Chapter 44
Raphael, Son of Archangel Nadiel, who is the son of Minariel and Athenecus, and Archangel Caliane, who is an Ancient with her lineage lost to time.
—The Naming Book (Archives of the Angelic Library, Refuge)
“My mother is here,” Hannah told Elena one crisp Refuge morning, when the marble of the buildings sparkled with a fine frost, and everything but the pathways shone white with a thick coating of snow.
Elena stared at the other woman. “I thought your mother was Sleeping?”
A mischievous smile. “She was until about three months ago. Says she felt that I needed her, so she woke up. She always led a quiet life so didn’t want any fuss when she woke—but she’s been fussing over me.”
Hannah exhaled, her breath white in the air and her face unshielded in its naked vulnerability. “I’m so glad she’s here. I have others who have been like mothers to me, but to have her with me at this time, it means…”
“I get it.” Elena squeezed Hannah’s hand, her throat thick with happiness for the other woman.
Hannah’s pupils flared. “I’m so sorry, Ellie, I didn’t—”
“Hush.” Elena shook her head. “I was mortal. She was mortal. I’m at peace with that.”
It was only later, when she landed on a distant field after a lazy night flight with Raphael that she realized she’d told the absolute truth.
“I still miss my mother, probably always will, but…there’s an acceptance there now that takes away the final sharp shards and leaves behind something gentler, more tender. ”
Her archangel rubbed her back in that exact spot that he knew bothered her.
When he swept his wings around her, she leaned back into his chest and looked up. “How are you doing, Archangel-mine?”
Raphael didn’t try to obfuscate; that would be an insult to his consort. “I still worry about my sanity.
“But having Mother go into Sleep when she did, realizing that I can make the same choice—and that I’ve set it up so I’m surrounded by strong people who’ll confront me with my madness should I begin to slide into the abyss—it eases my spirit until the shadows are but few.”
She reached back to stroke his face. “I’ll always have your back. Galen and Dmitri and Illium and all the others will help me pin you down and conk you on the head if I ever need to drag you into Sleep.”
“I am heartened.” A joking comment, but a truth, too—because all those she’d named, and so many others, would call him to account, and would back his consort should it come to it.
He kissed her fingers as he spread his hands over the hard mound of her belly. “Hello, little one. We’re excited to meet you.”
Smiling, Elena placed her hands over his. “I dream of the baby sometimes,” she said. “I like to think our child is dreaming in there and I’m catching bits of it.”
“What does this bright spark dream?”
“Warmth and pieces of color and a glow that feels like happiness.” Her hands tightened on his.
“We’ll be good parents.” A firm statement.
“Izar told me that. He pointed out that we kept all three of them alive while they were with us and we’re only having a single cub, so it should be a piece of cake by comparison. ”
Raphael’s shoulders shook. “Blunt but correct.” Except that their child, while not half-chimera, was to be born of an archangelic parent, and a woman who was an angel-Made.
Mortal or immortal, that child would not be like any other in this world.
“Did you point out that you’re a one-being just like Naasir? ”
“Hah! No. I’m going to tomorrow—I can’t wait for the discussion we’ll have.”
“Look, hbeebti. A shooting star.” It arced across the midnight sky dotted with diamonds, a line of stardust in its wake.
“Quick, make a wish!”
Raphael already had. Please, keep my Elena and our child safe. Nothing and no one was more important to him than the woman in his arms, and the child they’d created between them.
* * *
It was sometime in the middle of the next night that they received news about Hannah.
Elena was padding about in sweats in the kitchen, eating pickles that she was dipping into peanut butter—while a shirtless Raphael sat at the heavy wooden counter that ran half the length of the massive space, watching her with a kind of affectionate fascination.
She offered him a pickle, shrugged when he demurred. “Your loss.”
Finishing her current pickle, she went to the cupboard where the staff stocked things that they had shipped in from outside the Refuge—like the peanut butter, which none of them could understand. “Aha!”
There it was, the thin rectangle of orange-infused ninety-five percent dark chocolate that was her archangel’s secret vice.
Shifting on her heel, she shook it at him.
His grin turned him from handsome to devastating. “How did you sneak that in there?”
Tapping the side of her nose, she said, “I know people.” She handed it over to him.
After opening it, he bit straight into the bar as he always did.
“So uncivilized,” she muttered, while dipping a pickle into peanut butter.
“Come over here and say that,” he challenged, and they both grinned like kids up to no good as Elena went around to sit next to him, their wings overlapping and their thighs touching.
“You know,” she said, after swallowing a pickle–peanut butter bite, “when I first saw this kitchen all those years ago, it seemed this huge edifice of a thing. Not a home kitchen, you know? Not a place where I might one day have midnight snacks, or scrounge around for a piece of toast because that’s all I wanted. ”
Her archangel reached over to grab the bottle of cold milk she’d forgotten and put it beside her.
“I suppose it is a touch overwhelming.” He glanced up at beams that crisscrossed the cavernous ceiling, took in the stone walls.
“I’ve never really thought about it—I spent my childhood in kitchens just like this. ”
“Did you get underfoot?” Elena’s eyes almost glowed in the dark as they did at times when the wildfire was surging inside her.
Flames—white gold electric with blue, their edges an iridescent midnight and dawn—flickered over her wings just then, the wildfire lovely and not at all dangerous to her.
“All the time,” he said as he ate more of the chocolate that his consort had first introduced him to five decades earlier—and that she plied him with at odd moments that made him soften inside in a way that was only ever for her.
Of all the people he’d known in his adult life, Elena was the only one who wanted to look after him even when he was in the peak of health and power. That she loved him with the passionate fury of her deadly hunter’s heart was the grounding truth of his existence.
“I got swatted on the butt by kitchen towels more than once,” he told her, grinning as he remembered how he’d scampered through the kitchen, wriggling this way and that to escape the towel threats.
“They had no fear of my parents’ wrath, those staff members, because Caliane and Nadiel both expected them to treat me the same as any other child. ”
His parents might’ve disagreed on some parts of the raising of him—Nadiel had definitely been the less strict parent—but on this they’d been united. One court or another, he was treated as a child.
“I didn’t know until I was older that people were already predicting that I’d one day be an archangel. Mother and Father made sure those suppositions and predictions never reached my childish ears—and they ensured their staff knew not to give in to such gossip, either.”
He found himself falling back into memories he hadn’t revisited since he hit adulthood.
“Rolf, my mother’s cook in Amanat? He was the cook at her Refuge stronghold back then, and he used to put me in a ‘cage’ in one corner of the kitchen when things became too dangerous for me to be underfoot—like when they were moving huge vats of soup and the like.
“He tells me I’d peer out with my fingers around the bars while yelling that I could help.” He grinned. “I couldn’t even fly properly then, and had had my wings trodden on at least three times already that day when I let them droop instead of keeping them up.”
“Ouch.”
Realizing she had a gap in her knowledge because of how she’d come to be an angel, he said, “Children’s wings aren’t as sensitive or as breakable as an adult’s.
The bones are softer in a way that means they can bend more easily.
It didn’t hurt to be stepped on, but growing back feathers that got pulled off during those incidents made me itch, so I started to learn very quickly to keep my wings out of the way. ”
“Is that why the babies fly like they’re drunk?” Elena said, taking another pickle out of the jar. “Because their wings aren’t fully developed?”
He shook his head. “No, by the time they can take wing, they have an understructure similar to an adult’s—they’re unwieldy because their wings grow faster than their bodies at a certain point in development.
I think evolution decided we needed to get off the ground as fast as possible—a debatable choice, given some of the antics baby angels pull. ”
Elena bumped his arm with her own. “Tell me more stories of baby Raphael.”
“Once,” he said, “Rolf ejected me from the kitchen because it was about to get dangerous in there. But I managed to slip away from the warrior he’d asked to take charge of me, then walked around to the outside back wall of the kitchen—and climbed onto the wooden boxes stacked outside.
I think they delivered mead in those back then.
“Rolf screamed when he turned around to see my face pressed to the window glass right there.” Raphael was laughing now, Elena’s sudden attack of the giggles setting him off.
“I don’t think he ever forgave me for that—he still oversalts my food at Amanat—but he also took me under his wing for many of the small things a child needs to learn to live life as a functional adult. ”
His parents had loved him, but they’d also been archangels with endless calls on their time.
“It was Rolf who taught me how to cook so I wasn’t embarrassed when I became a warrior who lived on my own, and it was Rolf who put me to work washing dishes when I got older.
“Mundane experiences, but I was always around at least one archangel. My life wasn’t normal, but my parents and their people strove to put borders in place to ensure I never felt that.”
He stroked Elena’s thigh. “I want that for our child, hbeebti. To have a childhood covered in dirt and fun and mischief without the expectations or judgments of others weighing them down.”
“I don’t think we’ll have that problem with our senior teams.” Elena frowned. “But we should talk to the rest of our people—anyone who might come in contact with our spark—make it clear that they won’t be in trouble if they treat our kid like a kid.”
“We’re already agreed that Sivya will not discipline our hellion at all,” Raphael muttered. “She’s so soft that she is like that radioactive-colored abomination you ate four months ago for three days in a row.”
“Jelly,” his consort said with a grin. “You’re right. Sivya will be the chief household spoiler, and every kid needs one of those, but I think we can rope in Montgomery when it comes to not letting the kid run roughshod over her.”
Raphael. A powerful mental touch, familiar but not in the way of his Seven.
Eli. Is all well?
Hannah is in childbirth.