45
Having landed on roofs as far as the eye could see, the gray ones sat crouched like living gargoyles, their wings arched, fundamentally changing the landscape. Birds sat on the shoulders and bodies of many of them, silent and watchful.
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Elena asked Raphael, trying to make some sense of what she was seeing, and failing.
From what she’d witnessed in the battle as the gray angels fought around her, there was no color to them—gray eyes, pale smooth skin, hair of gray, gray wings. Yet they were humanoid, had faces with the clean lines and strong bones of the immortals. Their wings, however, had no feathers, instead formed of a leathery texture that reminded her of the wings of bats. The shape of those wings, too, was similar to the nocturnal creatures.
“No,” Raphael said after a long moment, as heavy clouds passed across the sky to drop a curtain of snow on the city, the sun blotted out to cloak the world in darkness.
It created the perfect muted background for the strange angels who crouched all over New York.
“These gray ones are an enigma.” Eyes of violent blue took in the eerie scene, everyone so silent it seemed impossible this was a city of countless souls. “Come.”
The gray angels didn’t stop them as they flew back through the snow to the Tower, Illium by their side. Coming to a stop on the Tower balcony, Elena took her place beside Raphael, their eyes on Manhattan. Dmitri flanked him in silence, while Illium acted as a winged sentry. Naasir, she realized, had to be handling the enemy vampires still in the city.
Take one step forward with me, Elena.
Guessing it to be some kind of angelic protocol, she did so without argument . . . and one of the gray ones flew toward them from a nearby building. Tall, with broad shoulders, his wings silent in the snow and his hair brushing his nape, Elena couldn’t have picked him out from any of the others. It was as if they’d been minted from the same press, one after the other.
Landing right in front of them, he placed his sword horizontally in front of his body and went down on one knee, head bent.
Elena bit down hard on her lower lip to stifle her gasp. The mark on his nape, she said, eyes on the primal black lines of it as the male’s dusty gray hair slipped to either side, it’s a mirror image of yours.
“Sire,” the unknown fighter said at the same instant, “we come as called.”
Raphael’s answer was accompanied by a freezing wind that swept through the deathly silent city. “None who fought so bravely should kneel.”
The gray angel rose to his feet on Raphael’s words. This close, Elena saw his irises weren’t truly gray; they were so pale as to be barely distinguishable from the whites, but for the black pinpricks of his pupils. It should’ve reminded her of Lijuan, but it didn’t, because where Lijuan carried death and a putrid evil in her eyes, the being that looked through those colorless eyes was near to a blank slate. As if he hadn’t yet decided who he would be.
“You call me Sire.” Raphael’s wing was heavy against her own as they stood side by side, their bodies aligned under the falling snow that was a cold, welcome kiss on the wounds that scored her flesh. “Tell me why.”
“We heard your voice in our Sleep.” It was a flat, toneless statement. “We hear only the voice of the Sire or his consort.” His eyes locked with Elena’s.
“Elena,” she said through a dry throat, forcing herself to remember this deadly creature was a friend, not foe. “You can call me Elena.”
He looked at her as though she were speaking a foreign language. “You are the consort.”
Okay, Archangel, I think this is more your speed than mine.
I’m uncertain these gray ones are anyone’s speed. “What do you call yourselves?”
“We”—an absolute hush, the wind frozen—“are the Legion.”
Elena felt her stomach drop, as if she’d learned something terrible.
? ? ?
The Legion.
Raphael had heard those words before, a long, long time ago. They are, he said to Elena, the threat used to scare badly behaving angelic children.
Have a nap or the Legion will come get you? Like the bogeyman?
Precisely. Except it appears our bogeyman is real. “You have been gone from the world an eon.”
“Yes.”
Raphael, look at his eyes. They’re starting to gain color. And his hair . . .
Doing as Elena bid, Raphael saw the gray one was indeed no longer so gray. His hair was darkening into black and his irises now boasted a fine rim of blue—the same blue as Raphael’s eyes. “You are now my Legion.” Not a question, the mark on his face a quiet thrum that told him the truth, told him, too, that the Legion waited for his command. “Your first task is to assist my troops in securing the city and fixing the damage to the Tower.”
A quiet nod, his wings folded with military tightness. “Sire.”
“You are their leader. I need a name for you.”
A pause. “I am not the first primary,” he said at last, “but that is what I am. The Primary.”
“All right,” Raphael said, accepting what appeared to be a rank rather than a name. It was becoming clear the Legion was not in any way an ordinary angelic—if they were even angels—squadron. “Tell the Legion they are to obey the orders of Dmitri and Illium as if they were mine or my consort’s.” He pointed out the two men. “I will make the others of my Seven known to you when they return from their tasks.”
“The Legion has heard and understands.”
“I estimate five hundred in your squadron. Is that correct?”
“Five hundred woke to the Sire’s call in urgency. Two hundred and seventy-seven need more time. They will arrive when their hearts begin to beat fast enough for flight.”
Seven hundred and seventy-seven fighters who functioned as a single cohesive and apparently tireless unit, their skills lethal and their healing abilities unparalleled. He’d seen a Legion fighter beheaded, only to rise again within minutes, his head growing a new body while the old disintegrated into dust.
It was an army no other archangel would easily wish to face.
“We’ll need quarters for the Legion,” Raphael said to Dmitri.
“Sire.” It was a quiet interruption from the Primary, and when Raphael nodded at him to speak, the male said, “We do not sleep except when it is time for us to leave the world.”
“Do you eat?” Dmitri asked. “Need water?”
Another pause, akin to those of older angels who sought to mine their memories for a lost answer. “Yes”—a faint sense of surprise in his tone—“when we are awake, we do need fuel, but we can fight for many days without sustenance or rest.”
I’ll work out the logistics, Dmitri said mind to mind. “Though you may not need a place to sleep,” he said aloud, his words directed at the Primary, “you should have a place where you can be with your men and women—” A frown. “I see no women.”
“We are the Legion,” came the incomprehensible answer.
Eyebrow raised, Dmitri continued. “You’ll need a place where your men can gather at least.”
“Yes,” the Primary said after another pause, his mind seemingly not yet having shaken off the shackles of his long Sleep. “We do not . . . do well if cut off from the group so soon after waking.”
“There are two warehouses next to each other not too far from the Tower,” Dmitri said. “We normally use them for storage, but they can be cleared for temporary accommodation if”—a glance at the Primary—“that wouldn’t be too basic an environment? They’re nothing but large spaces with four walls and a roof.”
“No, such will do well.”
Raphael knew the warehouses could only be a short-term solution. Even with the members of the Legion rotating in and out, the combined space wasn’t designed for over seven hundred winged beings. “Now that you’re awake,” he said to the Primary, “how long do you plan to stay this way?”
“Until it is time to Sleep again.”
Okay, he takes the win for most cryptic statements.
Biting back a smile at Elena’s dry assertion, Raphael said, “We’ll build you a living space suited to your requirements after the repairs to the city and the Tower.” Raphael owned a massive chunk of Manhattan, far more than most people realized, and it made sense to have this force around the Tower. “In the interim, you are welcome at the Tower. You are my people now.”
Epilogue
Sadness had been the pulse of the city for five days follow-ing the war, as they watched flower-covered bier after bier leave for the Refuge and buried hunters and vampires who’d fallen. Elena hated funerals—not hard to figure out why—but she’d attended every single one, as had every other fighter who’d survived and wasn’t confined to a sickbed. It had hurt.
The finest honor we can do the fallen is to bring our city back to life, until children play in the parks and lovers walk in the streets while angels soar among the skyscrapers and the blood kin share the kiss of life without fear. We must not forget what they died to protect.
Words a still badly hurt Aodhan had spoken, at the funeral of a vampire commander he’d considered a friend, and words they’d all taken to heart. In the past forty-eight hours, the rebuild of the city had kicked into high gear, and that was going a long way toward healing the wounds, though Elena knew it would take time for the emotional—and physical—injuries to heal.
She’d been lucky, so damn lucky that all her close friends had made it out alive, here and in the Refuge—the fighting there having ended the instant word filtered back of Lijuan’s defeat. Of the injured, Ransom and Ashwini were the worst off, but they’d both be okay. Ransom had taken a crossbow bolt in the leg in the final battle, his femur snapping, while Ashwini had been slashed pretty badly with a sword across her chest. The other woman now held the Guild record for most stitches in a single sitting and was trying to avoid answering the one question to which every hunter wanted to know the answer.
If she and Janvier weren’t together, then what was he doing playing (wow-mama-sexay) nurse at her apartment, hmm?
The silliness of wondering about Ash and Janvier’s relationship gave the tough, often stoic men and women of the Guild a much-needed emotional outlet, and if the jokes segued into more solemn conversations, that was good, too. Day by day, hour by hour, they were all finding a way to deal. For Elena part of that had meant a visit with Eve and Beth both, as well as a long squeeze-cuddle of a snuggly Zoe, a video call with Sam, and a visit to a hospital earlier that morning to fulfill her promise to a little boy who wanted to fly.
Today, she stood on a building across from the Tower with her archangel, the two of them having met there to get an overview of how the repairs were going—they’d both been working with their people until now. “Oftentimes,” Raphael had said, “an archangel must stand above those he rules, but there are times when he must stand beside them.”
Now, he turned to her, his leathers dusty from the work. “Astaad contacted me earlier. Once we are in a position to welcome guests, he has indicated a willingness to visit.”
Elena had no arguments with that, the other archangel having done the entire world a giant favor. It had been approximately fifteen minutes after they’d returned to the Tower after the retreat of Lijuan’s troops that Raphael had received a very polite call from the Archangel of the Pacific Isles. “Raphael,” he’d said, “I wished to let you know I destroyed the cargo planes heading in your direction. I cannot believe Lijuan would attempt to fly such unclean creatures over my territory.”
As it turned out, the holds had been stuffed with the last of Lijuan’s hideous reborn so far as anyone knew. “Tell him to bring Mele along,” Elena said, thinking she might actually start to enjoy this whole hostess deal if she kept getting to pick guests she liked. “Oh, you’ll probably get an official update from Elijah, but I was talking to Hannah and she says they’ve dug out the final few stubborn reborn from their territory.”
“Good. Our territory is also clean, and I think I’ll speak to Eli about certain ongoing safeguards to make sure that doesn’t change.”
Elena nodded and drew in the crisp, bright winter air as the sounds of horns drifted up from the cabs below. God, it felt good to have her city back again. It might be a little battered, but hell if anyone was going to keep it—and the people who called it home—down. “I can’t believe the Tower repairs were done so quickly.”
The winter sun creating that illusion of white fire across his wings she wasn’t sure was an illusion at all, Raphael walked to the edge of the building. “It’s the symbol of my power.”
As such, Elena thought, it could never appear weak.
“Of course,” Raphael added, “the Legion is an extraordinary workforce.”
“Yeah.” His consort came to stand beside him, arms folded as she scowled at the sight of two Legion fighters landing on a Tower balcony. “You’re sure they’re not secretly planning to take over the city?”
“Yes, I feel it inside.” Stroking his knuckles gently down the side of her face, the heavy bruise she’d taken on her jaw during the final fighting yet healing, he said, “You feel it, too, my suspicious consort.”
She unfolded her arms. “It’s like a tiny but steady pulse at the back of my mind, this awareness the Legion belong to us.” Eyes of silver-gray turning to him, face solemn. “I know if I think a little too hard about the Primary, he’ll appear in front of me, ready to do my bidding. And while I might be starting to get a handle on the consort thing, I’m not ready to deal with that kind of power. It’s yours.”
“Yes,” he said, “it’s mine.” Elena didn’t have the experience to manage a force such as the Legion, and more, she shouldn’t have to. Already, she was taking on far more of the responsibilities of a consort than anyone could’ve expected of her so soon into her immortality. “But I hope you’ll give me the benefit of your advice as I learn to deal with my new army.”
A twitch of her lips, her wing sweeping across his in a silent caress. “Try to shut me up.” Leaning into him, she said, “Why you, why us? I keep trying to get my head around that.”
“A question to which the Primary may even now give us an answer,” Raphael said, as the leader of the Legion landed in front of them.
The male’s eyes remained translucent but for that ring of blue, the effect oddly beautiful, according to Raphael’s consort. His hair, though, had turned totally black. His skin, too, was no longer the shade of death, but glowed golden with health, and his leathery wings had become a beaten gold except for the part where they grew out of his back.
There they were a black that echoed Elena’s wings, the color bleeding into midnight blue, which then flowed into the beaten gold. The metamorphosis of the rest of the Legion was slower but no less fascinating a process. Day by day, they were all becoming painted in color—and the palette was the same.
“Sire,” the Primary now said, “you call us.”
“Only you. The others may continue as they are.”
A nod.
“My consort has a question for you.”
The Primary looked at Elena without blinking.
“Why Raphael and me?” she asked, her passionate nature inherent in the intensity of the question. “Why not Elijah and Hannah? They’re older, have been together longer.”
“You are aeclari, and the Legion may only serve aeclari.”
Archangel?
I do not know this term, Elena. “Tell us about aeclari.”
“Aeclari is you,” the Primary said, as if it made perfect sense.
Do you think if I shoot him, he’ll actually answer a question?
Raphael fought his laughter. I think it’s a case of asking the right questions. “You’re connected to the power that tried to fill me,” he said, his skin prickling with the awareness of it.
“We are the repository. We tried to pass it to the Sire, but the Sire is not yet ready.”
It was as clear an answer as he could’ve wished for, the whispers making sense now that he’d seen the Legion, understood how deeply they were linked to one another—as if they were one organism with many parts. “What happens when I’m ready? Do you vanish?”
“No. We are then freed to stay in the world or return to our Sleep once more. If we stay, we become alone and separate.”
Raphael considered the other man’s words—and the Primary was a man, if one who hadn’t yet fully become—and placed it against what he knew of the Cascade powers gained by the rest of the Cadre. Each had to do with an ability or proclivity inherent to the archangel in question.
“You can only serve a warrior,” he said, and it was no question because he felt the rightness of it in his gut. Raphael had been a warrior in one guise or another throughout his existence, from a stripling in Titus’s army long ago, to fighting side by side with his own forces in the war past.
The Primary paused. “Yes,” he responded at last, in that totally flat tone devoid of emotion. “A warrior who is attuned to the power of which we are formed—of the earth, of life. But the warrior must also be aeclari.” His eyes flicked to Elena, giving Raphael the first glimmer of what that term actually meant. “And it must be the time.”
The Cascade happens and Neha calls fire and ice, Elena said into his mind at the same instant. Titus moves the earth, Astaad the sea, while creepy Lijuan brings the dead back to life. Meanwhile, my gorgeous archangel, not satisfied with, I don’t know, shooting lightning bolts or something, actually taps into the energy of the planet and calls an army of bogeymen from the bottom of the ocean. Of course you do.
The dry commentary made him wonder how he’d ever walked through life without the wit and laughter of his hunter by his side. He could no longer imagine such a cold, remote existence, the idea of it spawning an immediate repudiation in his bloodstream. Wing to wing with her, he said to the Primary, “Have others through time gained the ability to call you?”
Another long pause, the Primary turning the pages of his memory. “There have been warriors who have become attuned to the power of the earth, of life, and gained strength, but they touched only the edge of what we carry within us. It was not time for us to wake.”
“Tell me your history,” he said, a sudden chill over his skin, as if the answer was part of the racial memory of his people, buried deep, deep within the most primitive part of his brain.
“It was in the war that unmade our civilization that the Legion came to be. We were formed during the Cascade of Terror and bound to the first aeclari, our purpose to fight against the death that stalked the world.”
“The reborn?” Elena whispered. “You’re the antidote to their poison.”
“The death took a different form then, but it was no less virulent or vicious. By the time we gained victory, angelkind was nearly destroyed, and our home hollow and dead. The Legion, too, was near death, for we are of the earth, of life. Our people, infected with the deadly toxin created by the power of an archangel of madness, made the decision to Sleep eons in the hope the poison would fade.
“When they woke, it was to find a new people had been born from the ashes of the old, and the toxin had bonded permanently to the blood of the survivors.” His eyes lingered on Elena. “Madness and death reigned, until the desperation of a single individual made angelkind understand the fragile new people were their salvation, a gift from their healed world.”
Raphael. Unhidden shock in his consort’s expression. I think he’s talking about the birth of humanity.
And of vampires. It was a knowledge so huge, he knew he had no hope of comprehending it in a single instant. “When,” he asked, the chill he’d felt ice in his bones, “is the time?”
“Cascades come and go, are not our business, for they are part of the cycle of the world. We listen and watch in our Sleep, but wake only when that cycle reaches a crescendo, the gifts spawned in the archangels that of life and death itself, ferocious enough to rip apart the fabric of the planet.” His unblinking eyes met Raphael’s. “We have not woken since the Cascade of Terror.”
“Oh, hell.”
“Sire,” the Primary said on the heels of Elena’s soft imprecation, “if you would give me leave—I would rejoin the Legion.”
“Fly free.”
As they watched him sweep off on those wings of silence, Raphael considered the putrid darkness that had almost taken the world only days past. Lijuan’s reborn had been eliminated in all affected territories, but they’d infected tens of thousands in the interim. Titus, meanwhile, continued to fight a constant trickle of disease bearers sent across by Charisemnon.
In comparison, Raphael’s own strength continued to intensify day by day, until he knew that one day soon, he’d be able to wield the power carried by the Legion. “We’ve won this war, hbeebti, but it is only the first. I’m afraid this means Lijuan has not been erased from existence, for she is the epitome of death.”
“Or,” Elena said, “one of the other archangels holds the potential to go whackjob on us. But yeah, my money is on the Queen of the Dead.”
“Lijuan won’t repeat her mistakes.” Raphael—the world—would have to be ready to handle a bloated monster ready to gorge herself on the life force of those she was meant to protect.
“We’ll stop her,” Elena said, then shot him an unexpected smile. “We’re aeclari, after all.”
“It’ll be most intriguing to ascertain the exact meaning of that term.” Though Raphael was in no doubt it had to do with the heartbond that tied him to his hunter.
“You mean you don’t know?” Wide eyes. “The Primary was crystal clear.”
“Yes, how very unintelligent of your consort not to comprehend him.”
Convulsing with laughter at the way Raphael had said that without cracking a smile, Elena shook her head but couldn’t get the words out. It made him smile, then throw back his head and laugh, the sight causing passing Legion fighters to pause, watch in what appeared to be shock, while the Tower troops grinned and continued on their way.
God, but he was beautiful. And he was hers.
Moving into his arms because she needed to be with him, unable to forget how close they’d come to never again touching, never again laughing with one another, she smiled and tucked her wings close as he enclosed her in his.
Cupping the side of her face with one strong hand, he held her gaze with eyes of wild, impossible blue. “I may not understand all of the Primary’s words, but I know this with everything in me—the Legion would not have woken for who I was before you.”
His thumb caressing her cheekbone, his face close to her own. “You have never, and will never, weaken me. You make me a better man and a better leader than I would’ve ever been without you.” He shook his head. “You said once that you couldn’t do this without me. Well, I can’t do this without you, Guild Hunter.”
Her eyes burned from the potent power of his words, so raw and honest and necessary. She hadn’t known it until he spoke, but she’d needed to hear that, hear that he didn’t blame her for the changes within him. “Did you know,” she confessed, as the snow began to fall again, soft flakes that caught on his eyelashes, “I wake up terrified some nights and just watch you sleep?”
“No, I did not know.” His cheeks creasing, his lips brushing against her own as he bent his head. “I must trust you a great deal indeed to allow myself to sleep so deeply.”
That was when she understood the painful vulnerability inside her was forever. So long as Raphael existed, he’d have the ability to hurt her by getting himself injured or worse—and that was okay, because she wasn’t afraid anymore, wasn’t scared to live life with an open heart. Because the flip side to that awful vulnerability was an indescribable emotion that filled her up, made her happy to be alive and here, in the now.
“It’s true,” she murmured, as the joy of playing with her consort, her lover, her friend and mate, turned her blood to champagne, “I could’ve totally cut out your heart before you knew what was happening.”
Their foreheads were touching now, his hand still cupping the side of her face, his chest a wall of muscled warmth against her palms. “What stopped you?”
Lowering her voice, she whispered, “I thought Montgomery might’ve been pissed off at all the blood on the sheets.”
“Montgomery would never be something as uncouth as pissed off. Annoyed in an icily genteel manner, perhaps.”
Elena knew they should get back to helping their people rebuild their city, but she reached up to trace the mark on his temple with fingers rough from the work they’d all been doing. He turned slightly into her touch as he always did, her archangel who’d never wanted her to be anything but what she was. “It looks like we’ve got one heck of a scary adventure coming up.”
“We’ll certainly not be bored.”
His kiss was a branding, his wings folding back to leave them exposed, and when he wrapped one arm around her waist and lifted them into the snow-kissed sky, their mouths still locked together, she didn’t protest. Though she might’ve smiled and blushed into the kiss at the wolf whistles that floated up, followed by the cheers.
The Cascade was in full progress. The world was becoming an insane place where rivers turned to blood and the dead walked, while archangels gained powers that made it manifest they were part of the very fabric of that world. The monsters might yet get loose again and the wicked witch was probably going to come cackling back to life to join arms with her disease-spawning best friend.
Despite all of that, at this instant, with the snow falling softly around her and her consort, their city alive, Elena didn’t want to be anywhere or anywhen else. And neither, she knew, did the archangel who kissed her above Manhattan, his arms holding her safe.