Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 118699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 475(@250wpm)___ 396(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 475(@250wpm)___ 396(@300wpm)
When he’d returned to Alexander’s court at last, angelkind knew him not as Rohan, son of Alexander, but as Rohan, weapons-master to an archangel. Alexander’s pride in his son was immeasurable. The boy was all he could’ve ever wanted him to be, the best surprise of Alexander’s life.
He hadn’t loved Rohan’s mother, wasn’t sure he even had the capacity for such love anymore, and their union had been brief. When she’d come to him with news of a child, it had been the shock of a lifetime.
A beautiful shock.
“I wish to come with you, Father,” Rohan had said when Alexander gave him a short debrief prior to leaving with Raphael. “You need people you can trust around you.”
“This is no ambush, son. Raphael isn’t built that way.” Callie’s boy reminded Alexander of himself—perhaps the very reason why he was so irritated by the pup. “And I need you here. I have no idea what I’ll find at my brother’s new home, or how long I’ll be absent. We can’t both be away from the court.”
Rohan, his skin a burnished light brown, the same shade as his mother’s, and his eyes darkest ebony, his wings pale silver that merged into charcoal gray, had acquiesced at last. “I hope the rumors prove to be greatly exaggerated. Scary stories told by frightened mortals. Does the area not have wild cats of various kinds? Perhaps it is those cats that are hunting their children. The creatures have been known to become daring against mortals.”
Alexander hoped against hope that his son was right, but the closer they got to the icy heart of Osiris’s new home, the more his blood began to chill. His brother had chosen a place so remote that even angelkind rarely passed this way. It wasn’t on any of their usual flight paths, and even had it been, Osiris’s home was positioned in the shadow of a huge overhang. That overhang would protect it from the snow and any resulting avalanches, but it also provided a shield against flyers above.
For Raphael to find this . . . well, Caliane’s son had done her proud.
“The residence is smaller than I expected,” he said after the two of them landed silently in the falling snow.
Snowflakes catching on the midnight hue of his lashes, Raphael said, “To have room for a laboratory, it must continue underground. Makes sense in this environment.”
Alexander’s mind stirred, disgorging a long-forgotten conversation about Osiris’s need for a colder place to do his work. The stealth with which Osiris had abandoned just such a space in Alexander’s own territory was now fuel to the cold fire in his gut. Why set up in this desolate place when he’d already had safe access to an environment of constant ice and cold?
Alexander also didn’t like the idea of his brother hiding in the earth. That wasn’t the natural inclination of their kind. They belonged to the air and to the sky. But Osiris had chosen this remote and cold nothingness for a reason.
Dead things could be kept from rotting by such bitter cold.
Alexander’s stomach lurched, a chill nausea threatening to take hold. “Let’s go.” He strode ahead.
Raphael didn’t gainsay his right to be the one to confront Osiris.
Callie’s boy had manners at least.
When he went to push open the door, however, it proved locked. The nausea turned into scalding bile. Because what need did Osiris have to lock a door in this place so far from any other hint of civilization that it was a sprawl of white nothingness?
Unable to speak past the fear that had a stranglehold around his throat, he used a pulse of archangelic power to break the lock.
He expected heat when he walked through the open door, but the inside of the home proved as frigid as the outside. “This isn’t right.”
Angels were built to survive extreme cold, but that didn’t mean it was comfortable. He and Raphael were both dressed in heavy leathers, the insides lined to insulate against a landscape so painfully inhospitable.
Osiris had also lived in the tropics for so long because he didn’t enjoy colder climes. Alexander could still remember how his brother had groaned at the temperature when they’d been scouting a location for him to set up a laboratory in Alexander’s lands. Osiris’s dislike of snow and ice was also why he’d so rarely visited the Refuge after Alexander was no longer a child, far preferring that Alexander come to him and a place “where our nether regions won’t freeze off, brother-mine.”
His older brother’s laughter a ghostly echo in his head, he took in the icicles that dripped off the shelving across the way, the layer of fine ice that glittered in patches on the floor.
Having entered after him, Raphael crouched down to touch his finger to the ice. “It hasn’t set solidly.” Once back upright, he placed a booted foot on the ice and cracks spread outward, the thin shell fracturing to release a trickle of liquid. “This isn’t like the icicles—which I’m guessing formed out of trapped condensation. Water spilled here, began to freeze.”