Bright eyes of silver-gray searching his own. “You’re here.”
“Yes.” The power, cold and beautiful and dangerous, had threatened to swallow him, but in his refusal to be cut off from Elena, he’d found the clarity to understand once more that he couldn’t hope to control the vicious strength of it . . . but even a mere taste had been potent. If he could just find a way to hold a fraction of it, no other immortal would dare turn his or her eyes to his territory.
Elena’s fingers digging into his shoulders. “Hey, hey, your eyes are going black again.”
“So much power, Elena,” he said, burying his face against her hair as the cold fingers of it snaked through his veins. The whispers urged him to accept what he was given, as the scent of age, of time, filled his senses, as if this power had slept an eon and woke only for him. “I would be the most powerful archangel in the world.”
Shivering at the ice in that whisper, in her awareness that his heart no longer beat, his breath frigid, Elena tugged back his head to look into those inhuman eyes. “You would be a monster,” she reminded him. “I’d be nothing to you, my life one you’d snuff out without thought.”
“You are everything.” His kiss was so cold it threatened to shock her own heart into halting its beat. Unlike him, she wouldn’t survive.
Raphael, my . . . she managed to get out through the searing cold, her breath frozen in her chest when he broke their kiss. I’m dying, Archangel. It took all her strength to force that out past the ice in her brain.
A blink, incandescent blue flaring outward from his irises as one of his hands flattened over her breastbone. “NO!”
A punch of violent white-hot power that made her scream, her back bowing and her heart stuttering back to life. Somehow finding the will to think, to get her frozen hands to his cheeks to cup his face, she said, “Let it go,” through chattering teeth. “The power isn’t worth the price.”
Both arms crushing her close, his breath still frigid but his eyes that incredible, astonishing blue, he said, “Hold on, hbeebti.”
The sky exploded in an ear-piercing lightning storm of blue electric with piercing white fire that sheared away the ruby red to expose patches of the sky as it should be. With the blood went the abnormal cold and Elena found herself gulping in air that didn’t feel as if it was frozen crystals in her throat, in her lungs, her heart kicking into a normal rhythm.
She jerked when the first icy droplet hit her cheek . . . but this was only water, the air scented with the clean, fresh ozone of the rain that crashed down from a storm-darkened sky, washing away the stain of blood. Leaning back as much as she could given the tightness of Raphael’s hold, she tugged down his head with a hand on his nape and kissed him again—this time, the raw heat of him made her body burn, her breasts swelling against the heavy wetness of her combat gear.
“Glad to have you back, Archangel.” Another soft, suckling kiss of his lips, warm and alive, the rain turning to steam where they touched.
His forehead dropped to her own, his breath harsh and chest heaving. “I want no power that makes me cause you harm.” One hand rising between them, he rubbed it over her bruised heart, the curls of heat telling her he was fixing the damage.
“All good,” she murmured when he dropped his hand, her skin prickling with the need to reinitiate their bond in a more primal way.
“I also,” he said, his body pushing hard and ready against her abdomen, “do not want any power that turns my cock to ice.”
Oh yeah, he was back, she thought with a grin. “You have no idea how fervently I second that.” And though they hung in the midst of icy winter rain, she took the time to press her mouth to his, to indulge in a kiss so sexual, he might as well have been inside her body. No ice, no distance, only a molten heat between male and female, between an archangel and his consort.
• • •
Landing at the Tower, Raphael discovered from Aodhan that people were scared, believing he’d made the sky rain blood.
That, Raphael thought, could work to their advantage.
When he said as much to Elena while they dried themselves off in their Tower suite, she paused with the towel over her breasts, a gleam in her eye. “You should make sure Charisemnon and Lijuan hear about your new ‘power.’”
“I’m certain they’ve already heard.” Dry, he took the towel and bade her turn so he could pat the last of the moisture off her wings, her feathers designed to sleek off wet. “Dmitri says recordings of the event are already trending on media sites worldwide.”
“Right, what was I thinking?” Elena threw up her hands. “That New Yorkers would actually, I don’t know, hide or something else sane when the sky was raining freaking blood?”