Shaking them off, she turned the envelope over. The seal had been broken, but she could see the image once she lined up the edges. An angel. Of course, she thought, unable to stop staring at it. It was inked in black but why that should disturb her, she didn't know.
Frowning, she brought it closer to her face.
"Oh Jesus." The whisper rippled out of her as she glimpsed the secret hidden within the image. It was an illusion, a trick. Looked at one way, the seal was a kneeling angel, his head bowed. But change your focus and that angel stared directly at you, his eye sockets empty, his bones bleached white.
She's no longer wholly of this world.
All at once, Raphael's words took on an entirely new meaning.
Shuddering, she lifted the flap and removed the card inside. It was heavy cream-colored stuff, reminding her of the expensive note cards her father used in his personal correspondence. The writing scrolled across in antique gold. She rubbed her finger over it - why, she didn't know - it wasn't as if she could sense whether it was real gold or not.
"Wouldn't surprise me though." Lijuan was old, so old. And an ancient being of power could amass a great deal of wealth over a lifetime.
Funny, but though she thought of Raphael as powerful, she'd never thought of him as ancient. There was a sense of life about Raphael that denied that. A sense of . . .
humanity?No. Raphael wasn't human, wasn't anything close to human.
But he wasn't like Lijuan.
Her eyes went to the card again.
I invite you to the Forbidden City, Raphael. Come, let us welcome this human you have embraced. Let us see the beauty of this connection between immortal and what was once mortal. I find myself fascinated for the first time in millennia.
~ Zhou Lijuan
Elena didn't want to fascinate Lijuan. In fact, she wanted nowhere near the rest of the Cadre of Ten. She was pretty sure most of the time that Raphael wouldn't kill her. But as for the others . . . "Oh, hell."
My little pet.
My weakness.
She might despise the words, but that made them no less accurate. If the Archangel of New York really did love her, then she might as well be wearing a target on her back.
Again she saw him, face bloodied and torn, wings shredded, an archangel choosing death over eternal life. It was a truth she'd never forget, a truth that anchored her even as everything else in her world shifted and changed.
"Not everything," she murmured, reaching for the phone. Because while this place might look as if it existed in some long-ago age of chivalry and grace, the amenities were cutting-edge. Unsurprising when you thought about it - angels didn't survive eons by clinging to the past. New York's Archangel Tower, with its cloud-piercing form, was the perfect example.
As the phone rang on the other end, she found herself staring out through the balcony doors, searching for the magnificent being who ruled that Tower, the one she dared call her lover.
The ringing stopped. "Hello, Ellie." A raspy voice, followed by an audible yawn.
"Crap, I woke you." She'd forgotten the time difference between wherever the hell she was and New York.
"It's okay - we crashed early. Hold on." Rustling sounds, a click, and then Sara was back on the line. "I've never seen Deacon go back to sleep that fast - though he did mutter something that sounded vaguely like 'Hi, Ellie.' I think our baby girl wore him out today."
Elena smiled at the thought of Sara's "scary son-of-a-bitch" of a husband being run ragged by little Zoe. "Did I wake her?"
"Nah, she's wiped out, too." A whisper. "I just peeked. Going into the living room."
Elena could easily visualize Sara's surroundings, from the elegant sofas in a caramel shade that brought warmth inside, to the large black-and-white portrait of Zoe on the wall, her giggling face covered with bath foam. The gorgeous brown-stone was more home to Elena than any other place except her own apartment. "Sara, my apartment?"
She hadn't thought to ask during Sara's visit to the Refuge two days ago, her mind too full of the chaos of dying . . . and waking up with wings of midnight and dawn.
"Sorry, babe." Sara's voice held the painful echoes of memory. "After . . . everything, Dmitri blocked off access. I was more interested in finding out where they'd put you, so I didn't push too hard."
The last time Elena had seen her apartment, it had had a huge hole torn out of one wall, blood and water everywhere. "I don't blame you," she said, burying the hurt that stabbed into her at the thought of her haven being shut up, her treasures broken and lost. "Hell, you probably had more than enough on your plate." New York had gone pitch-dark during the archangel-to-archangel battle, power lines destroyed and pylons overloading as Uram and Raphael both pulled power from the city below.
It hadn't only been the electrical grid that had become collateral damage in the cataclysmic battle between two immortals. Her mind showed her a snapshot of crumbled buildings, crushed cars, and the twisted blades that meant at least one heliport had suffered severe damage.