Raphael’s last encounter with Caliane before she woke sane.
“This is her history,” she whispered, realizing that these doors held the eternity of an archangel’s life. Even the broken and bloody pieces.
“I did not think she would choose to remember that.” Raphael’s gaze remained locked on the two painful panels. “Sometimes, Elena, I do not understand my mother.”
“Well, don’t ask me for advice about how to deal with parents. You’ve seen the stellar state of my relationship with Jeffrey.” But she leaned into him and when he spread his wing, she moved her hand to brush over the inner surface. And froze. “Um, Archangel?”
“Hmm?” He was looking at another panel.
“Did you forget to mention acquiring black and purple feathers?”
That caught his attention. Looking down, he took in the black feathers that came out from the curve of his wings, as if growing from where his wings emerged from his back.
Those obsidian feathers faded into indigo and a deep blue before the white-gold of his wings took over. “It appears you have marked me once again.” He flared out the other wing, which bore the gunshot scar. “The underside is the same here.”
Shifting, Elena took in the top of his wings. “No change up top.”
“Show me your wings.”
Stormfire erupted out of her back. She saw the midnight and dawn of herself but alive within it was his golden lightning. “I thought the blending only went one way.” He was one of the Cadre, while she’d been a baby immortal when she went into the chrysalis.
“It appears not.” Not sounding worried in the least about that, he folded in his wings. “My mother has just asked if we intend to come inside or stand here all day.”
Despite the constant changes happening to both of them, her shoulders shook at his impression of Caliane’s regal tones. “Behave.” Turning as one, they pushed through the doors . . . into moonlight.
Elena’s breath caught.
The living area had no opaque walls excepting the one that led deeper into Caliane’s suite. The rest of it—roof included—was glass. Vines crawled over the roof, thick enough to provide dappled shade in the daytime. Set out below the vines were white velvet sofas that featured curved legs; the seat cushions had buttons on them.
“Come,” Caliane said, her face difficult to read. “I will take you to Nadiel.”
Elena fell into step beside the Ancient, while Raphael took the rear. Caliane led her through another set of doors into a large bedroom. The lighting here was soft rather than harsh, curtains pulled over the windows. The bed was a four-poster made up in white-on-white sheets with the bed curtains a pale gold and the carpet underfoot a rich brown.
“There.” Caliane shifted to face the wall behind them . . . the wall she would see when she woke each morning.
Chest tight, Elena turned, too.
The painter had caught Nadiel in an informal moment. He was shirtless, his legs covered in a warrior’s leathers, and his sword held across his thighs. A rag was crumpled in his right hand, and he was laughing, his eyes turned to someone just off to the left of the artist.
Caliane, it must’ve been Caliane. There was a potent intimacy in his laugh, in his eyes. The artist had captured a moment between lovers, been talented enough to put that moment on canvas.
“The Hummingbird,” she murmured, and it wasn’t a question. She knew only two angelic artists with gifts so incredible and Aodhan hadn’t yet been born when Nadiel died.
“Yes.” Caliane’s voice held an age that pressed on Elena’s bones. “She dropped by for a visit, and as always with Sharine, she had her sketchpad with her. Nadiel was outside cleaning his weapons, and I was laughing with him about something or other, and Sharine was sitting there sketching and it was such a normal thing that we didn’t really notice. A year later, she gave me this.”
It startled Elena to hear of the mysterious, haunted Hummingbird spoken of as just Sharine—a friend, a compatriot. But she was too fascinated by the portrait to follow that line of thought, to ask about the woman who was so very talented and so very broken.
Raphael had told her once that while he had Caliane’s colors, he had Nadiel’s bones. She’d glimpsed that truth in the angelfire portraits in Lumia, now saw the totality of it: the shape of Nadiel’s face, the width of his shoulders, the height she could see even with Nadiel seated, it was a mirror of Raphael’s.
Your father’s eyes were green. An astonishing green caught between emerald and aquamarine. So clear they were striking even caught in paint. She didn’t know why she’d never thought to ask about Nadiel’s eye color. Probably because Raphael’s father’s eyes had been pieces of angelfire in all the paintings she’d seen in Lumia.
The man in this painting wasn’t burning from the inside out. He was tanned and muscled, his cheeks creased, and his wind-tumbled hair a lush brown that faded into gold at the tips. In his right earlobe flashed an amber earring and she knew it for Caliane’s mark.
“He had such wicked laughter in his eyes.” Love was an ache in Caliane’s voice. “I knew him as a new member of the Cadre, but that was what first drew me to him as a man—his laughter. I heard it across a crowded marketplace and I had to know who it was that laughed with such open, unashamed happiness.”
A glow suffused her face, her eyes luminous. “He had mischief in him, too. He made me remember the girl I’d once been, the woman beneath the archangel.” The next words she spoke were in a language Elena didn’t understand.
When she glanced at Raphael, he shook his head. I do not know this tongue, hbeebti. It was one shared between my parents in their private moments and I have only a vague recollection of it in my memories.
I don’t really need a translation, I guess. Piercing love had a flavor, a hidden song within. She really misses him.
Their love is the one thing I never doubted. He’d grown up in the arms of that love. Even when they couldn’t be together, they would write letters, send each other small gifts, make comments many times a day about a thought they had to tell the other. The constant presence of that love had made it easier for Raphael to be apart from one parent during the periods when Caliane and Nadiel had to separate.
For two archangels couldn’t coexist in the same territory for a long period without their energies leading to an inevitable conflict. That Nadiel and Caliane had managed it as much as they had was a testament to the agonizing depth of their love.
Did you stay with both of them alternately?
When I was a babe, I stayed with Caliane. But later, after I was grown enough to understand how things must be, I would go with my father at times, remain with my mother others. Old memories stirred awake at the corners of his mind. “Mother, do you remember the time I returned home with no hair?”