Archangel Rafe (A Novel of The Seven Book 1) (22 page)

He needed to find the cure so that nothing like what just happened to Angelina could ever happen again. There was something odd about the virus and its effect on the humans.

“I can’t do this,” she repeated again.

Suddenly Angelina’s words penetrated.

“Do what?” He drew the blood from the woman quickly. They didn’t have much time. If only he could figure out what about this mutation was different. It was almost as if the reason stared him in the face.

Angelina hunched in the middle of the tent, her arms wrapped around her stomach. Her caramel hair fell around her face in curly tendrils from the dense humidity. Her cotton shirt was wrinkled and stained from the hard day’s work. What stopped him was her defeated posture.

“How could I have let her die?” Her words were stark in the twilight.

“The virus acted very aggressively against her body.” Rafe needed to get back in the lab to compare her blood and the other samples under the microscope and the data on prior occurrences of the virus. He really needed microscope time to compare the samples. The answer was there, somehow just out of reach.

With the blow of wind, shadows writhed on the darkening canvas walls. “Doesn’t matter. I let her die.”

They really didn’t have time to talk about this now. They had to get the woman to the morgue before the cadaver bugs began to feast. And he wasn’t ready to discuss the fact that he’d almost lost her.

“Snap out of it,” Rafe said with sympathy. With compassion.

As if the heavens were crying, a rumble of thunder groaned from the sky, and the clouds opened up. Rain pounded down with a ferocity as if the skies wept for the sorrow of the child and of Angelina. The noise became so loud, the deluge drowned out any hope of conversation. Ozone scented the air.

Rafe knew they would have to talk about what just happened. But not yet. Angelina swayed as if the slightest puff of air would have her horizontal and unconscious. She needed rest. She glanced around the tent blankly, as if her brain searched for what she needed to do. But he noticed she avoided the cot in the corner where death hovered.

“I failed,” she said almost inaudibly. “Failed.”

He needed her focus to shift from the dead to the living. Get her to think about something else. It was working for him. Sort of. “Angelina. I need you to go talk to Greta about the little girl. Hold her, comfort her. We need to find out where she will go, who else has responsibility for the child.” At least the little girl was healthy. “And we need to know if anyone else in their household is sick.”

He needed her to focus on something and someone else. Otherwise, she would continue to mourn the woman and what she considered her own failure. But she didn’t move, just stood there.

“Greta,” Rafe called to Stas’s widow. She had been married to Stas as long as the man had been a healer. Rafe needed her assistance and her family’s silence to carry out this makeshift clinic.

Greta peered into the shadowed recesses of the tent, the girl finally asleep on her shoulder. “
Tak
?”

“We need to find the girl’s family,” Rafe said.

“There is no need.” Lines grooved deeply around Greta’s mouth and eyes.

“Why?”

“She is my granddaughter.”

Before she could say more, the doorway to the tent ripped open. Stas’s son, Tomasz, crashed inside, water poured down his face. His hair, clothes, and shoes were soaked. His face whitened in a rush as he saw the corpse of his wife. He ran to the cot and fell to his knees as if his body could no longer support him.

“No.” He speared his gaze toward Rafe, his palms flat against his wife’s heart nadis. “Help me save her.”

The absolute pain in the man’s gaze stabbed something hot and uncomfortable in Rafe’s stomach. “It doesn’t work that way.”

With trembling fingers he brushed the matted strands of hair from her still face. “Please.”

“I can’t.” A hot ball of regret hovered in the region of his heart. “No one could save her.”

“She is my life.” Tomasz’s voice broke but he never took his gaze from her as if she would disappear if he looked away. He grasped her hands in his and rocked back and forth.

“Beloved,” he whispered over and over again as he brushed his lips softly over her forehead as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. “She wasn’t sick this morning when I left for work. How could this happen?”

Rafe didn’t know. The virulence of her case was particularly disturbing. In a normal avian flu the incubation period was six to eight days.

“She’s gone,” Rafe said quietly.

The man’s grief howled out into the tiny canvas tent, and swirled through the air with near physical force. Raw emotion poured from him like hot lava over cooled magma, burning everything, melting the foundation of his life.

“I’m sorry.” Angelina sat still as a stone in the chair by the little tray table, her eyes tortured as she stared at the man and his dead wife, her voice less than a murmur.

Greta ignored Rafe and Angelina, gliding toward her son, and placed her hand on his shoulder. But he didn’t move. He knelt next to the cot with his head down, grief in every rigid line of his body.

“Come, Tomasz. We must be strong for your daughter,” his mother spoke softly, the lines in her face more pronounced in grief. But her words were clipped and resolved. She would take care of her son and her granddaughter.

Rafe said gently, “I need to take her.”

“No.” Tomasz rose to his feet swiftly. “I will take her.”

Rafe’s gaze cut to Angelina, still sitting in the chair as if carved from sandstone. Unmoving. Trying to heal the woman had depleted her energy reserves. If he hadn’t been so focused on handing off the little girl to get her out of the tent, he would have made Angelina wait until he was beside her to help draw the excess energy from her.

He’d known the woman was sick. But even he hadn’t realized how ill she was until Angelina collapsed next to her. Angelina didn’t have control of her own abilities yet. He should have been there to make sure she didn’t overload her own system.

As he took in the hunched curve of Angelina’s body, he knew he had made a terrible mistake.

Tomasz rubbed at the woman’s arm, then caressed the soft inside of the woman’s elbow. “Is this why you didn’t save her?” Tomasz spat.

“Shhh.” Greta shushed. “Never you mind.”

Rafe expanded his body with breath, filled his lungs with air, bulked up his shoulders to stand to his full height until he towered over the younger man. “What are you talking about?”

“You wanted her to die.” Tomasz charged toward Rafe, fists clenched, face set in a mask of hatred.

“Why would I want her to die?” Rafe countered calmly in the face of Tomasz’s rage. “My purpose is to save humans.”

“Exactly,” Tomasz snarled. He strode back to his wife, grabbed the dead woman’s arm and lifted the limb toward Rafe. He could finally see what Tomasz had been rubbing. “But not
these
humans, right?”

The mark of the Nephilim.

Rafe’s first thought was danger. Threat. Enemy of humans. The Nephilim were responsible for thousands of years of misery before they were supposedly eradicated. Rafe’s body readied for action. His muscles hardened, his vision lasered to the perceived threat, the enemy of the human realm. His blood pulsed with adrenaline, a need for action, an overwhelming compulsion to attack. “She is Nephilim?”

“Tomasz, what have you done?” Greta whispered, her gaze shooting to the child asleep in her arms.

The tent was full of shocked silence. As if no one could believe Tomasz would blatantly admit to harboring a Nephilim. The Nephilim really were back.

Rain beat mercilessly against the canvas. Water had begun to saturate the ground. The trampled grass beneath their feet squished with the amount of liquid rapidly building up in the dirt.

And no one moved.

He remembered Angelina’s defense of the Nephilim. Could the Realm have been wrong when they tried to eliminate the entire race? He needed more information. Stas’s words came back to him. Right before he’d passed, he’d said,
“Don’t judge them. They are the same as me, just different.”
Suddenly his words made much more sense.

Rafe gave Greta a hard look. “We will speak of this later.” And she scuttled away with the little girl.

His body relaxed slightly and he assessed Tomasz’s anger and grief in the tense atmosphere. And the still, silent truth of a race thought long dead.

His gaze went back to the young woman. A threat to no one any longer.

He thought about her insistence that they treat her daughter first. She had been no enemy to humans. The virus had aggressively attacked her body. Could the virus be attacking Nephilim? For that information he’d need to know who was Nephilim and who wasn’t. But suddenly the fact that the virus ran in families made that possibility more likely. What the hell was going on?

Tomasz snatched up his wife’s body and carried her toward the door. “She never hurt anyone. She didn’t deserve to die.”

“I agree.” But Rafe still had to adjust to the idea that Nephilim were not bad.

Just as Tomasz needed to care for his wife, Rafe needed to attend to Angelina. After her last outburst, she was far too quiet. A quick glance to Angelina confirmed her safety, still mute, remote in the corner, unaware of the tableau of drama. She was fine. Safe. For now.

THIRTY-THREE

Sweat coated her skin. The dark humid night wrapped around her like a blanket, and yet, she was so very cold. With her back against the cool file cabinet, she huddled in the darkness, barely breathing. Failure chained her down, her arms and legs anchored by invisible links that kept her prisoner.

Her heart beat in a slow dirge, and she wondered how, why, hers still beat when that poor woman’s was silent.

Nothing touched her. Not the slowly soaking walls of the tent. Not Greta, not Rafe. Not the anguished stare of the woman’s husband, a healer himself. She had seen his mark when he’d so tenderly brushed his dead wife’s hair away from her face.

She needed to stay numb. Needed to stay in that frozen wasteland because if she let herself start to feel, she would fall apart. She blinked back tears, not ready to go there.

However frozen her body was, her mind moved at the speed of light. Images of her childhood flashed like a strobe, and revealed a new snapshot each time, alternating between her life as it was and thinking about the girl who had lost her mother. She visualized all the times the girl would need a mother who wasn’t there. Each flash suppressed more of her ability to breathe until her lungs barely inflated before shoving the air back out again. As if she were unworthy of the oxygen.

She couldn’t bring herself to turn her head. To look at him. To watch him leave. She waited for the brush of the tent door, for the sound of him walking away. And she stared blankly ahead.

Angelina sensed him before she heard him. The air rustled next to her. “Angelina,” Rafe’s whisper was soft in her ear.

“Angelina.” He gently twined his strong, hard, capable fingers through hers, and his warm, solid palm tethered them together.

And still she didn’t move, her body leaden and unresponsive.

“You’re freezing.” Rafe lifted his other hand to run his palm over her bare shoulder and skim along her forearm. Heat from his hand scorched along her nerve endings, and awoke her from the numbness. She didn’t want to feel. It was cowardly, but she needed to stay frozen, to stay in this stasis, because if she warmed up enough to feel, Angelina wasn’t certain what would happen to her.

“Go away,” She ground the words out, past the strangling grip of failure.
Don’t drag this out. Don’t give me hope. Just leave.

“I can’t.” He lifted her into his arms effortlessly.

The heat from his body seeped into hers, and warmed her up, but she didn’t want to be warm. She couldn’t allow any feelings in or she would shatter into a thousand pieces.

“I need to get out of here.” Angelina struggled in his arms. Her prior lethargy was replaced with a frenzied urgency. She had to get out of this tent.

“It’s pouring.”

“I don’t care.” She was nearly frantic. “I need to get out of here.”

Panic, sharp and urgent, struck her. She couldn’t stay in this tomb one more moment. Not with the spirit of the dead woman and her husband. His anguish hovered in the tent like a specter. To be loved like that. To love someone that deeply. To feel the ache of loss in every pore. That would be a gift.

“Okay. Okay.” Rafe finally seemed to understand she was about to lose it. “I’ll get you out of here.”

And in that moment she realized it was too late. She would shatter when he left. As much as she’d tried to keep herself apart, tried desperately not to get used to his presence, she understood now that loving him was inevitable.

And just as inevitable was the knowledge that they were doomed.

To think she could protect her heart and her soul had been laughable. How she ever thought she could was beyond her.

“Now. Please.” She clung to his shoulders, needing his strength, needing him, for however long he would be with her. “Please.”

With a one handed grab, he snatched a slicker from the center pole that held up the tent. The wind had picked up until it ripped at the canvas walls as if trying to pry out the emotions and wrestle them from the air around them.

Rafe ran through the pounding rain toward the house. Toward safety. The sharp stinging drops pummeled her face, and she lifted her head up toward the sky. She wanted the punishment. Wanted the pain. And knew it was miniscule next to what was coming.

***

Rafe burst through the back door of the farmhouse, and paused inside the mudroom. He gently set Angelina down on the colorful braided rug and snagged a towel from the hook inside the doorway.

She shivered uncontrollably, her entire body was chilled. Rafe rubbed the towel over her soaking wet hair to dry her off. Rafe rubbed at her streaked hair. Goose bumps stood out in sharp relief on her forearms, and her nipples were hard points through her wet cotton shirt.

Concentrate, Rafe.

She just stood there. Her arms hung limply by her side as if she didn’t care that her body temperature had dropped. The air was hot and humid and though the rain was cool, she shouldn’t be this cold.