PRAISE FOR THE GUILD HUNTER NOVELS OF NALINI SINGH
“Paranormal romance doesn’t get better than this.”
—Love Vampires
“Intense, vivid, and sexually charged.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[A] remarkable urban fantasy series.”
—RT Book Reviews (Top Pick)
“World-building that blew my socks off.”
—Meljean Brook, New York Times bestselling author
“[A] heart-pounding, action-packed story line of love and loss; death and destruction; family and friends; intrigue and suspense.”
—The Reading Cafe
“It’s dark and edgy, and so atmospheric.”
—Book Chick City
“Mesmerizing . . . Fascinating world-building.”
—Bitten by Books
“The Guild Hunter series is not set in a peaceful world and Singh doesn’t pull any punches.”
—The Book Pushers
“Completely awe-inspiring.”
—Fallen Angel Reviews
“Stunning, original, beautiful, intriguing, and mesmerizing.”
—Errant Dreams Reviews
“[Ms. Singh] has a knack for writing characters that are truly believable, and admirably strong and resilient.”
—Dark Faerie Tales
“One of the most immersive and consistently creative works in urban fantasy.”
—Grave Tells
“[A] fabulous addition to the paranormal world.”
—Fresh Fiction
“[A] powerful, riveting novel. I found myself wholly absorbed.”
—Dear Author
“Dark, lush urban fantasy, steeped in violence and power.”
—HeroesandHeartbreakers.com
Berkley titles by Nalini Singh
Psy-Changeling Series
SLAVE TO SENSATION
VISIONS OF HEAT
CARESSED BY ICE
MINE TO POSSESS
HOSTAGE TO PLEASURE
BRANDED BY FIRE
BLAZE OF MEMORY
BONDS OF JUSTICE
PLAY OF PASSION
KISS OF SNOW
TANGLE OF NEED
HEART OF OBSIDIAN
SHIELD OF WINTER
SHARDS OF HOPE
ALLEGIANCE OF HONOR
Psy-Changeling Trinity Series
SILVER SILENCE
OCEAN LIGHT
Guild Hunter Series
ANGELS’ BLOOD
ARCHANGEL’S KISS
ARCHANGEL’S CONSORT
ARCHANGEL’S BLADE
ARCHANGEL’S STORM
ARCHANGEL’S LEGION
ARCHANGEL’S SHADOWS
ARCHANGEL’S ENIGMA
ARCHANGEL’S HEART
ARCHANGEL’S VIPER
ARCHANGEL’S PROPHECY
Anthologies
AN ENCHANTED SEASON
(with Maggie Shayne, Erin McCarthy, and Jean Johnson)
THE MAGICAL CHRISTMAS CAT
(with Lora Leigh, Erin McCarthy, and Linda Winstead Jones)
MUST LOVE HELLHOUNDS
(with Charlaine Harris, Ilona Andrews, and Meljean Brook)
BURNING UP
(with Angela Knight, Virginia Kantra, and Meljean Brook)
ANGELS OF DARKNESS
(with Ilona Andrews, Meljean Brook, and Sharon Shinn)
ANGELS’ FLIGHT
WILD INVITATION
NIGHT SHIFT
(with Ilona Andrews, Lisa Shearin, and Milla Vane)
WILD EMBRACE
Specials
ANGELS’ PAWN
ANGELS’ DANCE
TEXTURE OF INTIMACY
DECLARATION OF COURTSHIP
WHISPER OF SIN
SECRETS AT MIDNIGHT
A JOVE BOOK
Published by Berkley
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2018 by Nalini Singh
Excerpt from Silver Silence copyright © 2017 by Nalini Singh
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
A JOVE BOOK, BERKLEY, and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Ebook ISBN: 9780451491657
First Edition: November 2018
Cover art by Tony Mauro
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
For Ashwini, who is one tough beta reader.
And who puts up with late-night calls from a certain writer who keeps vampire hours and wants to talk out the stories in her brain.
Also, who sat next to me on a plane and let me interrupt her every five minutes saying,
“Read this and give me your opinion,”
while I was working out a particularly tough scene.
Thanks for helping to make this book so awesome.
Contents
Praise for the Guild Hunter Novels of Nalini Singh
Berkley titles by Nalini Singh
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
The Legion
Chapter 47
The Legion
Chapter 48
Excerpt from Silver Silence
About the Author
A time of life
The drinker of blood lost
The agony of rebirth
The last feather to fall
Such eyes of wild fire, Such broken dreams
One must die for one to live
And the birds, ah, the birds always know
—ARCHANGEL CASSANDRA, ANCIENT AMONG ANCIENTS, LOST TO AN EONS-LONG SLEEP
1
Elena noticed the sparrows with the periphery of her mind.
The small birds were dipping and dancing beyond the Tower windows, their wings nearly brushing the glass. For a second, she felt a chill on the back of her neck, but then the sparrows flew off to do sparrow business and she realized she was being paranoid. Just because the city’s birds had gone all creepy and otherworldly once didn’t mean every sparrow was a harbinger.
Sometimes a bird was just a bird.
She returned to her Scrabble death match with Vivek.
Ten minutes later, the two of them were taking an insane amount of pleasure in arguing over a word when Sara called to ask her to track a young vampire who thought he could skip out on his Contract. “Why?” she said to both Sara and Vivek, after putting the conversation on speaker.
“Because you’re a Guild Hunter, and we find and haul back runaway vampires,” was Sara’s dry response. “If you don’t know that by now, Ellie, there’s no hope for you.”
“No.” Elena leaned back in her chair across from Vivek. “Why do a certain percentage of baby vamps think that (a) all the nasty, terrible things they’ve heard about the old angels aren’t true, and (b)—after discovering that, in fact, all the previous knowledge they had is true, why do they think they’ll be the one wet-behind-the-ears idiot who’ll make it to freedom?”
Both of those things made zero sense to Elena. You’d have to be blind, deaf, and mentally unhinged not to realize that angelkind was not human in any way, shape, or form. To a being who had lived a thousand years, what were mortals and new-Made vampires but bugs to be crushed? Nothing but fragile fireflies. Pretty perhaps, if your tastes ran that way, but gone and forgotten in mere heartbeats.
That Elena was now the consort of the most powerful immortal in North America didn’t change her bone-deep understanding of that searing truth. Raphael was learning to act with more humanity because of the bond of love that tied them together, but he wasn’t human, and he never would be; it’d be like asking a ferocious tiger to turn tame. An impossibility—and a destruction.
Raphael was a glorious fury, a power.
Elena was a newborn angel with a heart that would always be mortal, even should she live ten thousand years.
“I have an answer.” Vivek raised his hand, his sharply handsome face bearing a cheek-creasing grin, and the rich brown of his skin lit with good humor.
It had been a long time since Elena had seen any sign of the petulance and pettiness that had once been as much a part of him as his striking intellect. Then, Vivek had controlled the Cellars, the hidey-hole the Guild kept for hunters who needed to lie low for a while—such as a wayward hunter who might’ve slit the throat of a vampire so brutally powerful he was an archangel’s second.
Elena still wasn’t sorry about that. Dmitri had deserved to feel the lethal edge of her knife and more. And it wasn’t as if he’d been at any risk of dying. The arrogant fuck had blown her a kiss while his shirt was wet with darkest crimson, the blood loss nothing to a vampire that strong.
Not that his lack of injuries and twisted delight in the violent interaction had stopped him from stalking Elena—hence her need to disappear into the Cellars. In that underground world, Vivek had been king, and he’d relished his power. Piss him off and you’d say good-bye to air-conditioning, your room a sauna—and forget about fresh coffee. These days, however, the Cellars were someone else’s domain; and, like her, Vivek was growing into a strange new skin.
In the five years since he’d been Made a vampire, the formerly tetraplegic guild hunter had regained the use of his arms and most of his upper body. Even though his lower body remained numb to sensation and offered no way for him to get out of the wheelchair he’d been in since childhood, Vivek wasn’t complaining.
The healers had predicted it would take decades for him to regain even basic movement.
“Enlighten us,” Sara said in response to Vivek’s declaration, her tone distinctly amused. Whispers coming through the line told Elena her best friend was clearing paperwork while she spoke to them; the Guild director’s job was never finished.
“The transition to vampirism,” Vivek said in an ostentatiously pompous tone, “causes a reaction in a small percentage of vampires that turns on the idiot gene.” He held up a finger in a “pay attention” stance. “Said gene is located on chromosome pair twenty-four, colloquially known as the vampire chromosome.”
Elena nodded with equal solemnity. “An intriguing hypothesis, Professor Kapur. Perhaps you should apply for a VPA research grant.”
As Vivek cracked up at her reference to the Vampire Protection Authority—which seemed to exist to slap guild hunters with “excessive force” violations, usually while the hunters were still bleeding from vampire bites and clawings—Sara said, “If you two comedians are finished, I need you to haul ass, Ellie. Angel involved is very senior and very angry. Name’s Imani.”
Elena could’ve resigned from the Guild years ago. Being Consort to the Archangel of New York tended to tie up a woman’s time. But she’d clung to the Guild with her fingernails, being a hunter as much a part of her psyche as breathing. Even more so because she was hunter-born: a bloodhound with the capacity to track vampires by scent.
Rusted oak, champagne, sugar mixed with camphor, a cascade of flowers.
Just four scents among the millions in the world. Her brain had the capacity to narrow down a particular scent to a particular vampire. Vivek, for example, was cold and fresh river water and a vivid burst of aquamarine shards. She knew the latter wasn’t a scent, but it was the only way she’d found to describe what she picked up around her friend.
As for the angel-tracking ability she’d begun to develop after waking as an angel, that remained erratic at best and nonexistent at worst.
“I know Imani,” she said to Sara.
“I was hoping you’d say that. She’s . . . touchy.”
That was one word for the angel in question. “I’ll calm her down.”
“I’ve sent the details to your phone. You want a necklet?”
“No, I’ll be fine.” No point detouring to Guild HQ for the vampire immobilization device when she already had the advantage of wings as well as a droplet of immortal strength. Not much. Laughable when compared to angelkind, but she was now much harder to hurt than any other hunter in the Guild. “If I can’t haul back a runner on my own, I need to be put in Guild remedial school.”
As Vivek grinned, Sara said, “Come by tonight for a coffee. I want to talk to you about something.”
“I’ll be there.” Hanging up, Elena pointed a finger at Vivek. “I do not withdraw my challenge about your most recently created word.”
“Your funeral.” Vivek had on his Scrabble poker face. “I’ll save the game to continue the next time you’re in.” A beep sounded behind him in the surveillance control center.
Turning his wheelchair around using his hands, he went to check on the alert. After much anguish, he’d retired his previous high-tech and networked electronic chair—the manual chair gave him a way to exercise his upper body without having to spend even longer with the physiotherapists. He’d bulked up considerably in the past couple of years, his shoulders strong and his arm muscles defined.
“Ellie, hey, wait.” He flicked up an image
onto one of his many screens. “Signs of seismic activity out by the Catskills.”
“Shit.” She stared at the jagged lines that danced across the screen, her stomach suddenly in knots and images of the sparrows blazing to the forefront of her mind. One word loomed large in her thoughts: Cascade.
A confluence of time and unknown critical events that had ignited a power surge in the archangels who ruled the world, with a side-helping of random cataclysmic occurrences, the Cascade had demonstrated a tendency to spike then flatline as it built toward an endgame none of them could predict. It had been two and a half years since the last resurgence—back during her and Raphael’s trip to Morocco—and she’d been hoping the damn thing would go from dormant to stone dead.
Elena was sick of fucking zombies, impossible diseases that struck angels from the sky, and storms and quakes that left scars in the earth. Oh, and let’s not forget the Hudson turning crimson, as if the city was bleeding. That had been just lovely. “How bad?”
“Too deep and too weak for humans to feel. And it looks like I have a report from the seismic people at the university.” He read the e-mail. “Movement tagged as standard settling of the land. Only picked up because they’re testing the super-sensitive new equipment the Tower helped finance.”
Stomach unknotting, Elena blew out a quiet breath. No Cascade-linked insanity, then. No need to put on her tinfoil hat and start yelling about the end of the world. Just a tiny—normal—tremor deep in the earth. “Ping me if you get any more alerts, and make sure Dmitri knows too. I better get going on this hunt.”
Vivek swiveled his wheelchair around. “Happy hunting.” In his eyes, dark and intense, lived a feral hunger. It was as if his transition to vampirism had splintered more than two decades of grim-willed control.
Because Vivek, too, was hunter-born, the hunt in his blood.
That he hadn’t gone mad long ago was a testament to his incredible resolve. Elena had used him as backup on two recent jobs where he could situate himself on a rooftop and cover her using a sniper’s rifle. A number of other hunters had pulled him in the same way. For now, that seemed to be enough to take the edge off. “You, too,” she said with a nod at his control center. “Say hi to your man-crush for me.”