Chapter 74
Then she will kill you. She will make you mortal.
—From She who is to be Forgotten to Raphael (Once, long before the War of the Death Cascade)
Nisia and Keir were both of one mind on Elena and Raphael’s question about mortal cells in Raphael’s body.
“Beyond the bounds,” Nisia muttered.
Keir nodded. “So far beyond as to be ridiculous.”
The healers looked at each other, then back at Elena and Raphael.
It was Nisia who spoke. “But with you two, who knows. Let’s find out.”
That was how they discovered that the archangel whose name had been written out of angelic history, and who would ever be unknown except as a cautionary tale, had been right in this.
“Ambrosia isn’t a one-way transfer.” Keir’s voice was a whisper as he held up the vial of blood in which danced tiny glowing cells. Only a few. Just the ones that had reacted to the reagent Keir and Nisia had introduced into the sample taken from Raphael’s heart.
Because with an archangel, they could literally just go straight to the source—a wound that fine had healed over even as they pulled the needle out.
“But I didn’t give Raphael anything,” Elena protested.
“He fed you ambrosia in a kiss—are you attempting to say that there’s no exchange when you kiss?” Nisia asked in her usual caustic way, her eyebrow raised.
Raphael’s response was a grin. “Never change, Nissie.”
“I don’t care if you’re an archangel—call me that again, and I will find a way to poison you.”
Laughing, Raphael went down on one knee in a ceremonial bow she’d only ever seen Illium make, it was so showy and beautiful. “I beg your pardon, Lady Nisiantha Sparrowing of the Kishtwar Mountains. Will you forgive me?”
Nisia threatened to throw the vial at his head, but her eyes were laughing. “Oh, get up. How do you even know that ridiculous name my parents saddled me with? I thought I ripped out that page of the naming book.”
Even as he rose, stating he’d never betray his sources, Elena thought of what he’d told her about how she’d ended up with archangelic cells in her body. “Raphael put my dying mortal heart inside him,” she whispered.
I couldn’t bear to just abandon it, hbeebti.
The memory of his words made her entire chest ache even today. “Could that be where the transfer took place?”
“Unlikely.” Keir rubbed his chin. “The departed whom we do not name would have had no reason to ever imagine such a thing. As far as I know, Raphael is the only member of the Cadre in all eternity who has literally given another a piece of his heart.”
“I would do it again in a second.” Raphael held out his hand, voice husky.
As she slid her fingers over his, she felt like she was coming home.
“Ambrosia as the vehicle of transfer makes the most sense to me, too,” Nisia said, her attention once more on the vial she’d placed into a stand. “It is the moment of critical and emphatic change.”
“And,” Keir added, “it follows the pattern among angelkind. The toxin, too, is a two-way transfer.”
Elena realized she didn’t need an answer to that question—it was a curiosity, nothing more. But one thing worried her. “Have I made him weaker?”
“Never, hunter-mine,” Raphael said, even as Keir said, “If you had, you’d have discovered that in the War of the Death Cascade. No, Ellie, I think you have made him infinitely stronger.”
Arms folded as she leaned against the lab bench on which they’d run the tests, Nisia raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think our Rafe here would’ve gained the ability to heal without you, far less his ability to call the Legion.”
Keir’s pupils expanded. “Ah, Nisia, you see it clearly.” He turned to Elena. “You are the gardener, Elena, the grower of things, the one whose blood caused the Legion gardens to bloom even in the coldest, loneliest times. I saw it thus, when I sat with you one winter’s day as you tended to it.
“And while our Rafe”—a smile shared with Nisia—“bears the Legion mark, the Legion have always stated they serve only aeclari.” He picked up the vial.
“We have had many a discussion, have we not, on what that means. But what if it’s this at the core—a true bonded pair, each holding a part of the other? ”
Raphael’s Legion mark blazed, glowing brighter than it had since the war…and as it did so, the mortal cells in the sample became wildfire bright in a reaction that had nothing to do with the chemical agent the healers had introduced.
Keir and Nisia both sucked in a breath, but Raphael was laughing and kissing his consort, his happiness a glow in his very blood. You made me a little bit mortal, Elena-mine.
Elena’s eyes shone wet. She understood.
For how could Raphael ever go mad if he had Elena’s mortal cells inside him fighting the insidious damage of immortality? They both knew those rare few cells would battle to the death to save him from himself should it ever come to that.
Elena threw her arms around his neck as he lifted her off her feet and squeezed her tight, both their wings flaring so wide that Nisia ducked as Keir jumped back with his precious vial of glowing blood.
That just made them both laugh again, their giddiness an artifact of love.
* * *
They danced the most intimate dance of all that night, high in the skies above the Catskills. Skin to skin in the protective privacy of glamour, her breasts crushed against the hard plane of his chest and her bare thighs locked around his waist as she held the rigid need of him inside her.
When they fell, it was in a conflagration of tangled limbs and interlocked lips, Elena trusting her archangel to keep them aloft as they rose and fell, as they lost their breaths and their pulses went ragged.
Each kiss was another invitation.
Each shiver a surrender.
Each whispered word infinite tenderness.
All of it wrapped around the primal pleasure they found in one another. Sweat-slick skin and musk, the ocean crashing in her mind, his arm a steel band around her that said no matter what, he’d never let her fall.
She made sure to caress the arch of his wings with the firm touch he liked.
He kissed her throat just the way that made her moan.
She rode him with a ruthless precision that had his jaw going taut as he fought against the edge.
First, you. A rough kiss in her mind before he reached from behind to touch her just so between her thighs.
Elena moaned as she clenched on him, around him, pleasure scorching her veins. And in her pleasure, he found his own, thrusting deep inside her as they fell one last time, their wings aflame with wildfire.
* * *
They were back home and in bed—after first having tiptoed into Nix’s room to look in on their son and his best friend, the children having asked for side-by-side bunk beds—when Elena was struck by a thought.
“Marduk and Tiamat,” she sleepily muttered, “neither of them was ever mortal.”
“Keir only said a true bonded pair.” Her archangel’s voice rumbled against her cheek as she lay on his shoulder, atop his wing. “They’re also not like angels of this time—we don’t know how they bonded, how they could bond. All we know is that they were aeclari.”
Aeclari.
Elena fell asleep to the murmur of the Legion in the back of her mind…and the pulse of her archangel’s little-bit-mortal heart under her palm.