Guild Hunter 01 - Angels' Blood

Could she share everything with Sara now when to do so might be to expose the secrets of an entire race? Later, she told herself, she’d think about that later. “So, do you like my wings? Aren’t they the most exquisite things you’ve ever seen?”
    Sara started laughing. “Vanity, thy name is Elena.”
    “Thank you very much,” she said on a wave of determination. Losing Sara’s friendship wasn’t an option. And if she had to fight an archangel to keep it, so be it. “Now, tell me all the goss.”
     
     
    Outside, on the jagged rocks that guarded the Refuge, Raphael stood shoulder to shoulder with Dmitri. “A human sits in the Refuge,” he said, his hair whipped back by the wind. “It breaks one of our deepest taboos.”
    “She has no idea of the location—you can wipe her mind to ensure she can’t betray what little she does know.” Practical words from the leader of his Seven.
    “Yes.” But he wouldn’t and that was the change that was his. “Or I could trust Elena’s word on Sara’s sense of honor.”
    Dmitri nodded, and when he next spoke, his tone was quiet. “Elena will change us.”
    “She already has.” As wild and relentless as these fierce mountain winds, his hunter would never simply accept the way of things. And for a race of immortals, that might be the rudest of awakenings. Anticipation hummed in his blood.
    “Jason’s returned,” Dmitri said, pulling him back to the present.
    “When?”
    “Two days ago. Some of Lijuan’s reborn managed to injure him, but he’ll recover within the week.”
    Raphael nodded, knowing that more changes were afoot than the Making of an angel. “So it begins.”

Turn the page for a preview of
the next Psy-Changeling romance
from Nalini Singh
     
    Branded by Fire
    Coming in Summer 2009 from Berkley Sensation!

Change
     
    Change can kill.
    Devastate.
    Destroy.
    But it can also save. The Psy know this better than any other race on the planet. With the imposition of Silence, the protocol that wiped their emotions even as it saved their minds, this race of telepaths and telekinetics, foreseers and healers, a race both gifted and cursed, clawed its way back from the edge of the abyss.
    As they stood looking down into the horror they’d escaped, they shivered and turned away.
    Years passed. And when the Psy Council declared that their once catastrophic rate of insanity had lowered to negligible levels, that there was no longer any violence in the PsyNet, they knew they’d made the right decision. The only decision.
    Love. Happiness. Joy. What did any of that matter when the flip side was murderous rage, blood-soaked anarchy? The Psy preferred to leave such things to the “animal” races—and while the humans and changelings buried themselves in the viciousness of emotion, the Psy evolved into the most powerful beings on the planet.
    Cold. Pitiless. Silent.
    But now, in the year 2080, more than a hundred years after the “miracle” of Silence, the animal races are beginning to rise. And change is pulling the Psy back into the abyss. Into emotion and chaos . . . and nightmare.

1
     
    Mercy kicked a dry branch out of her way and glared. “Stupid stick.” Of course , it wasn’t the defenseless stick she was mad at—it just had the bad luck to be in her path as, shoulders hunched, she made her escape from the Pack Circle and the continuing revelry of Dorian’s mating ceremony.
    It was sickening how much her best friend was in love with his mate. In fact, all the other sentinels were starting to make her gag. “Clay making goo-goo eyes at Tally, and don’t get me started on Luc and Sascha.”
    Then there were the worst offenders of all—Nathan and Tamsyn. How dare they still be so crazy for each other after all these years! “Should be against the law,” she snarled. She wasn’t even going to think about Vaughn and Faith.
    She decided to go for a run instead.
    An hour later, and deep enough in the pack’s heavily forested territory that she couldn’t hear anything beyond the cautious whisper of nocturnal creatures moving about in the dark, she sat down on the smooth trunk of a fallen tree and blew out her breath. The truth was, she wasn’t mad at any of the sentinels or their mates. Damn, she was so crazy-happy for them it hurt. But she was jealous, too. Everyone was paired up now. Except her.
    “There,” she muttered. “I admitted it. I’m a big ole jealous baby.”
    Being a dominant female wasn’t a bad thing in