New York Times bestselling author Nalini Singh’s dangerous and beautiful world of archangels, vampires, and mortals has never faced a threat this cataclysmic…
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Nalini Singh’s Archangel’s Lineage, which is out April 23rd 2024.
Raphael and Elena are experiencing their first ever year of true peace. No war. No horrors of archangelic power. No nightmares given flesh. Until…the earth beneath the Refuge begins to tremble, endangering not only angelkind’s precious and fragile young, but the very place that has held their most innocent safe for eons.
Amid the chaos, Elena’s father suffers a violent heart attack that threatens to extinguish their last chance to heal the bonds between them and make sense of the ruins of their agonizing shared history.
Even as Elena battles grief, Raphael is torn from her side by the sudden disappearance of an archangel. But worse yet is to come. An Ancestor, an angel unlike any other, stirs from his Sleep to warn the Cadre of a darkness so terrible that it causes empires to fall and civilizations to vanish.
This time, even the Cadre itself may not be able to stop a ticking clock that is counting down at frightening speed…
The vampire bowed. “I welcome you in my role as second to Archangel Qin.”
Raphael gave the other man the same kind of nod of greeting that he would to one of his own Seven. “General.”
Rising, Atu met his gaze. “Is the rest of the Cadre on its way?”
“Only Aegaeon at this point in time.”
“I offer you a bathing chamber and fresh clothing while we wait.”
Raphael nodded and followed the general inside. Better to take a few minutes now when he had to wait regardless. Because that Atu had offered such niceties rather than immediately alerting his archangel of Raphael’s presence gave Raphael the answer to his question.
But they must have confirmation.
“We also have a communications center should you have need to contact your Tower.” Atu led Raphael to the guest wing of a home that echoed in silence, devoid of the voices of the harem and of Astaad’s intelligent and strong-willed senior team.
The departure of the latter was no commentary on Qin; such shifts occurred when one archangel took over the territory of another. But the silence did speak to Qin doing nothing to recruit others to his team—enticing people to join an archangel’s court was child’s play, but enticing good people took effort and intelligence.
The lack told Raphael a great deal about Atu and the load the general had carried since Qin took over the territory. For a second could only do so much in this particular circumstance—Atu wouldn’t have had much success in gaining the loyalty of others of his caliber if his archangel made no effort to back his plays.
“Thank you for the offer,” Raphael said, though he had no intention of using the communication system when he had the phone on which he’d spoken to Elena. “The house is quiet.”
Atu’s face didn’t so much as flicker. “Archangels are all very different individuals,” was his politic answer.
Raphael didn’t push him for more, not when he was impatient for privacy. Once in the guest suite—a sprawling expanse that looked out over a mass of hibiscus blooms beyond which lay the sun-sparkle of the ocean waves—the first thing he did was send a message to Elena. He’d have called at any other time, but he had an idea that she might be with her father.
The phone rang in his hand moments later. “Hbeebti,” he said, pressing one hand against the glass that looked out on all that lush tropical beauty.
“It’s so good to hear your voice.”
“I hear pain in yours.” It stabbed bloody spikes into his heart. “Have you reached your father?”
“Yes, you called just as I was about to walk into his room.” She took a shuddering inhale. “I heard the machines beeping as I began to push open the door and backed off. I thought I was going to throw up. I feel like such a coward.”
“Elena, you battled not one but two archangels and lived to tell the tale. You will never be a coward.” Her courage scared him at times, for how little she thought of her own skin.
But this, he understood, had nothing to do with her brave heart and too much to do with her history. “Your mother was in the hospital for a long time after the attack on your family.” His palm pressed so hard on the glass that he had to pull back lest he shatter the window with the power aglow in his wings. “It’s not a place you associate with good things.”
“I should be over that by now.” Furious words whispered low and private. “I shouldn’t be haunted by something that happened when I was a child.”
He struggled against the urge to smash the glass, take to the sky, fly home. “No, hbeebti, that isn’t how it works. I will fall wounded and helpless from the sky over and over again in my memories until the day my end comes. Some memories become mental scars—they fade but never vanish.”
It would’ve been easy to tell her otherwise, promise her that her memories of the massacre of her family would vanish with time, but Raphael didn’t lie to his consort. “And as a very wise hunter once told me, our memories are what make us.”
“Ha.” A rasping breath. “What if I have no more time?” This time her whisper was softer, shakier. “What if he dies this way, with anger and pain and recrimination between us?”
Raphael had seen death many times through the centuries, and if he knew one thing, it was that it followed no single path. “Until his heart beats no more,” he said to her, “hope exists.”
“I’m going to hold onto that, Archangel.”
Jeffrey Deveraux, Raphael thought, was a lucky man to have a wife and children so loyal—even when the object of their affections didn’t deserve it. But he didn’t say the latter. He, more than anyone, understood that some relationships were complicated.
His mother had committed mass murder while lost in madness, then left him bloody and broken in a lonely field far from civilization.
Caliane had shattered his bones and splintered his heart.
Yet, today, he accepted her as his mother and had even begun to trust that her sanity would not once more slip away.
Love was no mathematical equation with absolute answers.
It could be volatile and hard and it could make you bleed.
Copyright © 2024 by Nalini Singh
