by Nalini Singh
The impact is never the same, Raphael said. I am told that, only an hour after Uram’s death, while we were both unconscious, it began to rain across the entire world. It did not stop for three days.
Elena realized they’d never spoken about this. That time had been well past when she woke from her long sleep. The whole “I’m an angel” thing had taken up her attention, Uram a bad memory better left to the annals of history.
“Which one of us was it?” Michaela’s cheekbones were like knives against her skin, her wings held with vicious tightness. “Other than you and Lijuan, Titus and Charisemnon are the only two currently in battle with one another.”
Elena’s chest hardened to granite. Titus was one of her favorite archangels. She couldn’t countenance the idea of him being gone from this world.
“We will not know until the news filters out of the territory.” Raphael shifted so that his wing touched Elena’s. “Until then, we must believe that Titus has taken an enemy from the world.”
Elena caught another glimpse of the spreading black on Raphael’s wing and all at once nothing else was important; she had to get Raphael somewhere private. “You must be tired,” she said to Michaela, deliberately switching to a slight formality to hold with angelic etiquette in this kind of a situation.
She didn’t give a flying monkey’s ass about etiquette, her heart a staccato beat, but it got things done when it came to powerful angels used to certain modes of behavior. “Please,” she said, “make use of one of the suites in the Tower. It appears Lijuan’s troops are content to hold their territory and wait for her to rise. We’ll have a little time at least.”
“Thank you, Consort,” Michaela said with a sincerity that was almost real. “But if you do not mind, Raphael, I would speak to your second and gain a greater understanding of how this battle is being fought, and the enemy we face.”
“Elijah, too, will meet you in the war room,” Raphael said after a moment.
The three of them parted ways after showing Michaela to the war room. Elena caught Dmitri’s eye, then used Laric’s “silent tongue” behind Michaela’s back to quickly sign out a message. The corners of his eyes tightened at the news that Raphael was wounded, but he moved smoothly to intercept Michaela so she and Raphael could get away.
Dmitri had a dark sensuality to him even when he wasn’t trying, and Elena saw Michaela react with a slight softening. Her opening comment held a husky laugh to it. “You do get better with age, Dmitri.”
“And you get more ravishing,” he replied with a slow smile you’d take as real if you hadn’t seen him smile at Honor.
Elena took the chance and dragged Raphael away.
She all but tore his top off his body the instant they were in their quarters. The leather was cracked and smudged and dented, scorched in places, torn in others. When it stuck to his shoulders for a frustrating moment, she used a knife to just cut it off.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” His left shoulder was nearly all black and trickles of that blackness had begun to streak down his side toward his heart. The rib cage one was larger than the span of her hand—and it was sending lethal tendrils to his heart, too.
“I’m afraid I am not in the mood, hbeebti.”
“I’m going to kill you in a second.” But her hand was gentle as she checked the area around his rib cage, then higher.
He gripped her wrist when she would’ve touched the blackened flesh. “No, Elena. We can’t take the risk it will jump to you. You are currently devoid of wildfire and Lijuan is becoming more powerful—we do not know the properties of this poison.”
Jaw set, she nonetheless nodded. “It hasn’t reached your eyes.” The blue was painfully clear, the color intense. “Your body’s holding it at bay.”
“No. It is growing, simply slower than before because of the depth of the initial hit. She didn’t get as much of the poison in me this time.”
Elena wanted to argue with him that he was wrong, that the poison wasn’t creeping over his body in a toxic wave, but she couldn’t. The stuff was determined to claw around his heart, eat him up.
“Amputation,” he said, “may be the best option.”
Elena’s entire self rebelled at the idea of Raphael being brutalized in such a way, but she nodded. As an archangel, he could heal an amputation—and this deadly poison would be out of him. “You’ll be crippled on the battlefield.”
“Yes.” A warrior’s acknowledgment. “We leave the rib cage infection, and remove the shoulder one. I can still fight with one arm and shoulder gone.”
Heart ice, she stared into his eyes; he was signing his death warrant. That patch on his rib cage would continue to eat away at him. And battling Lijuan as desperately as they were, meant he’d have no time or resources to fight back, heal. “Together,” she reminded him on a harsh whisper. “You take what you need.” Her body was a paltry battery at best, but she was still generating droplets of wildfire.
When she pressed her hand against a clear part of his chest, a pitifully thin crackle of wildfire tinged with an opalescence of midnight and dawn spread from her into him. Maybe she’d bought her archangel another thirty minutes.
He closed his hand over hers. “Together.”
Elena wanted to wrap her arms around him, hold on tight forever, but with the infection rampant in his body, she knew he wouldn’t permit it. So they simply stood there, exhausted, in love, and determined, until a voice entered their mind.
Aeclari.
Both she and Raphael turned toward the balcony doors. It was no surprise to see the Primary standing outside, framed by a Manhattan that had gone painfully dark against the night. Snow fell in soft flakes to lie against his hair, his shoulders, this being from the deep who now walked the world.
She and Raphael walked over together to open those doors, but when they gestured the Primary inside out of the cold, he shook his head. “It is time.” In his voice lived hundreds of others, all his brethren, including those whose bodies had been poisoned.
Elena’s spine stiffened.
Raphael went motionless. “I would not lose my Legion.”
“You need all of what we can give—what we carry for you, and the energy that makes us.” The Primary’s eyes, dark pupils against a rare silver-blue, held Raphael’s. “The power is needed—and it can do more than this Legion.” He shifted his gaze to the black patch on Raphael’s shoulder. “We are not meant to outlive our aeclari.”
Heat burned Elena’s eyes. When the Legion had first arrived, they’d been an eerie mass of gray. Beings so other that she couldn’t comprehend them. Now, they were her friends. Strange and old and childlike at once. They gave her potted plants, and flew with her sometimes for no reason but that they wanted to. They’d built a lush green home in the center of Manhattan, a home filled with life.
“Is the energy that makes you only of the body?” she whispered. “Once you . . . unravel, will your minds and memories be lost, too? Can you ever come back?”
The Primary angled his head to the side. “We do not know. We have never given that which makes us. We are of the earth, so perhaps we will grow again from the seeds of our energy left in the world. Or perhaps we will die a true death.”
Tears fell from her eyes. The Primary looked at her with a strange quietness. “We have never had tears shed for us.” His voice was hundreds at once in her mind, and she was okay with that today.
Stepping forward, she hugged him tight. His body was cool, and she felt no heartbeat, no breath. Yet the Legion were deeply alive in a way Lijuan would never be. “I promise to watch over your home until your return.”
His arms were hesitant but they came around her. “We may never return.” Not a cold denunciation but a quiet warning.
“I don’t believe that.” She couldn’t; her heart was already breaking. To think the Legion, unique and different and seven hundred and seventy-seven,
would disappear forever from this world . . . She couldn’t bear it.
The Primary held her gaze when she drew back. “This is our purpose. We were created to be the right hand of the aeclari, to rise when darkness rises, and to fall when it is needed. We are content with our destiny. It is . . . honor.”
Raphael held out an arm in the way of warriors, and the Primary clasped it after another small pause. “You are my Legion and you will always be my Legion. As long as I exist, you are welcome in my territory, in whatever form you choose to take.”
“Sire.” The Primary inclined his head. “Consort, you must make contact with the sire.”
Wiping off her tears with one hand even though her nose was already stuffed up and more tears burned in her eyes, Elena curled her hand around Raphael’s uninfected upper arm.
The Primary placed his free hand over Raphael’s heart. Raphael. Elena. Aeclari. We give you what is yours. It was his voice and it was the Legion’s voice, so many differing notes in the words, so many differing personalities, until it was a wild song.
A single organism with many parts.
She heard the one who’d been so fascinated by the velvety stachys byzantina she’d had in her greenhouse that he’d lit up at being offered a seedling she’d grown for him. She heard the one who’d been trying out different hues of skin on the back of his hand, to see if he liked one better than being gray. She heard the one who always turned up on this balcony at night, to say good night. And others, so many others, each a specific memory in her mind.
Elena.
Aeclari.
Raphael.
Aeclari.
It is time.
They hovered beyond the balcony in endless rows of silent wings. You are in our memory. The aeclari of the Death Cascade. The aeclari who . . . loved us.
This isn’t good-bye, Elena said in reply. It’s only until the next time.
You will always be our Legion. Raphael’s voice came on the heels of hers, each word potent. Remember this place. Remember your home.
Elena. Aeclari. Raphael. Aeclari.
Thousands of whispers, building in a crescendo until Raphael gasped as a jolt passed from the Primary to him—and down into Elena. Her back bowed, her veins lit from within and the stormfire in her wings turned into an inferno, though she’d received only a tiny percentage of the power that had punched into Raphael. She recognized this power.
It was of blood and of darkness, a red storm.
The first time, she’d taken it to be a thing that wanted to control Raphael, but now she understood. Blood was life as much as the earth was life. It was power rooted in the basest elements, to be shaped by the bearer.
Above them, the snow-heavy sky began to turn blood red in an echo of the bloodstorm that had terrified her what felt like a lifetime ago. Golden lightning cracked that bloodstorm, and in the midst of it, she suddenly understood. Knowledge poured into her, the knowledge of millennia kept by the Legion.
Her brain wasn’t vast enough to comprehend even a single mortal lifetime’s worth, but it didn’t need to; it only needed to comprehend small fragments. Somehow, the Primary had made sure those fragments were at the forefront of what he gave to her and Raphael.
We show, the Legion whispered. We show. We show. Mirrors. Aeclari are mirrors. Aeclari are life. Aeclari are the channel. Aeclari . . . we love you.
The last was said in a tone of surprise, as if they had never loved in all their millennia of existence. Then the Legion were gone, their bodies collapsing into dust, as they did when they died in battle, only to rise again. But this time, though both she and Raphael waited, they didn’t rise.
Elena’s hand trembled against her mouth, a sob catching in her throat.
The Legion were gone.
So was the black poison on Raphael’s shoulder, his wing, and on his rib cage. His eyes glowed from within when he turned to her, his wings limned with light. Closing his arms and wings around her as she cried for the ancient beings who might’ve just erased themselves from existence, he said, “Your eyes are liquid silver and fire dances under your skin. Your wings are full of so much lightning, you burn.”
His voice was rough and she knew he, too, mourned. It’s suddenly too quiet in my head. The Legion had become a part of them, a murmur that was there without being intrusive.
Mine, too.
They held on to each other as the pain settled into their hearts and bones, a memory that would never fade.
When they parted at last, Elena glanced down at her arm, saw the golden lightning. It broke her skin in a river of molten gold, only for the wound to seal up again and a different one to open. “It’s like what happened to Illium.” Too much power thrusting into his body, power that had been meant for Raphael.
Raphael ran the fingers of one hand over her forearm. “Yet he would’ve died had I not taken it, while you hold it with ease.” He pulsed with the intensity of what was inside him.
“You don’t feel as you did in the bloodstorm. A little like it, but not the same.” Not as distant, as devoid of emotion.
Yet above them, the sky swirled a dark red that bathed Manhattan in a macabre light.
“It is a power that is cold and dark and deep.”
“Like the ocean where the Legion sleep.”
“Yes.” He shot a bolt of light into the bloodstorm clouds. The sky erupted with gold, drowning Manhattan in brilliance for a long moment. “A small exertion given the power inside me—and the display may cause Lijuan to hesitate.”
Since he was still glowing like a lightbulb, she saw his point. “Energy’s already started to turn into wildfire.” It was the only way his body could’ve fought the poison.
Raphael nodded. “But even were I glutted with wildfire, I fear it would not be enough.” His face was lines of pure beauty, an archangel at the apex of his power. “She has risen again and again after feeding.”
“What the Legion showed us . . .” Her mind struggled to grasp the concept; she could suddenly appreciate the difficulty the Legion’d had in describing the phenomenon.
“It was a moment of blinding clarity,” Raphael said, “but now it slips in and out of my grasp like a half-remembered dream.”
Elena tilted back her head and took a deep breath of the cold air, on the theory that not thinking about it would bring the concept to the surface. “I feel so powerful.” Her skin continued to break open but nothing hurt; she felt better than she had in her whole life. “I think I’m drunk.”
“Would you like to send a fireball to the sky?” She heard the smile in his tone.
Dropping her gaze from the sky to him, this creature of power and beauty, she grinned past the anguish. “You’re still a little bit mortal.”
“I have pieces of your heart inside me, hbeebti. I will always be a little bit mortal.” He looked again at the bloody sky. “Blood is not evil. Blood runs in our veins. Blood is life.”
“They gave theirs so we could fight for ours.” She couldn’t look toward where the Primary had stood, the pain too raw and fresh.
“The Legion were warriors, Elena-mine, and they laid down their existence for their aeclari. We will honor that.”
Elena flexed her hands, focusing on the energy that lit up her veins and not on the loss that would hurt for a long time to come. “We better go see Dmitri, see if he knows anything more about that boom we heard.”
They stepped off the balcony together. As they did, she wondered how they looked against the night sky. Shirtless and beautiful, Raphael was glowing almost too bright to look at, and she was painted with rivers of liquid gold. I hope someone snaps a photo, she thought to Raphael. We are never going to look this badass again.
He laughed and he was her Raphael, even if there was a heavier darkness to him now, the darkness of an ancient power that had found home in his veins. This, she thought, was permanent.
/>
He would carry the imprint of their Legion through eternity.
67
Dmitri took one look at the two of them and found a pair of sunglasses from somewhere. Elena had to laugh. The vampire had a sense of humor at times that very closely resembled hers. Not that they’d ever be friends. It was an unspoken law of nature.
Her laughter fled with Raphael’s next word. “Titus?”
“No news.” Taking off the sunglasses, Dmitri put them on a computer table. “Whatever he and Charisemnon did, it succeeded in blowing out all communications from those territories to the outside world. No one from another territory’s flown there and back yet to pass on the information.”
Dark eyes hard, Dmitri added, “Our own communications are sketchy at best. I think Lijuan or her people did a bit of deliberate damage at some point.”
“Have we lost our eyes on that side?”
“Vivek’s still got a few. It’s about what you’d expect. She’s getting ready to feed again, though we can’t see the flesh mountain—those bugs were crunched.” Dmitri brought up a feed on a nearby screen. “I sent Vivek to sleep after Michaela left with Elijah. He’s not meant to be awake and in the chair for such long stretches yet.”
Tell your friend to stop acting so human. It’s annoying.
I would not dare get in the middle of your and Dmitri’s special relationship, hbeebti. Light words, but he made sure his wing continued to touch hers, the glow coming off their bodies a silent testament to the sacrifice of seven hundred and seventy-seven exceptional beings.
Dmitri pointed to movement on the screen. “Wounded are being carried in that direction. Could be being taken to an infirmary, but my cold, dead heart has other thoughts.”
“What about the ships?” Raphael asked. “The possible troop or reborn transports?”
“Definitely coming this way.” Dmitri indicated a map on another screen; it had various lines dotted on it. “We’re updating this as we get any data—it’s become fragmented as communications continue to go out around the world.”
