Illium continued to spend more time at Erotique than he probably should, especially with Aodhan gone. Elena didn’t think that environment—sophisticated and full of vampires jaded and often no longer capable of simple happiness—was the greatest for him, but she couldn’t exactly ground him. She’d done plenty of self-destructive things herself before she met Raphael. Mostly involving hunts with major hazard payouts.
Illium turned in a direction that would take them to the Catskills if they kept on going.
Sweeping closer to him, she said, “You just want to fly?”
Hair rippling in the quiet but cutting wind, he twisted down in a complicated fall before flying back up to her side. She laughed at his showing off. That was Illium. An angel of violent power who had a heart that might almost be mortal. And, these days, she could appreciate his tricks again. Not a single angel in the city had been ready to witness his acrobatics in the immediate aftermath of the day he’d crashed out of the sky.
Elena would never forget her screaming fear.
To his credit, Illium had flown with absolute discretion for months, letting the memory dull and fade.
When he returned to her side today, his face was flushed, the gold of his eyes rich. “Sky’s too beautiful to shut ourselves away in a club.”
“Just don’t forget I’m not as fast as you. Also, I’m currently lame.”
Illium lifted one cupped hand close to his shoulder, the other moving back and forth . . . and she realized he was playing a tiny violin in response to her morose tone.
“Crossbow, Bluebell.” Narrowed eyes. “Remember the crossbow.”
He dived, his wicked laughter floating up on the night air. Lips twitching, Elena continued to glide, letting the air currents sweep her along with cold but gentle hands. Illium, meanwhile, flew circles around her—but he never went far, always close enough to halt her descent should she tumble.
She landed a number of times to rest her wings, once in an isolated park whispering and dark. A luminescent insect appeared then disappeared from sight before she could truly see it, an earthbound star. The ghostly owl sitting on a tree branch watched her with eyes even more luminous.
A sigh deep in her mind, an old, old presence restless in Sleep.
The hairs rose on her arms.
Then Illium shot them both up into the sky again, and together, they flew far beyond the diamond-bright skyline of the city and over the sleeping homes of ordinary people who lived in a world of vampires and angels, blood and immortality.
Another rest stop for Elena.
Another throb of pain from the cut on her forearm.
Another watchful owl, this one landing on Illium’s shoulder without his knowledge. Ashwini had told her not to be afraid of the owls, so Elena ignored the goose bumps and said, Hello, with her mind. A good night to fly.
A vein began to throb at her temple.
The answer came a long time later, after they were in the air again, the glow of the sinkhole visible from the distance.
It has been an eon since I flew.
Gritting her teeth against the devastating weight of age in that voice, Elena said, Do you plan to wake? The throbbing vein kept on pulsing.
A sense of stirring, two owls flying in languid patterns in front of her. I am tired, child of mortals. My Sleep is not yet done.
A bead of sweat running down her temple from the pain, Elena fought to hold onto the conversation, find out more about what was happening to her. Then why are you talking to me? Why are you partially awake?
I saw you once long ago, the old voice said. I felt the approach of the markers even in my Sleep, and I thought to see you again before the becoming.
Elena’s pulse spiked. The Legion had spoken about becoming, too. Who are you? Where did you see me?
But the owls were gone, the Sleeper once more at rest. Nausea churned in her stomach from the pain at her left temple, and she thought she’d have to land—but a long drink of Nisia’s concoction and the pain began to fuzz at the edges.
I love you, Nisia.
“It is a carnival,” Illium said to her with a grin.
He wasn’t far wrong.
The air around the sinkhole buzzed with activity—while unsmiling angelic guards kept the impatient and arrogant immortal audience from flying across to the heart of the cauldron of lava. No one seemed to be aware it was after two in the morning. “Forget a carnival,” she muttered, “looks like we found the hottest club in town after all.”
“Dance over the lava?”
“Hot, hot, hot.”
Despite the byplay, she and Illium stayed outside the border. Seeing Raphael’s consort and one of his Seven following the rules had the encroaching angels remembering their manners. The guards sent the two of them looks of exhausted gratitude.
Jurgen, who’d always put Elena in mind of a Viking, flew close enough to mutter, “I feel like I’m in the Refuge, corralling Jessamy’s fledgling students.” His neatly trimmed beard of dark blond shimmered with fine droplets of frost, his eyes an icy blue. “You’d think a particular seven-hundred-year-old angel had never once seen lava in his long and idiotic life. I’m of the opinion he has an amoeba for a brain.”
Elena snorted out a laugh before she could stop herself. Amoeba-angel was dressed in flowing robes of purple velvet with inserts of white lace that looked like a rash crawling up his neck and over his shoulders. He also had diamonds woven into his hip-length hair. Not so surprisingly, he wasn’t part of Raphael’s Tower.
It wasn’t, however, his flamboyance that made him unsuitable: Tower angels could clean up crazy-good when they felt like it. Elena had seen pearls braided into hair, gauzy dresses of handmade lace, shirts with more ruffles than a pageant gown paired with circulation-obliterating pants, all of it carried off with aplomb.
The difference was that the amoeba was a professional dilettante with no appreciable talent or expertise, the angelic equivalent of a socialite who lived large on inherited fortune. Vampires had a term for it among their own kind: “gilded lilies.”
“You didn’t see me do that,” she said to Jurgen. “I am a highly professional consort who does not laugh at jokes about amoeba-brained angels.”
Stroking his beard, he said, “Do what?” and winked before sweeping back to his patrol.
“Amoebas,” Illium mused with a deadly light in his eyes. “It’s an even better description than gilded lilies. Jurgen is hiding genius.”
And Elena knew the description would catch on among the non-amoebas. “I see and hear nothing. I am impartial.”
Illium didn’t call her out on her blatant lie. “Let’s do the rounds, your Impartial Consortness.”
The vast majority of the sightseeing angels wanted to talk about the lava, but a couple mentioned the vampiric killings in the Quarter. It seemed word of the attempt to slit Harrison’s throat hadn’t yet spread.
Then Elena ran into an angel who’d known one of the dead vampires.
21
“I always knew he’d do something foolish,” Miuxu said to Elena after the two of them decided to land and take a leisurely walk around the sinkhole fence.
“Eric Acosta or Simon Blakely?” she asked the tall angel who wore intricate and heavily embroidered gowns as a matter of course—and kept her black hair in a short, spiky cut dusted with gold dye.