“Elijah, too, will meet you in the war room,” Raphael said after a moment.
The three of them parted ways after showing Michaela to the war room. Elena caught Dmitri’s eye, then used Laric’s “silent tongue” behind Michaela’s back to quickly sign out a message. The corners of his eyes tightened at the news that Raphael was wounded, but he moved smoothly to intercept Michaela so she and Raphael could get away.
Dmitri had a dark sensuality to him even when he wasn’t trying, and Elena saw Michaela react with a slight softening. Her opening comment held a husky laugh to it. “You do get better with age, Dmitri.”
“And you get more ravishing,” he replied with a slow smile you’d take as real if you hadn’t seen him smile at Honor.
Elena took the chance and dragged Raphael away.
She all but tore his top off his body the instant they were in their quarters. The leather was cracked and smudged and dented, scorched in places, torn in others. When it stuck to his shoulders for a frustrating moment, she used a knife to just cut it off.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” His left shoulder was nearly all black and trickles of that blackness had begun to streak down his side toward his heart. The rib cage one was larger than the span of her hand—and it was sending lethal tendrils to his heart, too.
“I’m afraid I am not in the mood, hbeebti.”
“I’m going to kill you in a second.” But her hand was gentle as she checked the area around his rib cage, then higher.
He gripped her wrist when she would’ve touched the blackened flesh. “No, Elena. We can’t take the risk it will jump to you. You are currently devoid of wildfire and Lijuan is becoming more powerful—we do not know the properties of this poison.”
Jaw set, she nonetheless nodded. “It hasn’t reached your eyes.” The blue was painfully clear, the color intense. “Your body’s holding it at bay.”
“No. It is growing, simply slower than before because of the depth of the initial hit. She didn’t get as much of the poison in me this time.”
Elena wanted to argue with him that he was wrong, that the poison wasn’t creeping over his body in a toxic wave, but she couldn’t. The stuff was determined to claw around his heart, eat him up.
“Amputation,” he said, “may be the best option.”
Elena’s entire self rebelled at the idea of Raphael being brutalized in such a way, but she nodded. As an archangel, he could heal an amputation—and this deadly poison would be out of him. “You’ll be crippled on the battlefield.”
“Yes.” A warrior’s acknowledgment. “We leave the rib cage infection, and remove the shoulder one. I can still fight with one arm and shoulder gone.”
Heart ice, she stared into his eyes; he was signing his death warrant. That patch on his rib cage would continue to eat away at him. And battling Lijuan as desperately as they were, meant he’d have no time or resources to fight back, heal. “Together,” she reminded him on a harsh whisper. “You take what you need.” Her body was a paltry battery at best, but she was still generating droplets of wildfire.
When she pressed her hand against a clear part of his chest, a pitifully thin crackle of wildfire tinged with an opalescence of midnight and dawn spread from her into him. Maybe she’d bought her archangel another thirty minutes.
He closed his hand over hers. “Together.”
Elena wanted to wrap her arms around him, hold on tight forever, but with the infection rampant in his body, she knew he wouldn’t permit it. So they simply stood there, exhausted, in love, and determined, until a voice entered their mind.
Aeclari.
Both she and Raphael turned toward the balcony doors. It was no surprise to see the Primary standing outside, framed by a Manhattan that had gone painfully dark against the night. Snow fell in soft flakes to lie against his hair, his shoulders, this being from the deep who now walked the world.
She and Raphael walked over together to open those doors, but when they gestured the Primary inside out of the cold, he shook his head. “It is time.” In his voice lived hundreds of others, all his brethren, including those whose bodies had been poisoned.
Elena’s spine stiffened.
Raphael went motionless. “I would not lose my Legion.”
“You need all of what we can give—what we carry for you, and the energy that makes us.” The Primary’s eyes, dark pupils against a rare silver-blue, held Raphael’s. “The power is needed—and it can do more than this Legion.” He shifted his gaze to the black patch on Raphael’s shoulder. “We are not meant to outlive our aeclari.”
Heat burned Elena’s eyes. When the Legion had first arrived, they’d been an eerie mass of gray. Beings so other that she couldn’t comprehend them. Now, they were her friends. Strange and old and childlike at once. They gave her potted plants, and flew with her sometimes for no reason but that they wanted to. They’d built a lush green home in the center of Manhattan, a home filled with life.
“Is the energy that makes you only of the body?” she whispered. “Once you . . . unravel, will your minds and memories be lost, too? Can you ever come back?”
The Primary angled his head to the side. “We do not know. We have never given that which makes us. We are of the earth, so perhaps we will grow again from the seeds of our energy left in the world. Or perhaps we will die a true death.”
Tears fell from her eyes. The Primary looked at her with a strange quietness. “We have never had tears shed for us.” His voice was hundreds at once in her mind, and she was okay with that today.
Stepping forward, she hugged him tight. His body was cool, and she felt no heartbeat, no breath. Yet the Legion were deeply alive in a way Lijuan would never be. “I promise to watch over your home until your return.”
His arms were hesitant but they came around her. “We may never return.” Not a cold denunciation but a quiet warning.
“I don’t believe that.” She couldn’t; her heart was already breaking. To think the Legion, unique and different and seven hundred and seventy-seven, would disappear forever from this world . . . She couldn’t bear it.
The Primary held her gaze when she drew back. “This is our purpose. We were created to be the right hand of the aeclari, to rise when darkness rises, and to fall when it is needed. We are content with our destiny. It is . . . honor.”
Raphael held out an arm in the way of warriors, and the Primary clasped it after another small pause. “You are my Legion and you will always be my Legion. As long as I exist, you are welcome in my territory, in whatever form you choose to take.”
“Sire.” The Primary inclined his head. “Consort, you must make contact with the sire.”