“Yeah, but the rotting meat ‘baby’ . . . Nothing about any of that was normal even for the Cadre.” Worry wove through the compassion. “Do you know what happened to her first child?”
“The babe simply stopped breathing one day. Such a thing is extremely rare among angelic infants—in my entire lifetime, I have heard of only two cases, and Michaela’s infant was the second.” Memories flowed through his mind, of a tiny flower-laden bier, of Michaela’s severe, silent beauty.
“It is the only time since I have known her that I remember Michaela as a creature of icy silence. She did not speak for a year after her babe’s death.”
“Man, that’s so sad.”
“Michaela’s lover at the time, the babe’s father, was found dead two days after the infant’s burial. He’d been flayed alive, then beheaded.”
Elena’s hands clenched on the railing. “Michaela?”
“No one knows, but she didn’t demand an investigation into the incident, showed no anger, didn’t appear to feel any grief. And though he’d been her lover for half a century, she didn’t attend the ceremonies we hold for our dead.”
Elena had the feeling she’d never figure out Michaela, not if she lived to be as old as Caliane. “An act of grief because he reminded her of her lost baby? Or a scapegoat for her anger at being unable to protect her child? Could also be that she didn’t do it but was too numb from the first loss to process a second.”
“Only Michaela knows the truth and she’s never spoken of it—I tell you this so you remember that even with child, Michaela remains Michaela.”
“I guess it’s hard for me to see her intense love for her baby and separate that from who she is the rest of the time.” She shrugged her shoulders in a sharp movement.
Folding back his wing, he ran his hand down her spine. “What is the matter?”
“Just this weird sensation.” Her energy wings exploded out. “That’s better. It felt as if the lightning was building up under my skin.”
Raphael played with the lightning in wings that now held all the hues of her. Midnight and dawn. “You’re becoming stronger.” She’d flown all day today and yet she had excess energy.
A smile so brilliant that Michaela’s could never compete. “Hot damn. I might not have to ration my hours in flight anymore.” She jumped into his arms, kissed him all over his face, her joy an irresistible lure.
Their lips met in the stormlight of her wings.
* * *
• • •
After a quick meal, Raphael left his consort in an enclosed external courtyard bathed in the moon’s silver beams. She was planning to speak to friends in the Refuge, including a little boy who adored her; it had been her idea that he go to Caliane alone. “You know how she misses you.”
Such a soft heart.
“Raphael.” Caliane’s face bloomed when he entered her favorite garden.
She sat on a stone bench that faced a pond with water so motionless it was a mirror. Her joy in seeing him was an open incandescence that outshone the moon. Raphael’s heart clenched. The same woman who’d left him broken and bloody on a forgotten field had also sung to him as a child, songs so heartbreaking in their beauty that the entire Refuge had stood still to listen.
She was also the woman who carried thousands of dead souls on her conscience. Did she hear them in this space, quiet and lonely? Was that why she so often sat here? To listen to the recriminations of the dead? To remember their faces?
He held out his arm. She took it with a smile of pure happiness and allowed him to help her to her feet. Her gown was a glittering ice white and it flowed around her like frozen water as they walked the garden paths. It was Raphael who spoke first. “I know it hurt you to speak about the past to the Cadre.”
“I cannot pretend it didn’t happen, that I didn’t do a monstrous thing.” Pain scored each word. “I must bear witness to all the lives lost.” She squeezed his forearm. “I have asked Jessamy to bring the records here, so I can read a full account of what happened during my worst madness.”
So many children had died, the two cities become a tomb. In the end, the horror of it had been too much and the Cadre of the time had razed the cities to the ground. No new buildings sat on that land to this day, the area taken over by wild grasses that thrived in the sandy soil near the ocean.
“Are you certain that’s the right decision?” Jessamy’s histories could push Caliane back over a dark edge.
“It haunts me. I must know all of it.” Long minutes passed before she said, “I will not become mad again, Raphael. I know the signs now. If they appear, I will go back into Sleep.”
He believed her resolve, but he also knew that madness had a way of eating away at rational thought. He’d witnessed it firsthand in both his mother and his father.
“At times,” Caliane murmured, “I think Lijuan and I are not so very different.”
“If she had stuck to mortal victims, perhaps.” Heartless as it was, the Cadre didn’t interfere in such things in another archangel’s territory. “But she has managed to infect an archangel. That threatens our very civilization.”
“Should she come back sane?”
“Then we will have another conversation.” Raphael didn’t believe sanity was a possibility, not when Lijuan continued to stretch her arms across China. Sanity came from a long Sleep and she was, at best, in a light doze.
“Where is your consort?”
“She thought we needed time alone to be mother and son.” What his Elena would give to be able to take a midnight walk with her mother, talk to her one more time.
“She has courage,” Caliane said. “I see it and I am glad for you that you have such a consort, even as I worry about how her humanity changes you.”
Raphael didn’t reply; he’d made his choice and he had no regrets and never would. He would fall again and again with Elena. “I have another matter to discuss with you.” He told her Michaela’s secret.
Sucking in a harsh breath, she stopped on the path. “You are certain?” Wings limned with light against the night sky, her eyes blue flame.
“Yes. I was able to get in touch with Keir before I came to see you.” The healer had stopped at a waystation set up for travelers who were passing through a territory. “Michaela had given him permission to confirm the news should you or I ask.” And the healer did not lie, not for anyone.
Caliane began to walk again, her hand in the crook of his arm. “I noticed her tiredness and lack of interest in Cadre business, but I put it down to a period of ennui as happens to so many of us over time.”