Elena and Raphael return for the hauntingly poignant conclusion to <New York Times< bestselling author Nalini Singh&rsquo;s genre-defining Guild Hunter series.

<A thousand years. <

It&rsquo;s been a millennium since Elena&rsquo;s fateful first meeting with Archangel Raphael. She has survived war and loss, experienced beauty and cruelty. But no matter what, she has always held on to her mortal heart, as she and Raphael have held on to each other. Passionate and vibrant, they&rsquo;ve built a life that has stood the test of time, growing ever stronger with each turn of the sun.

But change is coming&mdash;of a magnitude they could have never imagined&mdash;and it will forever alter the trajectory of their existence.

Even as they grapple with the cataclysmic shift in their personal lives, the Cadre of Ten, which has maintained a hard-won peace for centuries, begins to simmer with dangerous fault lines. The specter of madness looms in one archangel, the promise of war burns between two others, and in darkness far from mortal and immortal eyes stirs an ancient, slumbering power.

Suddenly, the future is terrifyingly uncertain . . . at the very moment that Elena and her archangel need to protect a treasure infinitely more precious than eternity.

Autorentext

Nalini Singh

Klappentext

Elena and Raphael return for the hauntingly poignant conclusion to New York Times bestselling author Nalini Singh’s genre-defining Guild Hunter series.

A thousand years.

It’s been a millennium since Elena’s fateful first meeting with Archangel Raphael. She has survived war and loss, experienced beauty and cruelty. But no matter what, she has always held on to her mortal heart, as she and Raphael have held on to each other. Passionate and vibrant, they’ve built a life that has stood the test of time, growing ever stronger with each turn of the sun.

But change is coming—of a magnitude they could have never imagined—and it will forever alter the trajectory of their existence.

Even as they grapple with the cataclysmic shift in their personal lives, the Cadre of Ten, which has maintained a hard-won peace for centuries, begins to simmer with dangerous fault lines. The specter of madness looms in one archangel, the promise of war burns between two others, and in darkness far from mortal and immortal eyes stirs an ancient, slumbering power.

Suddenly, the future is terrifyingly uncertain . . . at the very moment that Elena and her archangel need to protect a treasure infinitely more precious than eternity.

Leseprobe
1

. . . I have no plans to kill you. Not today.

-Archangel Raphael to Guild Hunter Elena Deveraux
(Once, on a Tower roof)

A thousand years old.

Elena's brain struggled to comprehend the enormity of that truth, a truth writ large in the city that sprawled in front of her. Her vantage point on the railingless balcony outside her and Raphael's Tower suite gave her a bird's-eye view of a Manhattan that had altered dramatically since the day she'd first walked into a meeting with an archangel . . . and into her destiny.

The waters of the Atlantic had surged quietly into the landscape in the three centuries since Illium's ascension, nibbling away the coastal border until part of the city was now waterborne, buildings and parks floating gently on oceanic waves.

Unlike the airborne habitats, which anchored to the earth only in emergencies, the water habitats were permanently anchored and connected to solid ground, bridge after bridge arcing over blue-green water and into Manhattan proper.

That had always felt right to Elena-her home had, from the beginning, been a land of bridges and water, though the Hudson and the East River slumbered sleepily these days after having settled into their new pathways four hundred years earlier. Their waters ran clearer than they had in her mortal years, and today, the sun turned the Hudson into a sheet of sparks that almost hurt the eye.

The metal and glass and soaring skyscrapers so iconic of New York during her mortal lifespan still existed, but where roads had once cut the city into neat grids, there were now thick corridors of living green that served that function now.

That green heart hadn't impacted only the roads-the biotech born partially of the Legion's enduring legacy had speared outward until New York's skyscrapers rose half-organic from the earth. Even the Tower was part organic, its external walls a gleam of midnight blue-black.

Anytime she placed a palm on that living "metal," the area around her hand turned a searing blue so distinctive, it needed no name to identify it. Hbeebti, it seemed to say. Hunter-mine.

The Tower reacted that way to no one else . . . but then, it was Raphael's blood that had provided the blueprint for the Tower's organic skin. In battle, the Tower was now an extension of its archangel, a repository of violent power that sang with his name.

Glimpses of yellow through the canopies of the massive trees that lined Manhattan's streets and avenues.

Elena smiled, the ache in her heart a fraction less painful. Because the yellow cabs had soldiered on through war and change and multiple transformations of the world and of technology.

Like all vehicles in New York these days, they didn't need roads except as designated pathways along which to quietly purr. Their passage was so gentle that they did no damage to the greenery over which they hummed-but the drivers continued to honk and shake their fists at others they thought were dawdling.

Because the drivers had also come through time and change and the failure of pure self-driving tech. The latter had never totally recovered from the incidents where vehicles had stopped for frothing-at-the-mouth vampire "pedestrians"-thus serving up their passengers as a gruesome smorgasbord.

To the left of the last cab, a private vehicle pulled to a stop on the "third deck" of the street, the final level assigned for air-parking. Elena's eyesight had become increasingly sharper with each new century of immortality, edging ever closer to the vision of a raptor, so she had no trouble seeing details even from this distance.

The black-clad woman who stepped out of the car and onto a small gravity float that carried her to the ground before the float retreated to the vehicle had hair a familiar sheet of glossy ebony-in which fluttered a colorful array of the tiny mechanical birds that were in style this decade.

Holly, off to look in on the design studio she'd founded three centuries earlier-the same studio that had set the trend for mechanical hair accessories. Each piece was designed according to the aesthetics of the early twentieth century in a seamless melding of the past and present. Holly had not only come up with the initial concept, she'd also taken it into immortal clubs and ballrooms.

A wash of wind behind Elena, followed by the susurration of wings as intimately familiar to her as the air of this city. Folding her own wings tighter against her back, Elena leaned into Raphael as he came to stand behind her, sliding his arms over her shoulders and around to hold her against the muscled heat of him.

His biceps were bare, his leathers sleeveless.

"Hbeebti." A kiss nuzzled to the side of her hair, which she'd allowed to grow until it reached her butt, but which she wore in a braid today. "You are in a contemplative mood."

Raising her right hand, she closed it over his forearm. Her bracelet slid down her wrist as she did so, each slender metal link bearing a name beloved to her.

Her mother. Sisters. Nieces. Nephew. Father. Sara.

Heart twisting, she said, "I'm having trouble accepting that, as of tomorrow, I'll have lived an entire millennium." Most immortals past a certain age either didn't …