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)
A wash of wind behind Elena, followed by the susurration of wings as intimately familiar to her as the air of this city. Folding her own wings tighter against her back, Elena leaned into Raphael as he came to stand behind her, sliding his arms over her shoulders and around to hold her against the muscled heat of him.
His biceps were bare, his leathers sleeveless.
“Hbeebti.” A kiss nuzzled to the side of her hair, which she’d allowed to grow until it reached her butt, but she wore in a braid today. “You are in a contemplative mood.”
Raising her right hand, she closed it over his forearm. Her bracelet slid down her wrist as she did so, each slender metal link bearing a name beloved to her.
Her mother. Sisters. Nieces. Nephew. Father. Sara.
Heart twisting, she said, “I’m having trouble accepting that, as of tomorrow, I’ll have lived an entire millennium.” Most immortals past a certain age either didn’t bother to—or couldn’t—remember their date of birth, but Elena had held on tight to that piece of herself that was wholly human.
She kept a diary in which she maintained assiduous track of the passing of time; she was determined never to become jaded or to lose herself in the slipstream of an endless existence. “It seems impossible, even when I remind myself of everything that’s come in between.” Not only the losses that would forever mark her, but war, a hard-won peace, constant growth, and the transformation of her beloved New York at its very foundations.
“A thousand years of sunrises and sunsets. A thousand years of taking flight. A thousand years, Raphael.” Her archangel’s scent in her blood, her eyes closing as she sank into him.
“What astonishes me is how you’ve managed to stay so defiantly my Elena through it all.” Raphael’s voice rumbled against her, holding power even more deadly than the day they’d first met—the day he’d made her close her hand over her blade, and she’d decided that death was better than submission.
She opened her eyes. “What a journey we’ve been on, Archangel.” He’d gone from being a terrifying threat, to being integral to her existence; nothing would ever feel right again if she lost him. Even the thought of it made her stomach drop, cold begin to cut through her veins.
He spread out his wings, the magnificent span of them visible in her peripheral vision. “All of it because of your wild spirit and beautifully stubborn mortal heart.”
The irony of it was that Elena’s heart wasn’t physically mortal, wasn’t even like that of ordinary angels. Her body, her heart, carried archangelic cells. But the physical had never mattered, not in this. “If I lose that, Archangel, we’ll have to go into Sleep.”
Never did she doubt that if she went, so would he.
“I have no fear of that happening anytime soon.” One arm still around her neck and shoulders, Raphael moved his other hand to her hip as he leaned in to kiss the curve of her neck.
She shivered. “This is ridiculous. We should act our age.”
A chuckle, his aroused body hard against her lower back. “Per Marduk, we are but youths. Didn’t he call us ‘children’ when last we met?”
Laughter bubbled inside her even as she turned to take Raphael’s hand, let him tug her toward the doors into their suite. “I think he just likes messing with us.” Raphael’s ancestor—in the truest sense of the word—had a sly sense of humor that she would miss when he left this time. But her feeling of loss would be even keener when it came to his mate, she who had risen in one hell of an irritated mood a century into Marduk’s own waking.
Storms had raged across the world for three full days, the skies roiling black and the rains ceaseless, but when the tempests calmed and the sun pierced the clouds once more, the world had gained another being so old that she was beyond Ancient.
Of all the immortals Elena had met, Tiamat-Neith, Huntress of the Ages—Tiamat to her friends, and Tia to Marduk—was the most like Elena. She’d winced and told herself she was being arrogant for even thinking that of a being so old, had never articulated it to anyone but Raphael.
Then Tiamat—striking and dangerous—had stared at her one day out of eyes that altered shade much as a black opal did, and said, “So it seems Marduk managed to embed a very particular taste in women in our male descendants.” A grin that had nothing of civilization in it. “I think we will be intimates, Elena.”
They’d become exactly that over the centuries, their friendship an odd and unbalanced thing when it came to age and power, but balanced where it counted. In their humor, in their conversations, in the way Tiamat was covetous of Elena’s collection of blades after the Huntress of the Ages first woke.