her temple. Archangel, I really need you. It was a desperate mental whisper even though she knew he was too far away to hear her.
30
Elena.
She nearly staggered at the faint echo of water crashing against rock, the sea winds in her mind. Excusing herself from the group with a mumbled statement that probably didn’t make sense, she made her way to the elevator. Raphael? Where are you?
Two hours from home. His voice was stronger now . . . and it held strange echoes.
Swallowing hard, Elena clamped her hand down on her cramping forearm and tried to breathe. You sound like the Legion. Sweat broke out along her forehead, the vein in her temple a hammer ringing down beat by beat. I’m not doing so good.
I am sending Nisia to you. Where are you?
Why hadn’t she gone to the infirmary herself or told the others to call a healer? She didn’t know. Her thoughts weren’t running in straight lines. It was difficult to think past the wall of pain.
ELENA. Where are you?
Corridor outside our suite. Stumbling out of the elevator, she just barely made it inside their suite before collapsing on the plush white carpet. It felt so soft against the side of her cheek, almost like a cocoon.
She curled up on it, a sleeping cat, her eyes fluttering.
Elena!
I’m so tired, Raphael. It took too much effort to speak.
The doors from the balcony shoved open to admit a whip of icy air; the power that swept in with it was violent and familiar. I’m hallucinating you now.
“Guild Hunter.” Raphael’s arms scooping her up, his wings burning white fire, the glow coming off him so blinding that she had to squint her eyes to see through it.
When she put her hand on his chest, his heart pounded in a beat that was far too fast for an archangel of his power. “Your skin burns.” Her brain struggled to comprehend what was happening. “Two hours . . .”
Elena went limp in Raphael’s arms on those confused words. But he felt the pulse of life in her veins, the rise and fall of the air in her chest. Taking her through to their bedroom, he put her down on the bed just as Nisia ran inside. The healer was flushed from her headlong flight . . . and came to a jagged halt at spotting Raphael.
Healer instincts kicking in a second later, she went straight to Elena. “Tell me what happened.” Already her hands were on his consort as Raphael explained Elena’s call to him, and the confusion and enervating sense of tiredness that had come with it.
“My apologies for the glow, Nisia,” he said at the end. “I cannot currently restrain it.” His body burned, as if his cells had boiled to an impossible intensity.
“It won’t affect my work, sire.”
Raphael tried to have patience as Nisia worked on the hunter who was his heart, but a kind of quiet fury ravaged his veins.
Raphael? Izak just reported that you dropped out of the sky onto a Tower balcony. I’d think the boy had been in the wine, but he sounded both earnest and astonished.
Glad for the distraction of Dmitri’s voice reaching for his mind, Raphael answered, I am in our suite. Elena is down.
Wounded? She left us with unexpected quickness but appeared fine.
Because his hunter hated showing weakness. I wait to hear from Nisia.
“She is out of energy,” the healer said a minute later, her tone dumbfounded. “There’s barely enough in her cells to keep her breathing.”
Raphael stared at the healer. “Has she not been eating?”
Frown dark, Nisia tugged at something sticking slightly out of one of Elena’s pants pockets. She had to unzip the pocket to get it out. “A chocolate bar wrapper . . . No, there are three.”
Nisia dropped the wrappers on the nightstand. “She’s eating and drinking but even with the potent and double-strength mix I made for her, she isn’t intaking enough energy to fuel the changes in her body.”
Raphael could literally see Elena’s bones becoming more prominent against the dark gold of her skin as her body consumed itself from the inside out. “Will my blood make any difference?” Elena wasn’t a vampire, formed to metabolize blood into energy.
“We have to try.” Taut desperation on Nisia’s face.
It thrust a cold dagger into his gut. The practiced healer never panicked.
Lifting his wrist to his mouth, Raphael went to tear open his vein when the taste of a haunting golden richness licked across his tongue, a richness he’d tasted only