Land on the closest surface. Now!
Looking down, she saw a passing barge and was down three seconds later, Raphael landing beside her. The crew stared slack jawed, but didn’t approach. “I have my cell phone,” she said, having stuffed it into a pocket from force of habit. “I can call Aodhan—”
“It’s done.” Raphael’s eyes remained on the roiling blackness as he spoke. “All of the angels in the air have received the instruction to land.”
Skin crawling at the phenomenon, Elena made a different call. “There might be another incident,” she told Sara, knowing that as Guild Director, her best friend had access to an automated warning system that could send out a text message to every hunter in the vicinity. “Tell everyone to watch for—shit, tell them to watch for anything.”
“Got it.”
Hanging up, Elena stood with her body aligned to Raphael’s, their eyes skyward as the barge continued to move along the river. The crew had their heads tilted back now, voices pitched high and words tumbling one over the other as they spoke rapidly in an unfamiliar language.
Elena’s faint hope that the unnatural clouds would just disperse or float out to sea died a quick death when the boiling patch settled right over the barge, following it as the watercraft traversed the river. Then the cloud began to fall at high speed, causing the crew to scream, duck, but Elena and Raphael kept their eyes on the sky.
So they saw the “cloud” wasn’t a cloud at all.
“They’re not falling.” That alone distinguished this phenomenon from the one that had begun the strange events.
As they watched, hundreds—thousands—of birds landed all around them, until the tiny winged beings completely covered the barge, their combined weight making it sink deeper into the water. The truly eerie thing was their absolute silence. No chirping, no fighting even where they sat on top of one another, nothing . . . but for the fact that every single set of tiny bird eyes was locked on them.
No, not on them. On Raphael.
Okay, creepy. They’re staring at you.
Or something is.
The birds rose into the air in a mass of wings the next instant, dispersing so fast it was difficult to imagine they’d been there as a cohesive force—until she looked at Raphael. His skin burned with cold power, as if a cool blue light glowed beneath the surface of his skin.
Come, Consort.
Heart thumping against her ribs at the piercing ice of his mental tone, she ignored the cringing crew to turn into his arms for the liftoff. He released her as soon as they’d gained the correct altitude, both of them angling toward the Tower in silence. Aodhan was waiting on the balcony outside Raphael’s office, his eyes reflecting the glittering night of Manhattan in jagged shards.
“No casualties or injuries,” the angel said, “no reports of anything except for garbled messages originating from a barge on the Hudson.”
“Thank you, Aodhan.”
Waiting until the angel left, she walked to stand beside Raphael on the very edge of the railingless balcony that looked out over the nightscape of their city. “Archangel.”
“Yes.” He turned, and on his face, the red blemish pulsed.
Again, he was distant. But this time, she didn’t wait. Shifting to stand toe to toe with him, she drew him into a kiss that tasted of the sea and of darkness, cold, silence. Heavy and old, so old, as if the silence had grown for thousands upon thousands of years, until it was an entity that lived and breathed.
Shivering, she pressed closer, her breasts crushed against his chest, his hand fisted in her hair. It wasn’t until she broke the passionate ice of the kiss, her chest spiderwebbed with frost, that she saw. “Your irises”—that incredible, unearthly blue—“they’re black.”
“A temporary effect.” Raphael could feel the darkness as it crawled through him, chill and drenched with a strange, potent power. It sank into his cells, an intruder the angelfire inside him attempted to eliminate.
He fought his instincts, knowing he needed to own this power, hold it—except it threatened to own him. Even now, his blood felt as if it crystallized into frost, his view of the world filtered through a layer of chilling remoteness, until only Elena was drenched in color. Vibrant and alive and with the wings of a warrior, she burned against a backdrop of gray, the rest of the world meaning nothing to him.
If he needed to obliterate this city to win the war, it would be an inconvenience that could later be remedied. Millions would die, but he was an immortal, knew others would replace them given enough time. All that mattered was the power, holding on to it, shaping it, becoming it.