Reaching Raphael with soft beats of her wings, she looked at him with those sightless eyes. “You have half a heart.” A pause, a frown. “And you have two hearts. Yet you are not whole.”
“I won’t be whole until my Elena wakes.” An absolute truth. “What do you see?”
“The future has warped.” A bloody tear dropping to stain her gown. “I see . . . nothing. I see a million possibilities. I see chaos and horror. I see hope and life. I see everything that could be.”
We battled destiny and changed time, Elena-mine. The future was now theirs to shape.
Cassandra touched his face with fingers that bore nails encrusted with blood. “Ambrosia will flow and a mortal will be made an angel when an archangel loves true.” She spoke the words in a singsong voice. “That is what I saw and that is what I wrote and that was a future born.”
“Elena is the first angel-Made.” That was the answer to why there were no records, no road map to follow; the legend of ambrosia had been born of a prophecy spoken by an angel so old she was legend.
Cassandra held out her arms. “This child of kin bloodline is mine. In this moment, and in this time, she is mine.”
Raphael gave her Favashi because there was no other choice and because Favashi had spoken of this place. “When will she return?”
“Madness is coming. Life is coming. Wonder is coming. Death is coming. The future warps again and again.” Tiredness, such aching tiredness. “I try so hard to Sleep, but even in my Sleep, I dream. I see.” A pause. “I helped your love, this prophecy-of-mine, alter time. A new dawn not yet seen, not yet known.”
She hugged Favashi’s frail body close. “Fire cleanses. I knew fire would be needed. On this day and in this time, fire would be needed. For you alone cannot fight what she has become. The Cadre alone cannot fight the evil that Sleeps.”
Cassandra pressed a kiss to Favashi’s brow. “Archangel of Death. Goddess of Nightmare. Wraith without a shadow. Rise, rise, rise into your Reign of Death. For your end will come. Your end will come. At the hands of the new and of the old. An Archangel kissed by mortality. A silver-winged Sleeper who wakes before his Sleep is done. The broken dream with eyes of fire. Shatter. Shatter. Shatter.”
More bloody tears. “This was to be. Death, endless death, followed by victory. But you and the fragile, courageous prophecy-of-mine have rewritten destiny, erased the future to be. Time warps and changes. Only one constant remains. The Sleeper, the Wraith, the Goddess. She will rise and she will be monstrous.”
Cassandra began to lower herself into the lava. She was a being of liquid fire again before she reached the molten core, Favashi invisible against her.
The sinkhole began to close over in front of their eyes.
Two minutes after the encounter with an Ancient out of angelic myth, there was nothing there, no sign a sinkhole had ever existed. The earth was not bare. Grass grew, pebbles rolled around on it, and the wind swirled snow against the barrier of the fence.
Elena would not be pleased to have missed such a sight.
Inside his chest, his heart gave a sluggish beat. Come, Illium. You must watch for my fall today.
The blue-winged angel flew below him all the way home.
But even safely landed, Raphael could not yet rest. First, he must warn the Cadre about China. He called an urgent meeting using a signal that was never to be ignored. Their faces appeared one after the other on the screen in his study, cold and immortal and altered with Cascade-born power.
Only Michaela, strikingly beautiful and deeply manipulative, was different. She appeared . . . faded, tired.
Raphael described only what had happened to Favashi, shared only what Cassandra had said about Lijuan being a monstrous world-destroying force when she next woke. Too big for even the Cadre.
It was Caliane who broke the silence that had fallen after his short, curt report. “I would ask if you dreamed this, my son, but I know you are too practical and pragmatic a warrior to create fantasies—and I saw Favashi’s strangeness firsthand a month earlier, when I flew to offer her counsel.”
Neha was the next to speak. “So did I,” said the Archangel of India, her saree a yellow that made her skin shimmer with light. “I wanted to brush it off as arrogance, but there was a falseness to her presence, as if a shadow lay atop it.”
Raphael conserved his energy and let the ensuing discussion flow at its own pace until Titus said, “China is not safe.”
All the Cadre nodded as one.
Even Charisemnon’s expression was black. Archangels, after all, were not supposed to be prey. Such a line had never before been crossed in their histories.
“It cannot be left unguarded.” Alexander’s silver eyes were a painful echo of the ring of silver around Elena’s irises. “We saw what happened in the short period that Lijuan was missing. We cannot know how long Favashi will be gone.”
“She was adamant that whatever it is that Lijuan left behind in her territory, it affects only archangels,” Raphael pointed out. “Favashi has a number of strong men and women loyal to her who can run things in the interim. There are also enough of us that we can rotate through China to ensure no one in her territory forgets the Cadre exists even if they do not have a resident archangel.”
A cycle of flights was swiftly worked out. None of them would land in China, but an archangel didn’t need to land to make his or her power felt. Raphael, Astaad—Archangel of the Pacific Isles, and a number of others would stay in Japan when it came time for their turn at policing Favashi’s territory in her absence.
Caliane was considered neutral ground. She wasn’t neutral, of course, would always fight in Raphael’s corner. But she also wouldn’t take it amiss if an archangel guested in her territory—perhaps it was because of her love for Nadiel, but Raphael’s mother could tolerate the presence of another archangel close by for relatively long periods.
It was also agreed that none of them would use an archangel’s absence from his or her own territory to attempt to gain a foothold in that territory. The rest of the Cadre would unite against any such attempt, no matter friendships or alliances. This was a thing about controlling vampires; the Cadre would not let the world drown in bloodlust regardless of their other enmities.
Neha volunteered to take extra shifts. “It will be less of a distance for me, and seeing me will remind them that an archangel resides within easy reach.”
Caliane also volunteered to do extra shifts. “Five years,” his mother said afterward. “If Favashi yet Sleeps, then we must make a long-term plan.”
“It is settled,” said the Cadre, and the meeting was over.
His wound bleeding under his leathers, Raphael staggered up the steps. Such a wound needed the deep recovery of anshara, not a battle against another archangel.
Sire. Sire. Sire. The Legion’s voices filled his head as he entered the room. The chrysalis is too small. Dismay in every word. Where will her wings grow?
Hand pressed to his heart, Raphael crashed onto the bed and onto the silken filaments that flowed from the chrysalis that was too small to hold his hunter’s tall body and extraordinary wings. His own wing fell across the chrysalis and his heart, it stopped.
The Legion
The Primary watched Raphael’s blood seep from his body in a direct line to the chrysalis, where it was absorbed without a trace. The filaments from Elena’s chrysalis spread over him, cocooning him in a delicate blanket.
The Legion sat. They held guard.
Time passed.
Others loyal to the aeclari came to the place where they slept, but they did not disturb the sleeping pair. The one the Legion thought of as the Blade entered only once, to ensure his archangel lived.