“Of course. You were at the school.” Rigid and unbending as granite. “I need to speak to you face-to-face. Be here tomorrow morning, or lose your right to take part in the decision.”
“What decision?” Jeffrey and she hadn’t had anything to say to each other for ten years before Uram invaded the city. Even now, the only words they exchanged were well-honed weapons, designed to inflict maximum damage.
“All you need to know is that it’s a family matter.” He hung up, and though it frustrated Elena until tears—stupid, unwanted—pricked at her eyes, she knew she’d turn up at his office as ordered. Because the family he spoke of might be splintered, but it included not only Amethyst and Evelyn, but also Marguerite’s youngest daughter, Beth.
None of the three deserved to be caught in the crossfire of the endless war that raged between Jeffrey and Elena.
Having spent two hours in the Tower with Jason, talking through the information that had brought the black-winged angel to the city, Raphael now came in for a silent landing in the woods that separated his estate from the home Michaela used while in his territory. As he walked to take a position in front of the small pool his gardener had created in a grotto he’d shaded with vines and tucked in among the solid bulk of the larger trees, Raphael wondered if Elena saw more than he did.
He knew he was arrogant. It was inevitable, given the years he’d lived, the power at his command. But he’d never been stupid. So he heeded his hunter’s words, augmenting his mental shields with care before he stared down at the placid waters of the darkened pool and said, Lijuan, “pushing” the thought across the world.
There was a chance he’d fail to reach her, for he had no intention of undertaking a true sending. The price demanded was too high. In the Quiet, he became monstrous, stripped down to the lethal cold of power without conscience. It was during such a state that he’d terrified Elena so much she’d shot him, the scar on his wing a stunning reminder to never again walk that road.
If this did not succeed, he would have to send Lijuan a handwritten message—the oldest of the archangels eschewed modern conveniences like the phone. However, the water rippled an instant later, far faster than he’d expected. He’d known Lijuan’s strength had grown exponentially, but the rapid response, coupled with the fact that he’d used a minute amount of his own power, argued for a strength beyond anything the rest of the Cadre had imagined.
“Raphael.” She appeared of the flesh as her image formed on the water, her face as ageless as always. Only the pure white of her hair, the pearlescent glow of her pale, pale eyes betrayed what she was, what she was becoming. “So you return to me after all.”
He didn’t react except to say, “Do you think to make me a pet, Lijuan?”
A tinkling laugh, girlish and all the more disturbing for it. “What a thought. I think you would be a most troublesome one.”
Raphael inclined his head. “You are home?” Lijuan’s palace lay in the heart of China, deep in mountainous territory Raphael had never traversed, though Jason had managed to work his way inside before Lijuan’s “evolution.” Raphael’s spymaster had returned from the clandestine visit with half his face torn off.
“Yes.” The other archangel’s hair whispered back in a breeze that he was certain affected nothing else in the vicinity. “I find,” she continued, “that there are certain pleasures of the flesh I do still enjoy after all, and where best to partake of them than in my palace?”
Raphael didn’t make the mistake of thinking she spoke of sex. Lijuan hadn’t been a sexual being for thousands of years . . . or not sexual in the accepted sense. “Are your toys surviving the experience?”
A finger rose up until he could see it, waved at him. “Such a question, Raphael. You would call me a monster.”
“You would take it as a compliment.”
Another laugh, those eerie, near-colorless eyes filling with a surge of power that turned them wholly white, without pupil or iris. “An Ancient rises to consciousness.”
He wasn’t surprised she’d guessed at the reason behind this contact. Despite the nightmare she’d become, he’d never doubted Lijuan’s intelligence. “Yes.”
“Do you know how old your mother was when she disappeared?” she asked without warning.
An image of startling blue eyes, a voice that made the heavens weep, and a madness so deep and true it mimicked sanity. “Just over a thousand years older than you.”
Lijuan’s lips curved in a smile that held a strange amusement. “She was vain, was Caliane. She liked to tell people that because it made her almost the same age as her mate.”
Raphael felt ice form in his chest, spread outward in jagged branches, threatening to pierce his veins. “How much older was she?”
Lijuan’s answer shattered the ice, turned it into shards of glass that spliced through his system, causing massive damage. “Fifty thousand years. Even that may have been a lie. It was whispered that she was twice that age when I was born.”
“Impossible,” he said at last, knowing he could betray none of his shock. To do so would be to tempt the predator that lived within Lijuan. “No archangel that old would have chosen to remain awake.” A hundred thousand years was an impossible eternity. Yes, they had old ones in their world, but except for a few notable exceptions, most of them chose to go into the Sleep for eons at a time, awakening only for brief periods to taste the changing world.
Lijuan’s smile faded, her voice echoing with a thousand ghostly whispers. “They say Caliane Slept before, more than once. But when she woke the final time, she found Nadiel.”
“Then I was born.” He thought of his laughing, singing mother, thought, too, of her descent into a madness that had seemed to come out of nowhere. But if she’d been alive for so many millennia ... “Do you lie to me, Lijuan?”
“I have no need to lie. I have evolved beyond even Caliane.”
On the surface, that certainly appeared true. Age had never been the arbiter of power among their kind. Raphael had become an archangel at an age unheard of among angelkind. And at just over five hundred years old, Illium was already far stronger than angels ten times his age. But that wasn’t why he’d contacted Lijuan. “Is it my mother who wakes?” he asked, holding that “blind” gaze.
“There is no way to know.” The whispers in her voice sounded almost like screams. “However, the magnitude of the disruption, the strength of the quakes and the storms, says that the one who wakes is the most ancient of Ancients.”
Raphael wondered what it was Lijuan saw with those eyes, if it was worth the sacrifice of a city . . . of what remained of her soul. “If this Ancient wakes without sanity, will you execute him or her?” Not before. Never before. To murder an angel in Sleep was to face automatic execution—no one was immune to that law. Even Lijuan, invulnerable though she might be to death, would find herself shunned by the entire angelic race if she crossed that line. Not something a goddess would enjoy.
Another girlish laugh, this one a giggle that was more disturbing than her appearance. “You disappoint me, Raphael. What need do I have to execute an old one? They can do nothing to me ... and perhaps they can teach me secrets I do not yet know.”
It was then Raphael realized that if one monster came to waking life, it might well strengthen another.
The conversation with Jeffrey, coming as it did on top of the painful visit to the morgue, left Elena feeling as if she’d been beaten by stone fists. It was tempting, so tempting, to go home and hide, just pretend that everything would be okay when she came out again.
Except, of course, that was a child’s ploy. Elena hadn’t had the luxury of believing in hopeless dreams since she’d been a scared ten-year-old slipping and falling in a family kitchen turned abattoir. “Do you know where Jason is?” she asked Dmitri when they exited the morgue.
Dmitri pressed the car remote to unlock the flame red Ferrari parked in the employees-only lot. “Tired of your Bluebell already?” A tendril of champagne circled around her senses, cut with something far harder.
Never had she felt that harsh edge in Dmitri’s scent. She pitied the woman he took to his bed today. “Yeah, that’s it. I’m building a harem.”
Opening the door to the Ferrari, Dmitri braced one arm on top. For a moment, his expression turned probing, and she had the feeling he was about to say something important. But then he shook his head, his hair lifting slightly in the dull breeze, and pulled out his cell phone, checked something. “He’s at the Tower.”
Surprised by the straight answer, she fought off the wickedness of champagne to say, “Can you ask if he’d mind meeting me at the house?”
Dmitri made the call. “He’s leaving now,” he said, snapping the phone closed. “Nowhere for you to take off from here.”
Elena looked up. “Hospital building is high enough. I’ll head up to the roof.” Suiting action to words, she made her way back into the building and up. It was an interesting journey. There were only a few hospital staff in the lower corridors, and the ones who did see her seemed to lose the ability to speak.
Deeply bothered by that reaction from the people of a city she considered home, she found her way to the elevator and pushed the button. Because the staff used it to move beds from floor to floor, the cage was plenty big enough for wings. Then the doors opened on the first floor.
Two nurses, chattering to each other, looked up. Froze.
Elena stepped back. “Plenty of room.”
Neither woman said a word as the doors closed on their stunned faces. Variations of the scene were repeated on the next four floors. It was funny ... except it felt wrong. This was New York. She needed to belong here—though she knew she would never again fit in the same way.
“Hmph.”
She glanced up at that sound to see that the doors had opened on the fifth floor to reveal an elderly man leaning on a cane. “Going up?”
He nodded and stepped in, making no effort to hide the fact that he was staring at her wings as he used his cane to push the button for his floor. “You’re a new one.”
“Very.” She stretched out her wings for him, the knots in her soul unraveling a little. “What do you think?”
He took his time replying. “Why are you taking the elevator?”
Smart man. “Felt like it.”
He laughed as the doors opened on his floor. “You sure sound like a New Yorker!”
Elena was smiling when the doors closed, something she would’ve never predicted minutes ago as she stood beside Dmitri. When the doors finally opened on the last level, she got out and made her way to the roof with firm steps, no longer feeling as if she’d been pummeled to screaming point.
The flight across the Hudson, assisted as she was by strong winds, went by fast. Jason was waiting for her in the front yard, his wings folded neatly back, his hair in its usual queue. It was the first time she’d seen his tattoo in full light, and the detail and intricacy of it made her suck in a breath.
