Chapter 8
She was a good ruler. Before the madness, she was what an archangel should be.
—Raphael to Elena (Once, while Caliane, Archangel of Amanat, yet Slept)
Dressed only in loose black pants that were cool silk around his body, Raphael stood staring out at the sparkling night of his city.
He’d returned home three hours earlier, his entire being raw with the need to be here. Elena had been awake and waiting for him, her need as primal as his own. Now, at last, the woman who owned his heart in every way lay fast asleep, her rest an easier one this night.
If he could, he’d thank Greta for reminding Elena that she was no longer a terrified little girl, but a warrior honed and lethal.
The vampire, however, wouldn’t appreciate his words—for Greta wasn’t one to expect or want accolades.
The only thing she’d ever asked of Raphael was that he never add her to his official senior team.
“I do not wish to wear a public face, sire. I wish even less to go to formal or even informal events, including dinners at the Enclave. I want only to be left alone to do what I do best.”
Never would he have predicted that this most reclusive member of his staff would become a friend true and loyal to his consort.
A consort he’d held long after she fell into sleep, slipping out of bed only when he began to worry that he’d disturb her with his wakefulness. His entire body was tense, his muscles rigid and his breath a spiked weapon in his chest.
Such things he hadn’t felt for a long, long time. The last had been when Elena was mortally wounded, her life hanging by a thread. Everything in him had seemed to misfire, not quite working right.
As he stared out at the night, two angels flew upward past the Tower, heading for the high altitudes.
They wouldn’t have spotted him; all the private areas of the Tower were shielded from external watchers using technology invented by Illium.
For Elena’s Bluebell had held true to his determination to be himself, no matter if he’d ascended into the ranks of the Cadre.
It amused Raphael on a daily basis to see how Illium’s refusal to be what the older members of the Cadre expected confounded, irritated, and at times inspired those same archangels.
You know, I never considered that I could be other than what was expected of an archangel. Perhaps it is never too late to change.
The most surprising statement thus far.
Because it had come from Alexander. The Archangel of Persia had been set in his ways even when Raphael was a youth.
“Well, damn.” Elena had whistled when he’d shared Alexander’s comment with her. “Cadre meetings have clearly gotten a lot more fun since Illium’s ascension. Didn’t Caliane threaten to strangle him last year?”
He’d laughed then, because the threat had been more exasperation than truth. Illium had laughed, too, then stuck out his neck as if for Caliane’s hands. Which had made Raphael’s mother scowl—while Raphael fought a grin—and call the meeting to an end “before we all turn into savages.”
But he had no laughter in him this night when his right temple pulsed with a low throbbing pain, even though the Legion mark had long faded into near obscurity on his skin, barely visible even to Elena, who was the only person he ever permitted that close.
Well, no, that wasn’t quite true. Naasir’s cubs had seen it, too, when they’d been children who’d loved to hang off their “Rafa.” Because, of course, Illium and Aodhan had made sure the three boys knew of the name only small children were permitted to call Raphael.
He could still remember how Izar’s curious little fingers had touched his temple. “Dragon?”
“Dragon,” Raphael had said. “Like Marduk.”
Delighted, Izar had immediately shared this knowledge with his brothers, who had both roared with him in what Raphael assumed was their reproduction of a dragonish roar.
To this day, Raphael received random packages from the boys with dragonish mementos inside.
The most recent one had been from Nasien—a tiny figurine featuring a slumbering dragon, its tail curled around three dozing cats.
He had no idea how or where Nasien had found it, but it held pride of place on his office shelf.
To everyone else, the Legion mark was forever gone, fading with most people’s memories of the strange beings who had once crouched on rooftops, hung off buildings, or perched in trees in Central Park.
Living gargoyles who had been seven hundred and seventy-seven voices—and one coherent voice—in Raphael’s head.
You are in our memory. The aeclari of the Death Cascade. The aeclari who…loved us.
Lifting his hand on that echo of words that had been some of the last the Legion had ever spoken, he rubbed at the pulsing. It did nothing to ease the irritation. Biting off a curse, he went into the bathroom so he could see if anything was visible.
The mark remained less than a shadow.
The pain, he realized, was of him. Born of the same twisting anguish that had him leaving his Elena alone in bed.
A mind, cool and collected, touched his before he could begin the process of calming himself with conscious will; the contact was quiet enough that it wouldn’t have woken him had he been asleep.
Sire?
I am awake, Venom.
The vampire, who’d been by his side for more than a millennium now, shifted his mental voice to a normal pitch. Lady Caliane is on the line.
Though their world had long ago moved away from the visible lines and wires that first enabled long-distance communication, the language persisted.
Jessamy, who’d traced the complexity and evolution of language for most of her existence, had told him that sometimes certain elements became set in stone, never to change no matter what.
“As an example,” she’d said one day two hundred years ago, when the two of them had been walking through the Refuge of an afternoon, “people do not realize that when they refer to their morning cereal, they are referring back to the Archangel Ceres, who was well known for his harvests and who has Slept for eons. Language is a most fascinating mystery.”
I will speak to her, Raphael told Venom now. Transfer the call to the suite.
Shrugging on a loose cream-hued tunic, he stepped out of the bedroom.
The waiting call flashed on the faceted crystal that sat in a cradle of polished stone on a side table.
He could’ve carried that crystal anywhere, but he wanted to be close enough to intercede should the nightmares begin to hunt Elena, so he touched his finger to the crystal, and when the menu popped up, chose to answer where he stood.
His mother’s three-dimensional image appeared, as if she were in the room with him.
She was seated on a stone bench in the bright sunshine of the microclimate inside Amanat, flowers in her long dark hair and her gown a floating white.
This was her maiden avatar, but he saw the warrior within, her eyes marked by loss and grief, love and time.
“Mother.” He took a seat on a nearby chair, so he wouldn’t appear to be looming over her. “You extend your stay in Amanat.” It had always been her heart home, no matter if she’d spent vast swathes of time in India since she became the archangel who held dominion over that landmass.
“My son.” She held out her hand toward him, and when he took it, he could almost feel her skin and bones, the technology that created such communication advancing at a phenomenal rate with each year that passed.
Mortals, racing time again. Leaving their mark on the world.
“Yes,” she said after they broke their strange handclasp. “I miss my home.” Her eyes were warm as they took him in. “I had hoped that you were not asleep. I rarely sleep now. No one ever tells you that about becoming an Ancient—the urge to sleep vanishes at a certain point.”
Raphael frowned; thanks to the current makeup of the world, he knew a number of Ancients. And he’d picked up that they slept. More to the point—“Even Marduk sleeps, Mother, and he is your ancestor.”
Granted, it wasn’t much in comparison to the needs of mortals or young angels, but there was a need.
Per mortal scientists, sleep was a necessity for their kind to allow their brains to work through the events of the day, make memories, and otherwise stabilize themselves.
Angelic scientists were of the belief that it worked much the same in angelkind—the difference was simply a matter of degree.
“Hmm.” Caliane reached up to begin pulling the flowers from her hair. “Perhaps I am just having a long wakefulness then.” A quiet smile. “No doubt I will sleep for a week in turn.”
Raphael’s gut twisted. “Are you sure nothing’s wrong?” he asked. “You feel as you should?”
Delighted laughter, the intense blue of her eyes alight.
“How you worry so, my Rafe, my son with my beloved, Nadiel.” Flowers all placed neatly on the stone bench, she began to braid the rich black of her hair.
“I am quite well. Just haunted by dreams, I suppose, and so I avoid sleep.” A sigh, her smile fading.
“I did not wish to admit that, but of course you will have guessed.”
Sorrow cast a heavy shadow on the flawless lines of her features. “They say immortality tangles memory, but it has tangled none of mine when it comes to your father. I miss him as much this day as I did the day I had to end his life.”
It was Raphael’s turn to reach for her hand.
Allowing her braid to unravel without hesitation, Caliane accepted his offer of silent comfort. “Tell me of your city. It has been too long since my last visit. How goeth your Bluebell?”
“You saw him at the last Cadre meeting, Mother.”
A dreamy look outward, Caliane’s attention caught by a butterfly that circled around to land on the flowers she’d left on the bench.
“There is such wonder in the world, is there not, Raphael? I see it and I am grateful to be alive even in my sorrow.” She reached out a finger, but she wasn’t Aodhan, with an affinity for the fragile creatures.
The butterfly flew off, vanishing from sight.
Dropping her hand and releasing his, Caliane said, “I think you are right, my son. I will rest. I am very tired.” She rose and walked to him, to brush her lips against his temple, the maternal kiss a ghostly brush through technology.
Then she was gone, her image vanishing out of existence.
Raphael sat there unmoving for a good half hour, his earlier tension replaced by another, before he made a voice call. “Jelena,” he said when the woman who was one of his mother’s closest advisers answered. “Is my mother asleep?”
Jelena’s answer was a long time coming. “I am loyal to my archangel.”
His fingers dug into his thigh. “This is critically important, Jelena. If she continues to not sleep, you must call me. No one else. I am her son, will not take advantage. You know this.” Jelena and her partner in life, Avi, had known him since boyhood, had seen him and Caliane weather the tumult of time—and the pain of choices made in and because of madness.
Another pause. “I’ll call you.” She hung up without any attempt at even token politeness, but he cared nothing for that. Because in that terse exchange, she’d given him some vital information. And it hadn’t been an accident—Jelena was too experienced to slip up.
That meant the situation was even worse than he’d begun to believe.
Needing Elena, he walked back to the bedroom on bare feet, stripped, then slipped in beside her, draping his wing gently over her body.
“Raphael?” she mumbled, her skin warm and soft with sleep against his.
“Sleep, hbeebti. And I will sleep with you.” He kissed her jaw, could see her falling into rest even as he did so.
Only with him was she so trusting. Anyone else, and she’d have been out of bed with a blade in hand in a matter of heartbeats.
He also knew she’d placed a dagger under her pillow after realizing she was pregnant.
He understood that it had nothing to do with him or her belief in his ability to protect and shield.
Her wings rustling, her words a sleepy whisper, “Love you, Archangel.” A nuzzle. “Rest now.”
He slept, but he didn’t rest. No, he dreamed of a woman with flowers in her hair who walked on grass as green as emeralds, the white of her gown flirting around her ankles as she stepped on droplets of his blood that glinted ruby red in the sunshine.
“Shh, my darling, shh.”
Such a lyrical, haunting beauty of a voice. Lovely enough to have filled his childhood with lullabies more evocative than had ever been sung to an angelic child. Compelling enough to have drawn the adult populations of two warring cities into the ocean.
And…so gentle with him as she stroked back his hair while he lay splintered at her feet on that day when she’d flung him to the earth at brutal velocity.
“My darling boy.” A kiss soft and maternal on his temple, her lips stained with his blood when she lifted her head back up and the sky a cerulean clarity behind her.
In that moment, his breath filled with the scent of flowers and of his own blood, his mother was the most beautiful…and the most insane being he had ever seen.