He brushed his hand over the near-white silk of her hair, what he felt for her such a huge violence inside him that it had no name. “To the end and beyond, hunter-mine.”
Forcing himself out of the room, he shut the door quietly behind himself, then went to the screen mounted on one wall of the suite’s library. He could’ve used a phone to call Amanat, but Caliane didn’t trust in such things. She was barely comfortable with the system that allowed them to see each other as they spoke.
The face that answered on the other end was a familiar one: uptilted eyes of dramatic green, hair of a deep, deep red, skin that was close to translucent and wings of copper silk.
Tasha would never pass unnoticed through a crowd.
Her eyes widened at seeing him, a gasp exiting her throat. But the woman—and warrior—who’d been his lover when they were young angels first spreading their wings was already moving out of shot, and he knew she was getting his mother.
Tasha was as loyal to Caliane as Dmitri was to Raphael.
When Caliane appeared on the other side, it was with a frown marring her forehead. “What—” She cut herself off, her face softening in a way it only ever did for Raphael. Placing her hand on the screen on her side, she whispered, “My son. You are home.”
Raphael echoed her gesture on this side, placing his palm over hers. “We will speak further soon, Mother. I must take care of my territory now.”
Caliane had been an archangel longer than Raphael could imagine; she didn’t argue against his priorities. “That upstart vampire you call second needs to learn how to speak to his elders, but he has done you proud.” Regal and a touch haughty, Caliane’s words nonetheless held the approbation of an archangel who had never been afraid to have strong people around her. She had taught him how to rule by example.
Until the madness. Until the death.
“I never doubted he would.” He inclined his head. “I will go now.”
“Before you do—your consort?”
Once, that might’ve been a barbed question, but Caliane and Elena had made their peace. It would always be an odd peace with jagged edges, but that was what happened when two strong women collided and one of them was used to being obeyed in all things—while the other obeyed only the dictates of her conscience.
“She is resting,” was all Raphael said; he and Elena would have to speak when she woke, decide their next course of action. Until then, he’d share nothing of her physical state.
After ending the call, he looked into the bedroom. A glint of hair of near-white . . . and the muted glow of her skin beneath the quilt. His hunter was curled up on her side in a tight ball, her knees tucked to her chest and her spine curved, her head curled over her knees. The tattoo on her back pulsed with light in time with her heartbeat.
Jaw clenched, he fought the urge to shake her awake from that torturously constricted position that had permitted her to emerge from the chrysalis with all her limbs. He lost the battle. Elena.
A sleepy mumble from her mind, the warm steel of her presence a kiss.
Muscle memory, he told himself. That was all. But he touched the back of his hand to her cheek to reassure himself of the life of her.
Sighing, she snuggled deeper into the bed . . . just as droplets of fire fell from his wings to dance over the exposed side of her face. She shivered as first one small flame sank into her flesh, then another, but didn’t wake.
The power spread under her skin in a soft burst that made her veins pulse a luminous gold for a startling second before the effect faded into a softer radiance. Soft or not, his hunter remained very much “glow-in-the-dark.”
He could imagine her displeased scowl when she woke.
Leaning down, he pressed his lips to her cheek. “If it is any consolation hunter-mine, my wings continue to burn and my eyes are alive with lightning.”
Archangel. A soft, sleepy murmur from a mind caught in deepest sleep but aware of him and what he meant to her.
The hand clenched around his heart stopped squeezing. Sleep, hbeebti. I will be home soon.
He stopped long enough to pull on a sleeveless tunic, and put into his pocket a set of small sample bags Keir had left behind. “Your scientists,” the healer had said, “will no doubt appreciate any samples you are able to retrieve from the chasm.”
As he took flight from the balcony off their bedroom, he paid attention to the performance of his wings, checked his speed. Everything felt as it ever had, as if he had flesh and blood, feathers and bone and tendon under his command.
Satisfied with his ability to control his body in the air, he swept across the glittering sunlit skyscrapers of his city, past the showy forms of trees ablaze with one last burst of color before their winter slumber, and over the chilly waters of the Hudson. Calmer now, it glimmered under the early afternoon sunshine, sparkles dancing off its surface.
He could see Illium’s wings from here, the wild blue vibrant even against the crystalline blue of the sky, the silver filaments bright shards. The angel held a hover near the edge of the cliffs. He’d also ordered members of his squadron and of the Legion to create a wide barrier around the dangerous hole in the ground.
No unauthorized wings moved in the air above, and no one walked anywhere in sight. Illium, have there been any reports of casualties in the Enclave?
No. I had members of the squadron fly over the area—they reported no fallen or wounded individuals.
Angling his body to wing high above Illium and the others, Raphael took in the wound in the earth. From so far above, it was a dark blot in the landscape, a scar that should not exist.
No power swirled in or around it. No lava glowed.
Dropping down, he landed on the very edge of the hole. Illium and the Primary soon came to land on either side of him. When he glanced at the Primary, he saw a strange thing: the Primary was now almost completely colorless. The transition had begun before Raphael went to sleep in the bed beside Elena.
The second becoming, that’s what the Legion had told Elena when she asked why they were losing the colors that had begun to appear in some of them. As Elena had regressed back into humanity, the Legion had regressed into the grayness that was the color palette with which they’d risen from the lightless deep.
But Elena was no longer mortal, and yet the Primary remained colorless. “Has the second becoming ended?”
The Primary tilted his head to the side. “No,” he said after a pause to consider the question. “We are deciding.”
Putting the matter aside for now, Raphael looked into the chasm created by the power that was ice in his veins. Such a cold, cold power. A power that whispered in his ear that Lijuan was an imposter and he was the true god.
The one who should be worshipped.
13
A kiss of heat inside him, a pulse of defiant life. A piece of Elena’s heart, refusing to surrender him to the immortal cold.
Raphael fisted his hand. “I’m going to fly down and ensure there are no hidden dangers.” As he would not become a mindless tool for the Cascade, he would not build his and Elena’s home on poisoned soil.
Illium stirred. “Sire, you just emerged. I’d rather you didn’t disappear back into the black hole.”
The angel with eyes of aged gold and a face of pure beauty—gaunt now in a way angels rarely became—was too young to give Raphael orders. Their relationship was far different from the one Raphael had with Dmitri. Raphael had held Illium as a newborn, known him as an unwieldy child angel with wings he could barely control.
He’d watched the youth Illium had become fall so madly in love that his heart had broken forever with the loss of his mortal lover. And he had known Illium as a young warrior who mourned the loss of a friend who had been trapped inside his own torment for two hundred years.
All these things and more made up the ties between Raphael and Illium. “I have nothing to fear down there,” he said, for the greatest risk was in his blood, in the power that sought constantly to shape him into a weapon of chaos.
Lijuan believed herself a goddess, so he must be a god.
The Cascade was nothing if not a blunt hammer.
“If I cannot contact you”—Illium set his jaw—“I’ll fly in to search for you.”
“Let us hope it doesn’t come to that.” Raphael stepped into the chasm, his wings spread to control his descent.
His primaries didn’t come close to touching the edges.
In places, the walls around him were glassy. Either the energy he’d released had solidified natural minerals into a glassy surface, or pieces of their home had become bonded to the earth. Here and there, he saw the odd item he recognized—a spoon, part of a stair railing—but the majority had been pulverized.
Sorrow sang an unexpected song in his heart. The Enclave home was where he’d first made love to Elena. It was a place all of his Seven had called home many times over their lifetimes. It was where he’d begun a friendship with Elijah. And it was the house in which his mother had come to stay after waking from madness.
But . . . he’d built this home as a lone archangel. He would rebuild it as one half of an unbreakable pair.
Most of the earth is simply compacted, he told Illium. I should be able to churn up the dirt so that the walls collapse inward, eliminating most of the hole. What space remains, we will fill using soil excavated from other areas.
That new skyscraper being built in Soho, Illium said. Tons of earth just sitting around. I’ll put a squadron on standby to bring across as much as we need.
Raphael continued his descent. There were no scorch marks, nothing that indicated a raging fire. Just crushed and broken things that spoke to the violence of the power inside him. Halfway down, he halted and placed his hand against the soil, felt a faint warmth—it was an echo, an imprint left behind by the energy that crawled across his wings and lived in his bloodstream.
He kept on dropping.
A glint caught his eye. After tracing his way back to the spot, he laughed at what he saw. Carefully digging out the leather-bound book with gold lettering on the spine, he dusted it off and put it in a side pocket of his pants. Elena would be aghast that of all their books, it was Imani’s tome on angelic etiquette that had survived unscathed.