by Nalini Singh
Entering on feet as silent as those of the feline weaving around his ankles, he took a seat across from her, the golden brown of his wings stroking down to kiss the thick copper-hued carpet. "Hello, Jason." The cat jumped up to settle on the table beside him as he spoke, a small smoky gray Sphinx with eyes of luminous gold.
"Keir." The black-winged angel whispered away and out of the room, pulling the door shut behind himself.
"I worry about our beautiful Jason," Keir said, his gaze on the heavy slab of wood beyond which Jason stood guard. "When you've survived what I suspect he has, there really is nothing left to fear."
Jessamy's hand fisted in the pale yellow of her gown, her mind circling around the quiet panic that had colored her interactions with Galen. "Isn't that a gift?"
Keir shook his head, his silky black hair brushing his shoulders. "We should all have something to fear, Jessamy." The feline purred as he stroked slender fingers through its fur. "As we all should have something to hope for. Jason has neither."
"And such a man," Jessamy whispered, "has no reason to go on living." Worry pierced her soul for the angel who had a voice so haunting it rivaled Caliane's, but whose song made tears form in her heart. "Raphael," she said, her voice trembling with relief. "Jason has given his loyalty to him, and Raphael will not let him go."
"Yes. There is something to be said for that young one's arrogance." A slight smile, because Keir had a favorite, too. "So, I hear the big brute Raphael has accepted as his weapons-master is courting you."
Jessamy jerked up her head. "Jason's knowledge, I understand, even if I can't explain it. But you've been working in the Medica for days." A fragile newborn, the first child born in the Refuge for five long years, was commanding Keir's interest. "The babe?" Keir had forbidden visitors--for the hall of healing would've been buried in wings otherwise.
"Her angry screams summoned me deep in the night; tiny she might be, but she does not like being ignored. I rather think our little sprite will be a warrior." Eyes sparkling with a light that was unique to Keir, he leaned forward on the gleaming wood of the table. "As for your brute--you allowed him to fly you. Did you think no one would notice?"
Jessamy swallowed. "It can't be, Keir."
"Why?"
Forcing her fist to unclench, she held that warm gaze of uptilted brown, tore the scab off her most vicious wound. "I think he does truly want me"--a memory of the hard length of him pushing into her abdomen, his mouth so hungry on her own, his hand gripping her jaw with masculine possessiveness--"and I will not deny the depth of my own attraction." Such a pale word that was, to express the wildness of what Galen aroused in her.
"Yet something's holding you back."
"Even knowing I'm thinking too far ahead," she said, rubbing a hand over her heart in a futile attempt to still the ache within, "I can't help but imagine his bitterness when he realizes that being with me means having his wings clipped, his lineage ended." For Jessamy would never chance subjecting a child to the same painful existence she'd endured. "I will not be the weight that drags him out of the skies."
Keir's tone was soft when he replied, his words without mercy. "Galen does not seem to be a man who lacks in courage. That you say this about him makes me think less of you, old friend."
Ice trickled down her spine, Keir's words a painful echo of what Galen had said on the ledge outside his aerie. "You're calling me a coward," she said in a hoarse whisper. "You're saying I'm hiding behind my wing."
7
"I didn't say that, but you heard it." Reaching across the table, he closed his hand over her own, his skin smooth, so unlike another man's far rougher touch. "Is that how you see yourself?"
Emotions choked her throat, tore up her chest, turned her voice raw. "I'm making the right decision; you must see that. If I allow him in and he rejects me, I couldn't bear it." Not when it was her infuriating, maddening, magnificent barbarian, a man who looked at her as if she was beautiful, awakening dreams she'd buried deep so she could survive and be content, not a resentful creature eaten up with envy.
Keir's expression was tender. "Everyone learns to survive heartbreak." Releasing her hand, he rose and came to lean over the back of her chair, his arms around her neck, his cheek rubbing against her hair. "Your disadvantage is that you did not have to face it early, when you were younger, more resilient. Now, sweet Jessamy, I think you are afraid."
Swallowing the knot in her throat, she put her hand over the supple muscle of his arm. "Shouldn't I be afraid? My life has not been akin to the lives of those who can touch the sky at whim." Her years of learning to live with a desolation, a sense of aching loss no other angel could understand, had made her brittle on the inside. "Have I not earned my peace?"
Keir's lips brushed her cheek, the scent of him a languid caress. "You never wanted peace, my darling. The only question is, are you strong enough to reach for what you do want, knowing the joy may be followed by terrible sorrow?"
The door opened on the lingering echo of his final words, to reveal not Jason, but Galen, eyes of sea green incandescent with fury. "You are now free to teach at the school," he said. "Illium and Jason will be present to ensure the safety of you and your students both." With that curt pronouncement, he was gone.
Her hand tightened on Keir's arm. "He thinks we're together." It would be easy to allow him to believe her a liar, a woman who had betrayed her lover with a scorching kiss, a hundred hidden glances.
Her stomach twisted; her gut roiled. "Let me up, Keir." When her friend released her, she rose, shook out the skirts of her gown. "The fear is like metal on my tongue--I've known him but a fragment of time, and yet I'm certain if I accept his suit, it will destroy a part of me when he leaves."
Keir reached forward to tuck her hair behind her ear. "We're all a little broken." Quiet. Potent. "No one goes through life with a whole heart." His eyes, full of wisdom too profound to belong to a man who was only three hundred years her senior, told her he saw her soul, tasted the salt of her loneliness.
But what even Keir's eyes couldn't see, she thought as she walked out of the library, Jason a silent shadow by her side, was that her heart wasn't whole. It had broken long, long ago--the first time she'd looked up at the sky and realized it was forever out of her reach. The courage it was taking for her to reach out again was a tight rawness in her chest, serrated at the edges by the remnants of a thousand shattered dreams.
*
Galen put both vampires on the ground using a fury of kicks and hard whacks with the flat of his blade. "You made the same mistake twice," he said, waiting only until their eyes focused after the stinging slap of the blade. "I gave you a warning." Second warnings didn't exist in his world.
Struggling to their feet, the two nodded. One wiped blood from the corner of his mouth. But neither demurred when he demanded they go through the exercise again. This time, they were so busy trying not to make the first mistake, they made a different one. Realizing both males were exhausted, he pulled his hits and called a halt. "Go," he said. "Work on your own and against each other tomorrow. Day after, we'll spar once more."
The younger vampire hesitated. "We want to get better." His partner nodded.
Impressed the two hadn't made a run for it after the beating he'd given them, he forced himself to speak past the anger that was a violent storm in his body. "You will. I want you to go through the steps I showed you at the start again and again until the movements are second nature." Galen had spent countless hours doing drills, knew their value. "Part of combat is being able to react without thought--you need to train your muscles to remember."
The vampires left after asking several intelligent questions, determination writ large on their faces. Ignoring his audience as he had since she'd entered in an elegance of cool yellow, he picked up his broadsword and began to go through a complicated routine that would've left his opponents in tiny pieces in the blink of an eye. People often misjudged his speed because he looked big and heavy. In truth, the only one of
Raphael's people who might be faster, he thought, was Illium.
"I'll have a class of disappointed babes if you force me to wait any longer." Her voice was quiet, but it tore through the air of the salle, nails on his skin.
"Say what you have to and leave." He forced himself to slow his movements so he could hear her past the whipping cut of the blade.
Silence.
If she thought he'd halt for her, she was very wrong.
"So"--a soft murmur--"this is the flip side to your determination and loyalty. Utter, obdurate stubbornness." A rippling laugh. "I'm rather glad to find you have a flaw."
Galen clenched his jaw because she was right. He was stubborn, a tenacity he'd made into an asset, but one that had often gotten him into trouble as a child. And he did have a tendency to hold on to his anger, but he was justified here. Jessamy had allowed him to taste her lips, allowed him to believe he might court her, when she belonged to another man.
Halting with the edge of the blade a hairbreadth from her neck, he growled, "That was a singularly stupid thing to do." Coming up behind him was never a good idea.
Neither fear nor apology in eyes of lush brown he'd wanted to see soft and hazy in his bed. "I know you heard me."
He lowered the blade, put distance between them, the warm, earthy scent of her threatening to compromise his honor all over again. "What is it you wish to say, Lady Jessamy?"
Jessamy's heart thudded at the naked fury on Galen's face. All heavy muscle and gleaming skin, he made her think thoughts that were not the least bit civilized. And fear . . . yes, it lingered, but not of him. Of this, what she was about to do. It might well go down as the worst mistake of her life, but she knew there was no other choice. Not when it destroyed her to have Galen thinking her disloyal.
"Keir," she said, and saw the heliodor-green turn molten, "is my friend. My best friend. He has been thus for thousands of years." Continuing to speak when he didn't so much as blink, much less soften, she continued. "He invited me to his bed once, a long time ago. He wanted me to experience such intimacy." It had been the heartfelt gesture of a young healer who could find no way to heal his friend. "But I said no--if I share a man's bed, it will be because of passion, nothing less."
Still no response from the angry, stubborn creature who fascinated her so. Realizing he was too deep in his anger to hear her--yes, his temper was another flaw--she turned to leave. The last thing she heard was the whir of his sword cutting through the air once more, vicious and precise.
*
Drenched in sweat and with his shoulder muscles aching from holding his wings too tight to his back, Galen finally stopped moving when Illium walked into the salle.
The angel whistled. "Do I want to know?" He looked pointedly at the blades embedded in the walls.
"I was practicing my throwing." Pulling out the blades one by one, he began to stack them on the table. "You're fast. I need to practice trying to pin you."
"Just ask," the angel said without hesitation. "No one's ever succeeded yet." Flying up to some of the higher blades and wrenching them out, he dropped them on the table. "Jessamy finished her lessons, so Jason is escorting her back home--they're probably there by now. He'll keep watch until relieved. I can--"
"No."
Golden eyes tipped with black lashes dipped in blue were suddenly looking into his as Illium came to a precise landing in front of Galen. "I like you, Galen, but I love Jessamy. Hurt her and I'll gut you."
Galen looked the angel up and down. "Bluebell, you couldn't take me if I was blindfolded and had both hands tied behind my back."
"Bluebell?" Illium narrowed his eyes. "That's it, Barbarian." Throwing two of the knives to Galen, he picked up two of his own.
And then they were moving. He'd been right. Illium was faster than him. Much faster. The blue-winged angel could also do things in the air that should've been impossible, except that Galen had the cuts on his back and the bruises on his chest to prove they weren't. But he was more than holding his own . . . waiting only until Illium made one overconfident move too many to pin the angel to the ground with a blade through the tip of his wing, where the wound would heal by morning.
Cursing with unexpected creativity for someone so pretty, Illium glared at Galen. "You set me up."
"I had to gauge how fast you were, what you bring to Raphael's forces." Releasing the other angel, he rose to his feet. "You'll do, Bluebell."
Illium swore at him in rapid-fire Greek. Galen replied in just as blue French, ordering him to come back for further sessions to improve a technique that was damn near flawless except for one thing. "You're too cocky. Need to have some sense whacked into you."
Illium snarled but agreed to return-- "So I can put you on your ass."
Separating from the angel once they reached the cliff, he flew down to his aerie to clean up and change before flying back up right as the rays of the setting sun blazed across the sky in innumerable shades of gold and orange, with the slightest edge of blush. It reminded him of the feather he'd secreted away with such care, the feather he'd been unable to discard even when he'd thought Jessamy's lovely face that of a liar.
It still bubbled in him, the rage that had roared to the surface when he'd seen the healer with his lips touching her skin, her face lifted up to his in absolute trust. Galen had no right to expect anything similar from her after so short an acquaintance, but the logic of it didn't matter, because he did.
Landing on the gray and blue tiles shimmering with flecks of hidden elements in the dark orange light, he relieved Jason with a curt nod, waiting until the other angel took flight--his inky wings a dramatic silhouette against the cascade of color--to walk inside Jessamy's home, bolting the door behind himself.
"Jason, did you--" Looking up from where she sat behind a harp, the thick silk of her hair cascading over one shoulder, her gown now a plain sage green that curved lower across her chest than the gown she'd earlier worn, Jessamy's welcoming smile faded, her expression turning guarded, solemn. "Galen."
It twisted something inside him to know he'd put that look on her face. "I have a temper," he said, because it had to be said. "A terrible one."
Her fingers danced over the strings of the harp with exquisite grace, filling the air with a ripple of music, pure and sweet. "I've seen you practicing, sparring--you fight as if you have no emotions, a man utterly contained. Is that why?"
Remaining in a standing position, he clasped his hands behind his back when the urge to fist her hair and tilt her head so he could take her mouth with primal possession, as he shaped the delicate mounds hinted at by her clothing, threatened to overwhelm him. "My father told me at a young age that if I didn't learn to handle it, it would consume me."
"Your father was a wise man." Another lilt of music. "Sit. Or do you plan to loom over me until I submit?"
No one who had seen him in a temper had ever dared tease him before. He wasn't certain how he felt about it, but he allowed himself to lower his guard now that she'd accepted him in her space and--stripping off his sword and harness--took a seat in the large armchair in front and to the left of her. "I've become legend for the depth of my control. No one has witnessed me rage in well over a century."
The music twanged, stopped.
"You say such things, Galen . . . and I'm not certain how to respond." Aching vulnerability twined around Jessamy's heart. He would mark her, this man. Mark her so deep and true it would become a scar. But she'd made her choice, would not permit fear to steal it from her. "It's time for another lesson about the Cadre." She continued to play, noticing how his shoulders relaxed as the lyrical sound filled the air.
Checking his sword harness with absent attention, he nodded. "It's becoming clear to me how much more I need to learn."
He was a cooperative pupil, his mind quick and agile. In the conversation, it came out that he spoke not simply Greek and French with a native's fluency, but also the myriad languages of Persia and Africa. Fascinated and wanting no distractions as they sp
oke, she stopped playing to slide into a chair at the dining table. He moved into the one next to it the same instant, asking her perceptive question after perceptive question. Most people, she thought, quite likely severely underestimated his intelligence because of his ease with weapons and war, the way he talked, and dressed--or didn't dress.
It was impossible not to caress the ridged plane of his upper body with her gaze when he sat so close, his wing spread over the back of her chair, the heavy warmth of it a silent touch. The possessiveness of the act wasn't lost on her, but she found herself spreading her own wing a fraction, so it would whisper against his.
"I am only a man." It was a rumbling murmur, his eyes on her mouth. "If you continue to play with me thus, I'll forget I came to apologize for my behavior, and act in a fashion that'll have you angry with me all over again."
Her lips felt swollen, her breasts tight, but she found the wit to say, "And when will I hear this apology?"
Shifting his focus, he held her gaze with eyes she knew she'd never forget, not if she lived ten thousand years. "I am sorry for doubting your honor, Jessamy." A pause. "I'm not sorry for wishing to separate Keir's head from his body."
"Galen!" Laughter bubbled out of her, bright and unexpected and so very real that it brought tears to her eyes. "Oh, you are a barbarian."
His cheeks creased, one hand coming up to play with her hair, twining strands around a thick finger. When he tugged, her stomach dropped, but she leaned forward. She expected to feel his mouth on her own, but he angled his face and brushed his lips over the top of her cheekbone. Shivering, she curled her hand around his nape, the feel of the tendon and muscle moving beneath the heat of his skin a seductive intimacy as he continued to brush kisses down the edge of her face, until he reached her neck.
"Oh."
8
He nuzzled the place he'd kissed, the skin so sensitive that the hot gust of his breath made her toes curl. A fraction of a moment later, the pleasure and power of him were replaced by a shock of air as Galen ripped himself from her and retrieved his sword in a single savage motion. Attempting to quiet her gasping breaths, she stared around his battle-ready form, saw nothing. An instant later, a footfall sounded on the front path, followed by a knock.
