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)
Then he was gone on those silent wings, just one more member of the Legion among the others. The markers that made them unique individuals were subtle, and only detectable from up close—and this time around, Elena had the instinctive understanding that that was how they liked it.
The Legion are never going to be anything but a collective organism, she said to her archangel. To attempt to separate them, to individualize them beyond a certain point, wouldn’t be a gift or a cruelty—it’s a simple impossibility.
His answer was a beat in coming. Marduk intimated much the same to me once, during a passing conversation. He said the Legion are not like angelkind, and that we should not expect them to be—for they are not multiple beings, but the many parts of one single being.
Bees, she murmured as she watched them fly in multiple directions without ever getting in each other’s way. They’re like bees. Each individual able to think and take action on their own, but always in pursuit of the larger goal.
There is no queen.
It’s us—their aeclari, she told him, feeling the truth to her core. We are their queen, the reason for their existence. It was a remarkably odd thing to realize, a thought that Raphael echoed a second later, before he had to drop away to handle an incoming call from Michaela.
That, too, she thought, was an oddness. The former Archangel of Budapest, now Archangel of the Pacific Isles, was not at all who Elena might’ve expected her to be on her rising. Per what little she’d picked up, Michaela was doing far better with Gavriel than Aegaeon ever had with Illium.
“Immortality is full of surprises.” She patted their little spark. “Next thing you know, Michaela will end up giving me wise counsel.”
Another stroke of her belly. “Jokes aside, my sweet parasite, I feel so much for her. I hope she manages to forge a relationship with Gavriel. Because no matter what, she loved him.” Elena would never forget a grievously wounded Michaela’s final request—even as she lay dying, she’d thought only of her son.
Thoughts of her own baby in mind, she walked into the forest, knowing that this was a place where she was always welcome. Using a dwarf orange tree as a brace, she got herself down next to a crouching member of the Legion. “What are we doing?”
A glance from this being who remained colorless in almost every facet but for the merest drift of brown across his irises. “These are intruders and must be removed.” He pointed to a specific weed. “These are not intruders.” Another indication, this time to plants that also looked like weeds.
But one woman’s weed was another woman’s very important plant for the microclimate, so she memorized both and got to work. “I wonder if the baby will like gardening,” she said, almost to herself.
The member of the Legion looked at her abdomen, then back at her. “We did not know until we had a garden.”
“Nice surprise?”
“Nice surprise,” he echoed in that way that was pure Legion.
The two of them worked side by side as the afternoon slipped into early evening, the skies streaked with color. Looking up, one hand on her abdomen, she smiled. Their baby would be born in the winter, while snow carpeted the city, and in future years, they’d celebrate their child’s birthday while soft white flakes fell from the sky.
She knew without asking that the child of the aeclari would also always be welcome in this wild forest, would be kept safe while being allowed to play.
A fat little bee buzzed by just then, before landing in the heart of a white daisy in front of her. She smiled, content to just watch the creature do what it had been born to do—as around her, the Legion did what they had been formed to do.
“Ari would’ve loved to photograph this,” she murmured to herself.
But the Legion fighter beside her heard. “Who is Ari?”
“My second-eldest sister,” Elena found herself telling him. “She died a long time ago, when I was a young mortal girl.” Memories of Ari’s generous smile had her own lips curving. “She was organized, too, just like you. The kind of person you could trust to get things done.”
How wonderful, she thought, that she could talk about Ari in a way that didn’t cut her, make her bleed. So she spoke more, telling her willing listener all about the big sister who’d taken her hand on her first day of school and told her to be brave, the same big sister who’d snuck a chocolate bar into her schoolbag as a treat.
Lucky, she’d been so lucky to have Belle and Ari, Beth and Amy, as her sisters. Luckier still that she had Eve to this day. Her life was a tapestry that had begun woven in blood and anguish, but a thousand years had passed since then—the tapestry had grown until that bloody patch was a faded corner, so much hope and life around it that it was no longer the dominant feature.