Archangel's Prophecy

46

Sire. You must wake.

The voice nudged at his consciousness again and again until Raphael stirred. Jason? Scents of old blood and absence in his breath, his chest a heavy ache.

Yes, it’s Jason. You must wake.

Jason was not an angel to say such things without reason.

Shrugging off the heaviness of sleep, Raphael opened his eyes. His wing no longer lay over Elena’s body. Where she’d been was an oval chrysalis. White filaments flowed out from the chrysalis like water, falling over the bed and spreading across the carpet.

When he rose, he had to tear himself from the strands that had flowed over him in his sleep. “Fight, hunter-mine,” he said, not knowing if she could hear him . . . if she’d ever hear him again. “You have always written your own history. Now write ours.”

Sire.

The sharp concern in Jason’s voice got through this time. Reaching out his infinitely more powerful mind to catch the spymaster’s faint whisper, Raphael said, How far away are you? Jason had to be incredibly distant for his voice to be so weak in Raphael’s mind.

I am over the ocean. Perhaps two hours on the wing from Manhattan, his spymaster told him. I took too long to leave—I could not go while there was no news of you or Elena. I intended to fly into Titus’s territory first, pick up any news from there, then fly on to China. Augmented by Raphael’s archangelic strength, his voice came through strong and clear. I have just seen what appears to be an army headed toward New York.

Raphael looked down at his chest. The hole remained, though it was webbed over with wildfire. He hadn’t finished healing, had only half a heart. It seemed appropriate that he would go into battle with only half a heart when he had no Elena by his side.

“I will keep the predators from the door,” he promised her. “Just come back to me.”

Leaving the bed, he washed off any dried blood then dressed in leathers of old and weathered bronze paired with worn-in boots. It wouldn’t do to advertise that he was wounded. That done, he gripped two heavy swords and slid them into crisscrossed sheaths on his back. Archangels rarely fought sword-to-sword when it came to it, but Raphael wanted to be ready for anything.

How long did I sleep? he asked the Primary, for a number of the Legion sat on the balcony, watching through the glass doors.

Four days. We did not allow anyone to interrupt.

Raphael nodded. Protect her. She is your only priority.

He hauled open the doors.

Illium stood on the far edge, swords at the ready and his expression wearing death. When he saw Raphael, he shuddered, his eyes closing for a heartbeat before he raised his lashes again. “Ellie?”

“She fights,” was all he said, and saw Illium’s heart break in front of him. “Come. Jason says an army is heading toward the city.” Chest aching, he lifted up into the air.

Do you believe Lijuan has woken? Raphael asked his spymaster as he and Illium flew seaward.

I cannot see her, but she could be hidden in the mass of the flyers.

I am coming out to you, Jason.

“Sire,” Illium said across the icy winter air between them. “I have alerted the squadrons to join us.”

“Stay with me. Tell the others to follow.”

Illium was one of the fastest angels in the world, could keep pace with Raphael. He didn’t have the endurance of an archangel, but he wouldn’t need it for the distance in question. It still took him effort to stay with Raphael, was one of the few times Raphael had seen the blue-winged angel breathing heavily in flight, beads of sweat rolling down his temples.

They hit the water, New York disappearing rapidly behind them until it wasn’t even a smudge on the horizon, but there was no sign of Jason or of the army he’d warned against.

Jason, where are you?

Heading in your direction. I flew back to see if I could discern anything further.

A risky move, but if anyone could do it, it was Jason. Did you see Lijuan?

No. Favashi is the archangel flying in the center.

Fly toward me as fast as you can, Jason. This is a battle of archangels.

Sire.

His chest straining from the force of the flight, Raphael told Illium what Jason had shared. The blue-winged angel swung down on an air current, riding it to conserve his energy, then swept back up. His wings glittered in the sunlight. The sluggish cloud cover had finally moved, and though the sea would be a chilling embrace for a fallen angel, no snow fell from the sky.

“Sire,” Illium said aloud, the two of them close enough now that they could exchange words again. “What possible reason could Favashi have for mounting an assault against New York? You’ve always had a good relationship with her.”

“She has no rational reason to come at me—and if her spymaster is even half as good as Jason, he must know that my territory is heavily guarded.” Raphael didn’t sit on his laurels; he’d learned from the last battle and fixed the holes in his defenses.

He’d also taken on more warriors. Many of them had been independents to whom he’d had Galen make a personal offer. He’d expected perhaps a quarter to respond—sometimes ennui got to even the best of men, and they felt no impetus to interact with the world. Most eventually slid into Sleep.

The response rate had been seventy-five percent.

It turned out that doing scandalous things like falling in love with a mortal then turning her into an angel, followed by defeating Lijuan in battle, had made New York something of a “fascinating hotspot” to immortals.

Elena’s words.

That their city also had pretzel bars, coffee stations, even burger carts on rooftops—fly-throughs, as some clever human had nicknamed it—was seen as exotic and outlandish and worthy of a visit.

But if the old vampires and angels had originally come to satisfy their curiosity about Raphael’s territory, they stayed because New York had seduced them. More, Elena had seduced them. She didn’t even know she was doing it, but he’d seen the way the old ones watched her—as if she was a new and prized treasure, surprising and unexpected.

Three weeks before it all began to go wrong, he’d seen her offer to take a five-thousand-year-old female warrior to a dance club on a rooftop after the angel mused about not having danced for centuries. The warrior had returned luminous with a renewed sense of excitement about the world, her gaze holding a whisper of the youth she’d once been.

Elena woke people up with her raw zest for life, reminding them what it was to be alive. And now his hunter battled a foe that sought to erase her . . . and Raphael went into battle with her heart cradled inside his, the fragile light of mortality somehow not extinguished by the violent forces in his body.

I see Illium’s wings.

Raphael spotted Jason at the same time that his spymaster’s voice filled his mind. Jason’s black wings were stark against the winter blue sky, his black clothing the same. How far behind you are they? An army could never move as fast as a strong lone warrior.

At least twenty minutes, Jason told him.

The three of them met above the ocean, nothing beneath them but waves that had begun to crash in a pattern that did not reflect the weather. First, he got numbers from Jason about the size of the army; then he asked if Favashi had brought her senior people. A single skilled and powerful fighter could do the same damage as a hundred unskilled warriors.

“That’s the strange thing,” Jason said. “From what I could see, all of those at the leading edge of the formation are Lijuan’s people who stayed behind and joined Favashi’s court.”

“Impossible.” Illium shook his head, the blue-tipped black strands of his hair whipping wildly in the wind that had begun to rise. “Favashi may have accepted those people into her court, but she wouldn’t trust them, not enough for anything like this.”

“I agree,” Jason said, his power a quiet but potent darkness. “But that’s what I saw.”

None of this made any kind of sense.

“I’ll go ahead,” Raphael said to Jason and Illium. “Flank me, but stay back far enough that she can’t eliminate you both with a single strike.”

The two angels nodded.

And Raphael flew toward the approaching army as his grievously wounded heart struggled to beat.