36

Elena gripped his hair and hauled his face to her own, pulling him back from the edge of the abyss. “Don’t you dare give in to the darkness,” she ordered. “This energy is yours. Shape it to your will. Don’t let it shape you.”

And he saw at last what she already had—if he wasn’t careful, the Cascade surge would alter him to its own design. “No one,” he said coldly, “manipulates an archangel.”

Elena’s smile was fierce, his consort well aware he wasn’t speaking to her. “The voice said the second marker is a painful rebirth . . . and isn’t it strange, how the power surge occurred when Jessamy is in the city? Do you think this energy could heal her?”

“If it is a marker—”

Elena pressed her fingers to his lips. “We fight destiny other ways. We don’t attempt to nullify this marker . . . and it’s only a marker. Whether it takes place or not, events continue.”

Raphael fought his black rage to say, “I will wait for you and Jessamy to return.”

“Laric is in the city, too.” She frowned. “He qualifies as well as her, if I’m reading the prophecy right.”

“I’ll speak to him.”

“What about Vivek?” she asked, and he could feel her hope.

“This power is too strong. It would burn out a vampiric body.” Raphael tried to think of others, not only of her. “He will recover, Elena. Unlike with Laric and Jessamy, all Vivek needs is time.”

“Yes, you’re right.” She claimed a kiss, as was her right as his lover and consort. “See you soon, Archangel.” Grin wild, she brushed her hand over the mark on one side of his temple, the mark of the Legion. “And after, we’ll plot how to foil destiny and a prophecy spoken by an archangel who saw me at the dawn of time.”

A small cloud of light glowed through her own clothing before he could release her for flight. It came from the spot where she’d felt the pain in her chest, but this time, she didn’t collapse.

“Whoa.” Unzipping her jacket, she pulled up the top she wore underneath to expose that patch of skin. It was the merest pinprick of smudged light, and it settled into her skin even as they watched, but what it left behind was a small darkness in the shape of the Legion mark on his temple. But where his mark crackled with light, this one absorbed it.

“Huh.” Elena stared at it. “Ask the Legion if they know what this is.”

When Raphael did, the ancient beings said: A dark mirror. Whispers in his head, the Legion in conversation. Not our mark. Your mark. It is a mirror. A sense of a huge mind straining. Aeclari are . . . mirrors. They are more. But they are also mirrors.

Raphael’s heart accelerated. After sharing with Elena their first piece of concrete information about what aeclari meant, he asked, Is this as it should be?

No, came the storm of voices. The mirror should not be dark. This mirror is wrong. Agitation in the Legion mind. This becoming is wrong.

Elena’s face stilled when he repeated that unequivocal response. “A mirror,” she whispered. “To reflect power back to you, maybe magnify it?”

He thought of how the wildfire came from both of them, and said, “Perhaps.”

“It explains why all my problems are concentrated on the left.” She touched her fingers to his right temple. “Mirror images.”

Raphael wasn’t thinking with enough clarity to have seen that. His head rang with the Legion’s cry that this mirror was wrong, Elena’s becoming was wrong.

“But this mirror absorbs light,” she said, her brain working better than his. “And my body isn’t magnifying your power, it’s just rejecting it. It makes no sense.”

Comprehension cut through the chaos and he understood what the Legion were telling him. “This mark”—he ran his fingers over the lightless black of it—“is a brand. Mine on your flesh.”

Scowling, Elena tugged and zipped her clothing back into place. “Fucking Cascade needs to learn I’m not a cow, to be branded. And what’s the point anyway, if I’m mortal?”

“This isn’t over yet.” Raphael kissed her hard. “I will find a way to erase the brand.”

A smile full of teeth, followed by a kiss as possessive as his own. “On the other hand, I suppose it’s fair, since you wear mine.” Her gaze went to the starburst pattern on his left wing, where she’d shot him once. “And look, we screwed up the mirror image thing there.”

In her wild smile, he found reality again, the Cascade-born power no longer swamping his senses. He had it held tightly in his fist now, under his control and beyond the Cascade’s ability to shape. “I suppose you will say you shot me in preparation for this moment.”

She laughed, the rising night winds whipping her hair from its braid to stream around them. And in her face, he saw bones too close to the surface once more, saw too the small break in the skin of her neck that hadn’t been there when she first flew to him.

And when Elena fell from his arms with a sound of joy to flare out her wings, two feathers of indigo blue fluttered silently to the earth.

“Will you tell me what you saw up in the sky with Raphael?” Jessamy asked Elena as they rode up in the Tower elevator. “I won’t put it down in any official record until you tell me it’s time.”

“Yes,” Elena said, her throat rough. She’d never forget the heartbreaking rage in Raphael’s eyes when he realized he couldn’t heal her. Fuck fate! She refused to sit back and let the Cascade screw up her archangel into some twisted bitterness haunted by watching his consort die mortal and wingless.

It is foretold, child, whispered the old, old voice in her head. One must die for the other to live.

Elena stared into the endless golden eyes of the owl that hovered in front of her. Why can you talk to me when Raphael can’t? Is it because this is a waking dream?

He is altered, as you are altered. You must . . . A deep stirring. But you do not have time. One must die. You must die.

Yeah, well, I’m not convinced on the whole predestination thing. Forget one to die for one to live. I and this unknown other will both live.

The owl tilted its head to the side. Child of change. You alter the fabric of the universe. A sense of waking in the voice that was Cassandra’s, an old being disturbed in her Sleep. You rewrite time.

The doors opened and the owl flew out, to disappear into the distance.

Elena smiled deeply within. So, she could rewrite what was foretold. Good to fucking know—because she had no plans of being a meek lamb led to the slaughter. She walked through the open door of her and Raphael’s suite on that vow. Her archangel was overflowing with golden energy—though it wasn’t as obvious as it had been in the cold night sky. The lightning-bolt cracks were thinner, the energy a shimmer of light against his skin and wings rather than an inferno.

Galen stood with his hands on his hips, talking to Raphael. The weapons-master’s expression changed the instant he spotted Jessamy. It didn’t go soft—Galen was too rough and tough, but it turned gentle in a way that it only ever did for Jessamy. He held out his hand, and she walked across to take it.

The first thing he did was unhook her cape and throw it aside.

The pale blue of Jessamy’s simple but elegant gown skimmed her slender form to froth at her ankles, soft waves crashing to shore. The historian pressed a tender kiss to Galen’s cheek. Her twisted wing overlapped by his, she looked at Raphael with eyes soft in wonder. “May I?” She lifted a hand.

At Raphael’s nod, she released Galen’s hand to reach over and brush her fingers over part of Raphael’s forearm. Curious, Elena watched. But when Jessamy raised her fingers, no light came with her.

“Ellie,” she said. “You do it.”

Elena stroked the same part of his arm, the warmth and heat and strength of him sinking into her and making her smile even in the midst of the continuing madness. Her fingertips glowed when they lifted off his skin. Pursing her lips, she blew the light back into him. The flickers flew like fireflies to become a part of him once more.

Raphael stroked his hand over the arch of her wing. “It knows who you are to me.” Unsaid was the angry coda: it didn’t matter if his power accepted her if it couldn’t help her.

God, he was so angry. This could ruin him if they didn’t figure out a way through it. She hoped he was able to help Jessamy—that might take the edge off his rage. “Jess,” she said quietly. “Raphael is overflowing with power.”

A moment of incomprehension before Jessamy’s face went still.

Galen strode forward at the same instant. “Sire.” His hands were fisted, his shoulders rigid. “The decision has been made.”

Elena didn’t try to get in the middle of that conversation—this was between an archangel and one of his loyal Seven. Raphael had attempted, if not to heal then at least to ease Jessamy’s twisted wing before. However, his healing power hadn’t been able to affect the malformation that kept Jessamy bound to the ground except when she flew up in the plane or in Galen’s arms.

“I will honor that wish.” Raphael closed his hand over Galen’s shoulder and squeezed. “But I would not be your archangel if I did not offer you this chance.”

Jessamy spoke for the first time since Elena’s words. “Laric?”

“He was caught in the energy released by the death of an archangel,” Raphael said. “According to Keir’s tests, his cells have altered in unusual ways that make those cells unlike ordinary angelic cells. It has also made them unrecognizable to my power—that may change as he grows older and his own healing processes restart, but for now, I can do nothing for him.”

Raphael’s eyes began to glow. Not only the cerulean blue that was his own but a ring of golden light that hadn’t existed prior to the energy surge. “The choice is yours.”

Jessamy ran her hand down Galen’s arm to his bunched hand. Unfurling it at her touch, he locked his fingers with hers. “What will happen to the power if I say no?”

“I do not know. It doesn’t feel too much for me, so it may simply stay until I use it. Or it may dissipate.”

Power enough to shatter the night and he wasn’t overwhelmed. No wonder Cassandra said he was changed—but he was guiding that change now, shaping it to his will. Yet Elena still felt a jagged rock in her gut . . . because what if the worst happened? Would Raphael fight the Cascade forces then? Or would he allow those forces to shape him into a cold and ruthless immortal untouched by mortal vulnerability?

Jessamy turned to Galen and put her free hand on his chest. Elena and Raphael both stepped away as the couple spoke in low voices tense with withheld emotion.

“What if we’re doing the wrong thing, Archangel?” Elena asked out of earshot of the other couple, suddenly afraid. Not only would a failure hurt Jessamy, it would be another darkness whispering to Raphael.

Eyes inhuman with power held hers, and when he spoke, his voice was different. Heavy with archangelic power. He sounded more like the archangel she’d first met than he had in years. But the words he spoke, they were her Raphael’s. “Hunter-mine. To not make the attempt would be a disservice to Jessamy. Especially after I could do nothing the first time we attempted to ease the malformation so it would not ache.”

Until then, Elena hadn’t known that Jessamy’s wing caused her physical discomfort. Not on a daily basis, and the pain was a dull throb rather than a sharp stab that made her cry out, but the muscles did spasm and lock up at times. The historian had described it as a bad cramp—to Elena, that would be an awful pain, but Jessamy had become accustomed to it over the centuries and centuries of her existence.

She didn’t seem to understand what that said about her strength, this slender woman who was no warrior and who, to this day, tried to avoid the fighting lessons Galen gave her so she would never be helpless against an opponent.

“Sire.” Stiff but resigned, Galen’s voice split the heavy silence. “Jessamy wishes to try.”

Raphael moved around to Jessamy’s back without further discussion—and that, too, was different. The Raphael she loved would’ve said something to reassure his weapons-master. Or maybe she was just jumpy and Raphael was too concerned with reigning in this wild power to waste his energies on anything that wasn’t strictly necessary.

“I need you to spread your wings as far as possible,” he ordered Jessamy.

One strong wing whispered out in a glow of delicate magenta and luscious cream against the pale sky-blue of Jessamy’s gown. The other stayed close to her back, the bones, muscles and tendons formed wrong and unable to stretch outward.

Elena and Galen both moved so they could see what Raphael was doing, one on his left, the other on his right.

“Describe it to me,” Jessamy said with the frustration of a historian missing out on what might be the making of a piece of angelic history.

“The sire is staring at your back,” Galen muttered bad-temperedly. “If I didn’t know that he was madly in love with Elena, I’d have to thump him for looking at you with such intensity.”

Jessamy’s laughter was a warm, gentle thing.

“His hands are full of light now,” Elena murmured. “It’s like the lightning we saw from Sara’s roof, not the blue of his usual healing energy.” Her heart thundered at seeing the violence of it, quite unlike the delicate dandelions that had floated back to him. “Archangel?”

“Sire, that is archangelic energy meant to level cities and battle others of the Cadre,” Galen said harshly at the same time.

“Yes,” Raphael said in a distant tone, “but it is also mine to mold.”

In front of them, the lightning became shot with streaks of healing blue. Elena shuddered inwardly at the sign that he continued to carry a touch of mortality, a touch of humanity. He’d always said that his ability to heal came from his love for her and how it had changed him on a fundamental level.

“Someone tell me what’s happening.”

Elena responded to Jessamy’s demand. Galen was too focused on Raphael’s hands, his big body all but vibrating in readiness. And Elena knew that if he thought Raphael was hurting Jessamy, he’d unsheathe his broadsword and take on an archangel himself.

“The light coming off Raphael is almost too much to look through now.” Elena’s eyes teared even though she’d narrowed them as much as she could without totally cutting off her sight. “He’s moving his hands closer to your wing.” She blinked away the tears. “The energy’s touching you. Small lightning bolts arcing against your wing.”

“I can’t feel the touch,” Jessamy said, attempting to look over her shoulder.

“Be still.”

Jessamy went motionless at the command, and Raphael—

Everything blurred in an incandescence of overwhelming gold, light sparking behind Elena’s lids as she instinctively closed her eyes. When she opened them back up a millisecond later, the light was retracting back into Raphael, sucked in until it no longer lay like a second skin on his arms and his hair and his eyes.

The breaks in his skin sealed up in front of her gaze.

Elena jerked her attention to Jessamy’s wing. Disappointment slammed her in the gut, an ugly two-fisted blow. It was exactly as it had been, and she saw from the angry sadness on Galen’s face that he was an inch away from punching Raphael.

About to tug away her archangel so the weapons-master could focus on his beloved Jessamy, she halted at a keen of sound from the angelic historian. “It hurts.”

Galen moved in a burst of raw strength, cradling her trembling form against his chest. “Where?” His voice was like stone, murder in the pale green of his eyes.

But Jessamy pushed back from his chest, her hands braced against it and her nails digging into his shirt. Another animalistic keen of pain, a helpless creature with its limb caught in a trap.

“Sire, you must fix this,” Galen demanded.

“It is an old and tight muscle,” Raphael said with unnatural calm, his gaze yet intent on Jessamy’s wing. “It has not been stretched in nearly three thousand years.”

“Jesus.” Elena saw it then, saw what was happening. “Galen, look at her wing.”