Elena lifted her fingers to brush the mark. “It’s afire.”

The Cascade begins again. I wonder how long this cycle will last, and if it will be the final one before the cataclysmic crescendo the Legion warn us is coming. Raphael’s voice was the sea at its calmest while treacherous currents swirled underneath. “Look up.”

Elena shivered, not wanting to see whatever it was that had captured an archangel’s attention. Not wanting to know why Raphael’s skin was suddenly brushed with a light that held edges of crimson. At the same time, she had to see, had to know the threat looming on the horizon.

She looked up.

The sky boiled as red and angry as the lava at their feet.

And the rain, when it fell, was almost hot enough to burn. Minuscule bullets fired into the snow, creating tens of thousands of tiny tunnels and causing the survivors to run for the shade of the trees.

None of that, however, was as bad as the haunting and old, old voice in Elena’s head that wasn’t her own: Child of mortals, your time comes. For one must die for one to live. A sigh drenched with a terrible sadness. You must die.

5

Chilled to the bone in more ways than one, Elena barely made it to the Enclave house as night began to fall in a cold curtain bright with starlight that cut. Her wing was no worse than when she’d first injured it, but she was exhausted. Her muscles ached. Her back felt as if it had been pummeled by a prizefighter. And her boots had turned into heavy cement blocks while she hadn’t been looking.

“I think I’m getting the flu,” she said to Sara on the phone, after collapsing on her back on the enormous bed in her and Raphael’s bedroom.

“Immortals don’t get the flu.”

“I’m only a fledgling immortal.” She could swear her bones had begun to ache too; maybe it was growing pains, a kind of immortal puberty.

She made a face at the horrifying thought. Puberty had been bad enough the first time around—she didn’t need a redo. “Was the rain hot in the city?”

“Melted the snow right down. Which means it’s now turned to ice—I almost brained myself three times on the walk home from the subway.”

A higher-pitched voice in the background, excited and fast.

“Come on, then”—Sara’s tone held a love intense enough to burn—“say night-night to Auntie Ellie.”

“Hi, Auntie Ellie! I gotta go to bed.” Words heavy with disappointment. “I made you a crossbow. I’m gonna paint it red for danger.”

Elena grinned despite her fluey exhaustion. “I can’t wait to see it.” Zoe Elena might be a girl of barely seven and a half, but she’d been “helping” Sara’s husband, Deacon, in his workshop since before she could walk. Six months ago, she’d graduated from plastic toy tools to miniature actual tools. “Give your mom extra kisses for me tonight.”

“Mwah! Mwah! Mwah!” Each word was accompanied by a loud smacking sound and Sara’s delighted laughter.

“Good night, cuddle bug,” Elena heard through the line, followed by a deeper voice responding to Zoe’s animated tones. Then Sara said, “Ellie, give me a minute to go tuck her in with Deacon.”

A knock sounded on Elena’s door at almost the same instant.

Levering herself up into a seated position with a small groan, her wings spread out on the bed behind her, Elena said, “Come in.”

Montgomery, handsome and precise in his black suit, his black hair newly cut, and his white shirt spotless, entered with a tray. “The sire asked Sivya to prepare a high-energy bite for you,” he said in his English-accented voice.

Elena’s heart did that mushy thing it only ever did for Raphael. The first time they’d ever met, he’d forced her to close her hand over a knife blade, cut herself until her blood dripped to create a dark splatter at her feet. Life and love had changed them both, until she could barely remember the cold and pitiless archangel who’d once hired her for a hunt unlike any other.

“Thanks, Montgomery. It looks like I’ve turned into an eating machine again.” Her stomach rumbled on cue as he put the tray onto a small table, then moved the entire thing closer to the bed. “Can you ask Sivya to make her special energy bars?” Elena’s immortal development surged and ebbed like the Cascade, with her body demanding enormous amounts of fuel during each surge phase.

“She begins even now,” Montgomery assured her.

Mouth already full of a delicious cheesy thing, Elena mumbled her appreciation. Montgomery’s eyes were smiling when he withdrew, closing the door behind himself. Elena put her phone on speaker then dug in.

“Ellie, you there?” Sara’s voice.

“Uh-huh,” Elena got out past the bite she’d just taken.

“Zoe will stretch things out for another half hour,” Elena’s best friend said affectionately. “Extra bedtime stories, bathroom visit, a glass of water—our little scam artist’s got every trick in the book down pat.”

“That’s my girl.” Elena took a drink of the vitamin-infused water on the tray. “I actually called to say I won’t make it for coffee tonight.”

“I figured that after I heard about the sinkhole. Is it bad?”

“One fatality.” She’d made the notification personally on her way home, hurt wing or not. Imani’s sadness had been all the more affecting for being so contained.

“Foolish boy,” she’d said quietly as the two of them stood in the midst of the eerily blooming rose garden. “Now he will never have a chance to gain wisdom.” Her lovely, sad eyes had met Elena’s. “You are tired and yet you offer me the respect of words spoken from your own lips.” An incline of her head. “I will not forget, Consort.”

Behind her, the roses stirred in a cold wind, petals falling to the snow.

Drops of blood red against pristine white.

Elena had left unsettled, the roses as unnerving as the unearthly voice in her head. That voice hadn’t spoken again after telling her she was going to die, and she hoped it’d stay silent forever. No one sane heard predictions of her own death from inside her own skull.

Talking to Sara was exactly the antidote she needed. After bringing her friend up to speed on the sinkhole, she said, “I managed to tear a muscle in my wing.” The increasing pain was why she’d returned ahead of Raphael—there was no point being in the field if she became a liability. “Senior healer did some work on it, slathered my shoulder in ointment then grounded me for the night.”

“How did you injure it?” Sara demanded, her tone curt in that way it got when she was worried. “Shouldn’t you be beyond that?”

Scowling, Elena told her best friend the worst of it. “Nisia said she’d only seen this injury on baby angels—actual babies—who were trying to do tricks before their bones hardened enough.” Needless to say, being compared to angelic infants who flew like drunk bumblebees had been excellent for Elena’s ego. “She thinks I must’ve been ‘too enthusiastic’ with my vertical takeoff this morning.”

“So it’ll heal?”

Elena swallowed her current mouthful before replying. “Within the week, but good news is I’m allowed to fly again come morning.” To lose the sky after gaining the beauty of flight would be a nightmare. “No verticals, but glides and low-speed wing movements are fine.”

Sara chuckled. “Remember that time you tore your hamstring jumping off a building on your first hunt?”

“Jeez, Jameisha tore a strip off me.” The now-retired Guild medic had been ancient even then, but they’d all been petrified of her wrath. “What’s she up to these days?”

“According to her last message, whatever the hell she damn well feels like,” Sara said in an excellent approximation of Jameisha’s croaky chain-smoker’s voice. “You should go rest,” she added afterward. “We can talk later.”

“No, I could use the company.” Grounded as she was, she’d just be eating and waiting for Raphael to get home otherwise. “What did you want to talk about?”

Sara took a long time to speak. “Archer,” she said at last.

Elena’s muscles bunched. Putting down the savory muffin she’d picked up, she leaned forward with her forearms on her thighs. “I’m still having trouble getting my head around it.” Hunters lived dangerous lives, but for Archer to have gone out the way he had, it just seemed wrong. “I half expect to find a message from him in my e-mail even though I went to the funeral, even though I know he’ll never message me again.”

Quinton Archer had been the Guild’s Slayer, the hunter charged with tracking down and executing those of their own kind who’d turned murderous. Hunters were trained killers after all, and had the expertise to avoid or eliminate anyone who stood in their path.

It took a hunter to track a hunter. It took the Slayer.

Archer had been so good at remaining unseen by skilled hunters that they’d called him the phantom. He’d been the Guild’s Slayer since Deacon stepped down from the position, but Elena had only met him about two years ago—at a dinner at Sara’s. The two of them had stayed in touch since; Elena knew he’d only given himself permission to begin the friendship because she existed outside the Guild. He’d never be called upon to track and execute her.

“It was seven months ago today that he died,” Sara shared softly. “I think about what his final moments might’ve been like each night when I close my eyes.”

Elena’s fingers clenched on the phone. “Do you think . . . ?”

“I don’t know.” Her best friend’s voice held the weight of what it meant to be director. “Losing his wife one year then his daughter the next messed him up—especially after he’d managed to get her into rehab, but he was upbeat the last time I saw him, said he had plans for the future. And the police confirmed skid marks on the road. It was just an accident on a rainy night.”