Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 112287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Her city, soft in the morning light, nonetheless pulsed with life. When she spotted a bunch of kids at a neighborhood basketball court jumping up and down and waving at her, she swept down to dip her wings—close enough that she heard their cheers and raucous joy.
The interaction made her day as much as it made theirs.
Only minutes later, she’d just entered her and Raphael’s suite when her phone lit up with an incoming call from her archangel. Emotion roared over her. “Raphael.”
“Hbeebti, I would see you.”
“Wait, let me patch the call onto our big screen. Where are you?” The signal was clearer than it had been during their previous conversation.
“A small communications center on the far western edge of Australia.”
Thanks to Vivek’s lessons, it took her mere seconds to get the feed up onto the screen. Her archangel wore faded leathers of deep brown, his ceremonial sword visible over one shoulder, against the arches of wings held with warrior control. The two of them raised their hands in unspoken harmony, touching their fingers to their personal screens.
“I miss you,” she said, her voice cracking on the words.
The blue flame of his eyes blazed, as did the Legion mark on his temple. So much wildfire in the lines of the dragon that her breath caught in a hope painful. Until this unexplained resurgence, she hadn’t seen the luminous white-gold, its edges iridescent with midnight and dawn, since the war . . . where the Legion had laid down their lives to save the world.
You are in our memory, they’d said in some of the last words they had ever spoken. The aeclari of the Death Cascade. The aeclari who . . . loved us.
“I dream of you.” Raphael’s voice was gritty, his jaw a rigid line. “I sleep but an hour here and there, but when I do, I dream only of you.”
Her skin felt too tight, her emotions too big for it to contain. “Did you hear about the quakes?”
“Yes.” He thrust a hand through his hair. “Jessamy joined us at a Cadre meeting held an hour ago, as did several other learned scholars, but none of them have discovered anything useful.”
A message bubble popped up on the side of the screen. It was from Vivek: I found a weird thing that might be important.
Forehead creasing, she told Raphael of the message. “I can put him on the call with us.”
Raphael gave a quick nod.
A surprised Vivek was on a split screen with Raphael half a minute later. “Archangel Raphael,” he managed to get out, coughing to clear his throat.
“What did you find, Vivek?” Raphael said.
“I’ve been running searches on any literature I can find, even things labeled myths and legends. I figure history gets old enough, it starts turning into story.” He carried on when neither one of them interrupted. “This came up in a book of myths said to originate in ancient Egypt. It’s about the gods they used to worship.”
Elena wasn’t startled at the mention of gods. Regardless of the immortals among whom they lived, all human civilizations had gods, the need driven by the belief that there had to be more in this universe than what they could see and experience.
Elena understood that, believed the same. The idea that her mother and sisters were just gone when they stopped breathing wasn’t one she was ever going to accept. Her hand fisted, her mind awash in memories of the dreams in which her mother spoke to her; she wanted to believe that was Marguerite’s soul, reaching out to her from beyond the veil.
“What does your myth say?” she asked Vivek.
“It talks about a ‘great unraveling’ due to the actions of a particular god—what little I managed to unearth of this being makes it clear they were considered a dark god.”
Vivek’s face vanished, to be replaced by a set of Egyptian hieroglyphs. A glowing circle appeared around one: an eye with a red center. It had nothing in common with the protective Eye of Horus except that both depicted the same organ. This eye had a starburst pupil of black within the red of the iris, fine red veins crawling outward from it. No eyebrow, nothing to soften the pulsating stare.
“Dramatic,” Elena muttered. “A bloody evil eye.”
Vivek’s face reappeared. “Exactly. Anyway, the myth states that the evil act or entity—I can’t quite tell which—was so terrible that it caused the earth to shake and splinter, until empires fell and civilizations were lost, and the world had to begin again. It ends with a homily about watching for evil so that we don’t lose eternity. It isn’t much.”
“But it has the earth shakes”—Raphael spread his wings, his eyes narrowing—“and we did recently experience a great evil. Keep digging.”
“Sire,” Vivek said, and logged out, leaving them alone once more.
“Lijuan?” Making a face, Elena folded her arms. “I mean, she was evil, but powerful enough to cause all this? I can’t see it, not when we defeated her.”