A twitch of her lips, her wing sweeping across his in a silent caress. “Try to shut me up.” Leaning into him, she said, “Why you, why us? I keep trying to get my head around that.”
“A question to which the Primary may even now give us an answer,” Raphael said, as the leader of the Legion landed in front of them.
The male’s eyes remained translucent but for that ring of blue, the effect oddly beautiful, according to Raphael’s consort. His hair, though, had turned totally black. His skin, too, was no longer the shade of death, but glowed golden with health, and his leathery wings had become a beaten gold except for the part where they grew out of his back.
There they were a black that echoed Elena’s wings, the color bleeding into midnight blue, which then flowed into the beaten gold. The metamorphosis of the rest of the Legion was slower but no less fascinating a process. Day by day, they were all becoming painted in color—and the palette was the same.
“Sire,” the Primary now said, “you call us.”
“Only you. The others may continue as they are.”
A nod.
“My consort has a question for you.”
The Primary looked at Elena without blinking.
“Why Raphael and me?” she asked, her passionate nature inherent in the intensity of the question. “Why not Elijah and Hannah? They’re older, have been together longer.”
“You are aeclari, and the Legion may only serve aeclari.”
Archangel?
I do not know this term, Elena. “Tell us about aeclari.”
“Aeclari is you,” the Primary said, as if it made perfect sense.
Do you think if I shoot him, he’ll actually answer a question?
Raphael fought his laughter. I think it’s a case of asking the right questions. “You’re connected to the power that tried to fill me,” he said, his skin prickling with the awareness of it.
“We are the repository. We tried to pass it to the Sire, but the Sire is not yet ready.”
It was as clear an answer as he could’ve wished for, the whispers making sense now that he’d seen the Legion, understood how deeply they were linked to one another—as if they were one organism with many parts. “What happens when I’m ready? Do you vanish?”
“No. We are then freed to stay in the world or return to our Sleep once more. If we stay, we become alone and separate.”
Raphael considered the other man’s words—and the Primary was a man, if one who hadn’t yet fully become—and placed it against what he knew of the Cascade powers gained by the rest of the Cadre. Each had to do with an ability or proclivity inherent to the archangel in question.
“You can only serve a warrior,” he said, and it was no question because he felt the rightness of it in his gut. Raphael had been a warrior in one guise or another throughout his existence, from a stripling in Titus’s army long ago, to fighting side by side with his own forces in the war past.
The Primary paused. “Yes,” he responded at last, in that totally flat tone devoid of emotion. “A warrior who is attuned to the power of which we are formed—of the earth, of life. But the warrior must also be aeclari.” His eyes flicked to Elena, giving Raphael the first glimmer of what that term actually meant. “And it must be the time.”
The Cascade happens and Neha calls fire and ice, Elena said into his mind at the same instant. Titus moves the earth, Astaad the sea, while creepy Lijuan brings the dead back to life. Meanwhile, my gorgeous archangel, not satisfied with, I don’t know, shooting lightning bolts or something, actually taps into the energy of the planet and calls an army of bogeymen from the bottom of the ocean. Of course you do.
The dry commentary made him wonder how he’d ever walked through life without the wit and laughter of his hunter by his side. He could no longer imagine such a cold, remote existence, the idea of it spawning an immediate repudiation in his bloodstream. Wing to wing with her, he said to the Primary, “Have others through time gained the ability to call you?”
Another long pause, the Primary turning the pages of his memory. “There have been warriors who have become attuned to the power of the earth, of life, and gained strength, but they touched only the edge of what we carry within us. It was not time for us to wake.”
“Tell me your history,” he said, a sudden chill over his skin, as if the answer was part of the racial memory of his people, buried deep, deep within the most primitive part of his brain.
“It was in the war that unmade our civilization that the Legion came to be. We were formed during the Cascade of Terror and bound to the first aeclari, our purpose to fight against the death that stalked the world.”