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 flicker in his peripheral vision. When he focused again, it was to see a white owl with golden eyes sitting on Marduk’s shoulder, its huge orbs blinking.
Neither Marduk nor Tiamat reacted.
Elena-mine?
Owl sighting. Cassandra’s around.
But there was no aged voice in their heads, no sense of the slipstreams of time, and the owl vanished in a matter of seconds. Perhaps she was just attracted by this dinner party and wished to join us.
With Qin. Elena’s voice was melancholy. I hope they’re together, that they’ve managed to stay one this time.
Movement at the doors. “Sire.” A blond vampire bowed deeply. “Archangel Suyin has been sighted on the border. She brings a guest.”
Marduk nodded in acknowledgment, and the vampire whispered away. “It’s Jinhai,” he said afterward. “She asked if she could bring him—he is a power, that boy, and he must learn to be in society. Should he one day ascend, we do not wish for an insane member of the Cadre.”
Raphael considered who Zhou Jinhai had been when he was first discovered just under a thousand years ago and wondered if that was enough time to undo the damage wrought by Jinhai’s megalomaniacal mother, damage so ruinous that Jinhai’s psyche had split into two, Quon his stronger and far more vicious “brother.”
Another child. Another insane parent.
Elena’s hand squeezing his. “We’re not alone and neither is Jinhai,” she reminded him under her breath while Marduk was saying something to Tiamat.
“His mother—though to call her that is an insult to the term,” she said with a curl of her lip, “chose to surround herself with sycophants—or those so blindly loyal that they never called her on her mistakes. We choose strength and treat our friends and compatriots as equals. So does Suyin—Jinhai is learning from her.”
“You are right, Guild Hunter.” He slid his arm over the narrow back of her chair, a chair designed to accommodate wings. “I will be glad to see them both.”
The conversation meandered at that point, with neither Marduk nor Tiamat bringing up their decision to Sleep again soon. That was to be expected. Sleep was an intensely personal choice.
Still, Raphael was glad of this private dinner that he knew deep within would be the last such with the couple from another age. He would miss them in a way he could’ve never predicted.
Lifting his tankard, he said, “To friends.”
“To friends!”
16
You will always be welcome in my territory—and Jinhai could do no better than to have you as a man from whom he can learn. I thank you, too, for watching over this broken child rather than executing him at first sight.
—Archangel Suyin to Illium and Aodhan (Once, in China, in the Ruins of War)
The ball the next night was a cascade of power and beauty, held on the sprawling main roof of the stronghold as well as in the stunning desert garden below. There were lights strung everywhere, with standing lamps adding further color.
The large moon added its own illumination, bathing the world in silver.
But Raphael couldn’t focus, his attention on the sky.
Caliane had arrived in the territory two hours earlier, but wasn’t staying at the stronghold; she’d asked to stay at a location a short distance away that she particularly favored.
Knowing she’d have barely enough time for a quick rest before she readied herself for the ball, Raphael hadn’t flown out to see her. The conversation they needed to have couldn’t be rushed. He also knew her well enough to predict that she wouldn’t appreciate being cornered—his mother was both an ancient and a warrior, and he had to treat her as such.
“Raphael.” Suyin’s voice, her hair a sheet of white in his peripheral vision.
Shifting his attention from his watch for Caliane, he inclined his head in greeting. “Suyin.” A tall and sharply handsome man stood by her side, his skin as cool a white as the hair he’d had cut in a short, crisp style, and his wings a soft dove-gray. The wing coloring had only emerged after the amputation of the wings that had grown in twisted and incapable of flight after being clipped over and over again.
That he was the son of the Archangel of Death could not be disputed. But he’d been raised as the foster son of an archangel who was a maker, not a destroyer: Suyin, Archangel of China and Builder of Worlds.
“Jinhai.”
“Archangel Raphael.” Jinhai’s bow was precise to the nth degree, the eye contact he made polite without being confrontational.
“How was the flight from China?” he asked the younger angel.
“It was a good journey. The sire held her speed at a pace I could maintain.”
Raphael knew Jinhai was bonded to Suyin and not in the same way the Seven had bonded to Raphael. Jinhai’s attachment to Suyin wasn’t about loyalty but about a voracious need that knew no boundaries.
“It is also a leash,” Suyin had said to Raphael the last time he’d been in China, “and I wish it were not so.” Deep lines forming on her brow, her lips tight. “I thought the problem would be controlling him as he grew into his power, but it turns out the problem is making him see himself as an individual with a right to his own future—he does not seem to understand that he isn’t simply an adjunct of me.”