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)
The entire city was blooming in a dazzling false spring, the thick heat of summer forgotten.
Even the Legion forest wasn’t immune—multiple cherry blossom trees visible on the far edge suddenly burst into bloom, the previously summer-green canopy awash in pink.
“A lovely sky,” Elena said, staring up at the dark blue now riven with delicate veins of bronze, “flowers, bees…someone who likes life?”
“Or,” Raphael said, “someone who likes beauty.”
Elena’s spine tightened. “Michaela?” A mercurial and breathtaking beauty of an archangel whom Elena had never trusted and who had done some terrible things—but who had, in the end, fallen in an effort to save the world from evil.
“There were flowers when she ascended,” Raphael said. “I’d forgotten that. In the Refuge in the depths of winter.”
“Raphael.” Dmitri poked his head out onto the balcony. “Pings from Alexander and Suyin on the Cadre line.” Walking out to join them on the balcony when they didn’t respond, he took in the flower-draped city and whistled. “The Archangel of Budapest is waking up,” he said without hesitation. “That’s going to throw a wrench in the works since Aegaeon is now in charge of that territory.”
“My mother Sleeps and so does Marduk,” Raphael reminded the other man. “There is more than enough territory. I’m more concerned about Gavriel.”
“Damn.” Elena had become used to thinking of the handsome warrior-scholar as Keir’s child, but he had a mother…a mother who’d loved him enough to think of him even as she lay mortally wounded.
“My son. The healer…he will be kind.”
“Keir? You want Keir to be the foster dad?”
“Yes. Tell him…tell him…I did not mean…to leave him. My…son. Protect…”
Some of the last words Michaela had spoken before she’d used her power to blast away most of her own chest in an effort to fight Lijuan’s poisonous infection. Her neck had been barely attached to her body at that point, her bones shattered. No one could ever say that Michaela, Archangel of Budapest, had not acted with courage to the last.
Elena’s womb, in which grew their child, ached for Michaela.
The archangel had left behind a baby, a mere infant, but would be rising to meet a man full grown who’d never known his mother except through stories told to him by Keir and others—including Raphael, who had known Michaela since before her ascension. Most in the immortal world, however, didn’t realize whose blood ran in Gavriel’s veins.
“It’s too much pressure for a child to bear,” Keir had said to them when they visited him in the Refuge. “To be expected to carry the banner for his mother, who fell so heroically in battle. Better to give him a childhood free of such weight, and share the truth of his origins with him after he is of an age when he can decide what to do with that knowledge.”
As it was, Gavriel had never disseminated the facts of his bloodline to the wider populace.
Elena had adored the intelligent, creative, and thoughtful child he’d been, and the affection had been returned.
“Can I be in your Guard, Ellie?” he’d asked, as Sam had once asked.
Holding his tiny hand in hers, she’d thought about what to say. In the end, she’d smiled and tapped him on the nose and said, “Ah, but that’s a conversation I will have with you when you are full grown. Who knows, perhaps you will decide to be an adventurer who doesn’t like being tied down.”
She’d known that having Gavriel in her Guard would be a complicated thing should Michaela rise. The archangel had entrusted Gavriel’s well-being to Elena with her last words, and Elena wouldn’t have the other woman believe that Elena had taken her absence as a chance to “steal” her son.
As it was, they’d fostered Gavriel at the Tower during his youth, considered him one of their own—and later, after a number of frank conversations with him and Keir involved, Michaela’s son had joined Elena’s Guard for two centuries.
“I’m my own man now,” Gavriel had said, his angled jawline set hard. “You did as she asked for her babe, Ellie. Now that I’m grown, she has no voice in my decisions.”
It was the harsh truth, and he’d been right to call Elena on it.
After his time in her Guard, she’d encouraged him to experience other courts and territories, as she’d done with Sam and Izzy as well.
The latter two had returned to her, but Gavriel had landed elsewhere. “I love you, Ellie,” he’d said with one of those rare grins that took him from handsome to breathtaking, “but I’m going to accept Illium’s offer. To help set up an archangel’s first-ever court? It’s going to be a wild ride.”
Elena couldn’t have been happier. Gavriel, scholar and warrior, had a calm that balanced several of the hotter temperaments on Illium’s team—alongside a well-hidden streak of the wild himself that meant he’d worked well with Illium and Aodhan from the time he was a young angel just finding his wings.