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)
“I am Raphael,” he said aloud. “You stand in my territory.”
Marduk’s eyes flashed back to their other form, and he looked around with a curious gaze before returning his attention to Raphael. “Why did that impertinent child, Cassandra, wake me?”
He was getting easier to understand now. Either his voice was settling, or Raphael was becoming more used to it. “Lady Cassandra is no child.”
Marduk stared at him again. “I cradled her when she was but an infant and I eons old. She will forever be a child to my eyes.”
Holy shit, Archangel.
Yes.
“You are not an Ancient,” Raphael said with certainty. “Are you one of those we call the Ancestors?”
A quicksilver smile from Marduk that almost made him seem an ordinary angel—but for the rippling scales that shimmered in the sunlight. “No, blood of my line. I am not so old as that.”
Double holy shit.
As always, hbeebti, you have a way with words. Because if this being wasn’t an Ancestor, then what the fuck did angelic Ancestors look like?
Yawning, Marduk stretched, then turned with reptilian suddenness.
To stare at Elena.
“My consort, Elena,” Raphael said, a warning in his tone. This Marduk might be old, but Raphael would allow no trespass.
Marduk held out his scaled hand, palm up. That palm was half-covered in scales.
After a pause where she held his eyes, Elena placed her palm flat on his, and he closed his fingers around her hand with gentleness conscious. “Different,” he said at last. “New. Not blood of my line. Yet . . . marked by my blood.”
He’s sensing your cells in my body, Elena said.
Raphael wasn’t sure what he thought of that, or of Marduk in general, but the angel didn’t appear to be threatening or warlike.
“Elena.” Marduk rolled out her name as if it was a new sound on his tongue. “Why do my Legion dream of you?”
Elena’s hand flexed hard and flat in his. “Are they alive?” she rasped. “Did they make it?”
Marduk tilted his head to the side, as if processing her question. “They are Legion. They are endless. Now, they rest. They heal. They become again.”
A single tear rolled down her face at the confirmation. “They sacrificed themselves in a war against a terrible enemy.”
“That is their duty and why I made them.” His voice was thunder rolled in gravel.
Frowning, he looked at their clasped hands. “They should not feel as angels do . . . and yet, they dream of you.” His eyes, no longer angelic, held hers.
She didn’t blink, didn’t look away. “I love them,” she said simply.
He was the one to blink, his eyes shifting back. “I will know you, Elena, Consort of Raphael,” he said at last, then dropped her hand. “But first”—his attention back on Raphael—“tell me, young child of Marduk, why has Cassandra meddled where even she, that brazen girl, should never go?”
43
To say the next meeting of the Cadre was interesting was an understatement of magnitudes vast. Marduk hadn’t made an appearance onscreen; he insisted on an in-person meeting despite Raphael making it clear that they could use modern systems to communicate far more quickly.
“No,” the archangel had said—for he was an archangel, if one unlike any other. “It must be a meeting in person.”
He wouldn’t elaborate on that, but Raphael had the sense that the man who wasn’t an Ancestor, but might as well have been, wanted to take everyone’s measure. None of the others argued with Raphael’s request for an in-person meeting—likely for the same reason. The searing white sky of Marduk’s awakening had also blanked any and all cameras in the vicinity, so no one who hadn’t physically seen Marduk knew anything of his being.
Even archangels could fall victim to curiosity incurable, and since they were all aware that none of them had the energy for war, there was little to hold them at home. Especially now that the assigned senior angels and vampires had taken Qin’s former territory in hand.
To give everyone time to make arrangements, the meeting was set for the third night hence.
* * *
* * *
Raphael had multiple options for where to hold the meeting of the Cadre, and he was against holding it at his and Elena’s Enclave home—their haven—until he got some wise advice from Sivya.
His cook rarely ever raised her head above the parapet, not because she was anything less than courageous and competent, but because she was content in her work in the kitchens, happiest away from the politics of the archangelic world.
That she heard the tail end of his discussion with Elena about the Cadre meeting was an indication of the trust in which he held both her and her mate, his butler Montgomery. He knew both would lay down their lives rather than betray him or Elena.
So when the slender angel with wings of palest gold placed the tray of savories she’d just baked on the study table, but hesitated after they’d thanked her, he glanced over from the armchair in which he sprawled, his tunic unlaced at the throat and wings allowed to fall as they would.