by Nalini Singh
The doors opened and the owl flew out, to disappear into the distance.
Elena smiled deeply within. So, she could rewrite what was foretold. Good to fucking know—because she had no plans of being a meek lamb led to the slaughter. She walked through the open door of her and Raphael’s suite on that vow. Her archangel was overflowing with golden energy—though it wasn’t as obvious as it had been in the cold night sky. The lightning-bolt cracks were thinner, the energy a shimmer of light against his skin and wings rather than an inferno.
Galen stood with his hands on his hips, talking to Raphael. The weapons-master’s expression changed the instant he spotted Jessamy. It didn’t go soft—Galen was too rough and tough, but it turned gentle in a way that it only ever did for Jessamy. He held out his hand, and she walked across to take it.
The first thing he did was unhook her cloak and throw it aside.
The pale blue of Jessamy’s simple but elegant gown skimmed her slender form to froth at her ankles, soft waves crashing to shore. The historian pressed a tender kiss to Galen’s cheek. Her twisted wing overlapped by his, she looked at Raphael with eyes soft in wonder. “May I?” She lifted a hand.
At Raphael’s nod, she released Galen’s hand to reach over and brush her fingers over part of Raphael’s forearm. Curious, Elena watched. But when Jessamy raised her fingers, no light came with her.
“Ellie,” she said. “You do it.”
Elena stroked the same part of his arm, the warmth and heat and strength of him sinking into her and making her smile even in the midst of the continuing madness. Her fingertips glowed when they lifted off his skin. Pursing her lips, she blew the light back into him. The flickers flew like fireflies to become a part of him once more.
Raphael stroked his hand over the arch of her wing. “It knows who you are to me.” Unsaid was the angry coda: it didn’t matter if his power accepted her if it couldn’t help her.
God, he was so angry. This could ruin him if they didn’t figure out a way through it. She hoped he was able to help Jessamy—that might take the edge off his rage. “Jess,” she said quietly. “Raphael is overflowing with power.”
A moment of incomprehension before Jessamy’s face went still.
Galen strode forward at the same instant. “Sire.” His hands were fisted, his shoulders rigid. “The decision has been made.”
Elena didn’t try to get in the middle of that conversation—this was between an archangel and one of his loyal Seven. Raphael had attempted, if not to heal, then at least to ease Jessamy’s twisted wing before. However, his healing power hadn’t been able to affect the malformation that kept Jessamy bound to the ground except when she flew up in the plane or in Galen’s arms.
“I will honor that wish.” Raphael closed his hand over Galen’s shoulder and squeezed. “But I would not be your archangel if I did not offer you this chance.”
Jessamy spoke for the first time since Elena’s words. “Laric?”
“He was caught in the energy released by the death of an archangel,” Raphael said. “According to Keir’s tests, his cells have altered in unusual ways that make those cells unlike ordinary angelic cells. It has also made them unrecognizable to my power—that may change as he grows older and his own healing processes restart, but for now, I can do nothing for him.”
Raphael’s eyes began to glow. Not only the cerulean blue that was his own but a ring of golden light that hadn’t existed prior to the energy surge. “The choice is yours.”
Jessamy ran her hand down Galen’s arm to his bunched hand. Unfurling it at her touch, he locked his fingers with hers. “What will happen to the power if I say no?”
“I do not know. It doesn’t feel too much for me, so it may simply stay until I use it. Or it may dissipate.”
Power enough to shatter the night and he wasn’t overwhelmed. No wonder Cassandra said he was changed—but he was guiding that change now, shaping it to his will. Yet Elena still felt a jagged rock in her gut . . . because what if the worst happened? Would Raphael fight the Cascade forces then? Or would he allow those forces to shape him into a cold and ruthless immortal untouched by mortal vulnerability?
Jessamy turned to Galen and put her free hand on his chest. Elena and Raphael both stepped away as the couple spoke in low voices tense with withheld emotion.
“What if we’re doing the wrong thing, Archangel?” Elena asked out of earshot of the other couple, suddenly afraid. Not only would a failure hurt Jessamy, it would be another darkness whispering to Raphael.
Eyes inhuman with power held hers, and when he spoke, his voice was different. Heavy with archangelic power. He sounded more like the archangel she’d first met than he had in years. But the words he spoke, they were her Raphael’s. “Hunter-mine. To not make the attempt would be a disservice to Jessamy. Especially after I could do nothing the first time we attempted to ease the malformation so it would not ache.”
Until then, Elena hadn’t known that Jessamy’s wing caused her physical discomfort. Not on a daily basis, and the pain was a dull throb rather than a sharp stab that made her cry out, but the muscles did spasm and lock up at times. The historian had described it as a bad cramp—to Elena, that would be an awful pain, but Jessamy had become accustomed to it over the centuries and centuries of her existence.
She didn’t seem to understand what that said about her strength, this slender woman who was no warrior and who, to this day, tried to avoid the fighting lessons Galen gave her so she would never be helpless against an opponent.
“Sire.” Stiff but resigned, Galen’s voice split the heavy silence. “Jessamy wishes to try.”
Raphael moved around to Jessamy’s back without further discussion—and that, too, was different. The Raphael she loved would’ve said something to reassure his weapons-master. Or maybe she was just jumpy and Raphael was too concerned with reigning in this wild power to waste his energies on anything that wasn’t strictly necessary.
“I need you to spread your wings as far as possible,” he ordered Jessamy.
One strong wing whispered out in a glow of delicate magenta and luscious cream against the pale sky-blue of Jessamy’s gown. The other stayed close to her back, the bones, muscles, and tendons formed wrong and unable to stretch outward.
Elena and Galen both moved so they could see what Raphael was doing, one on his left, the other on his right.
“Describe it to me,” Jessamy said with the frustration of a historian missing out on what might be the making of a piece of angelic history.
“The sire is staring at your back,” Galen muttered bad temperedly. “If I didn’t know that he was madly in love with Elena, I’d have to thump him for looking at you with such intensity.”
Jessamy’s laughter was a warm, gentle thing.
“His hands are full of light now,” Elena murmured. “It’s like the lightning we saw from Sara’s roof, not the blue of his usual healing energy.” Her heart thundered at seeing the violence of it, quite unlike the delicate dandelions that had floated back to him. “Archangel?”
“Sire, that is archangelic energy meant to level cities and battle others of the Cadre,” Galen said harshly at the same time.
“Yes,” Raphael said in a distant tone, “but it is also mine to mold.”
In front of them, the lightning became shot with streaks of healing blue. Elena shuddered inwardly at the sign that he continued to carry a touch of mortality, a touch of humanity. He’d always said that his ability to heal came from his love for her and how it had changed him on a fundamental level.
“Someone tell me what’s happening.”
Elena responded to Jessamy’s demand. Galen was too focused on Raphael’s hands, his big body all but vibrating in readiness. And Elena knew that if he thought Raphael was hurting Jessamy, he’d unsheathe his broadsword and take on an archangel himself.
“The light coming off Raphael
is almost too much to look through now.” Elena’s eyes teared even though she’d narrowed them as much as she could without totally cutting off her sight. “He’s moving his hands closer to your wing.” She blinked away the tears. “The energy’s touching you. Small lightning bolts arcing against your wing.”
“I can’t feel the touch,” Jessamy said, attempting to look over her shoulder.
“Be still.”
Jessamy went motionless at the command, and Raphael—
Everything blurred in an incandescence of overwhelming gold, light sparking behind Elena’s lids as she instinctively closed her eyes. When she opened them back up a millisecond later, the light was retracting back into Raphael, sucked in until it no longer lay like a second skin on his arms and his hair and his eyes.
The breaks in his skin sealed up in front of her gaze.
Elena jerked her attention to Jessamy’s wing. Disappointment slammed her in the gut, an ugly two-fisted blow. It was exactly as it had been, and she saw from the angry sadness on Galen’s face that he was an inch away from punching Raphael.
About to tug away her archangel so the weapons-master could focus on his beloved Jessamy, she halted at a keen of sound from the angelic historian. “It hurts.”
Galen moved in a burst of raw strength, cradling her trembling form against his chest. “Where?” His voice was like stone, murder in the pale green of his eyes.
But Jessamy pushed back from his chest, her hands braced against it and her nails digging into his shirt. Another animalistic keen of pain, a helpless creature with its limb caught in a trap.
“Sire, you must fix this,” Galen demanded.
“It is an old and tight muscle,” Raphael said with unnatural calm, his gaze yet intent on Jessamy’s wing. “It has not been stretched in nearly three thousand years.”
“Jesus.” Elena saw it then, saw what was happening. “Galen, look at her wing.”
37
Keeping one arm around Jessamy’s waist, his features set in brutal, unforgiving lines, the weapons-master came around Jessamy’s other side so that he could look at her back. The twisted part of Jessamy’s wing was moving. The motion was slight, but it was there.
“Has it ever moved before?” Elena asked both Jessamy and Galen. “Jess, have you ever been able to manipulate that part of your wing?”
Gripping hard at Galen’s forearm, Jessamy shook her head. “I can feel it now.” Her words were breathless, pain dripping from each one. “Before, it was a knot. It didn’t hurt except for the odd cramp, but there was no flexibility in it, either. This . . . it is the most horrifying agony I’ve ever experienced.”
Breaking unwritten angelic law, Elena pressed a hand against Jessamy’s wing on that sensitive upper section. “Stop.”
“Elena,” Raphael warned, even as Galen’s hand rose toward her.
Elena broke contact. “Jess, really, stop.” She fought for the words to explain. “We need to get one of Vivek’s physiotherapists in here. Regardless of your final range of movement, we’re talking about the rehabilitation of a part of your body that hasn’t been used for close to three thousand years.”
All three immortals in the room froze.
Jessamy turned to stare at her. Her eyes were dark hollows in her face, pain a purple bruise under them, and her bones striking. “Physiotherapist?” So much disbelief it was gray fog in the air. “Such practitioners are not used by angelkind.”
“Um, we’re not exactly in a normal situation.” Honestly, angels could be aggravating at times. “Vivek goes to physiotherapy every single day, sometimes twice a day. We’re talking about exactly the same thing here, bringing to life part of your body that hasn’t been used your entire lifetime. Being an angel might mean your process moves faster, I don’t know, but given your pain and the way your wing looks to the naked eye, no way can it be immediate.”
“Elena is right.” Gripping the back of Jessamy’s neck on those surprising words, Galen pressed a kiss to her temple. “I know you are impatient, my love. But we must take this slowly.”
Jessamy nodded at last, pressing her face into Galen’s chest. “I can feel it,” she whispered again, her voice wet. “As if I could open it if only I tried hard enough.”
Galen ran his hand over her hair and tenderly across the painful wing, before looking to Raphael. “Sire . . .”
Raphael shook his head. “If you had caused Elena pain, Galen, I would’ve taken off your head too.”
And that was that.
Elena had taken those moments to call the physiotherapist, a honey-skinned and gently muscled vampire who’d been born in what was now Vietnam four hundred years ago. As a senior member of the Tower team, Nga was fully aware of Jessamy’s wing. Elena had also deliberately called her rather than her male counterpart. Galen was already at the limit of his patience—and she didn’t think Jessamy would be as comfortable with a male, especially since the treatment would mean hands-on contact.
When the physiotherapist arrived—dressed in sweatpants and a fitted tank top—she listened to Elena’s breakdown of the situation before speaking. “First, we need scans of your wing,” she said directly to Jessamy. “Are there previous scans for comparison?”
Jessamy, more in control of herself, said, “Yes.”
No one was going to be sleeping tonight, and no one was going to be waiting another day for the scan. They tracked down a qualified vampire technician and began. The machine had been modified to accommodate an angel, but even so, it couldn’t do Jessamy’s entire wing in one go.
Two hours later, they had a full scan.
Elena was no medical genius, but even she could see the change.
In the original scan, done prior to Raphael’s first attempt, the muscles and tendons and even bone of Jessamy’s wing had been locked together in what Jessamy called a knot. It must’ve happened at a very early stage of growth—everything had merged instead of separating out.
In the current scan, Elena could see the fine bones of Jessamy’s wing as separate pieces. Everything remained bunched in, and her muscles were undoubtedly too short after lack of use, but there were tiny particles of light in certain areas, as if those parts of the wing were attempting to stretch out.
Nga took over at that point, guiding Jessamy through a range of test exercises to judge her current capacity for motion. Jessamy gritted her teeth and got through the gentle set, but she was sweating by the time it ended. Galen managed not to intervene, though Elena could see the muscle jumping in his jaw as he fought not to break poor Nga in half.
“I think we can get that wing to open out, but it’ll take considerable time,” the physiotherapist said in her practical way. “You risk tearing things if you rush it—then it’ll be a long recovery and we’d be starting from scratch again.”
“She’s saying you can’t pick up a sword before you’ve learned to handle a knife, Jess,” Galen murmured against Jessamy’s temple, his body her anchor.
One arm around his waist, Jessamy swallowed. “I can’t stay in New York. Vivek—”
“My partner will continue to work with him—Vivek will not begrudge you my shift in allegiance,” Nga interrupted. “In fact, he has been known to call me the chief servant of Satan, so he may celebrate my departure.” She turned and bowed deeply to Raphael. “If the sire authorizes it, I will return to the Refuge with Jessamy and begin to torture her instead of Vivek.”
Raphael resettled his wings, but he didn’t smile. “Stay as long as you need.”
Galen looked at Jessamy. “Are you happy to fly a passenger?”
She smiled, though pain webbed her eyes. “This passenger, I will fly as many times as she wishes.”
After Nga had left the room to put together her bag, Jessamy moved to stand in front of Raphael. “When you were a boy who would not listen to me in school, and who ran off laughing when I attempted to chastise
you, I couldn’t imagine that you would one day give me this gift beyond price.”
Her fingers brushed his hair with the maternal gentleness of a woman who’d taught him as a child, and who saw him not only as the archangel he’d become but as the laughing boy he’d once been. “I was deeply happy with my life when I entered your suite, but this adventure will take me to new places. I wish the same wonder for you, Raphael.”
Raphael gathered her into his arms, the moment poignant with a thousand unspoken emotions—and a relief to Elena. He was acting like her archangel, compassion in his heart no matter how huge his power.
She caught the feather about to slide free from her wing, slipped it into a pocket before anyone could see. This was a moment full of light. She wouldn’t mar it with shadows.
* * *
• • •
Galen and Jessamy left at dawn—as soon as Jessamy was certain the pain in her wing wouldn’t hamper her ability to pilot her craft. The couple planned to stop a number of times so Jessamy could stretch out her wing according to Nga’s instructions, but their goal remained to get to the Refuge as fast as safely possible.
It might take years for Jessamy’s wing to fully straighten out, but as Jessamy herself had remarked, even a decade was but a moment in the span of her thousands of years of life.
“Show me,” Raphael said to his consort after Galen, Jessamy, and Nga had left. He and Elena stood on the Tower roof under the painted sky of dawn, the orange-hued light coloring Elena’s hair like a watercolor.
Face solemn, his consort reached into a pocket and pulled out a feather of deepest blue with the merest hint of indigo. It lay against her palm, a silent witness to her descent into mortality. Again, she angled her hand downward and let the feather dance away on the air currents.
“Spread your wings so I can assess their status.” Rage continued to burn in him, a black cauldron, but it was also oddly distant, leaving his mind crystalline.
