The light painted the canvas of her skin but it didn’t stick, her hand unblemished when she drew it back. Sorry, I shouldn’t have done that but I felt so safe. A glance at the owls. I think they know this isn’t harmful.
Raphael sliced his wing through the light. There is energy here. A power. It resonated deep within him. But I sense no malevolence.
The sea aurora was moving steadily toward his city. Dmitri, do you have anything?
Jessamy just found a reference to a “dream of light and color over the ocean.” It’s in an ancient text that vaguely mentions Cassandra—Wait. Thirty seconds passed. Here’s the quote: “And in that dream of light and color over the ocean danced the seer’s wings. The two are ever entwined and never together. One of light and dreams, the other of blood and prophecies.” Make sense to you?
I’m afraid it might.
Elena, now close to him, said, “Why the look?”
He told her what Dmitri had just said and watched her work it through. A tiny frown dug its way between her brows. “One of light and dreams, the other . . .” A widening of her eyes. “Shit. Another waking Ancient?”
“That seems to be the unavoidable explanation.”
“Fuck.”
“Yes.” Aegaeon had stirred in Astaad’s territory, Cassandra was in a fitful Sleep at best, and now this. “For the time being, however, it doesn’t appear to be dangerous. I will allow our people to view it as long as they follow the squadron’s orders.”
Angelic silhouettes lifted up from roofs and balconies and streets all over the city as Elena and Raphael flew back. A number of seacraft began to chug their way toward the light.
Dmitri and Venom were waiting on the Tower roof and Raphael angled that way, Elena beside him. The snow on the roof softened the sound of their landing, and the light, when they turned to look back at it, remained as beautiful and as eerie.
Venom came to stand beside Elena, Dmitri beside Raphael.
“I took a call while Dmitri was talking with Jessamy.” Venom slipped his hands into the pants pockets of his deep gray suit. “It was from Charisemnon’s second.” His lip curled up at the mention of the archangel who’d caused the Falling, crashing angels to the ground all over New York. “Images of the light phenomenon have already spread around the world. He called to ask if we believed an archangel was waking.”
Raphael spread his wings, closed them with slow deliberation. “That’s a highly specific question.”
“I pointed that out. Response was that a remote lake in their region has just frozen over—within it are millions of translucent bubbles, the colors intimately similar to our aurora over the sea.” He passed across his phone. “Pure luck anyone found it—a senior angel decided to take the long way home.”
“Wow again,” Elena said.
“Indeed.” The water was a glossy sheet, the bubbles below pristine and perfectly formed. Air caught in ice. “Do they know if this occurred at the same time as the sea aurora?”
A shake of Venom’s head. “I got the impression they discovered it a couple of days ago, but kept it quiet.” No surprise in his tone at such behavior from Charisemnon’s court.
“I can see why they think the two incidents are connected.” Elena handed back Venom’s phone. “Those are distinctive colors in the bubbles and in the light.”
“How many Ancients can the world sustain?” Dmitri folded his arms across his chest. His black shirt rippled in the cool wind coming off the water in the distance.
“We are currently nine. The tenth should be an archangel not an Ancient, but the world will not break if we are three Ancients.” He seemed to recall a long-ago history lesson in Jessamy’s classroom that mentioned a Cadre with three Ancients.
“After that, Ancients who awaken will cause major disruption and chaos unless we lose several current members of the Cadre.” Their powers would be too close together, the energies too violent—and the old tended to be set in their ways, not ready for this new world. “It’ll make the Cascade look like a training run.”
Elena sucked in a breath. “That bad?”
“We survived with eleven before because Mother did not want territory and China is so huge that Favashi was far distant from her. We can rely neither on a lack of territorial desire nor geography with any new archangels or Ancients.” His mother was a unique case in not wishing to rule a vast area.
“You’ve seen how much violence two archangels can do in battle.” Raphael and Uram had nearly destroyed New York. “Now imagine that happening between more than two archangels, the battles taking place in multiple locations around the world at the same time.”
Elena’s gaze returned to the sea aurora. “You can be an Ancient and not be an archangel, right?”
“Yes. But any Ancient who awakens with natural phenomena such as this is an archangel.” The light continued to hang over the sea, seeming to ripple in the wind, a gentle music.
Dmitri’s phone rang. He glanced at it. “It’s Rhys.”
A senior general in Neha’s territory.
He stepped away to take the call, returned to say, “Delhi is glowing. Some kind of bioluminescence. Rhys is sending me images.”
“If this is all the same Ancient,” Elena said, “then I kinda like them already. I mean, pretty lights, cool bubbles in a lake, glowing cities, seems pretty mellow to me.”
Raphael stared out at the water, not certain it was all connected to one Ancient. “The bioluminescence strikes me as different from the two water-based phenomena.”
“Rhys has understatement down pat.” Dmitri flipped his phone in their direction.
“It looks like the aliens came and irradiated everything.” Elena whistled through her teeth.
When Dmitri’s phone rang just as he drew it back, Raphael said, “Which second is it now?”
“Not a second but might as well be—it’s that creep, Riker. I don’t know why Michaela keeps him around. He’s a vicious fucker.”
“He’s also viciously loyal to her,” Raphael said as Dmitri stepped away again.
His second just held out his phone when he returned: on it was the image of an old European city, possibly Prague, backed by a sky in which swirled a slow spiral of stars. A new galaxy being born.
It wasn’t the final portent.
By dawn, New York was in the grip of a huge storm that coated the city in ice, and the list had grown to include intricate crop circles in Titus’s land, a rainstorm in Japan that turned the country a bright magenta, large standing rocks erupting out of the earth in Alexander’s territory—some through the floors of buildings—and last but not least, an impossible blooming of wildflowers across frozen Siberia.
If each represented an Ancient—or even simply an archangel . . . Death. It was death.
38
The vortex of ice finally began to thaw seventy-two hours later, but Elena wasn’t breathing easy. Not only had the bitter cold caused a number of deaths, the volcano that shouldn’t fucking exist had blown with a vengeance. Andreas was in charge of disaster cleanup and his people were still counting the dead.
Raphael’s territory wasn’t the only casualty of the wave of catastrophic events.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, had been washed away in floods in India, while plagues of locusts had poisoned countless people in Titus’s and Charisemnon’s territories. A massive landslide in Alexander’s territory had buried a remote village, while a rampant fire had rioted through the ancient city of Xian, China.