1
Two years had passed.
Two years since Alexander woke.
Two years since the last confirmed sighting of Zhou Lijuan.
Two years since Illium threatened to burn up in a catastrophic explosion of power.
Two years while the Cascade seemed to hit Pause.
Elena was fucking over waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“Come on already,” she muttered up at the sky, Manhattan a toy borough hundreds of feet below the edge of the railing-free Tower balcony on which she stood.
“Speaking to your ancestors, Elena-mine?” The voice came from behind her, familiar and imbued with a power so violently deep that the mere sound of it engendered fear in the hearts of mortals and immortals alike.
It made Elena’s own heart ache, the love she felt for her archangel a painful, terrifying thing in these times of uncertainty. If she lost him . . . No, she couldn’t think that way. Even if that damn other shoe was still smirking at her, just waiting to thunk down on top of her head when she least expected it.
“Whoever or whatever it is that controls the Cascade, that’s who I’m talking to.” She leaned back into Raphael. The position trapped her wings in between, but with Raphael, she could be vulnerable, she could be weaponless, and still be safe. Not that she wasn’t armed to the teeth, but that was habit and none of it would ever be turned against Raphael except when they sparred—or when he pushed her buttons a little too hard.
Her archangel hadn’t quite got the hang of the fact he wasn’t lord and master over his consort. He tried but a thousand-five-hundred-years-plus of power had a way of messing with his attempts at seeing his once-mortal lover as an equal when it came to their personal relationship.
Elena cut him some slack every so often. “Some” being the operative word.
Today, he wrapped his arms around her shoulders from behind, his jaw brushing her hair as the two of them looked out over their city from their vantage point on the cloud-piercing form of Archangel Tower. New York. Brash and messy and noisy and full of color and energy and life. So much life. Elena could hear it on the busy streets far, far below, sense it with every beat of her heart, taste it in the myriad scents that clashed and fought and yet somehow made their peace.
Her blood hummed in awareness.
“I have news,” Raphael murmured. “It may inject a little excitement into your currently mundane life.”
Elena snorted. “I don’t need any more excitement. I just need the damn Cascade off Pause so we can get it done.” Her hand twitched to go for the lightweight crossbow strapped to her thigh.
Unfortunately, she didn’t have anyone or anything to shoot at right now.
Raphael’s chuckle vibrated against her. “You sound a little tense, Consort.”
Elena would’ve elbowed him if her wings hadn’t been in the way. “Why are you in such a good mood?” The past two years had been as tautly tense for him as they’d been for her. All the archangels had stayed within the borders of their own territories—but for a few secret trips here and there—in preparation for further Cascade madness.
Only the unpredictable worldwide phenomenon that caused dangerous power fluctuations in the archangels as well as some angels, along with tumult across the earth in the form of storms, quakes, and floods, seemed to have decided it was finished. But of course, they all knew it wasn’t. Not by a long shot. Even Elena could feel the thunderous portent in the air, just hanging there, waiting to unleash itself.
“My good mood is because something has at last broken the stalemate of the past two years.”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?” Elena said darkly.
“Such a suspicious mind.”
“Yes. It keeps me alive.” She watched an angel with wings of an astonishing, haunting blue edged with silver rise up over a skyscraper in the distance, Illium’s physical strength back to what it should be for his age and development. There had been no other vicious and possibly deadly surges that threatened to tear his body apart from the inside out.
Even better, he was laughing again, was once more the playful angel who’d become her first friend in this immortal world. “Bluebell’s about to do a dive,” she predicted from the way Illium was soaring up into the crystalline sky.
And then he was turning and falling, a sleek bullet whose laughter she could almost hear.
“I bet you he’s planning to go low enough to freak out the pedestrians.” New Yorkers were used to angels in their city, turned up their noses at the tourists who gawped up at the sky, but angelic acrobatics could still make them jump. Especially acrobatics done by an angel as fast and as quick to maneuver as Illium.