Archangel's Legion Read Online Free Page A

out over the downpour, the lights in the windows refracted by the hard rain coming in from the left. “It was above an island in what is now called the Pacific, the sky a rage of thunder, the lightning a violent dance. My friends and I, we made a game of dodging the strikes.”
    She wanted to smile at the image, but the wounds of the day were too raw to permit it. “An immortal game of chicken?”
    “Perhaps.” Blinking away the rain, he stepped back. “Come, we must see to the injured.”
    They stopped in at their Tower suite only long enough to dry off and change, before heading down to the infirmary. It made no difference that she’d already seen the damage—it was as bad now as it had been the first time. An angel with wings patterned like a sparrow’s had lost most of his internal organs, his chest a gaping cavity, but at four hundred, he’d survived the damage and now slept in an induced coma that would help him heal.
    Beside him was the near-decapitation victim, his life signs flickering. Kneeling beside the young male, Raphael placed his hand over the gruesome injury. Only Elena was close enough to see the faint blue glow that was an indication of Raphael’s growing but nascent healing ability. He couldn’t fix all the damage, but he could give the hurt man more of a fighting chance.
    Two beds down lay an angel who’d lost both legs at the upper thigh and broken most of the remaining bones in his body, including those in his brutalized face. But whether through luck or through fate, his brain was still inside the cracked eggshell of his skull, his heart in his chest, his spine damaged but not fatally so—because Izak wouldn’t have survived otherwise, being far too young to heal such trauma.
    “Sorry! Sorry! I just got out of the Refuge. I—” A gulp. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you that! Please don’t tell Raphael.”
    Anger and worry combined into a knot in her throat at the memory of their first meeting. He’d been hanging upside down off the roof over the little balcony of her old apartment, all yellow curls and huge eyes as he tried to sneak a peek at a real-live hunter. To see someone so young and innocent lying broken and silent, his body a mass of bruised and torn flesh . . .
    Elena wanted to do violence, make someone pay for this horror, but as of right now, they had no answers as to the origin of the nightmare, their enemy invisible.

3
    I t was well past the midnight hour when Raphael and his consort found their beds. He didn’t need rest as Elena did, but she slept better if he was in the bed with her. When she woke to find herself alone—and she almost always woke in the middle of the night if he wasn’t there—she came looking for him.
    The first time it had happened, he’d thought she’d been wrenched from her rest by nightmare echoes of the horror that had ended her childhood, but she’d said she just missed him. Such simple words. Such powerful words. So now he slept with her, at least for certain critical hours of the night.
    Tonight, though, neither one of them was ready to surrender to slumber. “Lijuan,” she said at last, her head against his shoulder. “Are you thinking the same?”
    “The possibility had occurred to me.” The Archangel of China was rapidly becoming the Archangel of Death, her abilities touched with the putrefaction of a final ending that was without mercy or dignity, for all that she called herself a giver of eternal life.
    Lijuan’s version of life was a horrific shambling shell fed of human flesh.
    “But?” Elena raised herself on her elbow so she could look down at him, the near-white strands of her hair brushing over his skin, a thousand fleeting caresses.
    He spread his fingers on the warmth of her lower back, stroked along the delicate arch of her spine. His tough hunter was still so vulnerable in countless ways, could well have been among the fallen today, for it was the youngest who’d borne the brunt of the damage, and Elena was