Raphael's hair lifted in the night breeze, darker than the blackness that surrounded it.
"He didn't kill indiscriminately. For the longest time, they were all convinced he was simply driven by a hunger for power, for territory."
"Others joined him," she guessed.
A slow nod. "He was an emperor, but he wanted to be a god. When the murders began, they were stealthy, even political."
Elena reached up to push his hair off his face, needing to touch him, he'd become so suddenly remote. "What made people change their minds?"
He leaned into the touch, but his expression remained acetic, distant. "When he began incinerating entire villages in territories not his own."
The reading she'd done under Jessamy's guidance came to her aid. "A declaration of war."
"My father didn't see it that way. He expected the others in the Cadre to fall under his command - he'd come to believe hewas a god by then."
"How old were you when he died?"
"Mere decades into my existence."
A child, she thought, he'd been nothing but a child. "That means . . ." She stopped, couldn't continue.
"That he was well on the way to madness before I was born."
She slid her arms around his waist, laying her ear over his heart. "That's why the worry over your birth."
His own arms were steel bands around her.Sometimes, I wonder what he passed on to me. What my mother passed on.
Chapter 23
In that moment, Elena understood that the Archangel of New York had shared something with her he'd shared with no one else. How she knew, she couldn't say. But she knew. As she knew there were no words to answer Raphael's question. Only time could do that, but. . . "The course of your life has taken a direction I bet not even Lijuan could've foreseen.
Nothing is predestined."
Raphael didn't speak for several long minutes, and they stood there while the night winds played dark music across their bodies, stroked over their wings. Her archangel hadn't bothered with a replacement shirt, and his skin felt wonderful under her hands, her cheek. She was, she realized, oddly content in spite of the unsettling events of the day.
"The night is quiet," Raphael said at last, "the winds fairly calm. Visibility is clear in every direction."
"A good night to fly," she whispered.
"Yes."
She held on as he lifted off, shifting her hold to around his neck. The wind of takeoff whipped her hair off her face, then snapped it back to tangle around them both. "I need to cut this," she muttered, pulling strands out of her mouth with one hand, the other locked around Raphael.
Why did you not, even as a hunter? I would've thought it a vulnerability.
The wound was too close to the surface today, but she answered anyway.My hair's like my mother's. I was the only one of her four children to retain the color as I grew. Ari and Belle had both gone a golden blonde like Jeffrey, while Beth was a throwback to their paternal grandmother, her hair a gorgeous strawberry blonde.
So, we are both our mother's shadows.
Knowing that what she cherished might be to him a curse, she brushed her lips over his jaw in silent comfort. "Go faster."
Raphael swooped up and down without warning, making her laugh in sheer joy as she locked her legs around his. She didn't realize she'd expanded her own wings until they began to catch air. "Raphael!"
"Pull them in," he said. "Otherwise our landing will be rough."
Thinking it through step by step, she contracted her wings - her muscles gave a mild twinge at going against the wind, but nothing to worry about. "They want to open again."
"Instinct." Angling them lower, he flared out his own wings to their greatest width and brought them to a gentle, precise landing on a small mountain plateau overlooking a shallow valley filled with snow.
"This place looks different from the land close to the Refuge." Its edges softened by time, the valley appeared as if it would cradle rather than crush.
"The snow here tends to be soft," Raphael said. "That's why it's a good place for flight training."
Her heart skipped a beat. "Now?" She'd thought he planned only to take her flying in his arms.
"Now."
Excitement a tattoo against her ribs, she stepped to the lip of the plateau, and glanced down.
And down.
Vertigo had never been a problem, but - "It suddenly looks a lot farther away now that I know I'll be falling toward it."
"You, afraid?" The touch of his wings against her own, a shimmer of gold that she caught with the corner of her eye.
Her lips twitched. "Are you dusting me, Archangel?"
"Angel dust looks beautiful coming off wings in the dark." A kiss pressed to her jaw as he shifted to stand behind her, the aphrodisiac dust a taste of unadulterated sex. "As you fly, it'll sink into your skin, readying your body for me."
"You're all talk," she murmured, feeling him settle his hands firmly about her waist.
"So, what do I do now?"
"The only way to learn to fly, is to fly." He pushed her off the edge of the cliff.
Fear obliterated everything but the need to survive. Her wings spread, catching air, slowing her descent as her muscles screamed at the sudden strain. Raphael's shirt twisted around her, baring her stomach to the elements. She didn't care, more concerned about getting her wings to work. But it was too late, the ground rushing up at terminal velocity.
No snow was that soft - she was still going to hit hard enough to splinter bones.
Hands gripping her under her arms, lifting her up with effortless strength.Close your wings.