by Nalini Singh
“Why didn’t you speak to Caliane directly?” A pregnant archangel was the weakest she would ever be—should Raphael want to kill Michaela, he would never have a better opportunity. “Why expose your weakness to me?”
“Lady Caliane intimidates me. You, on the other hand, are my compatriot.” Her smile was lush, deep, reached her eyes—and would’ve dazzled had he not been immune to her methods of getting what she wanted. “Even if you have refused to be my lover.”
I see pregnancy hasn’t altered her winning personality.
Resist the temptation to throw that blade at the screen, warrior mine. It would be awkward to explain to Mother. “The child is safe?” he asked Michaela.
Her practiced mask crumpled, her throat moving. “Keir has sensed nothing amiss. No remnants of Uram. The child in my womb is healthy in every way and he is mine.”
“A boy child?”
“I couldn’t wait. I asked Keir to ascertain it for me.” Her smile was a dawning light, real in a way that couldn’t be counterfeited.
Wow. Elena’s voice held wonder. That kind of beauty . . . She could own the world if she stopped trying to manipulate everyone.
“I am to be a mother again, Raphael.” A whisper. “At long last, my pain will end. He is my redemption.”
“I will talk to Caliane. I can promise nothing—she will make her own decision.”
“So,” Elena murmured after Michaela ended the call.
“She’s manipulating us.”
“Of course she is—that’s status quo for Michaela.” Elena played a knife through her fingers. “But she is also super pregnant.”
“If Keir has confirmed all is well, then we do not have to fear this will be anything but a child.”
His consort shuddered at the reminder of Michaela’s last “birth.” “No argument that she loves her kid already, but all that ‘my redemption’ stuff rubs me up the wrong way.” She made a face. “Maybe it’s because I don’t like her—and jeez, now I feel like shit.”
“No, Elena. I feel the same.” Walking to their balcony with her by his side, he leaned on the railing and looked out over the night-blooming flowers of Amanat. “She is making this about her and not the child.”
“I guess it’s understandable since she once lost a child.”
His hunter’s soft heart was there in every word. And it was hers now. His own had never been that empathic; what compassion he had, what humanity, it came from her.
“Kid’s probably going to be overprotected all to hell,” Elena said, “but I don’t think Michaela would hurt her baby.”
“To my knowledge, Michaela has never caused harm to a child.” Raphael watched a firefly flicker in the lamplit dark. “She is not the threat that concerns me.”
Sliding away her weapon, Elena leaned against the railing next to him, her body brushing his. It was instinct to spread his wing to cover her. She ran her fingers over the sensitive inner surface. “You’re worried about Uram?”
“I’m certain we destroyed his lingering phantom.” The dead archangel had somehow managed to leave behind a “ghost,” an energy echo that had sought to possess Michaela. “I’m more worried about whether she sustained any permanent damage as a result.” He shook his head. “It’s a foolish worry—archangels aren’t so easy to scar.”
“Yeah, but the rotting meat ‘baby’ . . . Nothing about any of that was normal even for the Cadre.” Worry wove through the compassion. “Do you know what happened to her first child?”
“The babe simply stopped breathing one day. Such a thing is extremely rare among angelic infants—in my entire lifetime, I have heard of only two cases, and Michaela’s infant was the second.” Memories flowed through his mind, of a tiny flower-laden bier, of Michaela’s severe, silent beauty.
“It is the only time since I have known her that I remember Michaela as a creature of icy silence. She did not speak for a year after her babe’s death.”
“Man, that’s so sad.”
“Michaela’s lover at the time, the babe’s father, was found dead two days after the infant’s burial. He’d been flayed alive, then beheaded.”
Elena’s hands clenched on the railing. “Michaela?”
“No one knows, but she didn’t demand an investigation into the incident, showed no anger, didn’t appear to feel any grief. And though he’d been her lover for half a century, she didn’t attend the ceremonies we hold for our dead.”
Elena had the feeling she’d never figure out Michaela, not if she lived to be as old as Caliane. “An act of grief because he reminded her of her lost baby? Or a scapegoat for her anger at being unable to protect her child? Could also be that she didn’t do it but was too numb from the first loss to process a second.”
“Only Michaela knows the truth and she’s never spoken of it—I tell you this so you remember that even with child, Michaela remains Michaela.”
“I guess it’s hard for me to see her intense love for her baby and separate that from who she is the rest of the time.” She shrugged her shoulders in a sharp movement.
Folding back his wing, he ran his hand down her spine. “What is the matter?”
“Just this weird sensation.” Her energy wings exploded out. “That’s better. It felt as if the lightning was building up under my skin.”
Raphael played with the lightning in wings that now held all the hues of her. Midnight and dawn. “You’re becoming stronger.” She’d flown all day today and yet she had excess energy.
A smile so brilliant that Michaela’s could never compete. “Hot damn. I might not have to ration my hours in flight anymore.” She jumped into his arms, kissed him all over his face, her joy an irresistible lure.
Their lips met in the stormlight of her wings.
* * *
• • •
After a quick meal, Raphael left his consort in an enclosed external courtyard bathed in the moon’s silver beams. She was planning to speak to friends in the Refuge, including a little boy who adored her; it had been her idea that he go to Caliane alone. “You know how she misses you.”
Such a soft heart.
“Raphael.” Caliane’s face bloomed when he entered her favorite garden.
She sat on a stone bench that faced a pond with water so motionless it was a mirror. Her joy in seeing him was an open incandescence that outshone the moon. Raphael’s heart clenched. The same woman who’d left him broken and bloody on a forgotten field had also sung to him as a child, songs so heartbreaking in their beauty that the entire Refuge had stood still to listen.
She was also the woman who carried thousands of dead souls on her conscience. Did she hear them in this space, quiet and lonely? Was that why she so often sat here? To listen to the recriminations of the dead? To remember their faces?
He held out his arm. She took it with a smile of pure happiness and allowed him to help her to her feet. Her gown was a glittering ice white and it flowed around her like frozen water as they walked the garden paths. It was Raphael who spoke first. “I know it hurt you to speak about the past to the Cadre.”
“I cannot pretend it didn’t happen, that I didn’t do a monstrous thing.” Pain scored each word. “I must bear witness to all the lives lost.” She squeezed his forearm. “I have asked Jessamy to bring the records here, so I can read a full account of what happened during my worst madness.”
So many children had died, the two cities become a tomb. In the end, the horror of it had been too much and the Cadre of the time had razed the cities to the ground. No new buildings sat on that land to this day, the area taken over by wild grasses that thrived in the sandy soil near the ocean.
“Are you certain that’s the right decision?” Jessamy’s histories could push Caliane back over a dark edge.
“It haunts me. I must know all of it.” Long minutes passed before she said, “I will not become mad again, Ra
phael. I know the signs now. If they appear, I will go back into Sleep.”
He believed her resolve, but he also knew that madness had a way of eating away at rational thought. He’d witnessed it firsthand in both his mother and his father.
“At times,” Caliane murmured, “I think Lijuan and I are not so very different.”
“If she had stuck to mortal victims, perhaps.” Heartless as it was, the Cadre didn’t interfere in such things in another archangel’s territory. “But she has managed to infect an archangel. That threatens our very civilization.”
“Should she come back sane?”
“Then we will have another conversation.” Raphael didn’t believe sanity was a possibility, not when Lijuan continued to stretch her arms across China. Sanity came from a long Sleep and she was, at best, in a light doze.
“Where is your consort?”
“She thought we needed time alone to be mother and son.” What his Elena would give to be able to take a midnight walk with her mother, talk to her one more time.
“She has courage,” Caliane said. “I see it and I am glad for you that you have such a consort, even as I worry about how her humanity changes you.”
Raphael didn’t reply; he’d made his choice and he had no regrets and never would. He would fall again and again with Elena. “I have another matter to discuss with you.” He told her Michaela’s secret.
Sucking in a harsh breath, she stopped on the path. “You are certain?” Wings limned with light against the night sky, her eyes blue flame.
“Yes. I was able to get in touch with Keir before I came to see you.” The healer had stopped at a waystation set up for travelers who were passing through a territory. “Michaela had given him permission to confirm the news should you or I ask.” And the healer did not lie, not for anyone.
Caliane began to walk again, her hand in the crook of his arm. “I noticed her tiredness and lack of interest in Cadre business, but I put it down to a period of ennui as happens to so many of us over time.”
Raphael hadn’t yet experienced such. Even when he’d begun to go cold before he met Elena, empathy fading into cruelty, he’d still been interested in the world. “Will you cover Michaela’s sweep of China, Mother?”
“Of course—she cannot risk any kind of infection. Is she protected? A babe is a strong drain on an archangelic mother’s energy.” A smile, a pat of his forearm. “I never minded, but I had Nadiel to watch over me and our gorgeous black-haired babe. You say Michaela claims the child alone.”
Memories from a distant corner of his past, of splashing in a bath while his mother laughed, of how she’d wrapped him up in a towel and carried his wet body close, uncaring of her pretty gown. “If no one has revealed Michaela’s secret till now,” he said through the heaviness in his chest, “then I think she has the right people around her.”
“Good. I will speak to her of such things as only an archangelic mother can understand.” Her hand rising to brush his hair off his forehead, as if he were a youngling. “We must be creatures of power while our hearts are on display to the world. It is a good thing that among our kind, to kill a child is an unforgivable offense. Else, I would’ve burned the world to the ground to protect you.”
“Did it take you a long time to recover your strength after my birth?” He’d been a youth when she’d left him broken and bleeding on that verdant green field. Such questions hadn’t come to him then.
“No, not so long. The archangelic body heals quickly. But I had a wound all the same—and I have it to this day.” The depth of her smile told him she was quite content with that. “You will always be the babe I rocked in my arms. When you hurt, I hurt. And I would still burn down the world for you.”
“No, Mother, you will not.”
A deep stillness to her. “You fear my madness even now.”
“Time is a winged beast for mortals, but for us, it is a creeping tide.” It would take him centuries, longer, to accept that Caliane’s sanity was here to stay. “You have been awake but a heartbeat.”
“When did you get so philosophical, my young Rafa?” A childhood pet name he hadn’t heard for an eon. “I left behind a wild, impulsive boy who wore his anger like a second skin, and came back to an archangel in firm control of his world but for his fascination with a mortal.” Laughter broke her motionlessness. “So . . . I think the wild boy remains in the man you have become. Still tweaking the noses of the stuffy and the rigid.”
For an instant, they were just mother and son. “According to Elena, half of angelkind thinks I have lost my mind and are waiting to see if I will regain it.”
They spoke of small things in the ten minutes that passed; of the newborns in Amanat, of the homes being repaired, of how his mother wished him to admit a vampire maiden into his Tower. “She is too fierce a thing for Amanat. If she wishes to return later, I will welcome her home, but I think to force her to stay here would be to smother her.”
“I will ask Dmitri to organize a transfer.”
Caliane’s next words were far more pensive. “A strange thing, is it not? That an archangel’s womb becomes fertile during a time of catastrophic change?” She looked up at the moon. “I think before this is over, the world will be altered in more ways than one.”
The words held the ring of a prophecy, raising the hairs on the back of Raphael’s neck, but he reminded himself that his mother was no seer. She wasn’t Cassandra, who’d once dreamed of a mortal become an angel, then risen to see her dream in brilliant, living color.
He deliberately changed the subject. “Elena mentioned today that she has never seen an image of Father.” The ones in the ancient stronghold of Lumia didn’t count; all those had been of his father’s death as witnessed by a traumatized young angel. Hair of fire, eyes of flame. All his colors had been submerged in the angelfire that was his death.
Sadness draped around Caliane’s shoulders like a heavy cloak, but intermingled with it was a smile drenched in love. “I keep my favorite portrait of Nadiel in my quarters.” She squeezed his forearm. “Tell Elena to join us. We will go see your father.”
33
Elena had never before been in Caliane’s private quarters. Raphael met her outside, told her his mother was waiting within. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected; what she got was both surprising and not. The space was exquisite in the way of a being who had lived millennia upon millennia and could choose from an endless number of cultures and designs.
The palette was white and a pale gold for the most part, the high walls of the hallway in which she walked covered in a wallpaper that stole her breath. Delicate and lovely, the design proved to be lovingly hand-painted. The floor wasn’t glossy marble but a warm glowing wood of pale honey, the curtains that hung over the large windows a white muslin so fine it was air.
It was a warm and welcoming space . . . until you got to the floor-to-ceiling doors that blocked the way to Caliane’s inner sanctum. Heavy iron, they bore the emblem of two crossed swords. Elena stopped far enough away that she could take in the entirety of the massive block of metal, and after a while, began to see elements hidden within the initially bold design.
Each of the swords, for one, was unique, the hilts boasting intricate designs that had nothing in common yet were somehow complementary.
“My father’s.” Raphael pointed to the right. “My mother’s.” The one on the left. “His burned up during his death and she broke hers into pieces and threw it into the ocean.”
A stab in Elena’s heart. She couldn’t even begin to comprehend what it would’ve cost Caliane to execute the man she loved so deeply, a love she hadn’t found until an eon into her long existence.
She deliberately brushed her body against Raphael’s as they took several more steps. Oh. “I almost missed all the other designs.” Intricate pieces that made no sense until you were close enough to see the details.
Raph
ael touched one particular panel. “My birth.”
She saw the child then, cradled within two palms, one masculine, one feminine. It was a stylized image, the infant not visible except as soft curves and a hint of wings on the back, but she put her fingers on the panel and smiled. “Finally, I get to see baby photos of you.”
No laugh from her archangel, his eyes on two panels high on the right-hand corner that seemed shinier than the others. “Those were not there before.”
Squinting, she tried to see what he had . . . Her skin tightened. A blaze of light. A falling angel, his wings broken and fire licking up his body. Nadiel’s fall. Right below that was a panel with the collapsed body of another angel, his wings crumpled and his body shattered until his limbs twisted into the wrong shape.
Raphael’s last encounter with Caliane before she woke sane.
“This is her history,” she whispered, realizing that these doors held the eternity of an archangel’s life. Even the broken and bloody pieces.
“I did not think she would choose to remember that.” Raphael’s gaze remained locked on the two painful panels. “Sometimes, Elena, I do not understand my mother.”
“Well, don’t ask me for advice about how to deal with parents. You’ve seen the stellar state of my relationship with Jeffrey.” But she leaned into him and when he spread his wing, she moved her hand to brush over the inner surface. And froze. “Um, Archangel?”
“Hmm?” He was looking at another panel.
“Did you forget to mention acquiring black and purple feathers?”
That caught his attention. Looking down, he took in the black feathers that came out from the curve of his wings, as if growing from where his wings emerged from his back.
Those obsidian feathers faded into indigo and a deep blue before the white-gold of his wings took over. “It appears you have marked me once again.” He flared out the other wing, which bore the gunshot scar. “The underside is the same here.”
