Page 69 of Archangel’s Lineage

Sorry. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing as, around them, others exclaimed at the dusting of a substance that was considered more valuable than diamonds by mortals—but that could also be an intimate act among angelkind.

It’s likely one of your Bluebell’s ancestors waking up, was the bad-tempered response as Raphael glared at the final disappearing meters of the Legion building. Dusting another archangel? This one wants war. His Legion mark burned with wildfire as vivid as it had been when the Legion walked the earth.

Elena patted his arm. Or they’re just old and lost control. Be polite. Don’t mention it.

Another burst from the sky—and this time it was rain. Washing away all that precious angel dust. Elena hoped some mortals had been fast enough to scoop up and store a handful. They’d get a pretty penny for it, be able to pay for an entire university education or even buy a house, depending on their haul.

Raphael dropped the bubble. “At least the idiot is polite enough to offer a shower in the aftermath.”

Crisp and cold, the rainburst vanished as quickly as it had come, but it left behind a film of shimmering scales across Manhattan. It was beautiful, Elena had to admit, but then she looked again at the Legion building and felt her heart break.

All these years, she’d held it safe, kept it thriving for the day the Legion would return, only for it to be encased by the massive power of an archangel who had never known the astonishing, eerie, and loyal beings who’d won her heart.

Raphael’s wing brushed over hers before he wrapped an arm around her shoulders to tug her close to his side. “Plants grow again,” he murmured to her. “Your Legion would understand.”

“They weren’t my Legion.”

“In this, they were.” A brush of his lips over her wet hair as they stood there watching the colors of this unknown archangel eat up the last green pieces of the Legion building.

Everything stopped. The world hushed.

And then...

Elena sucked in a breath.

The Legion building was morphing. It was literally twisting into the shape of an enormous snake... No. She frowned. Not a snake. Leaning back, she looked at the mark on Raphael’s temple, then at the wildness taking place where the Legion building had stood. “That’s a freaking dragon.”

Raphael reached up to touch his mark. “It’s pulsing,” he said, staring at the building that was no longer a building but instead a creature out of myth and legend... a creature that echoed the mark on Raphael’s temple.

A mark similar to that found in various places in the Refuge, hidden and old.

A roar of sound as the “dragon” of multihued light took off... leaving the Legion building untouched. It flew high, high, higher, until she had to arch her neck to keep it in sight.

A second later, it turned and dived—straight at Raphael.

Raphael stood his ground, his jaw clenched, was still standing as unmoving as granite when the dragon of light morphed into an angel unlike any Elena had ever seen. He landed hard on the rooftop right in front of Raphael, his landing spawning cracks in every direction along the impermeable surface.

His wings were more like the Legion’s than any other angel Elena had ever met. Leathery and thick, though they were black rather than the Legion’s gray before the beings began to become more differentiated. And the angel’s weren’t wholly leathery. She could see a fine coating of black feathers over the leather. But it seemed to her that those were cosmetic more than anything.

No primary feathers that she could see—no secondary ones, either.

What she could see were gleaming black claws that thrust out from the two top edges of his wings.

His skin was a burnished brown, his hair thick and dark.

He wore sleeveless leathers of a deep bronze.

But that was where his resemblance to other angels ended. His face... She swallowed hard as she took in the right side of his face. Scales iridescent and hypnotic covered that entire side, continuing up into the midnight of hair that reached his nape.

Those scales also ran down his neck to pour across his shoulder and down his right arm, to crawl over the back of his hand and halfway down his fingers before fading off into skin. A single piercing blue eye of fierce paleness looked out from within the scales that should’ve been monstrous but were instead an eerie fascination.

The eye matched the one on his other side, but his face on that side was sharp lines and skin. The split between his two sides wasn’t centered, however. It was more a gradual fading. The scales merged into skin partly along his jaw and across his forehead, blended slightly into his nose.

His lips were just kissed by the scales on one side, softly curved on the other.

He should’ve looked a nightmare.

He didn’t.

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