by Nalini Singh
“Stubborn,” Jessamy said, her breath an airy kiss against his neck, “has a terrible temper, arrogant, with a tendency to sulk. Your flaws are growing.”
Squeezing her, he dipped his wings, making her cry out, tighten her hold around his neck. “Stop that.” It was a laughing censure, the softness of her mouth pressed to his skin sweet agony.
In front of them, Raphael swept down and out of sight along a young, green valley, scouting ahead. The archangel’s wings glittered in the rising sun, his flight so smooth as to create not a single ripple in the air. Then he was gone, leaving Galen and Jessamy with the sky to themselves, the clouds soft white puffs he deliberately flew into.
Jessamy ran her fingers through the insubstantial filaments. “Oh Galen. I’m touching clouds.” The wonder in her made everything worth it, even the pain that might yet come… as Jessamy found her heart’s wings, and flew away from him.
He should have thought ahead, should have comprehended the consequences of her first taste of true freedom. Of course she’d be thankful to the man who’d taken her into the skies, but even had he known that from the beginning, he would’ve still done everything in his power, fought an archangel, to allow Jessamy to touch the clouds. His selfishness was only a small one—he wanted her to need him, want him, for himself. No one in his life had ever cared for him just because he was Galen.
“Are you planning to ignore me the entire way, you stubborn beast?” Jessamy murmured as they came out into the unbroken blue of the sky once more, the landscape below a verdant green interspersed with the snaking sparkle of water.
Realizing he had no will to resist her when she teased him with such unexpected affection, he said, “It is a long flight,” attempting a small tease of his own, when he’d never done such a thing. “If we use up our conversation now, the final leg will be deathly silent.”
Her laugh tangled around him, wrapping him in silken chains that might yet make him bleed. “I will never run out of words, Galen.”
“Then tell me things,” he murmured, stealing this time with her. No matter what happened once they reached Raphael’s territory, she was his for this journey and he wasn’t too proud to pretend that she did care for him the way he needed her to. “Tell me about Alexander. I have studied him, but never seen him.”
“Alexander,” she said thoughtfully, “is the oldest of the archangels. Caliane alone was older than him, and she disappeared when Raphael was a youth.”
Jessamy would never forget the haunting sound of Caliane’s song as she rocked her cherished baby boy. The archangel had had the purest of voices… so beautiful that she’d sung the adult populations of two thriving cities into the sea in a successful attempt to avert war. Except that it had meant the death of every one of those people, and later, of most of their children.
It was as if the shock and grief had hollowed the little ones out, turning them into mute shells who breathed—until one day, they began to curl up and die. Jessamy would never forget the dark history she’d been forced to write that year, the sketches she’d been sent to place within the pages as a silent testament to the terrible price paid by the innocent… sketches of a hundred, a thousand, babes wrapped with tender care for burial.
Dead of hearts broken, Keir had said when he returned to the Refuge, his eyes haunted. Dead of such sorrow as immortals will never know.
“Alexander,” she continued, her throat thick with the echo of memories as painful as when they had been formed, “is also a handsome man.” Golden haired, silver-eyed, and with a chiseled profile, his body honed in war, there was a sense of physical perfection to Alexander even before you got to the stark beauty of his wings—of a pure, metallic silver. “He is, in fact, so striking I believe Michaela hopes to bear his child.”
Galen chuckled. “She aspires to birth a son or daughter in the image of the two most beautiful angels in the world?”
“Yes, but I don’t think she will succeed—quite apart from the fact he already has a son, Alexander is not like her other conquests.” He was too intelligent, saw beyond the exquisite lines of Michaela’s face to the coldly ambitious heart within. “He once told me it would be akin to coupling with the black spider that eats its mate.”
Jessamy had always respected Alexander for his perspicacity, though she didn’t agree with his stance toward Raphael. “Why,” she said, “didn’t you attempt a position in Alexander’s court?” Titus and Alexander had dissimilar styles of rule, but they were both men of war.
“His age and power threaten to blind him to the reality of the changing world,” Galen answered. “If Alexander were to succeed in his goals, we would remain forever locked in time, fireflies in amber.”
Jessamy couldn’t disagree. Alexander had said something analogous to her on his last visit.
“I am too old for this world.”
His words had been a startling contrast to the ageless perfection of his looks. But that wasn’t all he’d said. Frowning in thought, she followed the fragment of conversation to its roots in a dialogue that had taken place near to two years ago.
“I’m tired, Jessamy.” Silver eyes so bright, they would never belong to a mortal. “Tired of war, tired of bloodshed, tired of politics.”
“You can choose peace.” She didn’t touch him as she might have Raphael—Alexander was far, far older than her, for all that he sometimes sought her counsel. “There is no need to raise an army against Raphael as I know you’re considering.”
A faint smile that held no humor. “Peace is a mirage… but yes, perhaps you are right in your counsel. Perhaps it is Raphael’s time.”
Sucking in a breath as she realized the import of the memory, she shared it with Galen. “No one suspects or expects Alexander to lay down his weapons.” Even she had taken his words for an idle musing, forgotten as soon as the lust for battle blazed once more.
The opulent red of his hair whipping off his face, Galen angled himself so she was in no danger of being buffeted by the wind. “Yet his armies amass even now.”
Jessamy examined each facet of the memory, each subtle shift of Alexander’s expression, but the fact was, it was one memory among thousands, hundreds of thousands, could mean nothing. “He’s an archangel,” she said. “They can be unpredictable.”
Galen began to drop from the sky in a slow glide. “We’ve reached the first station—Raphael will want to hear of your remembrance.”
The landing was flawless, Galen’s wings powerful. He didn’t resist when she reached out to massage her fingers across his shoulders. “Are you tired?” It was not good of her, but she wanted to be in no one’s arms but Galen’s.
A shake of his head, his face angled toward where Raphael stood talking to the guards. “Come.”
She waited until they were alone with Raphael inside the large domed cabin to speak. The blue of the archangel’s eyes seared her through and she wondered if the staggering strength of it was a harbinger of things to come. Caliane had had the power to tear apart the minds of other angels, and Raphael was, in many ways, his mother’s son.
“Jason,” the archangel said in an apparent non sequitur, “has been frustrated for seasons. He was able to get one of his people into Alexander’s stables; and has picked up pieces of knowledge from the gossip of the servants and the soldiers when they frequent the taverns, but he cannot get anyone into Alexander’s court itself. More, he hasn’t been able to find a way to see Alexander in public, attempt to judge his frame of mind.”
Galen’s wings rustled as he settled them. “That isn’t unusual. Titus’s court would be impossible to infiltrate, and Alexander is a warrior, too.”
Shaking her head, Jessamy put her hand on his wing. “No. Alexander has long made it a policy to walk and fly among his troops once every five days. He does it rain or shine, hail or snow. He has always led from the front.”
“The irony,” Raphael continued, “is that I took my example from Alexander on this. Yet Jason has not seen him appear to perform his duty in rec
ent memory.” The archangel paced the confines of the cabin. “While word in the taverns is of his favorite concubine, I assumed that in truth, he was holed up with his generals, in a deliberate attempt to ensure nothing could be gleaned of his battle strategy.”
“That remains a possibility.” Galen rubbed at his jaw. “But Alexander also has a son. His weapons-master, Rohan.”
Raphael’s eyes met Galen’s. “Yes. And Rohan is quite capable of mounting a battle campaign.”
Jessamy’s blood turned ice-cold, as she registered the implications of Galen’s suggestion. If Alexander was dead… but no, how could that possibly be? Only another archangel could have killed him, and such killings were always catastrophic events that sent tremors across the world—archangels did not easily die. They took people and places with them. No poison, no stealthy—
Oh no.
11
“Only an archangel can kill another archangel,” she whispered. “But if he was betrayed by someone he trusted, he could be entombed.” Such a horror had happened just once, long before even Lijuan had been born.
Cut into pieces after being ambushed in sleep by those he considered friends, the archangel’s body had been scattered and buried deep in far corners of the earth. But archangels could regenerate even from ash. This time, the piece that regenerated into the whole man was buried in a mountain range deep in what was now Uram’s territory.
That mountain range no longer existed, and neither did anyone who bore even a single drop of blood related to those who had buried the archangel, the carnage so absolute that no one sane would ever dare such an act again. She swallowed, continued. “I don’t think Rohan would be disloyal to his father”—they had a true father-son bond—“but if Alexander is missing, Rohan may well be running the battle campaign, certain his father will soon rise.”
“Jessamy is right,” Raphael murmured. “But if Alexander has indeed been missing so long, then he is likely to be dead.” A reminder that an archangel regenerated at a speed no ordinary angel could comprehend, and that nothing could keep him contained, earth or rock or water. “If he fell into anshara for some reason,” Raphael continued, naming the deepest of healing sleeps, “and was betrayed to an archangelic enemy, even Alexander may have been unable to fight a burst of angelfire direct to the heart.”
The ability to create angelfire, Jessamy knew, was a rare gift—and a lethal one. Caliane had possessed it, but her son did not… not yet, his power escalating at too rapid a rate to predict anything. “So far as I know, four of the Cadre can call angelfire.”
“Would the victor not claim Alexander’s territory?” Galen said.
“It may not have been about territory.” Raphael blew out a breath. “There are some in the Cadre who would find pleasure and amusement in the game, in the kill, and in watching the resulting disintegration.”
A terrible feeling bloomed in the pit of Jessamy’s stomach. She liked Alexander, though he was an Ancient, with an Ancient’s conceit. He was intelligent, could be kind in the absent way of a being of such power, had led his people well. It sickened her to imagine him killed with such stealthy malevolence. But that was not the worst of it—if an archangel was dead or missing, and no one had informed the entirety of the Cadre, then his territory was currently under the rule of an angel who had no right to rule.
It wasn’t simply politics—it was brutal fact. Archangels ruled because they had the vicious power to control the vampires who were their servants. Without an archangel at the helm, the chances of the more violent of the Made turning feral, driven by the unthinking fury of blood hunger, were catastrophic. “The entire mortal population of his region could be wiped out in days.” Horror was an iron-dark taste on her tongue.
“It also explains why a vampire came to kill you.” Galen’s words were so contained she knew he was fighting rage. “At least some of the Made have noticed and realized the likely true reason behind Alexander’s absence.”
Jessamy’s mind flickered once more to the memory of that unexpected conversation with Alexander. “There was a vampire with him when he visited—she stayed by the door while we spoke, was in earshot. A tall, blue-eyed creature with skin of ebony.” The startling contrast of ice-blue eyes against dark skin was why the woman had remained so firmly embedded in her memory.
“She was a senior member of his court.” One who might just have turned traitor. “If she’s behind this, she may see it as a rebellion against the servitude demanded in return for being Made a vampire”—of a hundred years duration—“but once she turns that key…”
Raphael completed her thought. “She’ll learn why the archangels are so pitiless with some of her brethren.”
Galen and Raphael began to talk of how they might confirm the possibility of Alexander being dead. But Jessamy, pacing back and forth, kept thinking something wasn’t right. Raphael had been correct about her entombing scenario being unlikely given the time that had passed, but even if Alexander had been ambushed, his death still wouldn’t have been a quiet thing. He was an Ancient.
Yet no one had reported any devastation, and surely Jason would have noticed such destruction in the archangel’s lands. Sleeping or awake, Alexander— “He may have chosen to Sleep,” she said, the words spilling out before she’d consciously completed the thought.
The men stopped midword, frowned, before Raphael shook his head. “He had to know if he did it without warning, it would cause chaos not only in his territory, but across the world.”
“Not if he trusted his commanders, especially Rohan.” Galen scowled at the floor, his mind clearly elsewhere. “He may well have gone to Sleep in a secret location, leaving instructions for the Cadre to be informed once there was no chance of anyone tracing his whereabouts.”
A little of the sickness in Jessamy’s stomach settled, because she could see Alexander doing exactly that. Angels in Sleep were inviolate. It was one of their most fundamental laws. But no archangel would ever choose to Sleep in a place where his enemies might find him while he was vulnerable.
“Rohan,” Raphael said, wings flaring, “is strong, perhaps strong enough to believe he can rule in spite of whatever instruction Alexander gave.” His anger was a glow off his wings, an icy burn that augured nothing good. “If he has indeed been fool enough to do this, his arrogance will lead to Alexander’s people being butchered.”
Jessamy thought of the times in their history when angelkind had not understood the depth of the bloodlust that lived within the Made, but they had learned. The cost had been paid in the lives of thousands of mortals.
“The Cadre must be informed.” Cold words. “I will return to the Refuge and have Illium fly to Titus and Charisemnon.”
“Do you wish me to fly to Neha and Lijuan?” Galen asked, naming the other two archangels close to Alexander’s territory.
Raphael shook his head. “No, Lijuan will take it as an insult if I do not inform her myself. I want you to continue on toward my territory. If we are wrong and Alexander is alive, awake, and strategizing, then we must be ready for his assault.” His gaze fell on Jessamy, the ruthlessness in it chilling, though she knew it wasn’t directed at her. “You’re safer with Galen than in the Refuge.”
“I’ll slow him down,” she said, practical because sorrow was no use in a situation so grave. And Galen… Galen had promised to fly her wherever she wanted to go, so she would get the chance to touch the clouds again. “I can remain here. No vampire could reach this location.”
“There is a small possibility the vampire who attacked you was working for Rohan—and Alexander’s son has angels under his command.” Galen’s wing brushed her own, a heavy, intimate weight. “We can’t risk you.”
“He’s right,” Raphael said. “You’re too important to the Refuge.” With that, he nodded at Galen. “Go as fast as you can. Dmitri has the situation under control, but I don’t like the picture we’ve painted—if Rohan gets wind of the fact the Cadre knows of Alexander’s disappearance, it could panic him
into moving faster.” A pause that said a thousand things. “I give you my trust, Galen.”
“Sire.” A single word that made Galen’s loyalties crystal clear.
Galen had wanted to give Jessamy a gift, but this flight was a hard march through the skies. As the night cloaked them in velvet darkness, the stars glittering into being overhead, he knew she ached for them to land so she could look up in wonder. “After this is done,” he murmured into her hair, “we’ll fly the journey again.”
Her response was a kiss pressed to his jaw, her braid brushing his forearm. “I adore you, Galen.”
The words threatened to undo every one of his vows to have more from her than a gratitude that would destroy him drop by slow drop. “That’s permissible,” he said, rather than tearing open the wound she’d unknowingly inflicted.
Jessamy’s laughter wrapped around him as they continued to fly. Over mountain ranges groaning under the weight of endless snow, and rivers roaring from the thunder of the water’s passage. Over tiny villages perched on rocks, and scattered habitations over sprawling grasslands. Across the wild beauty of the crashing sea, stopping on the rare tiny island in the endless blue, and once on the white sand beaches of a pristine lagoon. Over primeval forests and new paths, until they were heading toward the cloud-piercing form of a tower rising from the untamed land around it.
They came in just as another dawn broke, and it appeared as if the structure, formed of rock and wood and glass, was aflame, a brilliant pillar visible from every direction. It was an impressive achievement and an impressive statement. Raphael clearly understood that for some, power had to have a physical form.
Landing on the wide, flat roof, he set Jessamy on her feet and folded in his wings before meeting Dmitri’s dark gaze where the vampire stood waiting for them. “Any developments?” he asked, well aware Raphael had to have a relay set up that could move information at speeds no mortal would believe.