Chapter 21
You’ve never seen Andreas lead, Elena-mine. He is very, very good. Never harsh for the sake of it and never wasteful of his people.
—Raphael to Elena (As the Mantle Fell)
Andreas landed in the courtyard where they’d had breakfast just as Elena and Raphael walked out of the trees.
Folding back distinctive wings of a dark amber streaked with gray, he turned to them with grief stark in the pale green-kissed hazel of his eyes.
“They did it, then?” he said with the informality of a long friendship.
Raphael nodded. “Knowing Marduk, I assume the territory will run as it should for the next two weeks?”
“More if needed.” Andreas put his hands on his hips, his jaw working. “I’m not sure his people will know what to do with another archangel. He was one of a kind.”
There was nothing Raphael could—or wanted to—say to refute that. “He told us that another is to waken soon.”
Andreas’s lips kicked up at the corners. “It’s the kind of thing he’d do—wait until he knew he had a successor.” He swallowed hard. “I’ll never again serve someone like him, and that’s a loss I’ll carry through eternity.”
Elena and Andreas hadn’t been friends when they’d first met, when she’d seen only pieces of him, and understood far less about immortals, but that had been a long time ago.
Today, Raphael’s consort walked forward to grip the second’s forearm and say, “You’ll carry all you learned with him through time, too.
” Her voice was gritty from her own sense of loss.
He returned her grip, inclining his head at the same time; he wore his hair short this season, the dark strands just long enough to move in the breeze. “The stories they told me, Ellie,” he said as they parted. “Perhaps tonight, after I’ve drunk enough mead, I’ll share a few.”
“A fitting tribute to two extraordinary angels,” Raphael said after exchanging an embrace with the angel who had fought beside him when he’d been an archangel new and untried.
Andreas was older than him, but only by a matter of centuries; they’d been young warriors together, battle fury in their hearts.
In the end, however, Raphael and Elena didn’t stay the night, choosing instead to give Andreas and the rest of Marduk’s senior team privacy to celebrate the archangelic couple who had forever altered them.
That was as it should be, a gathering of comrades in arms.
It was how his Seven—present and past—and Elena’s Guard would want to celebrate—and grieve—them should the time come when Raphael and Elena chose to slip into Sleep.
* * *
It was exactly two weeks later that Raphael caught a strange scent on the breeze, and knew that the Cadre meeting scheduled for two hours hence would have to be postponed.
Andreas had just that morning notified the Cadre of Marduk’s decision to Sleep. The news had landed only a day after Jelena sent news of Caliane’s Sleep. To say that the Cadre was in a state of heightened tension was a vast understatement.
To rule with eight was…difficult.
Now we will not have to do it, he thought where he stood on the highest of the Tower’s balconies, the wind rising around him as he watched Elena coming in to land, the glory of her wings vivid against the dark blue sky.
He was ready to intervene should she require assistance, but she handled the sudden wind gust behind her with the athletic ease of a hunter, running several feet before coming to a halt.
“Wow, that wind! I half thought I’d end up splattered on the side of the Tower!” she yelled out over the sound of its rising.
“An archangel is waking.” Raphael walked to stand by her side, his eyes on the horizon.
Even as Elena sucked in a breath, Dmitri’s voice filled Raphael’s mind.
Raphael, we’re getting alerts from the other courts. Aegaeon and Illium are both reporting skies streaked with bronze lightning, while Alexander’s people report multiple sightings of honeybees circling in huge swarms. Who’s waking?
Raphael wasn’t surprised by the question; his second had been around too long not to understand the signs. Unknown as yet.
He told Elena what Dmitri had shared…just as the wind dropped, and he caught a sudden burst of color in the distance.
“Are those orchids?” Elena whispered.
“Yes, thousands of them.” All surging to the surface from the lush green of the hover pathways in a cascade of vivid color—dramatic orange and vibrant red, saturated pink, and a yellow so rich it was gold.
“Forget about their weather requirements, the city’s never planted orchids on those pathways.” Elena stared. “They’d never survive, not at those heights.”
The scent of orchids was stronger now, even made sense where earlier it had come from both nowhere and everywhere at once. It held undertones of a sensual musk…along with something deadlier. Acid?
“Look at the hanging gardens on that high-rise, and that habitat to its side.” He nodded to the east and the rapid-fire explosion of tiny flowers in hues bright that erupted from every green surface on both—and they were far from the only structures affected.
The entire city was blooming in a dazzling false spring, the thick heat of summer forgotten.
Even the Legion forest wasn’t immune—multiple cherry blossom trees visible on the far edge suddenly burst into bloom, the previously summer-green canopy awash in pink.
“A lovely sky,” Elena said, staring up at the dark blue now riven with delicate veins of bronze, “flowers, bees…someone who likes life?”
“Or,” Raphael said, “someone who likes beauty.”
Elena’s spine tightened. “Michaela?” A mercurial and breathtaking beauty of an archangel whom Elena had never trusted and who had done some terrible things—but who had, in the end, fallen in an effort to save the world from evil.
“There were flowers when she ascended,” Raphael said. “I’d forgotten that. In the Refuge in the depths of winter.”
“Raphael.” Dmitri poked his head out onto the balcony.
“Pings from Alexander and Suyin on the Cadre line.” Walking out to join them on the balcony when they didn’t respond, he took in the flower-draped city and whistled.
“The Archangel of Budapest is waking up,” he said without hesitation.
“That’s going to throw a wrench in the works since Aegaeon is now in charge of that territory. ”
“My mother Sleeps and so does Marduk,” Raphael reminded the other man. “There is more than enough territory. I’m more concerned about Gavriel.”
“Damn.” Elena had become used to thinking of the handsome warrior-scholar as Keir’s child, but he had a mother…a mother who’d loved him enough to think of him even as she lay mortally wounded.
“My son. The healer…he will be kind.”
“Keir? You want Keir to be the foster dad?”
“Yes. Tell him…tell him…I did not mean…to leave him. My…son. Protect…”
Some of the last words Michaela had spoken before she’d used her power to blast away most of her own chest in an effort to fight Lijuan’s poisonous infection.
Her neck had been barely attached to her body at that point, her bones shattered.
No one could ever say that Michaela, Archangel of Budapest, had not acted with courage to the last.
Elena’s womb, in which grew their child, ached for Michaela.
The archangel had left behind a baby, a mere infant, but would be rising to meet a man full grown who’d never known his mother except through stories told to him by Keir and others—including Raphael, who had known Michaela since before her ascension.
Most in the immortal world, however, didn’t realize whose blood ran in Gavriel’s veins.
“It’s too much pressure for a child to bear,” Keir had said to them when they visited him in the Refuge.
“To be expected to carry the banner for his mother, who fell so heroically in battle. Better to give him a childhood free of such weight, and share the truth of his origins with him after he is of an age when he can decide what to do with that knowledge.”
As it was, Gavriel had never disseminated the facts of his bloodline to the wider populace.
Elena had adored the intelligent, creative, and thoughtful child he’d been, and the affection had been returned.
“Can I be in your Guard, Ellie?” he’d asked, as Sam had once asked.
Holding his tiny hand in hers, she’d thought about what to say. In the end, she’d smiled and tapped him on the nose and said, “Ah, but that’s a conversation I will have with you when you are full grown. Who knows, perhaps you will decide to be an adventurer who doesn’t like being tied down.”
She’d known that having Gavriel in her Guard would be a complicated thing should Michaela rise. The archangel had entrusted Gavriel’s well-being to Elena with her last words, and Elena wouldn’t have the other woman believe that Elena had taken her absence as a chance to “steal” her son.
As it was, they’d fostered Gavriel at the Tower during his youth, considered him one of their own—and later, after a number of frank conversations with him and Keir involved, Michaela’s son had joined Elena’s Guard for two centuries.
“I’m my own man now,” Gavriel had said, his angled jawline set hard. “You did as she asked for her babe, Ellie. Now that I’m grown, she has no voice in my decisions.”
It was the harsh truth, and he’d been right to call Elena on it.
After his time in her Guard, she’d encouraged him to experience other courts and territories, as she’d done with Sam and Izzy as well.
The latter two had returned to her, but Gavriel had landed elsewhere. “I love you, Ellie,” he’d said with one of those rare grins that took him from handsome to breathtaking, “but I’m going to accept Illium’s offer. To help set up an archangel’s first-ever court? It’s going to be a wild ride.”
Elena couldn’t have been happier. Gavriel, scholar and warrior, had a calm that balanced several of the hotter temperaments on Illium’s team—alongside a well-hidden streak of the wild himself that meant he’d worked well with Illium and Aodhan from the time he was a young angel just finding his wings.
He was a man of whom any mother would be proud, but would Michaela, always demanding and often vicious, strike out at the world when she realized how much time had passed, how much she’d missed?
Would she be like Aegaeon and expect filial ties from Gavriel when she’d been gone from his life for the formative years of his existence?
Elena both hurt for her and worried for the man she’d watched grow from the time he was an infant.
“I’ll talk to Keir,” Raphael said. “He must be the one to tell Gavriel.” He exhaled slowly. “Let us hope that this waking does not augur another age of war and strife.”