“Not so much in the scheme of things. Perhaps an hour’s flight from the mountains to the far border at most.” Eyes of unfathomable blue met her own. “Is it all you imagined?”
Elena took another look at the compound getting closer with every wingbeat. “I’m not sure. I think I was expecting something more like the Refuge Library.” Stately and with a heavy sense of age about it. “Or maybe an austere monastery. This is more grand in a way. Peaceful and quietly lovely, but with an awareness of its own beauty.”
She deliberately “nudged” at him with a wing, their primaries barely brushing. “What about you? Is it as you remember?”
* * *
Raphael hadn’t flown wingtip to wingtip with anyone for a long time before Elena. Smiling deep within at the playful contact, the youth he’d once been rising to the fore, he nudged her carefully back. He was far stronger than Elena, and while she had incredible grace in the air, she’d only been in flight for a mere flicker of time.
Laughing as his nudge spun her to the left, she said, “Whoop!” and flipped over onto her back for a moment that had his heart crashing against his ribs as he prepared to catch her fragile not-yet-fully-immortal body.
If she hit the earth from this altitude, she’d break. She’d die.
But she angled her head down in a gentle curve, her body following, and was right-side-up again in a matter of seconds.
“I am going to kill your Bluebell,” he said, dropping two feet so they were wingtip to wingtip again.
A grin. “How did you know he taught me that?”
Raphael just raised an eyebrow.
Laughing again, his unrepentant consort blew him a kiss. “Don’t kill Bluebell. He’s teaching me to do a downward spiral roll right now.”
“Clearly, Aodhan is not the only one suffering pangs of boredom.” Raphael felt his lips kick up, the stab of fear retreating under a wave of memory featuring an intrepid little boy with wings of extraordinary blue. “Did he tell you who taught him the spiral roll?”
Elena’s mouth fell open. “It was you!” she guessed.
“The Hummingbird wouldn’t speak to me for a month afterward,” Raphael admitted with a grin of his own. “As for Lumia, the stronghold doesn’t appear to have changed in the time since I overflew it—and the splendor of the landscape, yes, that fits what I know of the Luminata way.” He’d never truly thought much about the sect, but when he had, it had been to see them as removed from life but not ascetic in the way of the monks Elena had referenced.
“As a very young man,” he told Elena, one long-ago memory sparking another, “I once met a mortal mystic, as you did the holy man. He was thin—only tendon and muscle over bone, no fat. Just enough flesh to sustain his mortal body.” Raphael remembered wondering how anyone could survive in such a state. “He had a long gray beard, and his skin was cured by the sun from all the hours he’d walked the landscape, but his soul, it emanated perfect contentment.”
Raphael been a young and arrogant angel at the time—akin to a mortal youth who’d left home for the first time—but in that instant, he’d felt humbled. “I felt he knew far more than I could ever imagine, though his lifespan could not have been more than six decades to my two hundred at the time.”
He’d ended up walking with that mystic for miles, curious and respectful and aware for the first time in his existence that immortals weren’t necessarily the pinnacle of existence. “Unfortunately, the lessons I learned in my days of walking by his side didn’t hold in the millennium that followed. I had forgotten him until this instant.”
“Don’t knock yourself, Archangel.” His consort’s voice held both her warrior spirit and her fierce love for him. “I learned things as a teenager and young hunter that I forgot in the years that followed. Life isn’t static, and sometimes, we don’t realize the value of knowledge or even of people, until farther down the track, when we’re mature enough to truly understand.”
At times, Raphael’s hunter consort surprised him with her perceptiveness about mortals and immortals both. “The Luminata,” he replied, “they’re not and have never been like my mystic or your holy man. Their members join after at least one thousand years of existence—no one younger is permitted to become an initiate. And by that stage, they are used to a certain way of life.”
“I get it.” Elena swept down on a wind current, her joy in flight an incandescent light he could nearly touch. The deep blue of her sleeveless gown glittered in the sun, almost as bright as the blade that glinted with jewels high on her arm.
Her hair was a shining banner of silken near-white.
Montgomery had done well, having chosen a gown with a sleek and tight silhouette that caught no air and created very little drag, but the skirts of which Elena could unzip at the sides once on the ground, freeing up her stride. There was also a cunning opening high up on her thigh on the right. It was only three inches and could be closed with tiny buttons that looked decorative.
But when open, it allowed Elena to wear her crossbow strapped to her thigh—as she was doing now. Not to mention the forearm gauntlets that held her throwing blades as well as a limited number of crossbow bolts, the long knife she wore against her spine under her dress, and the gun hidden in an ankle holster she wore over her boots.
Guild Hunter Elena Deveraux, Consort to the Archangel Raphael, would be landing at Lumia not as a pretty accessory as some older angels were apt to expect, but as a woman deadly in her own right.
Raphael smiled in grim satisfaction.
The Luminata have given up the world, his warrior consort said in his mind, but their version of giving up temptation is the comfortable immortal version rather than the austere mortal one.
Just so. Raphael moved to join Elena in her meandering flight over the landscape around Lumia. It was dead certain they were being watched—by the Luminata’s guard, by the Luminata themselves, by any archangels who’d arrived before them—but what did he have to hide? The world knew that the Archangel of New York loved his consort.
That he’d fly with her for no reason but to fly with her gave no one any extra ammunition. That didn’t mean he’d lower his guard. Not here. Not with the Luminata an unknown and the Cadre a danger he knew too well. Aodhan, stay high. Alert me of any approach.
I see other wings in the sky in the distance. A pause. Silver wings. Solid silver.
Alexander. No one else in angelkind had wings like those of the Ancient who was once again the Archangel of Persia. Is he alone?
No. I see two other pairs of wings. I will need to get closer to identify them.
Stay with us. He wanted any watchers to be aware that his consort would never be alone, because while he knew Elena could defend herself, he also knew immortals had a tendency to see her mortal heart first, her weapons second. We’ll find out soon enough. Then he rose high, only to drop down beside Elena in a hard, fast dive that required precision timing.