Archangel's Kiss(41)

 
 She should have gone outside, found help. But she wanted her mom, needed to see that she was alive, was breathing. Shoving through her parents' bedroom door, she slammed it shut behind her, turned the lock. "Mama!"
 
 There was no answer.
 
 But when she looked around, relief poured through her. Because Mama was just sleeping. Running over on feet that continued to leave fading red imprints on the carpet, she shook her mother's shoulder.
 
 And saw the gag around her mouth, the knives that pinned her wrists and ankles to the sheets. "Mama."Her lower lip quivered, but she was already reaching to undo the gag.
 "I'll help you. I'll help you."
 
 It was the terrified warning in her mother's eyes that made her turn.
 
 "Bad little hunter." Shaking the bedroom key at her, the monster pulled the needle out, and looked at it with a single curious eye, the other a bloody ruin down his cheek. "Do you think Mommy would like a present?"
 
 "Wake up, Elena! "
 
 
 She jerked into a kneeling position in one go, reaching for the knife she'd slipped under the pillow out of habit. Raphael looked up at her as she stared down at him, knife held high, ready to go for his throat.
 
 Red hazed her vision, her tendons quivering with the need to strike out.
 
 Elena.The scent of the sea, of the wind.You're safe.
 
 "I'll never be safe." It came out a withheld scream, so taut, so painful it was barely sound. "He hunts me in my dreams."
 
 "Who?"
 
 "You know." She tried to lower the knife. Her muscles refused.
 
 "Say it. Make him real, not a phantom."
 
 Her mouth filled with the taste of bitter rage. "Slater Patalis." The most infamous killer vampire in recent history. "We were his last snack stop."
 
 "The records say the hunters were able to capture him because you disabled him."
 
 "I remember stabbing him through the eye, but that wouldn't have stopped him." Her fingers finally unclenched, dropping the knife. It would've sliced into her thigh had Raphael not caught it midfall.
 
 Placing it on the small bedside table, he said, "Your memories are incomplete?"
 
 "They're coming back more and more." She stared out at the wall, seeing nothing but blood. "I've always seen parts, but now I think they were jumbled up pieces of the whole.
 What I saw tonight . . ." Her eyes burned, her hands fisting on her thighs. "The monster broke my mother's legs, her arms, pinned her to the bed, made her listen as he killed Belle and Ari."
 
 Raphael opened his arms. "Come here, hunter."
 
 She shook her head, unwilling to surrender to weakness.
 
 "Even an immortal," Raphael said quietly, "has nightmares."
 
 She knew he wasn't talking about her. Somehow, that made it easier. She fell into his embrace, burying her face in the warm curve of his neck, the clean, bright scent of him filling her lungs. "Later, I saw the streaks on the carpet, realized she'd tried to come to us even after he hurt her so badly. But he came back upstairs, put her in that bed again."
 
 "Your mother fought for you."
 
 
 "She lost consciousness soon after I found her. I was so scared then, so afraid to be all alone with him, but now, I think her lack of consciousness was a mercy." Her stomach twisted because in the most secret depths of her mind, she knew Slater had hurt her mother in other ways, made Elena watch. "I stayed awake because I knew Beth was coming home from her sleepover soon. I knew I couldn't let the monster get her. But he was gone before that."
 
 "So your youngest sister was saved from the horror."
 
 "I don't know," Elena said, remembering the lack of comprehension on Beth's small face at the funeral ceremony for Ari and Belle. "It was her first ever sleepover, and I don't think she's spent a night away from home ever again. Somewhere deep inside, she's afraid of what she'll come home to."
 
 "You, too, hold a hidden fear," Raphael murmured. "What is it that you're so scared to speak of?"
 
 "I think," she said through the haze of tears she refused to let fall, "he did something to me." Then he'd left both her and Marguerite alive, while Ari and Belle lay dead on the kitchen tiles.
 
 "Tell me." Raphael's voice was an icy breeze.
 
 She welcomed the ice, wrapping it around herself like a safety blanket. "I haven't reached that part of the day yet." Her heart squeezed off panicked beats at the idea but she held on to Raphael, his body strong beneath hers, and confronted the nightmare head-on. "Whatever it was, it was so bad, I blanked it from my mind all these years."
 
 "It may have been the transition that resurrected the memories." His arms were granite around her, possessive, protective, immoveable. "Your coma may have unlocked the same part of your mind as that which opens in immortals duringanshara ."
 
 He'd fallen into the deep healing sleep during the hunt for Uram, had returned to his childhood, to the heartbreaking beauty of his mother's face looking down into his while he bled across a meadow floor. "It opens memories that have faded over time, until we believe that they are long gone."
 
 "Nothing's ever gone." A warm breath across his neck, fingers curling into his chest.
 "We fool ourselves that things fade, but they never do."
 
 Raphael brushed a hand over that brilliant near-white hair that had hung like a banner over his arm as they fell to earth in Manhattan. Some memories, he thought, were etched in stone.
 
 "What do you dream of inanshara ?"
 
 
 "It's not something spoken of. Each angel's journey is his own."
 
 Elena's fingers spread over his heart. "I guess it's about confronting your demons."
 
 "Yes." And then he made a decision he'd never thought he'd make-not since the day he watched Caliane move across the dew-sparkling grass, her feet so light, her voice so clear as she hummed an old lullaby. "I dream of my mother."
 
 Elena stilled. "Not your father?"
 
 "My father was the monster who was known." His mother had been the horror in the dark, unknown, unknowable. "Caliane kissed me good-bye as I lay bleeding and bloody after a fight I knew I'd never win." But he'd had to try, had to stop the madness that had spread a dark stain across his mother's eyes. "That was the last time I saw her."
 
 "Was she killed by the Cadre?"
 
 "No one knows what happened to my mother." It was a mystery that had haunted him for hundreds of years, would probably continue to do so for thousands more. "She simply vanished. No trace of her was ever found after the day I watched her walk away." He hadn't been discovered for . . . a long time. So young, so damaged, he hadn't been able to summon help, had lain there a broken bird, his wings crushed.
 
 "Do you think she knew?" Elena asked, sorrow in her voice. "That she took her own life to spare you the task?"
 
 "Some say that." Raphael ran his fingers down her wings, fascinated as always by the blend of colors that marked his hunter as unique even among angelkind.
 
 "What about you?"
 
 "When angels have lived millennia, they sometimes choose to Sleep until such time as they feel compelled to wake." Secret places, hidden places, that was where angels slept when eternity became a burden.
 
 "Do you think Caliane is Sleeping?"
 
 "Until I see her body, see her burial place . . . yes, I think my mother Sleeps."
 
 "Shh, my darling, shh."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                        
       
           



       26
 
 The next six weeks passed in a fury of weapons and flight training-with Raphael when he was in the Refuge, and with Galen when Raphael had to return to the Tower. Her spare time, she spent inhaling as much information as she possibly could, and visiting Sam. To her delight, the boy was healing far faster than anyone had predicted. Noel, too, was well on the way to recovery.
 
 There was no more overt violence at the Refuge . . . except for the bloodstained Guild daggers that kept showing up in places she frequented. The blood proved to be Noel's, so there could be no mistake about the origin of the threat. Unfortunately, the daggers had all been devoid of vampiric scents. And Elena's angel-tracking ability continued to be wildly erratic.
 
 Frustrated at the lack of a solid lead-but determined to ensure she'd be no easy target-
 Elena had just dropped off another dagger at the forensic center one cool morning when she came face-to-face with Neha's daughter.
 
 "Namaste."The greeting came from the mouth of an enchantingly beautiful woman with the sloe-eyed gaze of a born sybarite . . . if one didn't see the calculating intelligence behind it.