Elena looked around, grabbed a notepad off a nearby side table, and gave it to Laric along with a pen, before retaking her seat. He held the pen oddly and she realized the scarring on his hands made it difficult for him to write smoothly.
He could, however, still write.
When he handed the pad back to her, Elena saw he’d written the words in painstakingly formed English: There is nowhere else where I will be left in peace.
Frowning, she said, “Do you want that? Isn’t it lonely?”
The healer said nothing for a long time. Then he wrote again: People are cruel.
Young, Elena remembered, he’d been so very young when he’d been injured. Regardless of his physical age, he was still that boy inside who’d been rejected by his lover, then looked on with pity and maybe even distaste by the immortal world. Still . . . “Do you know Jessamy?”
An immediate nod, those scarred hands writing carefully on the page: She is strong. I am not strong.
“I don’t think you’ve ever given yourself a chance,” Elena murmured and, acting on instinct, placed her hand on his shoulder.
He went stiff before slowly relaxing. But he didn’t pull away. That’s what she’d thought: this boy wasn’t like Aodhan, who’d shunned touch. People had simply stopped touching him. “Think about it,” she said. “There are a lot of unusual things in New York—you won’t stand out as much as you think.”
Grinning, she said, “The other day, I saw a man dressed as a chicken walking with a briefcase. He kept looking at his watch as if he was late.”
His surprise was such that she almost caught a glimpse of his face before he angled it so the shadows of the hood concealed him, clearly practiced at the maneuver. Picking up the notepad, he wrote: Angelkind does not want its mistakes out in the world.
Anger burned Elena’s blood, but she couldn’t tell him that wasn’t true. Even Jessamy had said something similar.
“Watching one archangel execute another in the skies of New York,” Jessamy had murmured, “is a far different case from seeing an angel with a malformed wing.” A soft smile that told Elena the other woman was at peace with who she was. “One is an otherworldly thing beyond mortal ken, the other far too close to their own reality. Angelkind cannot ever afford to be that real, Elena. It would shatter the foundations of the world.”
On the heels of that memory came that of Raphael’s bloody story about the angels who’d wanted to rule without any archangelic oversight.
We live in a world of predators and prey.
And the consequence of seeing an angel with a “mortal” ailment could be thousands, tens of thousands, of mortals dead after some idiot decided they could take on the angels and win.
Because mortals could never win.
Gritting her teeth, Elena narrowed her eyes. “There must be a way,” she muttered. “There’s always a way. We just have to figure it out.”
Laric appeared to be staring at her. What he eventually wrote on the notepad made her grin. “Yeah,” she said, “I’m not like other angels. I’m a hunter angel.” What the hell—people were already using that term. She’d just co-opt it. Then she’d make Demarco and Ransom and all her other hunter friends who insisted on wearing the ridiculous hunter angel T-shirts, bow down to her in homage.
The idea made her want to laugh, regardless of the brutal storm outside and the subtler malice within Lumia. “Hunters are a different breed.”
The healer didn’t respond, but she could feel him staring at her again. “Did you ever try to get your scars excised?” she asked. “Adult angels have an incredible healing ability from what I’ve seen.”
Laric’s hand moved slowly across the page. The scars are impossible to cut through.
Elena tried to process what he was telling her, considered the amount of energy that would’ve been released at the violent death of an archangel. There’d been no similar blowback when Raphael executed Uram, but those two had extracted a hell of a lot of power from their environment, then expended it during their fight, Manhattan a war zone. Badly damaged high-rises and a burned-out electrical network had only been the start.
And in comparison to Caliane’s and Nadiel’s battle, Raphael’s and Uram’s fight had been between young “pups,” as Alexander was wont to say.
Nadiel had been younger than Caliane, but not young. The amounts of energy involved . . . It must’ve seared the scars so deep into Laric’s body that they went to the bone itself. Raphael, do you think you could try your ability to heal on Laric once you’re back from China? Not before. Not when they had no idea of what he might face there.