Chapter 58
My son. He is of Nadiel and I, but he is better than both of us.
—Caliane (After the First Waking)
A decade could pass by in a heartbeat when you had an intrepid child who had:
One: almost fallen off multiple Tower balconies because he thought he could fly even while his wings were half-size.
Two: tried to crawl into the house’s oven as a hiding spot—thankfully his wings had given him away there.
Three: somehow managed to get a blade out of one of his mother’s locked sheaths and had tried to throw said blade like he’d seen her do when she found him and lost at least five centuries off her immortal life.
And those were just his top three hits.
Needless to say, Elena had utmost sympathy for Lady Sharine these days. Because apparently, Illium and Aodhan had been even worse.
“Watch out if he makes a quiet friend,” Lady Sharine had said while holding Elena and Raphael’s incorrigible hellion on her hip. “That’s the true danger. The quiet one will distract you, while this one will get up to more mischief than he should be able to imagine.”
“Oh no.” Elena had groaned. “Aanisa is quiet. Not Aodhan-quiet, but quieter than Nixie. She takes after Hannah.”
“Anise, my friend,” Nix had proudly told Lady Sharine.
“Well, then, I’m afraid you and Raphael are doomed.” Lady Sharine had nuzzled a laughing Phoenix then. “You will give your poor parents quite the time, little one. Perhaps take a day off from mischief now and then, hmm?”
Nix had shaken his head while laughing so hard, it had been impossible not to laugh with him.
Now, said mischief-maker stood in between Elena and Raphael on an open field inside a forest in Kagoshima, each of them holding one of his hands. He kicked up his legs and swung between them now and then, not yet impatient because this was an adventure.
He’d already tried to catch one of the wild horses, crying, “Horsie!”
A word he now repeated in a questioning tone, his face mournful as he looked up at his father.
“Angels don’t ride horses,” Raphael said, his lips curved. “Our wings are too big and heavy.”
“Nixie small,” was the quick response, their child’s verbal skills now around that of a mortal two- to three-year-old.
Another ten, fifteen years, and he’d be like Sameon had been when Elena first met the boy who’d grown up to become part of her Guard.
“Your wings are big,” she pointed out, nodding to how they dragged on the ground, once again reminded of Sam and how he’d sighed as Jessamy nudged at him to raise them.
Phoenix looked back over his shoulder, then scrunched up his face real hard as he tried to raise those glorious black wings with filaments of white gold that glittered in the sunshine.
The hints of darkest indigo in his feathers were only visible in a certain light; hidden even deeper and only visible on the underside close to where his wings grew out of his back were feathers of pale gold.
“They are identical to my father’s feathers,” Raphael had told her when they’d first discovered them. His voice had been gritty, his hand tight on hers. “I am glad to see them again.”
“Grr,” Phoenix said now, imitating Bengal—who had vocalized his annoyance at being left at their residence in Japan—as he continued to try to lift his dragging wings.
Elena’s heart freaking melted. Despite appearances, their baby’s wings weren’t actually fully grown yet. He was also too small to have the muscle strength to succeed in his effort, but if determination were a currency, the kid would be well into the gazillions by now.
“Ugh.” He blew out a breath, then looked at Raphael, back at Elena, a gorgeous little boy with play-tumbled hair dressed in black pants and a black collarless tunic, which Holly had decorated on one side with a fall of painted feathers that perfectly matched his own. “Grandma?”
“Yes,” Elena said. “We’re waiting for your grandmother.” Her eyes met Raphael’s, and in them, she saw a fierce determination that had been apparent since the day of Nix’s birth.
“Nadiel was a wonderful father,” he’d told her one sleepless night, after their then-baby son had finally fallen asleep on her archangel’s bare chest five hours after midnight.
“Until his madness, he was a father who gave me a grounding in all that I needed to be a good man. I will be the same kind of father to Phoenix. One who is there and present, not lost in his own worries.”
And so her archangel fought his demons while she battled her own urge to wrap their son in cotton wool, both of them determined to give him a childhood colored in love and adventure.
“I wouldn’t worry,” Lady Sharine had told Elena after she confessed her fear of being stiflingly overprotective. “Your child is as feral as Illium once was, and I say that as a compliment, not a rebuke.”
Now, their smart and feral boy kicked up his legs again, swinging between them while murmuring “Grandma” to himself. After a while, feet back down, he stared at Raphael, his gaze considering. “Papa Grandma’s baby?”
Raphael’s grin was huge as he crouched down to their son’s height, his wings a glory behind him.
“Yes, Phin, I was a baby once,” he said, using a nickname he alone used for their son—it had happened organically, but afterward, she’d seen how much it meant to him to carry on the tradition of a father having a special name for his child, so she’d left it to the two of them.
Seeing her archangel and their son interact, their bond steel forged in love, it made her heart grow three sizes in a single heartbeat.
“Wow,” Phoenix said. “Mama”—he looked up—“Papa was a baby.”
Elena nodded solemnly at this important information, while Raphael continued to explain, “Grandma is my mother, Caliane. Like Shari-grandma is Uncle Illium’s mother.”
They’d already explained it all to him, but he was only small, and he’d never met Caliane. Now, he nodded solemnly. “Grandma,” he said firmly. “Cali-grandma?”
“No,” Raphael said softly, “she’s just Grandma.”
They’d been careful with this, none of them wanting to bruise Caliane’s heart when she’d gone to Sleep to protect her child—at the behest of that child. She hadn’t fought, hadn’t tried to manipulate her way out of the truth.
She’d just gone into Sleep because she’d made a promise.
Nix also knew about Marguerite: Elena’s lost mother was Grand-mère to him.
Elena had transferred the photos and recordings of her family through time, so their boy had met all of her mortal family through those images—and of course, he was Eve’s spoiled and adored shadow.
More than once, when Elena had to discipline him after he’d first started walking, he’d toddle to the communications array and say, “Anny Ebi!” and the system would connect him directly to his aunt (who had set up that automatic connection), whereupon he would then baby babble and gesticulate to his aunt as he complained about his mother.
Eve would nod and scowl and agree with him that Elena was just terrible.
Elena had taped him doing so, and those snippets of his younger self made her break out into a huge smile each time she pulled them back up. Not that he’d stopped calling Eve—who, as always, was his willing listener.
These days, however, he liked to chat with her about the games he was playing—and sometimes, he’d ask for the mobile crystal comm they’d put on a lanyard for him, so he could take her on walks with him, Bengal, and Bengal’s daughter.
Because yes, Bengal had gone courting when they’d visited the Refuge two summers earlier.
Elena didn’t know how relationships worked for not-housecats, but when they’d visited again the following year, he’d gone into the wild again, to return with a kitten Naasir confirmed was his. Turned out that kitten was as adventurous as her father and ready to move to the Tower.
Nix had named her Tigress for reasons unknown to anyone—though Elena had her suspicions that he’d learned Bengal’s language, and Tigress had named herself. These days, she proudly sported a glittering tiger’s-eye anklet courtesy of Greta.
Not a collar. That would be an insult.
The trio liked to go romping in the Legion forest, where they were infinitely and always welcome.
Zoe, too, was a big part of Nix’s life, but she was less of a spoiler and more of a friend—as much as she could be to a child so young.
“I’m laying the groundwork for when he’s an adult,” Sara’s girl had told Elena.
“Because if you’d had him while I was a kid, we’d have grown up together and been friends.
So I’ll be just Zoe to him, and when he’s grown, I’ll take him drinking and teach him the odd bad habit. ” A wicked smile.
Nixie loved his Zoe…and Elena loved that Sara’s spirit shone so bright in her daughter. The idea of Phoenix and Zoe as adults, shutting down a bar or getting into trouble together, made her grin.
She and Sara had shut down plenty of bars together.
It has been an hour, Raphael said as he rose to his feet with Nix in his arms. Dropping their giggling child over his shoulder while keeping a firm grip around his ankles with one hand, her archangel looked at her. The sun has set, gray on the horizon.
Sunset on the tenth Spring Equinox hence had been their chosen time to meet again.
He’s still doing okay. Elena took in a delighted upside-down Nix, who was currently pretending to be one of the Legion with their occasionally batlike way of hanging off trees. If he gets too bored, we’ve got that bag of snacks and games.
Our child never gets bored, Raphael said, a glint in his eye. It quite terrifies me. Did I tell you I found him throwing power bolts between his fingers earlier today? Mere arcs, but hot enough to singe off his eyebrows.
I wondered when he’d done that. The two of them were so used to their progeny’s antics that this felt like a perfectly natural escalation.
Until Elena’s brain finally caught up to what he’d said, while her archangel played chase with their boy. “Did you say power bolts?” She stared at him. “Nixie is a baby!”