Elena realized with shock that he was talking about Jenessa, whose only crime had been in clinging to Samaria/Lucy as a friend. “Your rules are changing.” Elena was having trouble moving, numbness at her toes and at the very tips of her hands. “You’re going after people who never laid a finger on your daughter.”

Archer lowered himself into a fighting stance. “I guess your brother-in-law sleeps well at night because he doesn’t think feeding the monsters equals being a monster himself. My girl, my sweet Samaria would still be alive and breathing instead of rotting in the ground if he’d driven her home that night!”

“She was an adult, Archer! Harrison couldn’t drag her away from the bar!”

“You know nothing about her.” Archer began to advance again, flashing out with his sword and moving at lethal speed. Elena should’ve backed off to give herself more room, but she couldn’t do so without exposing Ashwini. Archer’s sword, she knew, would slice through Ash’s neck like a hot knife through butter.

She began throwing knives with one hand, peppering the air with metal, while she used the slender blade of her sword to slam up against his. The vibration rang down her quivering arm, but the weapon held.

A sudden assault she pulled out of nowhere as her heart strained. Archer lost enough ground to give her breathing room and hope that the other two Legion fighters were up and on their way. Elena capitalized on her advantage by spinning a blade star toward him. The wind changed its trajectory enough that the lethal edge just grazed the side of his neck.

Giving a bloodthirsty yell, Archer came at her, sword raised. The wind dropped to dead calm, giving him no resistance. Out of throwing knives and stars, Elena went to evade him, her intent to slide out her legs and trip him . . . but her body failed her. Something snapped in her leg, causing her to stumble clumsily . . . and Archer thrust his sword through her stomach.

She looked down at the razor-sharp metal buried in her abdomen, the point coming out her back, and she thought of her archangel. No. Fuck destiny. But her rebellious thoughts were hazy at the edges, her blood running down to pool in the dirty snow.

Archer drew back his sword.

As she crumpled to her knees in the cold, she saw that the sword was red.

45

ELENA!

Raphael didn’t bother to waste words on the man whose sword dripped with Elena’s blood. A single surge of power and that man was ash. Raphael cared nothing for who he was or his motivation in harming Elena. He cared only for the hunter with hair of near-white who knelt in the bloody snow, her hands clamped over the gushing wound in her stomach and her eyes watching him land.

A soft smile on her face when he reached her. “You are magnificent in flight.” It was a whisper almost without sound. “Ash . . .”

“Help comes.” He’d alerted Janvier and every other vampire and angel he trusted in the vicinity when the ghostly owls had appeared around him, warning him to go to Elena.

But no one had found his heart, his Elena, in time.

The owls had led him here on white wings while Raphael pushed his immortal body to the limit, his wings of white fire repudiating his attempts at preternatural speed. He was sweat-soaked, his heartbeat a roar, but the owls were unchanged. They sat silent and solemn around Elena’s mortally wounded body.

A motorcycle crashed to the road as Janvier ran down the dark lane to his wife.

“Your friend is safe,” Raphael told his hunter, because he knew that mattered to her.

A sigh. “Sorry . . .” Blood coughed out of her mouth. “Had . . . so many feathers left . . . when I started. Thought . . . could fight fate.”

Cradling her in his arms, his wings solid and aglow, Raphael lifted up into the air as two Legion fighters rose from the dead. He told them to stay with Janvier and Ashwini.

“Fuck fate,” he said in response to her words. “We’ll write our own future.” And in that future, Raphael would not have a dead consort.

Child of the flames.

To be called a “child” by anyone but his mother was a strange thing for Raphael, but Cassandra was older than an Ancient. To her, he was barely formed. Cassandra, he said, I thank you for the warning.

It had not come soon enough, but he’d found Elena while she yet had life in her body. Now he flew his consort not to the Tower but to their home. He’d already ordered Nisia to meet him there. Elena would not want to be seen this way by those in the Tower. She was a warrior, her strength her armor.

Fate realigns. She must die for the other to live.

Jaw hard, Raphael landed on the snow outside their home.

“Raphael.” Elena’s voice, so thin now. “My wings . . .”

Raphael’s skin burned with golden lightning. “They will heal.” He’d fight the Cascade itself to make that happen.

“No.” Shallow breaths, her hazy eyes finding his. “Cut them off. They’re dead.”

Rage tore through him because she was right; her wings were nothing but heavy protrusions pulling at her spine, limp and without strength. And yet, to strip his Elena of her wings? “Hbeebti?” It was a plea.

“I’m sorry, Archangel.” Her body swaying into his. “Please.”

She could’ve shot him again and again and it would’ve hurt less.

He shifted her in his embrace so that she was “standing” against him. Her blood dripped to the snow. Barely able to see through his angry grief, he used his power to cleanly excise both wings from her back, searing the wound shut as he went. They fell bloody and broken to the snow.

A burst of power and her wings were ash.

He would not have Elena see her amputated wings. Cradling her against his chest again, he ran into the house.

Montgomery’s face was a study in horror, but his butler snapped to action. “I will bring supplies to help with the wounds.”

“Nisia comes!” Raphael rose up on his wings to the second floor and their bedroom. “Bring her the instant she lands.”

A moment later, he lay his bleeding and badly wounded consort on the bed and he had a sudden panic. “I should’ve taken you to the human doctors.”

Bloody fingers brushed his cheek. “No. Look.”

Thick white filaments covered the back of her hand, and when he tore off her jacket and the top she wore underneath to reveal her brutal stomach injury, he found more of those delicate filaments crawling across her skin. He ripped them away in clumps, but they only regenerated. Like vines growing on her as soil.

“Cascade.” Her voice like air, Elena put a bloody hand on his. “Not human thing.”

Tearing his wrist open, Raphael went to drip his blood into her mouth. She didn’t stop him, though she made a face, his hunter fierce and wild and laughing and his eternity. Her eyes blazed golden and he thought it would work . . . right as golden streamers of energy poured out of her stomach wound to sink back into him.

Her eyes dimmed, became mortal gray again.

“NO!” It was a roar of sound. “Why is your body rejecting my energy?”

“I’m mortal.” Elena coughed up more blood.

It is time, child of flame. She must die for the other to live.

Raphael went to thrust Cassandra out of his mind—he was not Elena, who had no such ability. He was an archangel. But a fraction of sense shoved through the storm inside him. Who is the other? The one question Cassandra had not answered. Will Elena live if I destroy the other? Raphael didn’t care if the other was a being capable of ending Lijuan herself; weighed against Elena’s life, that unknown being had no value to him.

She is the other.

The words made no sense. “Cassandra says you are the other,” he said to his consort.

The thunder of feet, Nisia running into the room to jump onto the bed beside Elena.

Raphael kept his hand cupped around the side of Elena’s face as the healer attempted to seal the wound that had stained the bed a dark scarlet.

“I am the other,” Elena repeated on a bloody whisper.

It is a time of change.

Hope burst open in Raphael’s heart. Is this just a stage in her development? Like the creatures that form a chrysalis then emerge? That would explain the white filaments that were now spreading up her neck in fine tendrils, like living snowflakes. On her chest, the spot the Legion had called a mirror sat silent and dark beneath the thick covering of white.

Wrong, he thought, that was wrong. A mirror should not absorb all light, all energy.

Yes, said Cassandra’s voice at the same instant. But she will not wake. The other will wake.

Raphael found patience he’d never known he possessed. What will happen to my Elena?

Memories, thoughts, laughter, tears, these will not survive. The other will be new. A birth.

Horror clawed at him. “Elena, you must listen.” He kissed her and when she opened her heavy lids, he told her Cassandra’s words and saw the dawn of her own horror.

“Raphael.”

“I remember, hbeebti. I remember.”

I would rather die as Elena, than live as a shadow.

Words she’d said to him long ago, when he’d spoken about erasing her mind of certain memories.

Why? he asked Cassandra. Why does the Cascade kill Elena? She is my heartbeat and the reason I can fight Lijuan. Her mortality had helped create the wildfire that was the one weapon they knew worked against Lijuan.

Child of fire, child of love, you cannot carry enough of the wild, bright fire in your body to fight the nightmare that comes. A mirror is not enough this time. There must be a vessel.

His rage became ice. I do not wish to be Lijuan who feeds from others, and I don’t need anyone to turn my consort into an energy container. I need her.

End her now or let the newborn vessel rise. That is the only choice.

“Sire.” Nisia, always unflappable, was sobbing so hard she could barely speak. “I can’t make her body heal itself.” She raised bloody hands from Elena’s wound. “My power is rejected.”

“Go,” Raphael ordered. “My consort and I have a decision to make.”

Elena was barely clinging to consciousness, but she managed to meet his gaze. “Tell me.”

So he did.

A faint smile. “A glorified gas tank?”

“This is no time for jokes, Guild Hunter.” He went to cradle her into his arms, but her body was stiff with all the filaments blooming on her skin. A few thin tendrils crawled up her cheek. “We must find a third solution.”