“No.” Elena held Suyin’s gaze, certain deep in her gut that she had to stop that line of thought here and now or it would eat Suyin up alive. “This is yours and yours alone.”
“I am an architect.” She stared uncomprehendingly at her hands. “I am no battle-honed warrior. I should not be Cadre.”
“The world needs rebuilding. Who better than an architect to begin that rebuild?”
Raphael’s words settled against Elena’s skin, felt right. Yes, the world needed builders now, creators.
“I have no guard, no one loyal to me. An archangel cannot rule without a second.”
“I will send a guard with you,” Raphael said. “To be by your side until you find your own people.”
Suyin, still disoriented, decided to stay in New York for three extra days to settle into her skin, before she headed to China.
She’d just left to go to her room and spend some time alone, think over the cataclysmic change in her life, when golden light began to emanate from the direction of the Catskills. “Cassandra is saying good-bye,” Raphael murmured.
The two of them watched the strange sunset until the last flicker disappeared from the sky. Elena’s wings went with them, disappearing with an audible pop that made her ears hurt. Raphael gasped at the same instant and went down on one knee. His wings shimmered for a second, then settled, solid and strong.
The Legion mark on his temple blazed before going quiet.
Elena dropped down beside him, her hand on his wing and her lungs struggling to gasp in air. “Archangel.”
“The golden lightning of the Cascade is gone,” he said, his breathing unsteady, “as is part of what the Legion gave us.”
Her heart squeezed. “Maybe the part that makes them?”
“That is my hope, hbeebti.” He flexed his hand. “The bloodstorm power remains.”
“Can you make your wings turn to white fire?”
A pause before his wings morphed into pure flame. “Yes, and . . .” Blue wreathed his hand. “I can still heal.”
“So now we know what happens to superhero powers after a Cascade.” Her voice shook. “My wings came from the golden lightning. And now my back feels weird.”
Raphael rose, his jaw set. If the world had taken her wings again, he would savage it. What he found was that the slits in her jacket where her wings had emerged were glowing . . . the same hue he did when he was angry, or filled with power.
“You have a piece of my heart, Elena,” he murmured. “That heart is full of archangelic cells. Those cells can heal nearly any injury, any damage, any mutation if no other strange power is getting in the way. And the golden Cascade power is gone.”
Elena sucked in a breath. “What’re you saying, Raphael?”
“I need to see your back.” Wrapping her up in his arms, he flew her up to the privacy of their suite and the two of them tore off her arm sheaths, then her clothing. Her naked back was flawless but for two glowing lines where wings grew out of an angel’s back.
Raphael touched his finger to one.
Elena shivered so hard it was a shudder.
“Pain?” he asked.
“No.” She moved restlessly on her feet. “Just . . . sensitive. Very.”
“Do you have the urge to scratch as you have never scratched before?”
“Dear lord, yes! Argh!”
Hope exploded into certainty. “You are in the first stage of wing regrowth.”
Elena was silent for a long time. “You’re sure,” she said at last.
“Yes, but let us go to Nisia.”
The healer took a minute from her heavy workload to confirm Raphael’s diagnosis. “I can see the faint ridge of two developing stubs,” she said after examining Elena’s back closely. “I’ll give you an oil for the itching.”
Before they left, she took blood so Lucius could rerun DNA tests.
“Am I going to have fluffy duck feathers soon?” Elena asked Raphael after they were in their suite again and he’d rubbed in the heavenly oil. The relief was so great it was orgasmic; right then, she was glad she’d slept through her first time growing wings.
“I’m afraid so. Will you miss the energy wings?”
Elena’s eyes were wet when she turned to him. “They were amazing and they took me to the sky . . . but Raphael, I’ll have proper wings again, feathers you can stroke, feathers I can give Zoe and Maggie.” She cried then, in joy rather than sorrow.
Later, they looked out over their ruined city. At least seventy percent of the buildings had been badly damaged or fully destroyed. Even the Tower hadn’t escaped unscathed, but the Legion building hadn’t suffered a scratch.
It hurt Elena’s heart to look at it, but she would keep her promise. She would keep it safe for when the Legion returned. Beings that ancient couldn’t simply cease to exist.
Raphael’s hand closed over hers, warm and strong.
“What happens now, Archangel?”
“We walk into the future.”
“Together.”
“Always.”
Aftermath
Elena took to wearing capes to protect her sensitive stubs. Illium—still so angry underneath his joie de vivre—thought it a grand idea and bought a rhinestone-covered silver one that threatened to turn them all blind. He just laughed and swirled it around like a B-movie villain.
Elena stuck with hunter black.
Capes were suddenly all the rage in their battered city.
The itching made her want to crawl the walls, but there was too much to do. Raphael rubbed in the oil and they carried on. Life carried on. They’d been lucky, so fucking lucky. All of their closest friends and family had made it out alive. In honor of their victory and because it was a name from Nyree’s family, Ransom and Nyree finally settled on a middle name for their son: Viktor.
Hudson Viktor Winterwolf.
Big name for a little dude, but Elena had a feeling the kid would grow into it. As for the other newborn in their world, Riker told them Michaela had named her son Gavriel, after her father. Little Gavriel was safe with Keir, loved and protected, his parentage hidden. So many angels had died in battle that no one questioned it when Keir said he was raising a war orphan.
In other news, Galen and Naasir had returned to the Refuge, while Aodhan was with Suyin as her temporary second.
“I must give him this chance to spread his wings,” Raphael had said.
Every so often, as time passed, a kind of dawn-colored lightning would arc through Elena’s growing wings, far weaker than the Cascade power, but lightning all the same.
No one had any idea what that meant, though Keir had a theory. “You are the only living angel whose heart is formed of archangelic cells. A piece of you is an archangel. And when it ended, the Cascade left behind gifts in all of the archangels who were not already Ancients.”
Elena truly didn’t care as long as her wings kept growing. Illium outpaced her, but she’d expected that. Bluebell might not have ascended at the end of the Cascade, but his power was growing so strong that it frightened her for what it augured for his future.
When it came to her, Lucius told her that her cells were “almost” back to angel-normal. “Except for the odd glowing one. But Raphael has a few, too, so you’re still compatible.”
The meaning of his words didn’t really penetrate until Nisia called them into her office a month later, after Raphael had returned from helping Titus deal with the reborn problem in his massive territory. It wasn’t an issue that would be solved quickly, but all of the Cadre who were up and functional were helping each other out.
“Do you remember what I said about the super-parasite?” the healer asked.