Guild Hunter 03 - Archangel's Consort

hurt anyone I love. Why won’t they stop?” It came out shaky, not with fear, but with a tight, helpless rage.
    “Our memories make us, Elena,” Raphael answered, in an echo of something she’d once said to him. “Even the darkest of them all.”
    Hand splayed out on his chest, she listened to the beat of his heart, strong, steady, always. “I won’t ever forget,” she whispered. “But I wish they’d stop haunting me.” It made her feel like a traitor to say those words, to dare to wish for such a thing when Ari and Belle had lived the nightmare. When her mother had been unable to escape it.
    “They will.” Knowledge in his tone. “I promise you.”
    And because he’d never broken a promise to her, she let him hold her through what remained of the night. Dawn was pushing its way into the room on slender fingers of gold and pink when the sweet nothingness of sleep took her under.
    But the peace only lasted for what felt like a mere blink of time.
    Elena. A wave crashing into her head, a fresh bite of storm.
    Groggy with sleep, she blinked open her eyes to see that she was alone in the sun-kissed bed, the rain having cleared away to leave the sky beyond the windows a startling azure. “Raphael.” A glance at the bedside clock showed her it was midmorning. Rubbing at her eyes, she sat up. “What is it?”
    Something has occurred that requires your skill.
    Her senses stretched awake in anticipation, her mental muscles seeming to pop with the same pleasure-pain as her physical ones when she lifted her arms and arched her body. Where do you need me?
    A school upstate. It is named the Eleanor Vand—
    She dropped her arms, abdomen heavy with dread. I know
    what it’s called. My sisters go there.

3
     
    Ten-year-old Evelyn saw Elena first. Evelyn’s eyes went wide as Elena said good-bye to the angel who’d escorted her to the location via the quickest route, and flared out her wings to come to a steady landing in the front yard of the tony prep school, the velvet green perfection marred only by a number of errant leaves. Miniature twisters of spring green and crisp brown, small dervishes full of irritation, rose up in the wind created by her descent.
    Folding away her wings, Elena gave her youngest half sister a nod of acknowledgment. Evelyn went to raise a hand in a tentative hello, but Amethyst, three years older than her sister, grabbed that hand to pull Evelyn to her side. Her dark blue eyes, so like her mother, Gwendolyn’s, warned Elena to keep her distance.
    Elena understood the reaction.
    Jeffrey and Elena hadn’t spoken for a decade after he threw her out—until just before the violent events that had led to her waking with wings of midnight and dawn. And prior to being disowned, Elena had been banished to boarding school for some time. As a result, she’d had no real contact with either of her half siblings. She knew of them, as they knew of her, but beyond that, they might as well have been strangers.
    There wasn’t even a surface resemblance to compel the recognition of familial ties—unlike Elena’s pale, near-white hair and skin touched with the sunset of Morocco, not to mention her height, the girls had their mother’s exquisite raven hair and petite build, their skin a rich cream that wouldn’t have looked out of place on an English rose. Evelyn still carried a layer of baby fat, but her bones were Gwendolyn’s, delicate and aristocratic.
    Both of Jeffrey’s wives had left their marks on his children.
    Looking away from the two small faces that watched her with a combination of wariness and a tight, cool accusation, she took in the rest of the people on the porch. Several other girls clustered together just beyond Evelyn and Amethyst, all dressed in the maroon and white of the school, along with a number of adults who had to be teachers. Nowhere did Elena see any sign of Raphael, which meant he was either inside the heavy building of cream-colored brick or behind its ivy-covered walls in the large inner courtyard where the girls ate lunch, sat on the grass, played games.
    Elena knew that because she’d made it a point to find out. It didn’t matter that the three of them were only connected by the frigid ties of Jeffrey’s blood—Evelyn and Amethyst were still her sisters, still hers to watch over. If they ever needed her, she would be there ... as she hadn’t been able to be there for Ari and Belle.
    Heart encircled by a thousand shards of metal, each a stabbing blade,