Elena broke off the kiss, scowled. “Dmitri is plenty tough enough to do that.”
“But you, hbeebti, are no longer just a hunter,” he said, speaking the word “beloved” in the language his consort’s grandmother had brought with her from a distant land. “You are a symbol—even if I am missed, so long as people can see you in the air, they’ll feel safe.” Because everyone knows I would not leave my consort in a city I didn’t feel was protected against all harm.
“Shit,” Elena muttered. “I hate it when you make sense.” Strapping her crossbow to her thigh once again, she walked to the edge of the roof and waited for him to come up beside her. “Symbols are necessary right now, aren’t they?”
Raphael answered by sliding his wing over hers, both of them aware the world was perched on a precipice that could give way without warning. Wind riffling through his hair, he looked toward the Tower, saw Dmitri step out onto a balcony with Aodhan. “I should only be away from the city for a short time, just long enough to protect Alexander during the most vulnerable part of his waking.”
Elena nodded, her eyes turned in the same direction as Raphael’s. “We going to talk about how you made it to Illium so fast? That was an impossible distance to cross even for you, Archangel.”
Raphael watched the light glitter off Aodhan, shards sparking in the air, and thought of that moment when he’d seen Illium drop from the sky. He’d thought it a game until Aodhan’s cry for help. “The Hummingbird can’t lose him. He’s her only link to a tenuous sanity.” Raphael loved Illium’s mother, had great respect for her, but he also understood that she was broken inside.
A slightly rough-skinned hand closing over his, his warrior-consort’s fingers strong. “You can’t lose him either.” Her eyes held knowledge of him that belied the briefness of their relationship in immortal terms. “He’s the heart of the Seven.”
Yes. Illium might be younger than several of the others and appear irreverent more often than not, but he was their glue, the piece that tied all the others to one another. “Before Mahiya, when Jason was yet lost in darkness, the only time I saw him close to a smile was after Illium challenged him to an old-fashioned duel.”
Raphael could see his spymaster’s impassive face in his mind, remember how Jason’s eyes had warmed from within. “Your Bluebell was a stripling whom Jason easily defeated, but Illium just laughed and asked if he could have a longer rapier next time so he could poke at Jason from a distance.”
Elena’s lips twitched. “That sounds like Illium.” Though he’d woken an hour past and appeared fine but for a little residual dizziness, terror still bled through her at what she’d witnessed that afternoon. It was pure chance she’d been close enough to help—she and the Primary had been flying toward the Legion building when she’d glimpsed the wild blue and shattered light of Illium and Aodhan high in the sky.
She’d smiled, remembering something Aodhan had said to her.
It was worth the risk to play a game with my friend again. Until I threw that ball at Illium over the river, I didn’t understand I hadn’t felt alive for over two hundred years.
When Illium had fallen, she’d shaken her head at what she’d believed to be a trick. Everything had changed the instant she saw Aodhan dive, heard Raphael’s alert to every angel in the vicinity. Only no one was close enough—least of all Raphael. “Your wings were afire,” she whispered, still unable to fully understand what she’d seen in those seconds stretched by horror into hours.