Archangel's Shadows(60)
Elena kept to a more lazy flight homeward. Montgomery had promised her double chocolate fudge cake, and, whatever Naasir’s present, it couldn’t hold a candle to the butler’s double chocolate fudge cake—Montgomery made it himself from scratch, guarded the recipe like a dragon with his treasure.
When her phone rang, she answered it with a smile. “I was waiting to hear from you,” she said to her younger sister Eve. “How did the exam go?”
“It wasn’t as hard as my friends and I thought it would be,” Eve said, voice ebullient, and the two of them fell into an easy conversation.
Landing on the snow-covered lawn of her and Raphael’s Enclave home not long after she and Eve said good-bye, she watched Illium come down fast and neat. Aodhan dropped out of the sky at a slower pace, the early evening light fracturing off him in dazzling sparks.
“How’s the wing feel?” she asked, having noticed the last-minute correction he’d made to keep from toppling sideways.
“Significant weakness, but I must continue to exercise it at this stage of the healing process.” He stretched both wings out to their full breadth, folded them back in again.
Never, she thought, would she get used to the impossibility of Aodhan, to the feathers and hair that seemed coated with crushed diamonds that refracted light in endless shards. “Just make sure you don’t push it too far.” Hunters and Tower personnel, they both chafed at being grounded. Aodhan hadn’t mentioned pain, but she knew it had to be bad.
The immortal ability to survive brutal wounds came at an agonizing price.
“Don’t worry, Ellie.” Illium bumped a fist gently off Aodhan’s jaw, his skin warm gold against the sunshine-touched alabaster of Aodhan’s. “I sicced Keir on him two days ago when he refused to listen to reason. You haven’t seen a set-down until you’ve seen Keir delivering it.” A wince. “Poor Sparkle.”
Aodhan did something she didn’t quite catch, and suddenly, Illium was on the ground, flat on his back in the snow. The shocked look on his face was almost as good as Aodhan’s studiously blank one. “Shall we go inside, Elena?”
“How about helping me up first?” Illium scowled and held up a hand. “Now my back’s all wet.”
Aodhan hauled him up with his good arm. “Poor Bluebell.”
Elena’s lips twitched. It was starting to become clear why Aodhan and Illium had become friends. Aodhan might be quiet, but he could hold his own against the blue-winged angel—who remained the only person Aodhan could bear to have touch him. Elena didn’t know what had traumatized Aodhan to that visceral depth, but she knew the silent battle he fought each and every day.
“Your scars exist, but it’s your courage that defines you.”
She’d said that to him a week past, received a piercing glance in return from the haunting fracture of his gaze. “I’m afraid, every instant, that the darkness will suck me back under.”
“But you keep going, Aodhan. Any fool can jump unawares into danger—you know exactly the risk you’re taking, and yet here you are.”
In front of her, he brushed the snow off Illium’s feathers and said, “Next time you call me Sparkle, I’m dumping you into the Hudson.”
“I can swim.”
“Come on,” Elena said with a grin. “Montgomery will be waiting.”
The three of them had just taken the first steps toward the house when there was a wash of wind. Jason and Mahiya landed to Illium’s right a second later. The spymaster’s black wings were dramatic against the white of the snow, his facial tattoo vivid even in the gray light, but it was Mahiya’s spectacular wings that caught the eye. Jewel green and wild blue with strokes of black, the pattern was akin to a peacock’s spray.