by Nalini Singh
“Shift forward,” Keir said. “Just enough so we can see the entire mark.”
Having walked around to the back of the bed, Raphael stood watch as Elena did as instructed. Her tattoo was even more detailed than he’d realized. Each filament was defined with care, down to the small feather on her left wingtip that always liked to grow its filaments in the opposite direction to all other feathers.
“It is as if your wings have been made small and burned to your back.” Nisia ran an experimental finger over one feather.
A lightning flicker of power had the healer jerking her hand back with a jolt. “My apologies.” She shook out her hand. “That was unexpected.”
“Did it hurt?” Elena’s forehead scrunched up. “I felt the energy zap you.”
“Not so much pain as . . . I believe your body is telling me the area is private and to stop poking around.”
Keir was more careful when he chanced a touch, but got a jolt, too.
Despite the hazard, the two healers did a thorough examination. When they were satisfied they’d seen the entirety of it, Elena shifted back to lean against the headboard. “Bad news?”
“No news is the better descriptor.” Lines marked the corners of Keir’s eyes, unfamiliar etchings on a face that had always been flawless in its delicate beauty. “It is tempting to compare your wings to an angelic infant’s, but that feels wrong. Nisia?”
“I agree. She has far more sensory capacity than a babe.” Nisia frowned at a reading on the device in her hand. “Infants do not sense their wings until they gain an understanding of what they are.”
“Guess it’d be confusing for them if they can’t see what’s there.” Elena tapped a finger on the sheet. “Makes sense it’d be different for an adult.”
“It’s as if certain elements of your body have been scrambled.” Nisia touched a strand of Elena’s hair. “You have tiny feathers in your hair, while we have found no indication of wing understructure on your back.”
“We have discovered evidence that this marking you call a tattoo extends deep, through all the layers of your flesh.”
“Give it to me straight—is this it?” Firm voice, unflinching gaze, Elena’s question demanded utter honesty. “Am I stuck with a tattoo or is there a chance my wings might grow back?”
Keir’s timeless eyes held Elena’s. “I can give you no definite answers. This is a thing that has never happened.” A smile as gentle as his voice. “You keep being new, Elena.”
Nisia, still staring down at her device, murmured, “Are you hungry?”
“Yes, it’s weird.” Elena made a face. “Those immortal ringworms are hard at it.”
Nisia’s lips twitched. “Tapeworms, my dear, tapeworms.” She showed the screen of the device to Keir. “If I’m reading this correctly, her skin depth has increased by point two millimeters in the minutes since I took the first reading.”
Elena stilled. Archangel, did Nisia just say what I think she said?
Yes, I believe so. Your body is rapidly burning fuel to make you stronger. His hands clenched to bone whiteness on the headboard. It is why an archangel eats with vigor after the deep, healing rest of anshara. The food replaces the energy used during the healing process. It also helps complete final repairs.
She lifted a hand to touch his. And I’ve got a chunk of your heart booming away in my chest.
“IV nutrition,” Nisia said after she and Keir finished consulting with each other. “It’s a much faster way to get calories into you.”
The healers sprang into action on those words, and Elena was soon hooked up to a drip in either arm. As Keir was explaining that the IVs were set up to release their contents over the course of an hour, golden lightning zapped up the lines and sucked the bags dry.
“Whoa.”
11
Eight bags later and Elena could see the change: she was now extremely thin rather than skeletal. People might comment on her being all skin and bone, but they wouldn’t call the undertaker on her.
Her wing tattoo, however, remained unchanged. Keir and Nisia couldn’t find any sign that she’d begun to develop the understructure needed for flight. It was a blow, but she wasn’t giving up; angelic bodies healed by priority. Critical organs first, then skin and limbs. Wings fell in the latter category.
“Stop,” Elena said when Nisia went to grab bags nine and ten. “I think I’ve reached maximum capacity for processing calories in one go.” Her yawn cracked her face. “My body’s going to conk out soon”—sudden lethargy weighed down her shoulders, made her eyelids droop—“but first I need to make some calls.”
Archangel, she said mind-to-mind, her heart aching, when you have time, will you bring me the quilt my mom made for me? She’d left it in the storage locker all this time, the sweet loving memory of it too entwined with pain, but today, she wanted her mother’s embrace in whatever way she could have it.
I will do it as soon as I finish talking to Dmitri—he is waiting outside. Pressing a kiss to her lips, Raphael passed over a phone he’d asked Montgomery to bring up, then he and the healers walked out.
Keir and Nisia had their heads together. The two needed to process the readings and samples they’d taken, while Raphael had to meet with his second. She knew what it had taken for him to leave her, blew him a mental kiss. He turned at the doorway, his gaze shot with lightning. “Rest, hbeebti. You can play with your crossbow tomorrow.”
“Hah.” Sliding down the bed as he shut the door behind him, she brought up the phone. It took her two tries to input Sara’s number.
“Hello.” A noncommittal answer from the director of the Guild; she was no doubt wondering how the hell a stranger had gotten through to her private line.
“No, you didn’t accidentally eat LSD-laced fish,” Elena said to her best friend, referring back to their conversation when she’d first woken as an angel.
Silence from the other end, before Sara said, “Ellie, I’m going to strangle you this time.”
Elena grinned despite her heavy lids. Because this was her and Sara. Real. Normal. Friends. “I look so pathetic and spindly right now that I bet you’d feel guilty doing it.” Though that wouldn’t last long if she kept processing fuel at this rate. Already, she could feel her muscles strengthening, her bones gaining heft.
“Ellie.” Sara’s voice was thick. “I’m coming over.”
“No, give me a few days. I’m probably going to be asleep for most of them.” She yawned so hugely she was sure her face would crack. “How’s Eve?”
“Acting out. She stole Ransom’s motorcycle from the Academy lot and took it for a joyride.”
Eve had always been scarily well-behaved. “Hey, we turned out fine and we once stole a Cadillac.”
“Borrowed,” Sara said pointedly. “The director of the Guild can’t be a felon.”
Another giant yawn broke Elena’s laughter in two.
“Ellie, you sure I can’t run over there and give you a hug?”
“No, not yet. I need recovery time.” Seeing her this way would undo any good her call had achieved. “I’ve got to touch base with a few other people before I fall asleep. But I’m back and I’m not going anywhere.”
Ending the call with Sara soon afterward, her limbs so heavy by now that they felt like lead, she tapped in the number for her younger sister. It was a miracle she remembered any numbers at all with the sleep-fogginess in her brain.
Beth turned out to be with Majda and Jean-Baptiste Etienne—two people who’d already suffered unimaginable torture and loss. Her grandmother broke down in tears at the sound of her voice, while her grandfather was stolid but shaken.
Beth was mute.
Elena would deal with this, find some way to make emotional recompense for the pain she’d inflicted, but she’d do it face-to-face not over a telephone line. Promising to call again soon, she hung up and, eyes too heavy
to keep open, dialed Eve.
Her youngest half sister didn’t pick up.
So Elena called five times in a row—until Eve finally answered with a snarled, “What?!”
“I hope you didn’t scratch Ransom’s bike. He’s in love with that—”
“Ellie!” It was a scream.
The rest of the conversation was rapid and excited and Elena had to talk her sister down from stealing another ride and zooming over to the Tower then and there.
After reluctantly agreeing to wait to visit, Eve said, “Shall I tell Father?”
Elena’s body stiffened, nervous tension acting as adrenaline in her veins. “Are you home?”
“Yeah. Grounded.” The teenage eye-roll was almost audible. “I stayed out past curfew, then came home and decided to drink Father’s expensive brandy. Stuff is gross. I poured most of it in the garden, but he’s convinced I’m an alcoholic.”
Beth, Majda, and Jean-Baptiste weren’t the only ones to whom she owed an apology. This girl wasn’t the tough but stable little sweetheart who’d held Elena’s hand the last time they’d seen one another. Anger lived in her now. But it would have to wait until she could put her arms around Eve and hold on tight.
“Take him the phone.” Jeffrey and Elena might never heal the fractures between them, but she wouldn’t add to his torment.
Jeffrey Deveraux had already lost a beloved wife and two cherished daughters. The man who had married Eve and Amy’s mother, Gwendolyn, wasn’t the same Jeffrey who’d blown bubbles with Elena in a sunny backyard or the one who’d fought for her right to see her dead sisters’ bodies. She’d needed to know the monster hadn’t made Ari and Belle like him, so Jeffrey had taken her to them. He’d held her hand. And he’d cried.
He hadn’t been the best father, but he didn’t deserve the horrific pain of thinking he’d lost a third daughter.
“Father,” she heard Eve say, “someone wants to talk to you.”
Elena could imagine her father’s raised eyebrow at anyone calling him on his daughter’s phone, knew he was most likely removing his wire-rimmed spectacles as he considered whether to take the call without asking for further information. CEO of a mega-empire with fingers in every pie in the city, Jeffrey was not a man who liked a lack of control.
Today, however, whatever he saw on Eve’s face had him coming on the line. “Jeffrey Deveraux.”
“It’s Ellie.”
The silence this time was piercing.
“We’ll talk more later. Tell Eve I’ll call back to let her know when she can visit.” Elena hung up with that—she felt cowardly for it, but a girl had her limits. She’d just emerged from a chrysalis that wanted to consume her like a tasty snack and her body was falling asleep around her; she wasn’t ready to deal with Jeffrey and the complicated history that tied them together.
An echo of memory, the scent of his aftershave suddenly bright and clear. He’d given her his scarf so she wouldn’t be cold. She’d accepted it because it wasn’t only pain that lay between them but a thousand childhood moments of happiness and family. Her and Jeffrey, they’d never be easy with one another, but at times, they managed to meet halfway, the recriminations and the hurt held at bay.
The brush of a slender hand on her brow. Sleep, azeeztee. Maman is here to watch over you. Don’t worry about your papa—I will make it right.
Even mostly asleep, Elena knew her mother was dead, that this was the phantom of a memory . . . but she decided to believe. Just for this fragment of a moment when she was hurt and tired and beginning again. “Maman . . .” The phone slipped unheeded from her fingers, her body crashing into sleep.
Lightning danced over her skin, her veins a glowing network hidden by the sheet.
12
Raphael knew why it was only Dmitri who’d come up to the balcony outside his and Elena’s living area. He and his second, they had a unique relationship. Raphael might’ve been several hundred years old when he first met Dmitri, but Dmitri had been a married man by then, a farmer confident in his skin and open in his love for his wife.
The two of them, they’d always met as equals.
As he stepped out onto the balcony, his second turned and looked at him with dark eyes that gave nothing away . . . but he strode across the space to meet Raphael halfway. They raised their right hands, clasped each other’s forearms, leaned in for the embrace of warriors. “It is good to have you back.” Dmitri’s voice was potent with emotions unspoken but understood. “I’m putting in for ten years’ vacation leave starting today.”
“That bad?” Raphael asked as they drew back.
“Charisemnon keeps trying his luck, Neha watches in enigmatic silence, Michaela’s disappeared into her mountains, and China’s lost so many people without explanation that large swathes of it are silent.”
“Michaela?” he said, picking out the most intriguing detail among all that Dmitri had recited.
His second folded his arms, biceps taut and skin a bronzed hue that would hold its color even in the heart of winter. “Jason’s confirmed she’s in her stronghold near Budapest, but she hasn’t been seen in flight for at least five months.” A shrug. “No one’s dared misbehave in her territory yet. Her generals have orders to kill at any sign of insurrection. That’s it. No other punishment. Straight up beheading. It’s efficient.”
Raphael couldn’t disagree with the admiration in Dmitri’s voice. It was a simple and effective way to keep a territory in control while the archangel in charge went dark. “It’s not unknown for archangels to go under for months at a time.” Even members of the Cadre occasionally needed time to simply exist.
Raphael was too young to feel the urge, but he knew his mother had taken such time during his years as a child. “Michaela’s not much older than I am.” A matter of five hundred years, give or take. “But she has recently had to deal with a meat ‘infant’ and possession by Uram. Perhaps it has put her in a bad mood.”
Dmitri barked out a laugh. “I can see her sitting in a funk in her stronghold. At least she’s not creating more problems. Charisemnon, on the other hand, is being an asshole—it’s only having Titus at his border that’s keeping him in check.”
“The birds and cats are Eli’s?”
A short nod. “I found a damn lynx on the hood of my Ferrari the other day. Thing snarled at me.” Scowling, he continued on. “In other interesting news, Suyin asked to relocate to New York and go into combat training. I authorized it, put her under Honor’s tutelage.”
Raphael raised an eyebrow. With skin of cool white and hair of ice white, her cheekbones sharp as blades, Lijuan’s niece could’ve been her aunt’s twin if not for her dark eyes and the beauty spot under the corner of her left eye—and her lack of a killing instinct. Suyin had been Lijuan’s prisoner for thousands upon thousands of years, a fragile artistic being so traumatized that she was fading from life when rescued.
Dmitri nodded. “I wasn’t expecting that, either, but Honor says she’s a quick study and determined to be ready to fight Lijuan when her aunt rises again.”
“A motive to be respected. Especially after the torture she suffered under Lijuan.”
His second’s expression was dark, but his tone pragmatic as he continued his update. “Haven’t heard much from Astaad and Alexander—they’ve both been busy coping with massive ice storms.”
Parts of Alexander’s desert territory were susceptible to ice, but Astaad’s territory was nearly all tropical. “The islands?”
Dmitri nodded. “Residents barely own cardigans, much less snow gear. I’ve sent supplies and so have Michaela and Lady Caliane.” He shoved a hand through the black of his hair. “That’s not all of it—Alexander’s also been hit with flash floods, while the monsoon season in Neha’s territory is threatening to become monsoon year.”
“Elijah?”
“Plagues of wasps. Swarms have killed at least t
en people so far.” He braced his hands on his hips. “Titus and Charisemnon have the opposite problem to Neha: drought. Wildfires are running rampant across the savannah.”
“It’s gotten worse.”
A nod from his second. “We’ve been lucky in the scheme of things. A couple of torrential lightning storms, a few more minor geothermal issues in the area you already evacuated, and, bizarrely, an infestation of ladybug beetles in a small town. No damage from the bugs, but they creeped out a bunch of people.”
Dmitri cocked an eyebrow. “Did you know fear of ladybugs has a name? Coccinellidaephobia.”
It was an amusing thing he’d have to tell Elena. The rest however . . . “Favashi?”
“No sign of her since she disappeared into the lava with Cassandra. As for her territory—Lady Caliane keeps me updated when she isn’t threatening to boil me alive for not letting her see you, and she says that while Neha’s had to cope with some refugees from China, it’s nowhere near the number she expected. Not even after accounting for the vanished villages.”
“Lijuan’s people are loyal.” Many would say to the edge of madness. “Aodhan, Naasir, and Galen remain at the Refuge?”
“Yes. Galen wanted to send the others back to New York, but I told them to stay. I didn’t want to leave him without powerful backup.”
Raphael locked eyes with Dmitri. “What has happened?” Galen was Raphael’s weapons-master and well able to deal with any threat excepting attack by one of the Cadre.
“Things are moving under the Refuge.”
The Refuge never shook. Legend said it had been anchored by the cataclysmic power of Sleepers who wished never to wake. “Do not tell me you believe in the legend of the Ancestors, Dmitri?” Said to slumber below the Refuge, the Ancestors were whispered to be the first of Raphael’s kind, angels so old they were another species.
“Sire, at this point, I’m ready to believe in the fucking tooth fairy.”
Raphael clasped his second on the shoulder. “Thank you for holding my Tower safe.”