Archangel's Heart(56)

“You’ve led your brothers for a long time,” she said. “Aren’t you tired of it?”

A slight cocking of his head. “You’ve asked about me?” His eyes filling with light, his wings flaring out before closing back in.

“You are the Luminata. I was curious.”

“Yes, of course you would be curious. It is in your blood,” Gian said almost absently.

The words were stones thrown into a still pond.

Elena wanted to clutch at them, claw out the answers she needed. But she couldn’t show her hand. Not yet. Not when she was stumbling in the dark. “Yep. Hazard of being hunter-born, I guess.”

Gian blinked, stared at her for a second as if she wasn’t who he expected, then smiled. “Yes.” A glance up at the sun. “Alas, I must go. It is time for my first meditation—but I look forward to meeting again.”

Saying her good-byes, Elena walked up to Aodhan while Gian left the same way as his previous partner. “Just so you know,” she said, “you’re contemplating creating a new artwork.”

“You did not lie, Ellie. This place does interest me on an artistic level.” Eyes of shattered light met hers. “Gian stands too close to you.”

“Do you think it’s because he’s been here for hundreds of years?” She nudged her head and they walked down the corridor. “His social skills might just be rusty.”

“No.” Aodhan’s response was firm. “He only does it with you, no one else.”

Elena thought of how Gian had stared at her so strangely there at the end. “I remind him of the woman he was involved with.” She’d updated Aodhan on that piece of information after their flight the previous night. “I’d probably stare, too, if I met a man who looked like Raphael. And if the breakup was bad, if Gian’s lover did betray him, it explains why he hasn’t mentioned her.”

Aodhan nodded, but she saw he wasn’t convinced. Neither was Elena: she was just forcing herself to look at every possible angle. She couldn’t allow herself to be unduly influenced by the fact that those tiny hairs on the back of her neck? They’d quivered upright the entire time she was with Gian.

A sudden wind whistled through the courtyard.

Elena shivered, hearing within it a woman’s desolate moan.




Raphael sat next to his mother in the internal chamber. There was nothing in this room beyond ten armchairs arranged in a circle. On his right was Titus, next to Titus sat Elijah. Alexander had taken the seat directly opposite Caliane. Next to him sat Michaela on one side, Favashi on the other. Charisemnon had the seat between Michaela and Elijah, while Neha sat next to Caliane on her other side, Astaad next to Neha.

The Cadre of Ten was in session though there were eleven archangels in the world for the first time in known history.

“We shouldn’t be here,” Charisemnon said into the quiet broken only by the rustling of Neha’s silver-shot maroon sari as the Archangel of India crossed her legs.

Neha’s hair was in its usual elegant knot and she wore a teardrop-shaped bindi in jewel blue between her eyebrows.

Raphael knew that while Neha may have stopped wearing mourning white, she would never forget—or forgive—the death of her daughter. Regardless of how much he respected her, or how much he missed the relationship they’d once had, he could never forget that simple fact.

Vengeance defined Neha.

And it was she who responded to Charisemnon. “So sure, Charisemnon—have you had contact with Zhou Lijuan?” Her voice was poisonous grace, but that poison wasn’t malicious—Neha was the Queen of Snakes and Poisons after all. Then again, given the way she was looking at Charisemnon, maybe it was very much on purpose.

As Elena had pointed out, Neha did not suffer cowards.

And as far as Raphael was concerned, Charisemnon was a coward who brought shame to angelkind and who needed to be erased from existence. The Archangel of Northern Africa had gained the ability to create immortal-harming diseases in the Cascade, had used it in attacks on Titus’s and Raphael’s territories. In Raphael’s case, it had led to the Falling, when angels fell from the sky to be shattered and broken.

Hundreds had been horrifically injured.

Five had died.

Been murdered.

Including young Stavre, a promising youth on his first placement.

The fallen had been carried home from New York by an honor guard of angels, their funeral biers covered with flowers as they traveled the sky road they’d so loved in life. When the honor guard passed by Neha’s lands on the way to the Refuge, they’d been joined by another squadron. The new squadron had carried lanterns to light the way, those lanterns refreshed all the way to the fallen’s final home in the mountains where each had been born.