Page 89 of Archangel’s Lineage

Marduk’s smile gave nothing away, his eyes that of the creature that marked his skin. “The current time, the current history of angelkind? It doesn’t even begin to compare to the age of the old ones. They began with the dawn of this world, and they ended with the dawn of yours.”

A riddle? Or the absolute truth?

“Where do you consider yourself to fall?” he asked, curious. “In the old world or the new?”

Marduk turned to watch a wing of angels take off from the Tower. From this distance, they were dots against the sky, but their aerial finesse couldn’t be missed—they flew as a disciplined team, one large shadow angel with a single goal.

“That’s Illium’s wing.” Each wing had a different style, and Illium’s was as quick, sharp, and innovative as the angel himself. “Aegaeon’s and Lady Sharine’s son. You’ve met him—golden eyes, blue wings.”

Marduk’s smile spread until it was full-out laughter, his face lit with humor. The sound was deep, wild, of a creature too big for this world. “Ah, now I understand why the hotheaded blue-haired one wishes to rip you to shreds. But why is Titus so sanguine?”

“Because Lady Sharine would rather shoot out Aegaeon’s eyeballs than ever again touch him.” Raphael enjoyed the image; watching Illium’s once-broken mother, a woman who’d nurtured Raphael at his most wounded, come further into her power with every year that passed was a privilege.

“For such as her, even my impatient mate will sit still for a portrait.” He stared out at the gleaming steel of Manhattan. “I wonder what my consort will think of this world when the time comes. I will dare her wrath and wake her for a few years before we return to our Sleep.”

“We’ll need you until we get a permanent ninth,” Raphael pointed out.

Marduk shrugged. “What will that take? Five or six hundred years at the most? Lady Sharine’s child has within him the seeds of ascension. If you say you do not feel it, I will call you a liar, blood of my line.”

“We all feel it,” Raphael confirmed, his chest tight. “We just hope it’s not too soon. The forces of ascension would tear him apart. I barely survived and I was a thousand years old. Illium’s only just passed the half-millennium mark.”

“Hmm.” Marduk continued to stare out at the glittering skyline of his city. “Come, young blood, let us search for the piece of the Compass that belongs to you.” With that and no answer as to whether he fell in the old timeline or the new, he snapped out his wings in a leathery silence eerie and alien.

Raphael’s own opened with a soft susurration.

They were halfway across the Hudson when he saw Elena heading toward them. She’d changed into her flying leathers, complete with a jacket that covered her arms and sealed around her neck. Wildfire arced over her wings in a silent lightning strike.

Raphael was expecting commentary from Marduk, but he said nothing. Not then, and not when they landed on the Tower roof. Instead, he walked to the edge from which they could see the Legion building. “I sense their hearts within.” A murmur made in that voice unlike any other, a roughness of crushed stone touched by emotion. “I would be pleased to see my Legion again.”

He moved his head in that characteristic motion he had, slow but intense. Looking past Raphael, he stared at Elena. “You can help search for the blade.”

“Me?” Elena frowned. “From what Raphael’s just told me, I thought only archangels could recognize it.”

“You have some of my cells in your body, hbeebti.”

“Enough?”

Marduk shrugged. “We won’t know until we make the attempt.”

But though they searched nonstop for the next three days, there was no sign of anything even similar. Raphael’s territory just wasn’t old enough. His mother, however, had retrieved hers from Neha’s throne, Titus had taken his from his crest, and Elijah had discovered his in Hannah’s art studio.

“I was using it as a palette knife,” a mortified Hannah had confessed to Elena. “To my eyes, that’s all it was. I felt no compulsion to hand it to Elijah.”

“Of course not,” Marduk said when Elena passed on that piece of information. “She is his consort. The piece knew it could pass into his hand when needed. There was no urgency.”

Elena remained uncomfortable with Marduk, the age of him making her teeth ache, but he also reminded her of her beloved Legion. “You speak of these Compass parts as if they’re sentient.”

No smile, those dragonish eyes looking at her with unblinking focus as he said, “Perhaps the metal is not metal at all. Perhaps it is the blood of the Ancestors frozen in time.” Even as that unnerving idea made her shiver, he smiled. “Or perhaps I am amusing myself.”

“I’m not sure he wasn’t telling the truth the first time around,” she grumped to Raphael later that night, after another unsuccessful search through every archive available to them—including in the homes of old angels who lived in the territory.

The latter would’ve been an unlikely place to find the Compass part anyway, since it was meant to be located close to an archangel, but they’d run out of options. Even as they fought to think of any other place they could search, they got word from Zanaya.

I have it, she wrote in a message sent to the Cadre. Discovered it in my weapons chest. My second tells me she found it somewhere in the fort and thought it was perfect for me and placed it there—and then she forgot to talk to me about it. She never forgets anything. What are these cursed objects?

Elena was in sympathy with Zanaya. An item that could always find you? “What is that if not straight out of a horror film?” she said to Illium as the two of them stood on a Tower balcony late that afternoon, after another fruitless day of searching.

“It is simply power.”

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