Page 48 of Archangel’s Lineage

Raphael agreed. “Titus will keep on trying—he’s in the Refuge right now.” Sharine, the Hummingbird, watched over his lands in the interim, her own deputy taking over her duties as the Guardian of Lumia in the short term.

“I’m sure half of the ingrates in my territory wouldn’t notice if I keeled over dead in front of them,” Titus had said last time they’d met. “For my Shari, though? Oh, only the best china will do.

“Tea will be made in the middle of the savanna exactly how she likes it, and oh, but we must stay for sweetmeats.” He’d beamed with pride. “Even the worst vampires behave better with her in the vicinity.”

The latter was the critical point; Sharine’s presence, backed up by Titus’s warriors, would keep the southern half of Africa stable while he was away for an extended period.

It also helped that Titus was good friends with his neighbor, Zanaya; she’d offered to do regular flights over his territory to remind any troublesome vamps that while Titus might be gone, the land wasn’t free from archangelic oversight.

However, trouble was unlikely to arise. Titus had dealt with a huge reborn problem post-war. His people were in rebuilding and nesting mode.

No one had time to waste on bloodlust or uprisings.

“One vampire who recently showed signs of bloodlust was summarily thrown down a well by his friends and told to stay there until he snapped out of it,” Titus had shared with a huge laugh. “Otherwise he was welcome to eat his own face.”

But even bighearted and genial Titus had stopped laughing these past days of failure after failure to find anything close to an answer to the fracturing of the planet—or the unprecedented retreat of the Mantle. That the two were connected was clear, but how was anyone’s guess.

Beside him, Andreas frowned. “I asked my great-grand-many-times-over uncle about the Mantle. I have no idea how old he is, but he was old when Lady Caliane was a child, he tells me. But he had no knowledge of it.”

“Jessamy consulted him, too.” The grand-sire in question had only woken four years earlier, and had—by his own admission—been enticed to stay awake with stories of a mortal turned angel. “He tried his best, but he cannot tell us what he never knew.”

“I’ll keep searching. We all will.”

Raphael clapped Andreas on the shoulder, and they stood in silence for long minutes, watching the sun rise higher in the sky. “You are ready. It’s time for me to fly home.”

“Good journey, sire.” Andreas went down on one knee, in this moment a warrior to his liege rather than battlemate with battlemate.

Raphael took off in a steep vertical rise, carrying in the pocket of his dusty and worn jerkin a copper-colored rock with veins of shimmering gold that he’d found in one of the vast deserts of this island continent. He’d give it to Elena to put in her greenhouse.

She liked to tuck small natural treasures inside that space.

Afterward, he’d hold her as he hadn’t been able to during one of the worst times in her life. His heart hurt in ways he’d never believed it could hurt before he fell bloody and bleeding with a dying mortal in his arms.

30

Beloved, the weight is too great. They will fall. And all beginnings will come to an end. I see this in the river of time.

I cannot rise to help them. I cannot walk again without you. Do not ask this of me. I will go mad, become a monster ravening.

No, my heart. This I do not ask of you. But oh, the child of mortals worries. Her heart aches.

Why do you love her so?

In that one lives an understanding of loss and eternity that is a quiet shadow of our own. She has loved and still loves those who cannot walk into time with her. She has lost sisters. As have we. She will mourn forever, as we mourn.

Your heart ever holds small creatures close.

Not so small this child of mortals. Not so small at all. I would see her grow. I would see her become. And so I will meddle once more.

Always your greatest sin, my love.

Oh, how you make me laugh, even if only in my dreams.

Tell me of your meddlesome plans.

No living archangel can wake a Sleeper, that is our law. But... there is no law against one Sleeper awakening another... What say you to the one of whom I dreamt yesterday?

Him? That one is a breath away from being an Ancestor. He will burn down this world.

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