Early Excerpt from Archangel's Prophecy

by Nalini Singh

(Because this excerpt is from my working draft, it's subject to change. Hope you enjoy the glimpse of the book.:))

Taking another breath while trying not to notice the electric prickling on her face, Elena triangulated the source of the scent to a particular cabin. She’d just stepped foot in that direction when the electricity vanished.

The birds stopped singing.

The air froze.

And the earth trembled under her feet.

She came to a halt. An unknown sound made her look up. The starlings were circling in a constant wheel as they whispered their frantic and incomprehensible warning inside her skull.

The ground jolted violently.

Bunching her wings and gritting her teeth against the renewed pulse of pain, she rose up off the shaking landscape. Cabin doors flew open below her, people spilling out like disoriented ants to run in the direction of the lawn.

The ground under the cabins began to crumble.

Elena swept down to grab a young woman who was a frightening half step ahead of the disappearing earth. Elena wasn’t strong enough to carry a full-grown adult any real distance, but she managed to haul the woman to where the other guests could grab her, then yelled at everyone to go farther.

A scream split the air.

Elena twisted back…to see a man, his arms and legs flailing, disappear into nothingness. The ground had opened up under his feet in a rushing crash of dirt and rock. She flew toward him as fast as she could, but it was a futile effort.

Even as she reached the spot where he’d disappeared into the stygian maw of the earth, the sprawling and chillingly deep hole began to fill with a golden-red flow of magma. There was no sign of him, no sign of any of the cabins. Not even a smear of flesh or a splinter of wood.

The ground stopped shaking.

The earth stopped crumbling.

The birds danced.

Directly below Elena glowed a wound in the earth that pulsed with scalding heat.

All at once, there were no more starlings in the sunlit winter sky. Only screaming, sobbing people on the grass-heavy ground near a lava pit that shouldn’t exist…and Elena’s left wing was beginning to drag.