Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Not the most enthusiastic offer—but Elena knew her friend. Greta would fight to the death to protect Phoenix. She’d also talk to him as she worked, and if he fussed, she’d pick him up and rock him. Because Greta, for all her rigid facade, was kind to small children and animals.
“You don’t have to,” Elena said. “I know you don’t like babies.” She wasn’t about to put her friend in an awkward position. “Nisia’s happy to have him in the infirmary with her as long as they’re not overrun. Dmitri and Honor, too, if they’re in the Tower at the time.”
Elena’s Guard, the Legion, they’d all step in if necessary—but it was a case of who among the team knew how to handle an angelic baby this young. “Do you even know anything about babies?”
Greta rolled her eyes. “Yes.” A pause. “Tell anyone and I will call you a liar to your face, but a very long time ago, I was a child minder for angelic families.”
Elena’s mouth dropped open. “You’re lying. You told me you ate children during your witch phase.”
“Oh, be quiet.” Laughter in those bright green eyes. “And give me the child. He is my best friend’s baby. Of course he’ll stay with me. Don’t forget to leave him milk so I can feed him.”
That was how Greta ended up with a special bassinet that was lifted off the floor and designed so she could rock it using one foot as she worked at her desk—while also being able to look down and engage with Nix when he was awake. Elena hadn’t given her that rocking bassinet; Greta had ordered it all on her own.
As she had the mobile that hung over the bassinet, full of soft-to-the-touch animals and fuzzy things that the baby loved to grab at when he was awake.
One day, Elena walked into the office while Greta was looking down at Nix, and heard her friend talking to him in the softest, sweetest voice she’d ever heard from Greta. “Yes, I know you’re a smart boy,” Greta was saying. “Charming too. But I’m immune, so don’t even try it.”
But she then picked Nixie up for a cuddle.
Elena slid out of sight before Greta saw her; her friend…her best friend…deserved her secrets. Because with Nixie’s birth had come an opening in Elena’s scarred soul that allowed her to embrace Greta’s friendship to its greatest extent.
I did it, Sara. Finally, I did it.
Tears rolled down her face, the requiem in her heart a forever song to the friend who would always be her sister in every way that mattered.
55
Beloved, I hear a babe crying. A little boy, his tears endless.
Is he in danger, my love?
No, he is safe in the arms of the archangel who loves the child of mortals.
—Cassandra and Qin (In a Dreamscape)
Four years later, a shirtless Raphael rocked their crying baby against his chest as he walked around their Tower suite while an exhausted Elena slept. Their child’s tears broke her heart, but she’d simply been unable to stay awake any longer after countless days of wakefulness.
Raphael had literally thrown her on the bed and pulled a blanket over her. “Sleep,” he’d ordered. “One of us needs to be sane through this. It’s my turn now.”
Even Bengal, the most loyal of friends, was worn-out; he’d been anxious and worried from the start when Nixie began to cry tears of pain and heartbreak.
“You too,” Raphael had ordered. “You need to be rested to protect him.”
Bengal was curled up, snoring, at the small of Elena’s back, his body hidden by her wings.
As they slept the sleep of the exhausted, Raphael walked and talked to their distressed child. “It’ll be all right, Nixie.” He spoke the words into his son’s mind at the same time. “I know it hurts, but Papa has you.”
His son clung to him with tiny fists, his face scrunched up as he struggled to deal with the pain that came from the wings that had begun to strengthen and take on more solid form at his back.
“I didn’t know it was like this for babies,” Elena had said to him the first night after it began, her voice full of her own tears. “Mine just itched like mad.”
“It is like teething for mortal children,” he’d told her. “He will have no memory of it, and we have ways to ease him through it. Remember, Elena-mine, in mortal terms, he is only a few months old.”
But though they’d used the soothing balm, their poor babe was inconsolable. Nisia, Raphael said into his healer’s mind, are you sure there is nothing else to be done for Phoenix?
I’m sorry, sire. I have checked, and there is nothing wrong with him except that he is as stubborn as his parents and infuriated by this pain he cannot stop.