Page 54 of Archangel’s Lineage

“While I have you and Sara.” Elena nodded in a jagged motion. “I’m pretty sure he’s never even really talked to Gwendolyn about the entirety of it. I saw the look on her face one day when we were discussing something—I can’t remember exactly what, but it was bad, and I had the sudden thought that she didn’t know. He’d never told her.”

“Has she ventured any views on the disinterment of your sisters?”

“Only once. Gwendolyn’s always been careful not to push her way into the past, into the life of the family we once had. I don’t know if that’s just how she is, her sense of boundaries, or if it’s because she’s protecting herself from being hurt.”

“Not from you.”

“No,” she said. “We barely interacted before I became involved in Eve’s life. The rare times we did, we were polite to each other—I never had any strong emotional response to her, positive or negative.” That had changed; Elena hugged her stepmother often now, seeing in her a new fragility born of the knowledge that Jeffrey had never loved her as he loved Marguerite.

“What did she say on the occasion she weighed in on the topic of your sisters?”

“She said, ‘If I were to die, and my children had already passed, I’d want to be with them, Ellie. Whatever the choice made for them, I’d want that to be the choice for me, too.’ ” Elena pressed her lips together. “My mother loved her girls.”

“But she also left you,” Raphael said, completing the words she couldn’t say.

“Most of the time, I think I’ve forgiven her, but then I get this hot bite of anger and I want to shake her, make her explain herself.”

Raphael stroked her wing, strong and warm and a man who’d never leave her of his own volition.

Leaning deeper into him, she said, “I think Gwendolyn’s right in what my mama would’ve wanted. And I think Belle and Ari wouldn’t only want the same, but that they’d far rather fly with her than lie in the earth.” Theirs had been a family full of freedom and sunshine, the cold dark foreign to them. “I won’t have graves to visit, but I barely do that now. I’ve always hated thinking of them in the ground.”

“Does Beth have a view?”

Elena smiled, her entire being awash in tenderness. “She’s being the baby sister and saying that she’ll follow my lead.” Her heart ached. “I saw strands of silver in her hair the other day.”

It wasn’t only that Elena had stopped aging. All her scars were gone, her skin healthier than it had ever before been. Beth, in contrast, wore the lines of life on her face, had sun-freckles across her nose, and had complained laughingly of her “bad knees” when she rose from her chair.

Raphael enclosed her in his wing. He knew. He understood. He’d been born an immortal, but his best friend had been a mortal. And though Dmitri had become a vampire, his family hadn’t. Elena didn’t know much about Dmitri’s past, but from how little he mentioned it, she could guess that it had been painful. She’d picked up enough over the years to know that he’d had children.

Children who were now gone.

Children Raphael would’ve known.

As he’d known so many of the people his mother had sung into the sea during her madness.

Yes, her archangel understood what it was to mourn mortal lives.

So they sat here in this quiet forest that was a haven, and he didn’t tell her she wouldn’t one day have her heart broken to pieces by Beth, and she tried to breathe through that truth... until the earth shook.

Hard.

A blue radiance hit the side of Elena’s face at the same instant.

Raphael’s Legion mark wasn’t glowing. It was blazing. White lightning crackled along the lines of the stylized dragon, and then... a pulse of wildfire. Slow, so slow, but a pulse nonetheless.

“It’s as if your mark is echoing the pulse of some great Sleeping creature.” She didn’t know why she spoke those words; maybe Cassandra had whispered them to her beyond her conscious hearing.

“I can feel it,” Raphael said aloud, gritting his teeth as the earth continued to roll around them.

But as fast as it had started, it stopped.

Raphael’s mark blinked out at the same time.

They sat in stunned quiet for a second, the sudden extinction of the glittering blue light making the world feel as if it had gone night-dark. The decision to move was silent, the two of them rising to stand far enough apart that they could take off through the canopy without tangling wings.

Elena’s took her to the sky with ease, well healed now and far stronger than they’d been when she’d first grown them. Vertical takeoffs had seemed an impossibility then, but today she smoothed out into flight beside Raphael without hesitation.

As they were flying too fast to talk, she reached out with her mind. Fly ahead. He could far outpace her. You need to do a damage assessment on the city.

---