Guild Hunter 01 - Angels' Blood

and more and more of Uram’s bolts seared his skin, his wings. You must live. She had to survive. Her spirit burned too bright to be so easily snuffed out.
    And he realized . . . that fragile, mortal life wasn’t just important to him. It was more important than his own. Wake, Guild Hunter!
    He finally got close enough to Uram to chance another blow, but his power reserves were running low. Below him, the city was a spreading darkness as they both sucked power from the electricity grid, from anything they could. Cars stalled and died, batteries went flat, pylons overloaded. Still Raphael kept pulling. But he knew his body was going to give out long before the available power did.
    He hit Uram’s wing and it wasn’t enough. The Angel of Blood had glutted himself on his kills and, even weakened, his wing healed faster than an ordinary angel’s, faster than even an archangel’s. Uram laughed and created another ball of angelfire. But this one he shot toward the half-destroyed apartment.
    Elena!
    Raphael intercepted the blast, taking the hit on his shoulder. Pain seared through his body as the fire touched bone and began eating its way through. Blinking away the sweat falling into his eyes, he kept fighting, hovering above the apartment so Uram couldn’t destroy it.
    “You fool,” Uram taunted. “You’d give up immortality for a mere woman?”
    Raphael answered by staying where he was, deflecting the angelfire Uram shot his way with unrelenting force. He could sense his men coming closer. He warned them to stay out of range. Only an archangel could withstand angelfire for longer than a few seconds. Then one of Uram’s bolts hit his uninjured shoulder.
    The fire had already eaten through one side to expose the whiteness of bone. His load-bearing muscles were failing one by one. But he kept fighting, hitting Uram several times, vaguely aware that Manhattan was now completely without power, pitch-black under his feet. Farther out, in Queens, in the Bronx, lights continued to go out in a slow, dark, wave.
    More power lay beyond those areas, but his body was close to giving out. Filling it with as much energy as he could contain, until the glow of it blazed from his skin, he readied himself for a final, suicidal clash. If he could make contact with Uram’s body, he might be able to burn them both up. A high price to pay, but an archangel turned Angel of Blood could tear the world apart, end civilization itself.
    Throwing back just enough angelfire to keep Uram from coming closer, but not enough to drain himself, he watched for a gap in his opponent’s defenses, for a single mistake. But when his chance came, it wasn’t because Uram made a mistake. No, it came because of a hunter too stubborn to surrender to evil.
    Gunshots fired from the open side of the torn apartment building, ripping through the bloodborn angel’s wings.
    Uram screamed and began to spiral down, shooting angelfire as he fell. Raphael flew toward the tumbling archangel, leading with his hands. As one hand impacted on Uram’s chest, he held on to to the bloodborn angel with his other and thrust. His hand went through Uram’s rib cage to hit his heart.
    “Good-bye, old friend,” he said, knowing that nothing of the angel he’d once known remained in this monster. Then he released a final, shocking blast of angelfire. It spread through Uram’s body like a fever—the dying archangel’s grabbing hands threatened to take Raphael down with him. But Raphael had to live. Because if he didn’t, Elena would die.
    He wrenched back an instant before Uram exploded in a burst of pure white light, lighting up the whole of Manhattan in a single second-long blast. Then it was over and Uram was not only dead, but erased from the cosmos. Not even dust remained.
    Bleeding from wounds that continued to worsen as the angelfire dug in ever deeper, Raphael should have landed. Instead, he beat his barely functional wings upward.
    One of Uram’s last, desperate bolts had hit the building. Raphael knew Elena had to have been on the very edge of the eight-story structure when she’d shot up at Uram. That edge was now gone, but he could feel Elena’s life, feel her dying flame. Elena, answer me.
    Quiet, peaceful, a hush of sound. Then, Stay a little human, won’t you, Raphael?
    A request that was almost not a sound at all. But it was enough. He followed the mental thread to discover her broken body on the narrow ledge provided by a precariously hanging neon