her skin radiant with it. What startled Jason was the potent emotion he saw in the eyes of a vampire who had been a pitiless blade for all the centuries Jason had known him.

Cruelty came easily to Dmitri, maybe too easily in recent times. The vampire was near to a thousand years old and jaded with it, blood and death no longer enough to cause him to break his stride, much less shock. Jason had seen Dmitri wield his scimitar on the field of battle to take off invaders’ heads, glory in the spray of their dying blood, and he had seen Dmitri seduce women with sensual elegance and a cold heart simply to amuse himself.

Yet the man who touched Honor, who claimed her lips in a kiss of possession, had a tenderness about him that was as dangerous as it was gentle. And Jason comprehended that Dmitri would be a brutal weapon against anyone who dared harm his wife, that the darkness in him had not been tempered but merely leashed.

“He cannot deal with the Cadre if he is leashed,” he said to the woman who stood next to him, a hunter with wings of midnight and dawn. Feathers of a rich, silken blue flowed from the pure black at the inner curve of her wings, to segue into a softer indigo and the ephemeral shades visible in the skies when day broke, before becoming a brilliant white-gold at the primaries.

Elena was Raphael’s consort, and Raphael was Jason’s liege. Perhaps that was why he felt an unexpected kind of ease with her. Or it might be that she was a stranger in the land of immortals, searching for a path that would take her into the centuries to come, as he once had. Or perhaps it was that, unbeknownst to Elena, they were linked by a far bleaker tie, a tie that spoke of mothers and blood.

Iron rich liquid matting his hair, soaking into his tunic, sticky on his arms.

Elena looked up, shook her head, the startling near-white of her hair pinned back in an elegant twist, her body clothed in a simple ankle-length gown of a blue the shade of a pristine high-mountain lake. Her only ornamentation came in the form of the small amber hoops she always wore as an outward sign of her commitment to Raphael. “Don’t you see, Jason?” she said as the bridal couple broke a kiss that had more than one sigh rippling through the crisp morning air. “He is only this Dmitri for Honor.” She joined in the clapping and cheering when Honor and Dmitri turned to the assembled guests, well-wishers moving forward to congratulate them.

Having spoken to Dmitri before the ceremony, Jason waited for the crowd to thin. Elena, too, held her place, giving others a chance to speak to the newly wedded couple. As he’d been with Dmitri before the ceremony—alongside Raphael, Illium, and Venom—Elena had been with Honor, the archangel and his consort having turned over a suite in their home to the bride’s party. That party was composed of hunters, all certainly with a weapon or two hidden beneath the sleek, elegant clothes they wore for the wedding.

Blue flickered at the edges of his vision, and he turned to see Illium spread his wings for a hunter who had made the request. Clad in the same formal black worn by the groom as well as Raphael and the others of the Seven here today, he had a flirtatious smile on his face. The smile was real as far as it went, but then, it did not go far. Jason had seen Illium love until his heart broke, and he had seen the angel mourn until there was no light in those eyes of molten gold.

“I understand,” he said to Elena when she glanced back at him, reminded once again of the capacity others had for endless nuances of emotion. Jason had watched mortals and immortals alike for centuries, was able to glean even the most subtle changes in their emotional equilibrium, for no man could be a spymaster without that capability. Yet, through all that time, he had never been able to feel as they did. It was as if life skimmed across the surface of him, leaving his heart and his soul untouched.

“You are the perfect spymaster. An intelligent, gifted phantom unaffected by anything he sees.”

It was Lijuan who had said those words to him, four hundred years ago. The oldest of the archangels had also made him an offer—riches and women trained in the sensual arts, men if that was what he desired—if he would change his allegiance, put himself in her service. Except Jason had already earned and created enough wealth for a hundred immortal lifetimes. As for the other—when Jason wanted a woman, he had a woman. He had no need for anyone to act his procurer.

Elena’s wing shimmered lightly over his as she stretched a little, and he didn’t shift away to break the fleeting contact. In many ways, he was the opposite of Aodhan, the angel so broken, he couldn’t bear the slightest touch. Jason, by contrast, sometimes only felt real and not the phantom Lijuan had named him if he had the pressure of another’s skin, another’s wing against his own. It was as if all those years,
decades
, when he hadn’t felt the touch of another sentient being had created a thirst in him that could never be assuaged.

A sybarite drunk on sensation, that was what he might have become, but for the fact that those years of excruciating, endless aloneness had left him with other scars—scars that led him to embrace the very shadows he’d hated as a child, scars that meant he meted out trust with a careful hand. Regardless of his need, Jason allowed very few people to touch him outside of the bedroom; for the touch of a friend, it was a far different thing than the caress of a lover taken in the dark of night and left behind when morning broke.

“It was a beautiful wedding, wasn’t it?” Elena said, her eyes soft in the way women’s often were at such things.

“Do you wish for one?” Marriage was thought of as a mortal thing, but as today showed, some immortals continued to embrace it—Dmitri had been most insistent on the ceremony.

Startled laughter from Elena. “Raphael and I married above the wreckage of New York, when he fell with me in his arms.”

Raphael, too, Jason thought, was a different man with his consort, this mortal woman become an angel. Such a weak angel in terms of power, her immortality a flickering flame, and yet she had a strength that spoke to the survivor in him. So he’d taught her how to remain unseen in the sky, watched her push her body to merciless extremes in an effort to achieve a vertical takeoff so soon after her becoming, and listened for threats to her life.

For Elena was Raphael’s biggest weakness.

A tiny giggle, a mischief-eyed little girl running to Elena on wobbling legs, curls of bronze-threaded black captured at the sides of her head with ribbons of summer orange. Smiling in unhidden delight, Elena bent to pick up the child in her arms. “Hello, Zoe, Warrior Goddess in Training.” A kiss on one plump cheek, Zoe’s flower girl dress a confection of lace over Elena’s arm. “Did you give your mom the slip?”

Jason met the child’s direct gaze as she nodded, saw that she held a silver-edged feather of distinctive blue in a careful fist. The daughter of the Guild Director stared at his wings for a moment before whispering something in Elena’s ear. Jason heard what she said, understood none of it, her language that of very small children.

Clearly not at the same disadvantage, Elena glanced at him, silver-gray eyes shining with laughter. “The imp’s coveting more of your feathers for her collection, Jason. I’d be careful.” She was distracted a second later by a tall man with long black hair tied neatly at the nape of his neck, his cheekbones sharp against copper-gold skin.

Ransom Winterwolf.

Hunter.

It was strange to see so many of the Guild on the grounds of Raphael’s home. Located in the Angel Enclave, on the other side of the river from the gleaming glass and metal of Manhattan, it was undoubtedly elegant, but Jason knew the Sire had offered Dmitri far more stunning locations in which to make Honor his bride. However, the leader of the Seven had been adamant.

“Daybreak,” he’d said a bare three hours before sunrise. “We marry at daybreak.”

In those three hours, Elena and the Guild Director had managed to alert every hunter in the New York area who wasn’t on assignment and was within traveling distance, while Jason, Illium, and Venom stood for the rest of the Seven. Naasir, Galen, and Aodhan had been told, had all three spoken with Dmitri before the wedding.

United in their loyalty to Raphael—and to each other—the Seven had forged bonds that were unbreakable, but even had there been more time, it was impossible for all of them to ever be in one place at one time. To keep the balance of power in the world, Raphael needed to maintain a presence in the Refuge and in New York, and now, in the lost city of Amanat, home to the Ancient who was Raphael’s mother.

That three of them stood here to witness Dmitri’s wedding, it was an unexpected gift. There were other invited guests of course—the proud staff who ran Raphael’s home; a number of men and women who worked directly under Dmitri at the Tower, and whose loyalty belonged as much to the vampire as it did to Raphael; two mortal policemen who were considered part of the Guild family. The well-respected man who’d officiated the ceremony belonged to that family, too, having headed the Guild before passing on the mantle.

Raphael himself had stood at Dmitri’s side during the ceremony, the friendship between the two men old enough, deep enough, that it was the archangel who had played the second this day. Jason didn’t know of any other such friendships among those who served the Cadre of Ten, the archangels who ruled the world, but he knew this one had endured centuries, through anger and war and even a short defection by Dmitri to Neha’s territory. That hadn’t lasted long, and now Dmitri’s lips curved at something Raphael said.

While the vampire was dressed in a crisp black-on-black suit, his bride wore a gown of deep, vibrant green that caressed and embraced her curves before rippling in a liquid waterfall to the dew-laden grass, the fabric arranged cleverly at her left hip to give the illusion of waves. When her gaze landed on Jason, she smiled and came toward him, halting at the border of the invisible space that separated him from the world, one hand holding the wildflower bouquet Elena had created using the blooms in her greenhouse.

“Thank you,” she said, her happiness so luminous, it outshone the diamonds at her throat, diamonds Jason had seen Dmitri buy as rough stones three centuries ago.

It had taken the vampire another hundred years to get them finely cut and set into a necklace of exquisite beauty, until the stones appeared to be droplets of captured starfire.

“Who will you gift it to?” Jason had asked at the time.

Dmitri’s response had been a sardonic twist of his mouth, the hardness in his eyes akin to the gems he held. “A woman whose spirit dazzles brighter than these stones.”

The necklace had graced none but the honey-skinned neck it now encircled.

“For this amazing dream of a dress,” Honor continued, stroking her hand down the fabric. “I don’t know how you found it so early in the morning. It fits like it was made for me.”

“No thanks are necessary.” So much of life he spent on the sidelines—many times out of choice, sometimes because he didn’t know how to belong—but he’d needed to be a part of this day when a man he respected, and who was as close a friend as he was capable of having, claimed this woman for his own.

“Jason can find anything,” Dmitri said, walking over to slide his arm around Honor’s waist. “The winds talk to him, tell him where to go.”

Honor laughed, husky and warm, and then she was being embraced by Elena, the hunter’s wings iridescent in the white light of morning. Stepping a little to the right, Jason met Dmitri’s gaze. The vampire shrugged, the words unspoken but not unheard.

No one will ever believe it.

No, Jason thought, no one would. Even he had thought himself mad when he was a boy on the verge of adulthood. It had taken reading Jessamy’s history books once he arrived at the angelic stronghold that was the Refuge to understand he’d inherited his mother’s “ear,” her ability to sense things happening hundreds of miles away, across oceans and beyond mountains. It was how she’d always had stories to tell him about people in the Refuge, though they lived on an isolated atoll surrounded by the shimmering blue of the Pacific.

“I will write this story down for you, Jason. You must practice your reading.”

He had. Over and over, until the parchment disintegrated, he’d read those stories and the others in the books in the house. Then he’d copied the words out on wood, on flax, in the sand, forcing himself to remember that he was a person, that he should know how to read. It had worked . . . for a while.

“I’m happy for you, Dmitri,” he said now, allowing the ghosts of the past to fade into the background. “This is my gift to you and your bride.”

As Dmitri glanced down at the small note card Jason passed across, Honor’s second—a long-legged hunter who had unique gifts of her own—came to join Elena and Honor, and the women laughed and began to talk all at once.

“A safe place,” Jason said when Dmitri looked up from reading the address on the card, the sun glinting off the simple gold band he wore on the ring finger of his left hand. “Where no one will find you.”

Understanding whispered across the sensual lines of Dmitri’s face. Moving a small distance away from the women, he said, “I shouldn’t be surprised at what you know, and yet I am.” He slid the card away. “How certain are you of the security?”

“The house is mine, and no one has found it in two hundred years.” Hidden in the dense forests of an otherwise uninhabited mountain, it could only be reached via a very specific route that he now shared with Dmitri, mind to mind.
Even aerial entry is impossible unless the angel in question knows how to find a particular small clearing.
He gave Dmitri the coordinates.
Without that, severe damage to the wings as a result of the thick canopy—and the safeguards hidden within—is a distinct possibility.