Archangel's Legion(84)

“One that drenched me with power? No.” He had a feeling it had been something far more dangerous. “If I am coming into my power, it appears it has the potential to fundamentally change me.”

“Never going to happen.” A stubborn glint in his hunter’s eye. “I’m not gonna lose my man.”

“I know.” Even in the strange cold, he’d tasted her fury, her passion, the searing depth of her love, and it had wrenched him back into her arms, all distance erased. “Now it’s time for my woman to go to bed.” She had circles under her eyes from the string of tension-filled days and interrupted sleep. “If you do not argue, I shall send you into slumber with bedtime tales of blood and death and annihilation from the last Cascade.”

“Yippee.” Slipping off the robe to reveal a body lithe and golden, she snuggled under the blankets.

He lay on his side atop those same blankets, tugging her hair from its knot to play with the wild silk of it. “Have you heard of the lost city of Atlantis?”

“Of course.” Her eyes widened, soft wonder in the silver-gray. “It was real?”

“My mother says the legend springs from a water city that existed millennia upon millennia ago—a city of remarkable artistry created by an archangel who had abilities such as those we now believe Astaad to have, except this archangel’s powers were at their height at the time.”

Bleak realization stole the wonder. “It was destroyed, wasn’t it?”

“Caliane is uncertain if some part of it does in truth lie below the ocean, protected by its archangel, but it fell victim to the last Cascade wars, as did many other great civilizations.”

“Such wonders lost forever, Raphael. Things that eclipse the creations of this modern world, until the boastfulness of today is that of children who have never seen true grace.”

Repeating Caliane’s judgment for Elena, he told her the rest, how the wars had circled the globe, soaking the earth in mortal and immortal blood both. “By the time they came to an end, a century after they began, half the world was gone and civilization had regressed by millennia.”

Elena shook her head, as if the knowledge was too terrible to bear. “These Cascades, there’s no way of telling how many have come and gone, how many times civilization has been all but erased only to start again.”

“Yes.” Shifting so his body covered her own, his hand in her hair, he told her the prelude to the final brutal fact. “Caliane has survived more than one Cascade.” That, he was certain, no one knew. “She says not all are equal, and that from the changes apparent in the Cadre so soon into the Cascade, this may be the strongest in all her eons of existence.”

Unhidden horror, his hunter’s arms holding him close. “If the last Cascade ended in the destruction of half the world . . .”

“Yes.”


• • •


Given Raphael’s ominous bedtime story, it was a miracle Elena slept as soundly as she did. When she woke, however, to a haunting quiet that told her more snow had fallen overnight, it was with a blinding need to escape the madness of the immortal world for a fragment of time.

Sara had the morning off—as much as a Guild Director could ever have time off—so Elena hooked up with her best friend and Zoe at a small neighborhood eatery for brunch. The owner and most of the regulars knew Elena from before her transformation and, while there were a few people who snuck photos, no one bothered them.

An hour and a half later, they stood in Central Park, watching a giggling Zoe try to catch the pigeons. Bundled up like a little polar bear in an orange snowsuit, the tiny girl would sit down in the snow every so often to rest, then be off again after the birds. Elena’s breath frosted the air as she laughed in delight at Zoe’s antics, the temperature freezing enough that Elena, too, was dressed for the weather, wearing a long-sleeved top underneath her black hunting leathers. Her immortal body might be tougher than a mortal’s, but it had become clear she was too young to shrug off this kind of cold—especially in flight, where she had to deal with wind chill as well.

“How’s Vivek?” Sara said, after sending Deacon a photo of Zoe sitting in the snow.

“Aodhan is supervising his transformation.” Elena had made certain Vivek was in hands she trusted. “I haven’t been to visit him—he asked me not to. I don’t think he wants any of us to see him while he’s so vulnerable.” Paralyzed he might’ve been, but Vivek had never been helpless as long as Elena had known him. “You know how much he likes to be in control.”