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)
Elena swallowed to wet her dry throat. “Archangel?”
“Yes.” Eyes of an astonishing, impossible blue shadowed with grief met hers.
When she passed on Cassandra’s message, he gave a ragged half laugh. “I don’t know whether to be grateful or terrified. Only one of the archangels she took with her into rest after the war has emerged.”
Wrapping her arms around him, she pressed the side of her face to his chest and reminded him: “Zanaya emerged whole and healthy. I don’t think she’ll release Caliane until she’s the same—it’ll help your mother, too, to know that.”
Nuzzling the side of her head, Raphael said, “A decade isn’t long in an eternal life. She will still get to meet our child whether they are a toddling immortal babe, or a mortal youth.”
Elena hadn’t even thought about that, but now, her eyes pricked. Because she wasn’t the only one with a missing mother in this relationship now. “Yes,” she whispered. “We’re going to give her one hell of a surprise.”
Raphael’s arms tightened around her as hers tightened around him, both of them leaning into each other to withstand the emotional storm.
20
I should not be awake, young one. There is a reason I Sleep, a reason the Ancestors Sleep. We chose to give this world over to the young and we have all kept our promise through eons uncounted.
—Archangel Marduk to Raphael (As the Mantle Fell)
They returned to Marduk’s territory after Amanat vanished as if it had never existed.
Neither Raphael nor Elena, nor anyone in Caliane’s court, would even whisper of her Sleep until enough time had passed that all her people were in the right places to argue for their right to caretake the territory, rather than having it divided to be governed piecemeal by other archangels.
With the ball long since over, Raphael and Elena would’ve gone straight to New York, but Marduk and Tiamat had requested that they return if they could. This time, however, they’d been invited to meet the couple at a small private stronghold on the eastern side of Marduk’s lands, a region draped in subtropical green.
The other archangel had squeezed Raphael’s shoulder before he and Elena left for Amanat. “I would have one more conversation with you, blood of my line.”
The weight of realization was heavy on Raphael’s shoulders as he exited the shower enclosure a half hour after they’d landed in the depths of the night. The Cadre, he thought, would soon—far sooner than he and Elena had theorized—be eight. Not only that, but the two missing voices would include their wisest.
For that was what Caliane had become since her waking.
Do not tell me to go into Sleep, Raphael. I have had but a moment in time with you.
Her plea haunted him.
“I will miss her far more than I would’ve ever imagined when first she woke,” he said as he walked into the bedroom…to see that his consort was already asleep on top of the sheets. She was still wrapped up in the large white towel she’d grabbed after telling him she was getting out before she gave in to the urge to jump him.
Love overwhelmed him in a rush as powerful as any Cascade. All long legs and hair that glorious shade that was hers alone, her body sleek with muscle and power, she was the most precious being in all the universe to him. And now, she carried their child—and that child was demanding of her body.
Not wanting to disturb her, but also not wanting to risk her lying in the damp towel, he used a dusting of his power to leach the water from the towel. The droplets hovered in the air until he released them harmlessly on the balcony across from the bed, the doors to which they’d left open so the breeze could flow in.
He’d have to show her that trick after she woke, he thought even as he picked up a soft blanket from the foot of the bed and opened it over her. “Sleep, hbeebti. Dream only the sweetest of dreams.” He wished he could compel that, leach the blood from her dreams as he had the water from the towel, but some things were beyond the reach of even an archangel.
All he could do was hold her safe in this world while she walked the shadows of another. Slipping into bed beside her after he’d dried off his own body, he covered her with his arm and his wing.
* * *
* * *
Elena was sitting on the mat again, shelling peas with her mother. “I was so scared you’d never again visit me in my dreams. Not after we finally set you free like you wanted.” She could still see the daisies floating on the water as she stood on the cliff with her body leaning into her father’s.
Beth’s hand had been so tight on hers, as tight as the day they’d put Marguerite into the earth when Beth had been far too young to understand why her mother wasn’t coming home ever again.