Archangel's War (Guild Hunter #12) - Nalini Singh Page 0,6

reached eyes that were hers even if they were all silver with no gray. “At least we’ll match. You on fire. Me glowing.” But her smile of delight faded almost before it was complete. “I have legs. Arms. Eyes.”

She turned her hand in front of her, examining the brittle structure. “My bones are like matchsticks.” A scrunched-up nose. “Do you think I’m as breakable as I appear?”

Raphael nodded again, his soul stretching from its tiny curled-up ball. Elena was herself. The rest they could figure out.

“Ugh.” Dropping her hand, she blew a strand of hair off her face, then reached up to tug at that hair. “Am I going loopy, or do I have tiny feathers at the ends of my hair?”

Raphael hadn’t noticed, his focus on knowing who or what existed in his consort’s body, but he saw that she was right. Her hair had reached the middle of her back before the chrysalis. Now, it barely brushed her jaw and at the end of each strand was a tiny, tiny, tiny feather of the same shade as her hair. “Your Bluebell will be jealous he no longer has the most unusual hair in angelkind.” Black tipped with blue.

“No one will notice. You have to look real close.” She dropped her hand onto his where it lay on her cheek. “I think the feathers got confused and ended up in the wrong place on my body.” A bleakly haunted look. “I feel the urge to stretch my wing muscles . . . but there’s no weight at my back. The chrysalis was too small.”

Raphael saw no sign of the extraordinary wings of midnight and dawn that were his consort’s. He didn’t even know if his own wings had survived the cataclysmic release of power. He moved the muscles that would lift one.

Elena’s gasp was soft. “Archangel.”

His head too heavy to lift, he brought the wing over her . . . and saw that it was pure white fire. A cauldron of white fire. An inferno without end.

“That explains why you set your hair on fire—you’re going to be hell on the furniture.” She raised a hand without fear, this warrior consort of his. The fire clung to her when she retracted her hand, but it didn’t burn.

No part of him would ever harm her.

She laughed, playing the fire over her palm like a small pet. For a moment, she’d forgotten her own loss. “Those wings are seriously badass.” After returning the flame to his wing, as if returning a feather, she pushed against the arch of it. “I can feel muscle and tendon and bone. Do you think you’ll be able to turn the understructure to fire, too, when you want to? So there’s nothing physical to attack?”

“We will find out.” He brushed her hair off her face. “Do you remember the dream?”

“Yes. I remember everything.” She pressed a hand over her heart. “That was a weird-ass thing to do, Archangel.”

Pressing his forehead to her own, he smiled. “What other woman can say her lover actually gave her his heart?”

Her lips twitched, but the bleakness remained. “Do it,” she whispered. “Rip off the Band-Aid fast.”

He lifted himself up slightly, then moved his hand off her cheek to run it down her spine. And froze. “I can feel something.” Shifting so he could look at her back, he was aware of her holding her breath. So was he.

What he saw was unlike anything he knew. “It’s a slightly raised tattoo of wings.” Perfect in every intricate detail, down to the filaments on each feather. “With all your colors.” Rich black shading outward to indigo, deepest blue, and dawn, with primaries of a shimmering white gold.

Elena’s breath hit his skin in a hot, jagged exhale. “Baby wings?” Hope was a song in her voice. “Like with Aodhan’s nephew?”

Angelic babies were born more with an impression of where wings would grow than actual wings. “This isn’t the same,” he told her. “Those wings are transparent and clearly show folds where the wing will eventually spread out over the back as the baby develops. On a baby, you can’t see the full wing shape.”

“I remember now. Like an origami puzzle, with multiple folded layers.”

“Yes.” Elena’s by contrast . . . “The tattoo is of your full wings, just in a size proportional to the canvas of your back.”

A small silence before Elena said, “Was it like this the first time? When I was Made?”

And he realized that in all their time together, that