Archangel's Shadows(12)

            When Janvier and Naasir returned to the site after Lijuan’s defeat, it was to discover the reborn had stampeded through it, crushing the remains to dust. “What’s the chance that Lijuan is fully dead?” Putting on her helmet, she got on the bike behind Janvier.

            “Low,” he said over the throaty rumble of the bike’s engine. “Archangels don’t die easily, and Lijuan is the oldest of the Cadre, if we don’t include Raphael’s mother.”

            It wasn’t the news Ashwini wanted to hear. Because who the fuck knew what a half-dead archangel could do even after her body had been annihilated?





5


            Elena stretched her shoulders as she sat on the rooftop of the building given over to the Legion, her legs hanging over the side and her wings resting against the rough concrete surface. Her position gave her a direct view of the Tower, its windows blazing with the reflected glory of what promised to be a dazzling sunset.

            Beside her crouched the Primary, in the Legion’s distinctive gargoyle-like resting pose. Wings arched high and one arm braced on his knee, he was dressed in what had been unrelieved black, but was now dusty, the dark of his hair the same. He still wasn’t “human” in any sense, but he no longer made the hairs rise on the back of her neck.

            Most of the time.

            “You are tired.”

            Elena reached up to fix her ponytail, her hair damp from the quick shower she’d grabbed, else she’d be as covered in dust and grit as the Primary. “Busy day.” She’d spent it ferrying materials to facilitate the repair of one of the outlying high-rises that had been damaged during the battle. “How are the modifications to this building going?”

            “It was not built for winged residents.”

            The eerie, risen-from-the-depths male was getting verbose on her, she thought dryly. “Yes, there’s a lot of work to be done.” Railingless balconies had to be added, internal walls knocked down, windows turned into doors—what was safe and comfortable for mortals and vampires was annoying and stifling for winged beings.

            The overhaul would take time, but a technical assessment by a specialist team had shown it would still be faster and more efficient to modify an existing building to the Legion’s requirements than to build a new one from the ground up.

            “Are your people handling it all right for now?” One thing the Primary had told them was that while the Legion did not need sleep, his men didn’t do well cut off from one another so soon after their rising.

            “Yes. We gather on the roof.”

            Elena knew that. The first night she’d looked across from the Tower at midnight and seen their crouched forms, those hairs on the back of her neck had stood straight up. She wondered if the Legion had any idea how seriously other they could sometimes be. “If the snow’s too cold, we can organize—”

            “The roof is acceptable.”

            “Do you miss the sea?”

            A long pause, the answer halting, as if she had asked him a question he hadn’t considered until that instant. “Yes . . . there was peace . . . and wonder . . . more than mortal or immortal eyes . . . ever see.”

            Elena could do nothing but nod; she’d had but a glimpse of the Legion’s domain, and it had been of haunting beauty in the endless dark. “I had another home, too, once,” she told him, pointing past the Tower. “An apartment in that building with the serrated roof.”

            The Primary’s response appeared a non sequitur, but she could almost see how he’d worked his way to it. “You are not mortal and yet you are.”

            “I guess that describes me pretty well.” Angling her face to the caressing wind, she drew in the myriad scents of her city. A city made of spirit and grit and sheer bloody-mindedness.