Chapter 65
Your son is his own man. Should he wish to go with you, I will not hold him to his sworn vows.
—Archangel Raphael to Archangel Aegaeon (At War’s End)
While yet far enough offshore from Aegaeon’s territory that her presence wouldn’t be deemed a threat—because at this point, she could go in any direction—Caliane reached into her pocket to remove a communications device.
It had been superseded while she Slept, but Tasha had checked and informed her it still worked.
Now, she used it to make a call that showed the face. “I would speak to Aegaeon,” she said to the grim-visaged vampire with slashing cheekbones and dark eyes who answered.
“I will pass on the message, Lady Caliane.” The vampire’s tone was respectful if edgy. “But the sire is extremely busy at present and may not respond with speed.”
“Tell him it is about Aaeva.”
The vampire frowned, the name clearly unfamiliar to him. But he was seasoned enough to know that one did not get in the middle of conversations between archangels without an invitation, so he simply bowed his head. “I will do so now.”
Caliane remained offshore in the minutes that followed, using the winds to glide over the ocean waves. The minutes turned into an hour, longer. But then, there! Blue-green on the horizon, a shimmer of silver.
No winged battalions as a dark shadow.
Only a single archangel with wings of a deep green streaked with blue and shoulder-length hair of a much more vivid blue-green.
“How dare you!” Aegaeon roared when he was within vocal range. “You do not say her name!”
Water surged up in spouts around her, the wind whipping up as the silver swirl on Aegaeon’s bare chest glowed akin to his wings. “Someone must say her name.” Despite the violent storm around them, she kept her tone tempered. “Someone must remind you.”
He smashed down a fisted hand, and the water soared up and around them until they were trapped in a vortex that wanted to suck her down, crumple her wings, and shove her into the deep.
But she was an Ancient, too, with powers of her own.
She didn’t use them in offense, only to hold off the water so that, rather than a threat, it became a room that insulated them from the world; then she used her abilities to dampen the roar of the water. “You have forgotten her,” she said. “It has been so long that you have forgotten her.”
His hands were mallets, his shoulders bunched hard and rigid, and his face so hot and red that veins pumped on his temple. “I would never forget her!” It was another roar. “I would never! She was my daughter!”
A daughter born too young while Aegaeon, too, had been so very young. A daughter who had died in his arms, her tiny body too weak and unmade to carry on. Aegaeon almost hadn’t gone on, either, his grief a black morass that threatened to suck him under.
He’d been so thin back then, a bewildered sapling who hadn’t expected fatherhood anytime in his near future. When it had come, however, he’d embraced it. Embraced Aaeva, this precious babe born thousands of years before Aegaeon became an archangel.
Endless millennia had passed between then and now. She could count on the fingers of one hand the people close to Aegaeon who knew and remembered Aaeva in this time: her and Sharine. Alexander, while of an age with Caliane, had been at a distant court throughout the entire pregnancy.
Sharine would never even think to bring up Aaeva, certainly not in the context of a looming war, but Sharine was infinitely soft of heart.
Caliane, however, had almost lost her son. She understood what Aegaeon didn’t.
Today, the very fury of his response told her she’d been right. He was old, Aegaeon. Not as old as her, but old enough that memory was a thing malleable and threads could become lost…especially when it came to anguish a person didn’t wish to remember.
“I hurt my child once,” she told him. “I broke him so badly that he was nothing but shattered bones and blood left on a field far from civilization, far from help.”
A hint of memory in his eyes, a remembrance of the agony he’d suffered as Aaeva breathed her last only minutes after her birth, but the tornado of water continued unabated around them.
Caliane hovered unflinching in that dangerous space, even as his thick fists began to glow as hot as his wings and the silver swirl on his chest. “Every time I close my eyes, I dread the dream that might come.
Of seeing my precious boy, the babe I cradled in my arms, the toddler who gripped my hand in trust absolute, gasping for air and finding only blood in his lungs.
“Because of me. I did that. No one else.” She let her tears fall, let Aegaeon see her weakness. “He was so angry with me that day when we fought…but he cried, too.”
Raphael might not remember, but she did.
“My boy cried because he was afraid for me—and because I broke his heart.” She bit down hard on her lower lip in an effort to stop the quiver, but that same quiver was in her voice when she spoke.
“Because despite all I’d done, all the horrors I’d unleashed on the world, he’d believed that his mother would never hurt him. ”
The power around Aegaeon’s hands flickered, a candle hit by a blustering wind.
“The boy will not even acknowledge me as his father!” Violent, loud, angry.
“I held him in my hands when he was but newborn. I flew him in my arms across entire oceans! And he will not even call me Father! It is not the same!”
Caliane didn’t wipe away her tears. Her son deserved them. As Aegaeon’s son deserved Aegaeon’s pain—and the guilt he refused to feel because he was too arrogant to look his own mistakes in the eye.
“Did you give him his first sword?” she asked, knowing that she was pushing things to a perilous point, but she had to push, had to make him see. “Did you teach him how to make his wings stronger? Did you give him wise advice when he told you of his first love?”
Aegaeon’s eyes flashed. “I am his father.”
“No, Aegaeon. You were once. No longer.” She shook her head hard when he went to rage at her again.
“As I was not Raphael’s mother when I first woke from my long Sleep.
Do you know how long it took for my son to trust me?
Truly trust me?” Her voice was jagged now, her throat raw.
“It took until the moment I went into Sleep again as the ghosts of madness began to howl.”
Aegaeon stared at her out of the startling blue-green eyes that had been rimmed with red at the Refuge ceremony for Aaeva’s journey beyond the veil. Afterward, he and Aaeva’s mother had taken her tiny body to a peaceful hidden grotto deep in the territory where they’d first met.
“A beautiful place for our babe to rest,” Aaeva’s mother had told them all before they’d left. “She will sleep under the canopy of an ancient oak, surrounded by wild forest blooms.”
She’d been older than Aegaeon, but far more fragile. Caliane didn’t know what had happened to her, but she could guess—because she hadn’t returned from the burial.
She Slept beside her child.
“Don’t lie to me.” Aegaeon’s snarl shattered the anguished peace of the memory. “You have been part of Raphael’s life for centuries. I have watched you be so.”
“That is not true trust. That is a son allowing his mother some access to his life while forever keeping her at the corner of his eye. He was right to do so.” Her heart cracked again. “Because I did almost go mad a second time around, and I didn’t see it.”
She held the turbulent storm of Aegaeon’s gaze. “I had no idea I was once again becoming a monster, bringing all his concerns about me roaring to life.
“If I had done what you are doing, if I had held on to my arrogance, I would’ve lost him!” This time, she couldn’t stop her voice from rising. “I would’ve never been given the chance to hold my grandchild in my arms, or to hear him call me his grandmother.”
No glow of power around Aegaeon’s wings or his hands, the tempestuous spout of seawater pierced by sunlight it had previously blocked out. “He will not give me any respect,” he said, his voice a thing of crushed stone.
“He is angry,” Caliane said. “As my boy was angry with me for a long, long time.” She exhaled. “And you keep on giving him reason to be angry, Aegaeon.
“You show him not the statesman I once knew you to be, but a petulant and arrogant Ancient surrounded by sycophants. You would force his love and respect—and he is an archangel. Even were he not, would you respect you right now? Or would you, at best, fear and despise you?”
The water fell away, the sun bathing them in its glow.
Aegaeon’s hair blew back in a breeze that was natural, his eyes hard and jeweled as he stared out past her.
“I thought of him when I went into Sleep,” he ground out.
“I was aware I’d miss some of his life, but I thought it’d be fine.
We’d pick up as we’d left off.” His throat moved as he swallowed hard.
“I forgot to remember that he’d be a man full grown by then, not the child who clung to my every word. ”
A sense of exhaustion to his shoulders. “Am I so bad, Caliane? That you do not respect me, either?”
She had a choice to make: be politic and keep him calm—or tell the harsh truth and perhaps reignite his fury. “Yes,” she said. “We have never been akin to each other, you and I. I’ve always found you too brash, but once…once, I respected you despite our differences.
“You were a good archangel, and you had good people around you. Strong people. But at some point, you began to build edifices to your glory and your great generals left your court or went into Sleep. Rather than replace them with people of the same strength and honor, you began to surround yourself with those who defer to you.”
Heat on his cheeks again, his shoulders bunching. “Why are you here?” he asked bluntly. “It is surely not to make friends.”
“Because what I did to my son? It will haunt me for all eternity—I will never, ever forget, no matter how many ages I live.” She blew out a shaking breath.
“I don’t wish this for anyone, Aegaeon, not even you.
If you win this war you want to start, you will spend eternity haunted by the image of your bleeding… perhaps dying child.”
He flinched…and then he said the one thing she’d never expected him to say, not even after she confronted him with it.
“I’ve held a dying child in my hands before.
” His voice was raw torment and anguish.
“She was so fragile, her skin translucent and her body so tiny that I could fit all of her in one palm. I tried to keep her warm, keep her alive, but I could do nothing.”
“You know it was no fault of yours—the sweet child was simply born too soon,” Caliane murmured, her mother’s heart hurting for him. “That you even became a father at that age, it was a shock to all, including the healers.”
Aegaeon didn’t respond, his gaze distant.
But Caliane wasn’t done. “I will make you angry when I ask this,” she said, “but I will ask it all the same. Because it’s important for you to answer.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Don’t push it, Caliane. I respect you even if it isn’t reciprocated, but you are not my sire.”
She was startled into a smile. “You know, I had forgotten that we ever had sires.”
His responding smile was almost of the man he’d once been, the youth she vaguely remembered. “Yes, we were even children once.”
If he had always been this man, she thought, he wouldn’t now have a son who despised him. “How,” she said, “could you leave Illium behind when you’d already lost a cherished child to the arms of death?”
His wings glowed again, the wind rising.
“The answer isn’t for me, Aegaeon,” she said quietly. “It is for you. For in that wound, you will, I believe, find the answer to all you have become.”
The Archangel of the Deep stared at her for a long moment before throwing back his head in a roar. “Leave my waters,” he said, even though she was well outside his territorial boundaries. “You have interfered quite enough!”
Caliane didn’t push him any further. She had done all she could.
The rest was up to Aegaeon.