Chapter 23
I am to be a mother again, Raphael. At long last, my pain will end. He is my redemption.
—Michaela, Archangel of Budapest, to Raphael (Before the Birth of Gavriel, Son of Michaela, Grandson of Gavriel Past)
Michaela stood on the very edge of the rooftop of a stronghold built by Marduk, Archangel of the Forge and Keeper of Eon’s Flame. Though it was far more martial and less elegant than was her style, she had no quarrel with keeping it as her stronghold.
Before…before, it would have mattered.
Before, she’d have immediately ordered a new build to suit her high opinion of herself.
But before had been a long time ago…a death ago.
Because she had died on the way to a healing rest so deep, it was beyond anshara.
The wounds inflicted by Lijuan and what Michaela had done to counter them after the fall that had shattered her body had been so grievous that the thread holding her to this world had snapped…
only she’d been with Cassandra, who it seemed had a drop of the healer within her.
Just enough to pull Michaela back the mere breath that it had taken for her to slide into the endless nothingness of the state in which she’d spent century after century.
In that moment of death, she’d thought of only one thing: Gavriel.
Her son, lost to her forever.
Her eyes burned, her entire body stiff with an aching that was a new mother’s love. Because he had been but a babe when she’d left him, so small and fragile and so very, very loved.
“I have watched over him with all care,” Keir had told her when she’d spoken to him after her waking, his warm brown eyes gentle. “He has grown into an extraordinary man, a man of whom you can be intensely proud. Thank you for trusting me with him.”
She had been so hungry for stories of Gavriel’s childhood, and the healer had been kind enough to fly to her territory, spend several days with her.
He had shared so much. She’d cried at hearing the stories, and Keir, who she’d chosen for Gavriel’s foster father for his kindness, had showed her that same kindness before he gave her a single piece of advice.
“He is a man now, Michaela. Treat him as a man, or you will lose him.” He’d followed that up with a precis of the war that simmered on the border between Aegaeon and Illium, father and son.
A war driven by pride and arrogance.
Never, Michaela vowed. Never would she do something as heinous as attack her child. Whatever she had been, whoever she had been, she had loved her babies. Both the one she had lost too soon, and the one who had survived.
Each lived in her heart and always would.
“I will be what you need and want me to be,” she said to the evening air as she waited for her son to arrive for his first visit three weeks after her waking.
She’d dressed with care for this first meeting, choosing not a skintight bodysuit as had been her wont, but formal new leathers of a deep bronze. Her son was a warrior and she wanted him to see that she, too, could be a warrior when such was needed.
“Sire.” Andreas came to stand next to her a short time later, even deadlier and far more honed as a leader than when she’d gone into Sleep. “He has been sighted. He should be here within the half hour.”
Michaela knew that meant he’d been sighted much earlier—but Andreas knew she already waited here.
What good to tell her that her son was on the horizon when it would not change what she was doing?
When her stomach was already a tautness of nerves and her need to see Gavriel a gnawing on her bones—Gavi, Keir had called him, a childhood name that had carried into use among his intimates today.
Would she one day be permitted to call him so?
“While we wait,” she said, needing a distraction, “tell me further about Marduk, this Ancestor who was not an Ancestor.”
Andreas’s voice held a profound sadness as he said, “Marduk was…Marduk. To me it seems a great tragedy that he Sleeps forevermore—or that is his intent. He made this world a far better place, and he made me proud to call myself his second, but he was unyielding in his view that this time was not for him.”
He made this world a far better place…
Michaela knew without asking that no one had said that about her when she vanished into Sleep.
What, she wondered, had her son learned about her growing up?
Not from Keir—the healer was all that was good and kind, would’ve never abused her memory to her son.
But others…others would not have been so gentle.
As she hadn’t been gentle with them.
So many enemies she’d left behind, enemies who would’ve sought to harm her child—in spirit if not in body—had they known he was hers.
But that secret had been kept, not only by Keir and her own loyal people, but by Raphael and his consort, and all those bound to Raphael who had known of Gavriel’s existence.
They had protected and nurtured her babe so he could grow into the man who flew to her today.
She would’ve done the same had the roles been reversed; this, she could say in the full knowledge that it was the truth.
Perhaps no one would’ve ever entrusted a child into her care, but had they done so, she wouldn’t have betrayed their trust.
Children, mortal or immortal, were never to be hurt. Not under Michaela’s watch.
Perhaps Gavriel had heard that about her. One good thing at least.
“Marduk did have a serious advantage,” Andreas added, “in that people were awed by him simply because of how he looked. They didn’t dare misbehave lest he punish them in some primeval way of great ferocity.
” Humor now. “He found their reaction endlessly amusing, and used it to great effect. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t capable of harsh discipline where needed. ”
Michaela, by contrast, had always been known for her beauty. She’d been proud of being the muse of artists, prouder still of entangling immortals and mortals both in her web and manipulating them to do what she wished.
Uram.
The Archangel of the Steppes become the Archangel Bloodborn.
Had she ever loved him in truth? Or had it been about power and control?
That was a question to which she might never have an answer, because the woman she’d been had thought in ways that seemed alien to her now. Another self. One who had died while she lived.
No, that was a lie.
She continued to live inside the Michaela who had taken her first gasping breath after death. So did all she’d done, and to look away from that history would be to be a coward. She’d done what she had—the good and the bad—and it was time for her reckoning.
“I will leave now, sire,” Andreas said seven or eight minutes out from her son’s projected arrival time. “You will wish to meet him alone.”
“Yes, thank you, Andreas.” But she looked over at him as he turned. “I’m very glad that you were yet in the territory when I awoke.” Not only because he was intelligent and strong, but because he was also fearless and principled enough to stand against her should it be necessary.
No more did she want her people to fawn over her.
No more would she create vampires like Riker who were slavishly devoted to her despite her cruelty.
He’d been executed during her Sleep after going into murderous bloodlust—she carried that death on her conscience, too, because she’d had the making of Riker and she hadn’t taught him strength and discipline. No, she’d made him her vicious lapdog.
He’d died because she’d failed.
This time around, she would build a court of the strong.
She hadn’t yet asked Andreas if he’d stay on permanently as her second—that, she knew, was a decision to be made—on both sides—after the interim term to which he’d agreed.
Andreas inclined his head, the rich brown-black of his hair glossy in the early evening sunlight. “I grieve for Marduk,” he said, his face stark, “but I’m grateful to have the ability to stay longer in these lands. They have become home to me, sing in my blood now.”
Then he was gone, a deadly warrior who had chosen to honor her with his fidelity for a single short year.
Determined to be worthy of his trust and to earn that of her son, she straightened her spine and put her hands behind her back, gripping the wrist of one with the fingers of the other as the desert air hung unmoving. Because her son was a man, and she was a stranger to him.
She couldn’t simply embrace him, couldn’t simply expect him to love her. As evidenced by Aegaeon, to expect such was foolishness in the extreme. Foolishness that meant she could lose Gavi…for she could call him that in the privacy of her own mind and it was no trespass.
An owl, its feathers as white as snow, winged its way to look into her eyes with orbs of gold.
“Lady Cassandra,” Michaela said. “I thank you with all I am for this second chance.” She held that gaze, steel in her next words.
“But I am not your chick to look after anymore.” If Cassandra had a flaw, it was that she was too protective of those she claimed.
“This is my time, my rule, my decisions.”
Where before, it was arrogance that would’ve dripped from her words, today, it was a firmness coated in respect. “I am an archangel.”
Michaela, Archangel of Art and Grace. That ancient, familiar voice, full of an excruciating weight of history.
Michaela’s throat tightened. She had never held that title.
She’d been called the Archangel of Beauty or Muse Most Beautiful, and it had spoken to her vanity.
But this…“I will earn the title you have bestowed upon me,” she promised.
“I will be better than I was. I will make my son proud to claim me as his mother. This I vow.”
No more words from Cassandra.
The owl spiraled up into the darkening evening sky still brushed with streamers of orange-gold. It vanished from sight even as she spotted a shadow on the horizon, one that soon formed into the silhouette of an angel against the last of the sun’s glow.