See what you can discover in the town, he added. If the angels and vampires who live there are aggressive, it may be an overreaction or posturing on Lumia’s part. I, meanwhile, will attempt to keep from killing Charisemnon.
That last didn’t sound like a joke. What’s happened?
Nothing. But I look at him and I see Stavre.
The youngest angel to have died in the Falling, his funeral bier covered with flowers placed there by his warrior brethren. We’ll kill the evil bastard one day, she said. Better yet, I like to imagine his disease-causing power turning back on him again, but this time in a slow, tortuous, but eventually fatal fashion. Don’t give him your energy.
Wise advice from my consort. I shall attempt to follow it.
Blowing him a mental kiss, Elena winged to a slightly higher altitude as the first buildings came into view on the horizon, a hive of life in the midst of an otherwise arid landscape. Interestingly, nothing appeared much over two stories high—angels tended to go up when they built, though low dwellings weren’t unheard of depending on the weather and topology of an area. Lumia itself was gracefully low to the earth—though it did sit on a rise—so maybe that had influenced the architecture of the town.
Elena wanted to get an overview of the place before she landed, see how big an area it covered, guesstimate how many people she’d be dealing with in her hunt to unearth the identity of the woman in the miniature. For all she knew, that miniature had been painted centuries ago and no one would have the faintest clue, but she had to try.
The homes on the edge of town were very small and colored in earth tones, blending into the landscape. Then came the fruit trees—fig and orange maybe—followed by the shocking green of fields planted with vegetables and irrigated against the harsh sun and dry environment. Cows looked up placidly at the shadow of wings passing overhead and children pelted to their homes.
Elena frowned.
Kids ran under angelic shadows in New York, too, especially in Central Park, but they always tried to follow the wings, not divert away from them. Could be Raphael was right and the angels who lived in the town were aggressive and violent. Not that she could see any of them; the only wings in the sky were of her group.
Trees and houses broke up the patches of lush green. The farms were small, each field easily traversable on foot. The deeper they flew into the town, the more the houses began to cluster together, the greenery coming in smaller patches that were probably private gardens. Earth tones permeated throughout.
No mansions. No railingless balconies that she could spot. Nothing beyond the two stories she’d already noted. A few flat roofs that could be used as landing spots, but the people she spotted on them had no wings.
More and more of the town’s denizens began to come into view, some seated under the shadows of trees, others going about their business with their faces covered by colorful scarves. Those scarves were necessary under the merciless heat of the sun. Elena had thrust one into a side pocket when she and Aodhan swung by the suite earlier; it was a bright purple thing with silvery threads in it that she’d picked up on her last trip to Morocco.
In flight, the wind cooled the sun’s kiss and any damage was quickly repaired by the immortal ability to heal such small surface wounds, but on the ground, the heat could be punishing. Those of the Lumia group who hadn’t thought to bring scarves would probably make a few of the local traders very happy very soon.
The town’s central marketplace appeared below them not long afterward.
Elena had traveled the world as a hunter. Bustling marketplaces were one of her favorite parts of any city or village, whether that marketplace was an open air one on a small tropical island, only a tin roof keeping off the afternoon rains while people haggled, or one situated in the narrow maze of streets that was often the center of an old city.
Strip malls didn’t have the same impact, though Times Square did.
It was the unpredictability she enjoyed, the not knowing what stall or store she’d find around the corner or what random sights she’d see. Like the time she’d seen silk threads being colored and stretched along a wall, or when she’d walked into a small café in an old city and found herself in a Michelin-starred establishment. Then there was that G-string-wearing woman in Times Square.
Nothing too unusual about that except the human woman had been dressed like Illium, complete with a wig of black hair dipped in blue, gold contact lenses, and faux wings she wore with a harness that showcased breasts she’d painted a glittering silver. Elena wouldn’t have known whether or not to be horrified for her friend’s sake if he hadn’t been the one to point out the performer to her—Illium thought it was hilarious.