Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
“Oddly, her descent doesn’t haunt me for the same reason,” Raphael said. “She didn’t go mad. As with Uram, she made choice after choice after choice.” Turning to face her, he released her hand, but only so he could cup the side of her face, his hand an imprint of heat. “Such as killing the human who threatened to make her a little mortal.”
Elena spread her fingers over his heart, felt the powerful beat. She sucked in a breath. “Raphael, Keir never tested your blood.”
He tilted his head. “Elena-mine?”
“Do you think you’re actually a little mortal?”
Raphael’s eyes widened. “Well now…” Then he smiled. “If I am, it would be the greatest gift of my life. Because I know that so long as I carry a fragment of your mortal heart in mine, I will never be a monster.”
A dip of his head. A breath of heat. And Elena found herself being kissed by her archangel in a forest that began to glow with a thousand luminescent flowers—a secret gift of the Legion that was only for their aeclari.
74
Then she will kill you. She will make you mortal.
—From She who is to be Forgotten to Raphael (Once, long before the War of the Death Cascade)
Nisia and Keir were both of one mind on Elena and Raphael’s question about mortal cells in Raphael’s body.
“Beyond the bounds,” Nisia muttered.
Keir nodded. “So far beyond as to be ridiculous.”
The healers looked at each other, then back at Elena and Raphael.
It was Nisia who spoke. “But with you two, who knows. Let’s find out.”
That was how they discovered that the archangel whose name had been written out of angelic history, and who would ever be unknown except as a cautionary tale, had been right in this.
“Ambrosia isn’t a one-way transfer.” Keir’s voice was a whisper as he held up the vial of blood in which danced tiny glowing cells. Only a few. Just the ones that had reacted to the reagent Keir and Nisia had introduced into the sample taken from Raphael’s heart.
Because with an archangel, they could literally just go straight to the source—a wound that fine had healed over even as they pulled the needle out.
“But I didn’t give Raphael anything,” Elena protested.
“He fed you ambrosia in a kiss—are you attempting to say that there’s no exchange when you kiss?” Nisia asked in her usual caustic way, her eyebrow raised.
Raphael’s response was a grin. “Never change, Nissie.”
“I don’t care if you’re an archangel—call me that again, and I will find a way to poison you.”
Laughing, Raphael went down on one knee in a ceremonial bow she’d only ever seen Illium make, it was so showy and beautiful. “I beg your pardon, Lady Nisiantha Sparrowing of the Kishtwar Mountains. Will you forgive me?”
Nisia threatened to throw the vial at his head, but her eyes were laughing. “Oh, get up. How do you even know that ridiculous name my parents saddled me with? I thought I ripped out that page of the naming book.”
Even as he rose, stating he’d never betray his sources, Elena thought of what he’d told her about how she’d ended up with archangelic cells in her body. “Raphael put my dying mortal heart inside him,” she whispered.
I couldn’t bear to just abandon it, hbeebti.
The memory of his words made her entire chest ache even today. “Could that be where the transfer took place?”
“Unlikely.” Keir rubbed his chin. “The departed whom we do not name would have had no reason to ever imagine such a thing. As far as I know, Raphael is the only member of the Cadre in all eternity who has literally given another a piece of his heart.”
“I would do it again in a second.” Raphael held out his hand, voice husky.
As she slid her fingers over his, she felt like she was coming home.
“Ambrosia as the vehicle of transfer makes the most sense to me, too,” Nisia said, her attention once more on the vial she’d placed into a stand. “It is the moment of critical and emphatic change.”
“And,” Keir added, “it follows the pattern among angelkind. The toxin, too, is a two-way transfer.”
Elena realized she didn’t need an answer to that question—it was a curiosity, nothing more. But one thing worried her. “Have I made him weaker?”
“Never, hunter-mine,” Raphael said, even as Keir said, “If you had, you’d have discovered that in the War of the Death Cascade. No, Ellie, I think you have made him infinitely stronger.”
Arms folded as she leaned against the lab bench on which they’d run the tests, Nisia raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think our Rafe here would’ve gained the ability to heal without you, far less his ability to call the Legion.”
Keir’s pupils expanded. “Ah, Nisia, you see it clearly.” He turned to Elena. “You are the gardener, Elena, the grower of things, the one whose blood caused the Legion gardens to bloom even in the coldest, loneliest times. I saw it thus, when I sat with you one winter’s day as you tended to it.