Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121854 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121854 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Finally reunited in New York, they must now learn to navigate the monumental shift in their relationship. But for these two members of Archangel Raphael’s legendary Seven, there is no time to rest. As they investigate a case for the Tower that echoes the darkness from Aodhan’s past, they will be forced to confront not only the scars that mark them both, but the promise of a vast power that flickers in Illium.
The threat of ascension has haunted and troubled Aodhan’s Blue for too long, the forces of change immutable and without mercy...and uncaring of Illium’s fierce wish to remain part of the Seven. Change is a constant in an immortal’s life, and this new horizon will bring with it both terrible heartbreak and a joy extraordinary enough to reverberate through time…
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Today
1
Illium swept past the sleek skyscraper that pierced the white clouds of an early spring day, so close that his wing threatened to brush against black glass tough enough to withstand an angelic strike. It made sense that the innovation had come about in New York—born in the mind of a mortal who had been “sick and tired” of angelic battles leveling his beloved city.
No building, not even the most reinforced, would survive should an archangel turn their ire on it, but archangels had armies for a reason. War was fought on many fronts, and that mortal, his name and history immortalized in the records kept in the Refuge, had given New York a critical advantage: its buildings would not fall easily in any engagement, would instead provide cover for counterstrike after counterstrike.
As it was, in the hundreds of years since the invention of this new material, New York had come under only the mildest of attacks—in all cases as a result of Illium’s asshole of a father being pissy that his son would rather serve another archangel. But even Aegaeon hadn’t had the heart for a true war, so New York hadn’t fallen again since the end of the War of the Death Cascade. But why be stupid and arrogant? Better to build ever tougher.
A tall woman with striking facial bones ran to a window of the skyscraper to wave at him. He dipped his wings in acknowledgment. She’d worked in that corner office for half a decade, was a senior associate as of two years ago, and her face still lit up every single time he flew past. Because she was family. Part of the clan that Catalina and Lorenzo had created when they fell in love countless mortal lifetimes ago.
The most extraordinary thing of it all was that his beloved friends’ little bakery in Harlem had survived the inexorable passage of time. The home of the city’s famous angel-wing alfajores thrived still in that old building where the recipe had first been born—a building that had never lost its warm heart, no matter how often it’d been repaired and renovated. Because every generation of Catalina and Lorenzo’s family birthed a passionate baker who wanted to carry on their legacy.
Illium had purchased the entire block piece by piece to ensure the little bakery would always have a home, that it’d never be forced out by progress or simple change. Harlem might morph and alter around it like a chameleon forever in flux, but even when that part of the city had gone dangerously gray for a period, become the haunt of vampiric excess and mortal pain, no one had dared come for the bakery.
The entire city knew that it sheltered beneath wings of a vivid, unmistakable blue veined with fine filaments of silver.
Using those wings to ride the air currents coming off the ocean, Illium flew through the crisp bite of spring. It whispered of snows not long past, was even more acute in the fine mist that kissed his skin as he rose through the clouds to fly at a higher elevation.
Other skyscrapers speared through the clouds around him, and lush floating habitats appeared to sit atop the puffy white, but none came close to the soaring wonder of Raphael’s Tower. The tallest point in the sky at any given time, built to offer clear lines of sight in every direction, it, too, had undergone many an iteration over the passage of time, but always, always it had been a beacon of power and light. No black glass for the Tower, its body a steel gray that glittered with metallic highlights. The windows were reflective at the top levels, the levels that would be the most important in any battle, and they intensely annoyed Illium the man, who was as curious as his pet cat.
First General Illium, however, well understood their facility and had been part of the team that had designed the Tower when it came time for a new build. He’d also made sure the entire building was technologically connected in ways unlike that of any other archangelic stronghold in the world. The one thing that had never changed, however, was the waterfall of railingless balconies from which angels took flight.
He caught sight of a pair of wings opening up in flight just then. Feathers the shade of dark mahogany, hair a touch lighter, the flight form of a warrior.
Andreja.
Seven and a half millennia of age or so—she’d forgotten her actual birthing day eons ago—she wore the amber of an angel far younger than her. She, who’d vowed never to lock herself to one lover. But even tough and battle-scarred Andreja wasn’t proof against Laric’s patient determination. When she’d told the healer he was too young to tie himself to her, he’d simply waited her out.