Raphael went to heal the cut, but his healing energy had flatlined. Teeth gritted together, he tightened his grip on her bench. Elena was a blooded hunter who’d helped bring a mad and murderous archangel to justice. Wounds were a part of her life—but he didn’t like the look of that cut. It was too raw and deep, as if it had been newly taken; however, she hadn’t done it since his arrival.

Which meant it should’ve begun to heal at the very edges at least. Because while Elena was an infant in immortal terms, she’d already developed better healing abilities than a mortal.

Yet as he watched, she accidentally stretched the wound while reaching for a seedling on the far side of the bench . . . and a fine droplet of blood welled out over the edge.

7

“Elena, we must clean this cut.” Raphael didn’t wait for her to respond, instead tugging her to the tap she’d had installed in one corner of the greenhouse, on the far edge of the as yet unplanted garden she’d filled with rich black soil.

“Do you remember when you might’ve cut it?” he asked as the water washed off the blood, the light pinkness of it soon disappearing into the soil of her garden.

“No.” Elena stared at the small wound. “It looks too fresh.” Scowling on the heels of her words, she shook her head. “We’re probably just being paranoid because of the Cascade restart.” She pulled her sleeve down over it. “Let’s check it again when we go inside.”

Raphael wanted to order a healer to fly here at once, but Elena was correct. It was only a cut. A thing shrugged off by even the smallest mortals day after day.

Elena had returned to her bench, Raphael standing a short distance away, when the door to the greenhouse opened.

Illium’s golden eyes took in the tableau, and he hesitated on the doorstep. Conscious of the turbulence that held the younger angel in thrall, Raphael said, Come, Illium, at the same time that Elena glared. “In, and shut the door, or you’ll let out all the warmth. Then I’d have to murderize you for killing my plants.”

“You break my heart, Ellie.” The silver that edged the blue of Illium’s wings glinted in the light as he walked over to the tray and poured himself half a mug of coffee. There were extra drinking vessels, of course. Montgomery knew far too well that Elena’s greenhouse was a beacon that called to many far and wide.

“I’ve just returned from the sinkhole,” the angel said after throwing back the coffee and putting the mug aside with a sigh of satisfaction. “No change.”

While the report was appropriate and welcome, Raphael knew the real reason Illium had flown here rather than to his home in the Tower. Elena’s Bluebell adored her, and it was to her that he would speak things he wouldn’t speak even to Raphael. And tonight was the one-year anniversary of Aodhan’s return to the Refuge.

The angel who was Illium’s closest friend had asked to be resettled at the Refuge for a short period in the aftermath of his sister’s giving birth. The pregnancy had been a shock to the entire angelic community—angelic births were rare in the extreme, and Aodhan’s sister was young, comparatively speaking. The shock had been magnified when two other angels fell pregnant three months and six months later, respectively.

But after the shock had come a great celebration, the children to come even more cherished in the face of the battle losses resulting from Raphael’s fight against Lijuan, as well as the piercing loss of five angels in the prime of their lives due to Charisemnon’s plague. Angels had fallen from the skies that day, to smash into buildings and onto streets, the horror of the Falling one no immortal would ever forget.

Aodhan’s sister had given birth to a healthy baby boy.

Though Aodhan wasn’t close to his sibling—she’d been seven hundred years of age when he was born—he’d wanted to be there for her as she and her lover settled into their new lives as parents. “I think I would like to be an uncle,” he’d confessed. “My sister feels the same. She does not wish me to be a stranger to her child as she and I are to one another.”

In turning his wings toward the Refuge and the infant angel of his familial bloodline, Aodhan had left behind a city he loved, and a blue-winged angel with whom his relationship had undergone a seismic shift in the years since he first came to New York.

“I spoke to Aodhan before the earth tremor,” Illium said at that instant. “He was babysitting his nephew while his sister and her mate had time alone.”

“That baby is criminally adorable.” Elena’s attempt at a scowl turned into a fascinated smile. “I can’t get over those tiny transparent wings stuck to his skin. It’s almost as if they’re a tattoo on his back, an imprint of where his true wings will grow.” A pause before she added, “Though, yeah, I can see how giving birth would be a freaking horror show if babies were born with actual wings.”

Illium laughed at her shudder.

Raphael’s own lips twitched. “The bones will harden over time,” he told her, having witnessed the transition in the periods he’d spent standing watch in angelic nurseries as a young angel. “Feathers won’t begin to grow for two or more years, and even then, they will be baby feathers so fine as to appear to be fluff.” Angelic children took a long time to become capable of flight, their wings growing apace with the development of their minds.

“My mother often thanked the heavens I didn’t gain the ability to fly as a toddler,” Illium offered. “Apparently I was a walking, babbling emissary of impending disaster. Wings would’ve been the final straw.”

Grinning, Elena picked up the mug of coffee Illium had just refreshed for her. “Did Aodhan send you any new pictures?”

Illium nodded and began to reach for his phone. That was when Elena’s mug smashed to the floor in a pungent stain, Raphael’s consort doubling over with her hand pressed against her chest.

The pain was a spiky ball of razor-sharp knives inside Elena’s chest, the hand she pressed over the spot doing nothing to ease the agony. She couldn’t even cry out, her voice stolen and red spots dancing in front of her eyes. Shivers wracked her body.

She clung to Raphael when he swung her up into his arms and laid her down on her back on the floor of the greenhouse. Her wings would be filthy, she found herself thinking through the haze of red, as Raphael tugged away her hand from the top left of her chest and placed his own on it.

His expression went rigid, his wings limned with light, and she knew his healing energy hadn’t regenerated. Before she could attempt to reach out with her mind and tell him . . . something, the pain drained away as hard and as fast as it had hit.

The vacuum it left behind howled with emptiness.

Sucking in a breath, and conscious of Illium crouching beside her, his face stark, she wrapped her hand around Raphael’s wrist. The strength of his bones, the warmth of him, the beat of his pulse, it anchored her. “It’s gone,” she murmured in a voice roughened by screams she hadn’t vocalized.

“You’re certain?” A harsh archangelic demand. “No residual pain?”

“I feel bruised, but that’s it.” As if she’d imagined the terrible, overwhelming agony. “Did I just have the angelic version of a heart attack?”

“Angels don’t have heart attacks.” Raphael helped her up into a seated position, and when Illium wove his fingers through her free hand, he didn’t object.

“Ellie.” Illium’s hand clenched on hers, his left wing slightly overlapping her own. “What was that?”

“No idea, Bluebell.” When she described the sensations, neither her archangel nor Illium had any answers for her.

“Come.” Raphael’s voice held no room for argument. “We will go inside and contact Keir.”

Elena’s face flushed. Her heart pounded like a hammer. She wanted to say that it had been nothing, but burying her head in the sand wouldn’t make the bewildering assault on her body disappear. The dark existed whether you looked at it or not. She’d known that since she was ten years old, since she’d shut her eyes and pressed her hands over her ears and hoped the monster would go away.

He hadn’t. He’d slaughtered her older sisters and forever broken her mother.

Night after night, long after the monster was vanquished, she’d heard Belle’s dying breath.

Night after night, she’d slipped and fallen in Ari’s blood.

And night after night, she’d seen her mother’s broken arms and legs dragging on the floor as she tried to crawl to her dying children.

“Pretty hunter. Pretty, pretty hunter. I’ve come to play with you.”

Slater Patalis’s singsong voice was a horror Elena carried in her soul and would to her last days, but it hadn’t surfaced for the past two years, her sleep free of that nightmare at least. It seemed tonight was her lucky night, complete with ghost owls and being stabbed by knives inside her own body.

“Sire.” Illium’s cheekbones cut white against the golden hue of his skin. “I’m meant to relieve Dmitri at the Tower within the half hour.”

“Go—and send Nisia here,” Raphael said. “Elena will tell you the outcome.”

She loved Raphael impossibly more for that, for understanding that, right then, Illium needed to know the people he loved were safe. He was having a hard time with Aodhan so far out of reach, the two yet struggling to come to a balance in their relationship—Illium had become used to being the stronger one in the partnership, the one who looked after a badly traumatized Aodhan. But Aodhan was coming out of his shell, and the man he’d become wasn’t the boy Illium remembered.

The blue-winged angel walked out of the greenhouse with them, taking off in a wash of wind that flicked up snow into the air in firefly sparks. Normally, Elena would’ve stood on the cliff edge and watched him fly across to Manhattan. She didn’t think she’d ever become jaded enough to not appreciate the sight of an angel in flight.

Tonight, however, she kept her hand linked to Raphael’s, and the two of them walked directly to the study entrance into the house. “Take off your boots,” she said at the doorway.