Neha volunteered to take extra shifts. “It will be less of a distance for me, and seeing me will remind them that an archangel resides within easy reach.”
Caliane also volunteered to do extra shifts. “Five years,” his mother said afterward. “If Favashi yet Sleeps, then we must make a long-term plan.”
“It is settled,” said the Cadre, and the meeting was over.
His wound bleeding under his leathers, Raphael staggered up the steps. Such a wound needed the deep recovery of anshara, not a battle against another archangel.
Sire. Sire. Sire. The Legion’s voices filled his head as he entered the room. The chrysalis is too small. Dismay in every word. Where will her wings grow?
Hand pressed to his heart, Raphael crashed onto the bed and onto the silken filaments that flowed from the chrysalis that was too small to hold his hunter’s tall body and extraordinary wings. His own wing fell across the chrysalis and his heart, it stopped.
The Legion
The Primary watched Raphael’s blood seep from his body in a direct line to the chrysalis, where it was absorbed without a trace. The filaments from Elena’s chrysalis spread over him, cocooning him in a delicate blanket.
The Legion sat. They held guard.
Time passed.
Others loyal to the aeclari came to the place where they slept, but they did not disturb the sleeping pair. The one the Legion thought of as the Blade entered only once, to ensure his archangel lived.
He told the Legion that the archangel was not in anshara, the deep healing sleep that also allowed reason. Raphael’s sleep was beyond that. He didn’t breathe. His heart didn’t beat. But he lived, his hair midnight under the filaments of white and his skin cracked with gold.
Of Elena, no one knew. The chrysalis was opaque to the healer who had watched Elena become an angel, and he left with sorrow-deep grooves in his face.
The one she called Bluebell stood often on the balcony, a silent sentinel.
A warrior child came to the house once. She demanded to see her sister, but the Legion knew this Elena would never permit. They were not mortal, but they had been enough in the mortal world to understand what it was to protect a young heart. But they did not have to tell the warrior child she could not see Elena.
The one called Montgomery, who often asked the Legion if they needed food or drink, did the task with a quiet voice, and gentle arms that held the warrior child close when she cried. But it was the Blade who spoke to the others, for they came to the Tower in search of Elena. Sara, the friend of Elena’s heart who spoke for all the other hunter warriors. Jeffrey, the father who was not a father. And Beth, a sister so scared of the Tower, but who came asking after Elena.
Others did not come, but the Legion heard the Storm with black wings talking to the Blade and they knew the Cadre watched New York. Where was Raphael? they asked. Where was his consort? When the one who had sent disease to the aeclari’s city thought to grasp at this land, the archangel who laughed and made women smile massed his forces on the diseased archangel’s border and peace held.
The Mother came. She fought with the Blade to see her son. The Blade would not move. “You are an archangel,” he told her when she threatened his life, “but he is my liege. I cannot allow you to pass.”
The Mother was very strong, but she was not mad. Not in this life. She fought bitterly, but she did not destroy. And she made it clear to the others of the Cadre that if they came for New York, they would come for her. The General who had once been the Mother’s sent his birds of prey and his wild cats to the city in a silent symbol of allegiance.
And the peace held.
When the Queen, who mourned her daughter and looked at Raphael with hate but also sometimes with sorrow, told the Blade of the continuing strangeness in the land of the giver of death who Slept, he told her he would tell his sire. He said nothing about when, and she did not ask.
And the peace held.
Quakes ravaged the lands of the archangel who was of water and islands. Such things should not be, but they were. Ice furies hit the lands of the archangel of sunlight and silver. Heat scalded the mountainous territory of the archangel of beauty. And deep inside the territory of the giver of death who Slept, there was a growing hollowness, thousands gone without a trace.
But the peace, it held.
Those of the house of the aeclari accepted the Legion’s right to guard the sleeping place, their activity muted and near-silent. Without the archangel and his consort, they moved like automatons deprived of their reason for being.
The Legion saw all of this. They were seven hundred and seventy-seven, and they could not all stand sentinel while the aeclari slept; they did many tasks and the knowledge was shared. But always, their core watched and held guard. This was their truth. This was their existence.
The chrysalis grew. Too slow. Too small. Still too small.
The Legion did not move.
They listened for the restarting of an archangelic heart.
They waited for the chrysalis to open.
They watched.
48
“Shh, my darling, shh.”
Raphael had not stood in this verdant field far from civilization for . . . a long time. He had been a boy when he fell. When his mother crashed him to the earth. His blood had been rubies on the pure green of the grass, each filament so perfectly designed, each dewdrop a diamond.
And his bones, they’d been in so many pieces he could not even crawl.
He’d lain in the field as the seasons turned. He’d watched an insect labor across the earth. And he’d listened to the birds sing. They had brought him berries, those birds, thinking him a fledgling fallen out of the nest. There he’d lain with his broken wings spread out on the grass while it grew around him, over him.
Wildflowers had bloomed in his blood.
He’d been haunted by the memory of his mother’s delicate feet walking away. Her bare soles stepping on the grass bejeweled with his blood while the white of her gown flickered at her ankles.
“Eyes a blue as pure as the heart of the sun. Hair the heart of midnight. My son who is her mirror.”
On this field, he’d been a broken mirror.
Raphael frowned as the birds fell silent. “Mirror,” he spoke aloud into the silence of this field where his mother had left him.
Aeclari are mirrors.
The mirror is not enough.
Sounds clashed into the peace of this place out of time and he knew he dreamed. And he thought of the last time he’d lived this memory. Elena had invaded his dream then. She’d found him in the stygian darkness of the sea, too, when the Legion drew him into their domain.
Sounds shattered the silence once more, sword against sword, a desperate battle.
“A little help here, Archangel.” The voice was faint, but he’d know it even were it soundless.
His consort was invading his dream again.
Though he knew it was only his mind attempting to find hers and filling in the emptiness with illusion, Raphael withdrew his swords from the crisscrossed sheaths on his back and stepped forward out of the grass and into a deep gray nothingness that reminded him of the darkness below the ocean.
He’d lit it with wildfire then, creating a small sun.
Coaxing newborn flickers of wildfire from his body, he threw it up into the gray. It cut light across the world. And he was spinning before he’d consciously processed what he’d seen, his back slamming up hard against Elena’s.