Chapter 57
I have no prouder achievement than that I’m your father, Rafi.
—Nadiel to his Son (Once, when an Archangel was a Boy)
Raphael bent over, his toddler son’s hands held securely in his as he helped their Nixie “walk” along the Tower hallway outside his office—while Bengal padded beside them, his tail swishing.
He’d grown from the kitten he’d once been, but his adult form remained relatively small—around the size of the felines called Maine Coon cats, though Bengal was no Maine Coon.
He was, however, Nix’s best friend, and now purred encouragement in his throat.
Nix couldn’t yet keep himself upright, but he was determined to try, his face screwed up in concentration as he put one foot in front of the other.
When he fell or stumbled, there were no tears, only more scrunching of the face, more determined steps.
Apart from his frustration and pain during his wing-development years, he wasn’t much of a crier.
The wings that had given him such anguish remained of a size where he wouldn’t trip on them as he learned to walk.
“That’s my strong boy,” Raphael murmured, his heart full of a father’s pride.
Yes, that’s it, Rafi. Just so.
His breath caught at the memory fragment that floated to the surface of his mind without warning. It was old, that fragment. So old that he had no conscious recollection of it…but he recognized the voice.
Nadiel.
His father. Intelligent, handsome, doomed.
Nix looked up then. “Papa! Nissi wak!”
“Yes, you’re walking,” Raphael said, his voice rough. “I’m very proud of you.”
Smile huge, his son turned back to continue on his determined path, while inside Raphael surged a tumult of protective fear.
Because Nadiel had been like this with him, too.
He might not have conscious memories of it, but he’d been told the stories by more than one person—including a person he trusted beyond question.
“He loved you,” Lady Sharine had said as she stroked his hair while he sat on the floor heartbroken, his back against the seat she kept on the porch of her home at that time.
She’d been on the seat doing some sewing when he’d come to her, and she’d set it immediately aside to give him her full attention.
That had been before Aegaeon, before they lost their lovely, kind Hummingbird to the mists of her mind for hundreds of years. And it had been before his mother sent him crashing to lie broken and bloody on the earth.
Back then, he’d been so young—and with his mother lost in unending grief at having had to execute the man she loved, he hadn’t wanted to burden her with his own grief. So he’d gone to her best friend, the woman who had always been the secondary maternal figure in his life.
“If he loved me,” he’d asked her, his hand fisted on his knee, “why did he surrender to the madness? Why didn’t he go into Sleep at the first sign of it? At least he’d still be alive!”
Havens, but he’d been young, and so deep in his emotions that he’d asked the unanswerable.
“Because he wasn’t perfect, my sweet Rafa,” Lady Sharine had said. “We, none of us are perfect.” Her hand in his hair, such a gentle touch. “He was bright and brash and young and he thought he could win any battle—even the one against his own mind.”
Raphael hadn’t been ready to hear that, to even attempt to understand it, but now, watching his toddler son walk, he thought of the father Nadiel had been to him until his madness…and he felt his heart ache with love for the man who’d been unable to win that final war.
* * *
“No, Rafi, not like that.” An intent look out of eyes of changeable green, muscled arms shifting the wooden fighting stick in his hands, his whole attention on Raphael. “This way. Do you see?”
“Let me try. Like this?”
A slashing smile, his eyes aglow, and the pale gold of his wings held up with warrior precision.
“Exactly. I knew you could do it.” He ruffled Raphael’s hair.
“What a warrior you’re going to be, son of mine.
I look forward to sparring with you when you are full grown into your power—I will need to be on my mettle! ”
* * *
Nadiel hadn’t made it to that point in time.
Swallowing hard, Raphael looked down at Phoenix, his heart full of a love so huge and protective that it had forever changed him. So it must have changed Nadiel and Caliane.
For one thing was true: no matter what else, his parents had loved him.
He’d spent equal time with both, never a child who was pushed aside for other matters, despite his parents being archangels.
Even if it meant that Nadiel declined the suggested time for a Cadre meeting because he’d promised his son they’d go flying.
It would be the same for Nixie—he would know the love of both parents, would always understand that he was the most important thing in their lives.
“Oh, look at you!” That delighted feminine voice had everything in him lifting, softening. He glanced up to find Elena crouched at the far end of the corridor; she was dressed in warrior black, blades strapped to her biceps and thighs—and her arms held out to a now-laughing Nix.
“Mama!” He tried to toddle faster, his little legs wobbly in the sunlight that slanted in through the windows to their left.
As Elena spoke words of encouragement to their boy, Raphael let the shadows of the past whisper away, to live in the joy of today. If he allowed those shadows to overtake him, he would steal the present from both himself and his family. “Hey,” he said to his son, “how about Papa?”
The boy grinned and said, “Mama!”
“See”—Raphael shook his head, even as he grinned in turn—“this is the thanks I get.”
His son giggled, catching on to his mood, and across the way, Elena blew Raphael a kiss. Sexiest you’ve ever looked, Archangel.
Raphael’s cheeks creased. “There you go,” he said, steadying their son when his legs would’ve gone out from under him. “Show your mama what you can do.”
“Mama! Nissi wak!” Nix called out.
“Yes, Nixie, you’re walking! And getting faster with every step. Soon you’ll be racing up and down these hallways.”
Their little boy laughed…and fell into his mother’s waiting arms.
Scooping him up, Elena rose and kissed Raphael as he spread his wings around her and Nix in the sunshine of his Tower while a not-housecat prowled around their legs, purring.
* * *
It was much later that night, while Raphael slept the small amount he needed, that he dreamed of his father burning up in Caliane’s fire, Nadiel’s eyes turbulent with insanity as his glorious wings melted to nothing.
Wake up, Raphael!
He jerked awake to the sound of his consort’s distress. “Elena, what is it? Where is the danger?”
Cupping his face as she leaned over him, she shook her head. “You went rigid beside me, your hands fisted.” She stroked her hand down his neck, over his shoulder. “What were you dreaming about?”
Shuddering, he allowed his muscles to relax. “Nadiel.”
His answer had her spreading her wing over him as she put her arm protectively across his chest. Because his Elena understood his fears, had seen his terrors. “You know,” she reminded him, her gaze wildfire and silver. “You know. You’re always on the watch. It’ll never get to that point.”
She’d said as much to him many times before, but they both understood that the only thing that might help was to see if his mother would wake sane. “Five more years,” he said, his tone like sandpaper. “Longer perhaps.”
Each turn of the planet was another twisting of the knife of fear that had haunted him since he’d lost one parent, then the other, to an insidious—“My father called it a worm in the mind,” he told Elena.
“I’d forgotten that. But he said it not long before the end, while he was still able to pass himself off as sane. ”
Raphael could see the scene now, how his father had looked at him after Raphael asked a perfectly normal question. With suspicion and even anger that had made Raphael take a step back, say, “Father?”
Seeming to snap back into reality, Nadiel had shaken his head, the gold-touched mahogany of his hair shaggy and a little unkempt. “Sorry, Rafi. There’s a worm in my mind, eating up my thoughts.”
“I understood that to mean he was tired,” he told his consort now. “He wasn’t old, not in comparison to the others in the Cadre—I never even considered the specter of madness.”
Of a worm in the mind.
Placing her cheek against his shoulder, Elena just held him, as if aware that no words she could say would ever soothe his worry about what he might become. Not when the ghosts haunted him. As she’d once been haunted.
A sound coming through the small crystal that sat on the bedside table.
“Nixie is awake.” Raphael knew he should leave his son be—he was going through a stage where he woke, played games on his own, then fell back asleep.
The healers who specialized in childhood development had told them not to interrupt, especially if he wasn’t showing any signs of distress.
But today, Raphael needed to see his son happy and whole and healthy.
His hunter was moving before he could vocalize the raw depth of his need. “Keep the bed warm,” she said, and slipped away, her body lithe and strong under the tee she pulled on.
She was back within seconds, a delighted Phoenix in her arms. He wore stretchy pajamas of a soft gray material printed with the moon and the stars, which Raphael had put him into a few hours earlier.
Because Holly had kept her promise to dress him in style, and was ever couriering over new things she’d made just for him.
Their not-housecat had prowled in behind his favorite person, was already curled up at the end of the bed.
“Don’t get used to this,” Elena warned their son with a nuzzling scowl. “Tonight’s a special treat.”
Nix started telling Raphael all his news the instant Elena laid him down on the bed next to Raphael, his blue eyes bright with excitement and the midnight of his hair mussed from sleep.
Elena came down on their child’s other side, lying with her hand on Nix’s belly and smiling at his stories—all told in that baby language that wasn’t yet fully comprehensible, especially at high speed.
“Papa uv!” Nix held up his arms.
Tears hot in his eyes, Raphael took their boy and rolled over onto his back so that Nix could lie on his chest. “I love you, too, Nixie,” he said as he tugged Elena closer with one hand. “I always will.”
Their son snuggled down into his chest, his small wings folded tight to his spine—as was natural at this age—and his heart beating in a rapid rhythm as he reached out a hand to Elena. “Mama uv,” he said, his voice sleepy.
Elena kissed that little hand. “Your mama loves you, too, baby boy.”
See, Archangel. We’re doing good. We’re raising an amazing, empathic, wild little boy.
A kiss to Raphael’s jaw, her wing coming protectively over father and son.
“Now rest,” murmured the hunter who had forever altered his existence. “Dream only good dreams, my darling.”