Angels' Flight

1

FOUR HUNDRED YEARS AGO

She had seen empires rise and kingdoms fall, queens come and go, archangels clash in battle and drown the world in rivers of blood. She had recorded the archangel Raphael’s birth; recorded, too, the disappearance of his mother, Caliane; the execution of his father, Nadiel.

She had watched her students take flight century after century, heading out into the world with dreams in their hearts and tentative smiles on their faces. She had read the letters they sent back from far-off lands of primeval forests and drenching rains, endless deserts and unforgiving winds. And she had celebrated the rare, joyful times when they themselves became parents to a little one.

All this she had experienced from the craggy peaks and glimmering beauty of the Refuge, an earthbound angel, her wings never meant for flight. The first thousand years after her becoming had been hard, the second heartbreaking. Now that more than half of the third had passed, and with the specter of another devastating war a stealthy shadow on the horizon, she felt only a bleak acceptance.

“Jessamy! Jessamy!”

Turning from the edge of the cliff where she stood, looking up at a crystalline blue sky she would never touch, she crossed the rocky earth with quick steps to meet the child hurtling toward her, the girl’s wings dragging along the ground. “Careful, Saraia.” She knelt and captured that small, sturdy body dominated by wings of pure chocolate brown streaked with filaments of bronze that glittered under the piercing mountain sunlight.

The bronze echoed the colors of both Saraia’s skin and her hair—messy and tangled around her face, the shiny ribbon her mother had undoubtedly tied with care this morning straggling over her shoulder.

Unfazed, the little girl threw her arms around Jessamy’s neck with loving exuberance. “You have to come!” Flushed cheeks, sparkling eyes, the scent of sticky sweets and shimmering excitement. “You have to see!”

Jessamy had been a teacher of angelic young for more than two thousand years, yet a child’s smile had the power to cascade light, joyful and luminous, over her senses still. Shaking off the melancholy that had cast a heavy weight over her as she watched a flight of angels dive and soar across the jagged, echoing gorge that ran through the center of the Refuge, she pressed a kiss to the plump softness of Saraia’s cheek and rose, taking the child with her.

Saraia’s wings hung over her arm, silken and warm, but the weight was one Jessamy could bear with ease. It was only her left wing that was twisted and useless, an alien ugliness in a place of power and dangerous beauty. The rest of her was as strong as any angel. “What must I see, sweetling?”

Saraia directed her toward the archangel Raphael’s section of the Refuge, and to the area that held the weapons salle and training ground. Jessamy frowned. “Saraia, you know you’re not permitted there.” The risks could be lethal for a baby angel uncertain of her wings and balance.

“Illium said we could stay this one time.” The explanation came out in a rush. “I asked, promise.”

Knowing Illium would never endanger the children, she continued on.

However, it wasn’t the young angel’s distinctive wings of a startling, unbroken blue that she saw when she turned the corner toward the windowless wooden salle and the practice ground of beaten earth in front of it, but the dark gray wings of an angel with a far more muscular body, his stunning hair a red so pure, it was a flame, his hand holding a massive broadsword. Steel clanged as that sword slammed up against one held by Dmitri, Raphael’s second.

Jessamy’s arm tightened instinctively around Saraia’s body.

Dmitri might not be an angel, but the vampire was powerful, the most trusted of Raphael’s advisors. And the most lethal. But this big angel with his wings reminiscent of some great bird of prey’s, white striations visible in the gray when he snapped them out for balance, was taking the vampire on in a brutal session of combat. Feet bare and chests uncovered, their skin gleamed with sweat.

Dmitri had on flowing black pants, while the angel was wearing a garment that reminded her of that worn by the archangel Titus’s men, the rough black fabric around his hips held up by a thick leather knife-belt in the same color, and reaching three-quarters of the way down his thighs. It was only when he moved that she realized the garment was heavy, as if sheets of beaten metal lay behind the first layer of fabric… part of a warrior’s armor, she realized. He’d simply chosen not to wear the metallic breastplate or the arm or leg guards.

It was impossible not to look at those legs, not to watch the flex and release of raw muscle beneath gilded skin covered by a scattering of hair that glinted in the sun. Then he shifted again and her eyes flew to the magnificent breadth of his shoulders, the primal power of him a fiercely controlled thing that birthed a wild, unexpected fascination in her.

“Who,” she said to Illium, when the golden-eyed angel reached over to take Saraia and perch the girl up beside her friends on the fence in front of him, “is that, and why is he antagonizing Dmitri?” Even as she spoke, she didn’t take her eyes off the angel, who looked as if he’d be right at home in the backroom of some rough vampire tavern.

Illium’s wing brushed her own as he leaned his arms on the fence. It was an overly familiar act, but Jessamy didn’t reprimand him. There was no subtext to his touch, nothing but an affection rooted in childhood—to him she would always be the teacher who had threatened to tie him to a chair if he didn’t stop fidgeting and read his history books.

“Galen,” he said, “is one of Titus’s people.”

“That’s no surprise.” Titus was a warrior archangel, never more at home than in the midst of the blood and fury of battle—this Galen, too, was made for combat, all rippling muscle and brute strength.

Strength that was in hard evidence as he blocked a blow and kicked out at the same time to connect with Dmitri’s knee. The vampire grunted, swore, and just barely avoided a strike with the flat of Galen’s blade that would’ve no doubt caused a severe black bruise. So, they weren’t actually attempting to kill each other.

Sliding one arm around Saraia to steady her when the little girl clapped, Illium continued. “He wants a transfer to Raphael’s territory.”

Now she understood. Raphael had become an archangel only a hundred years ago. His court, such as it was, was a nascent, still-forming unit. Which meant it had room to accept and integrate the strong who might find themselves bored or underutilized in the older courts. “Raphael isn’t concerned about him being a spy?” The archangels who ruled the world, forming the Cadre of Ten, were ruthless in the pursuit of their interests.

“Even if Raphael didn’t have his own spies to vouch for Galen,” Illium said with a grin that was so infectious, she’d had the most impossible time maintaining a stern face when she’d disciplined him as a child, “he’s not the kind to lie. I don’t think he knows the meaning of the word ‘subtle.’”

A ringing blow with the flat of the blade against Dmitri’s cheek, a kick to the gut, and suddenly, Galen had the advantage, the tip of his broadsword touching Dmitri’s jugular as the vampire’s chest heaved where he lay on his back on the ground. “Yield.”

Dmitri’s unblinking gaze locked with Galen’s, the merciless predator within the sophisticated vampire very much at the forefront. But his voice, when it came, was a lazy purr languid as a summer afternoon. “You’re lucky the babies are watching.”

Galen didn’t so much as flinch, his focus absolute.

Dmitri’s lips curved. “Bloody barbarian. I yield.”

Stepping back, Galen waited until Dmitri was on his feet to raise his sword and give a curt bow of his head in a symbol of respect between two warriors. Dmitri’s response was unexpectedly solemn. Jessamy had the feeling this new angel, with his battering ram of a body and large, powerful wings, had passed some kind of test.

“I think you broke my ribs.” Dmitri rubbed at the mottled bruise forming on the dark honey of his skin.

“They’ll heal.” Galen’s eyes lifted, scanned the audience… locked on Jessamy.

Pale green, almost translucent, those eyes sucked the air right out of her; they watched her with such unwavering intent. The force of his leashed power was staggering, but it was his lips that had her hands turning white-knuckled. The only point of softness in a harsh face that was all angles, those lips caused thoughts, shocking and raw, to punch into her mind. She didn’t breathe until Dmitri said something and Galen turned away, the silken red of his shaggy hair lifting in the wind.

Galen watched the tall, almost painfully thin woman walk away with her hands held by two of the smallest of their erstwhile audience, other children running around her, their wings brushing the earth when they forgot to pull them up. He’d never seen any angel who appeared as fragile. A single mistake with one of his big fists and he’d break her into a hundred pieces.

Scowling at the thought, he turned away from the sight of her retreating back, one of her wings appearing oddly distorted at this distance, and walked with Dmitri into the echoing emptiness of the salle, where they cleaned and stored their blades. Illium entered not long afterward, his wings a faultless blue Galen had seen on no other. The angel was young, only a hundred and fifteen to Galen’s two hundred and seventy-five, and appeared a beautiful piece of frivolity, the kind of male who existed in the courts for his decorative value alone.

“You owe me the gold dagger you brought back from Neha’s territory.” Illium’s words were directed at Dmitri, a gleam in his eye.

Eyebrows lowering, Dmitri muttered, “You’ll get it.” A glance up at Galen. “He wagered you’d take me down.”

Galen wondered if the younger angel had bet on an unknown commodity for no reason but that he enjoyed baiting Dmitri, or if he had knowledge Galen didn’t realize. No, he thought almost at once, Illium couldn’t be Raphael’s spymaster—quite aside from the fact that he was unlikely to have built up the necessary network of contacts given his age, he seemed too flamboyant for such a task.

“You were a good opponent,” he said to Dmitri, making a silent note to watch Illium with more care—men like Dmitri didn’t associate with pretty, useless butterflies. “I can usually intimidate most with brute strength alone.” Not only had Dmitri failed to be intimidated; he’d fought with practiced grace.

The vampire inclined his head, dark eyes appearing lazy—if you didn’t look beneath the surface. “A compliment indeed from the weapons-master Titus is furious to be losing.”

Galen shook his head. “He has a weapons-master—and Orios has earned his position.” There’d been no room for Galen, except as Orios’s subordinate. Galen had felt no discontent in occupying that position when he first reached maturity, aware Orios was the better fighter and leader. But things had changed as Galen grew older and more experienced, his power increasing at a rate that far outstripped his peers. “Orios was happy when I told him of my desire to leave Titus’s court.”

“The men are becoming confused about who to look to for leadership,” the weapons-master had said, his near-black skin gleaming in the African sunlight. “It would have cost me should we have been forced to meet in combat to decide matters.” A big hand squeezing Galen’s shoulder. “I hope we never go against each other in battle. Of all my students, you are the one who has flown the highest.”

Galen had made certain Orios knew of his own respect toward the man who had never withheld knowledge from his student, no matter that Galen threatened his position, and they had parted on good terms. “Titus is simply posturing in an attempt to gain concessions from Raphael.”

“A fool’s game,” Illium said, running his hand along the edge of the blade Dmitri had been using. “Raphael is no less an archangel for being the newest member of the Cadre.” Hissing out a breath after slicing a line on his palm, he closed his fingers into a fist. “Why didn’t you set your sights on Charisemnon’s or Uram’s courts? They’re both older and stronger, with far more men at their command.”

Galen shoved back his sweat-damp hair, thinking he must remember to cut it off—he couldn’t afford to have his sight compromised. “I’d rather be a second-tier guard in Titus’s court than work under either Uram or Charisemnon.” Titus might be a brute on occasion, might be quick to anger and even quicker to declare war, but he had honor.

Women were not to be brutalized when his troops marched in battle, and children were not to be harmed. If a man fought only to protect his home, he was to be shown mercy, for Titus appreciated courage. Any fighter found to have broken the archangel’s rules was summarily drawn and quartered, the lumps of meat that had once been his body hung up from the trees in display.

While Raphael’s style of rule was very different, his anger a cold blade that cut with precision in comparison to Titus’s sometimes indiscriminate rage, in the century since he’d become one of the Cadre, Raphael, too, had shown the kind of honor that didn’t allow him to subjugate the weak and the defenseless.

“Is there room in this court for me?” he asked, blunt because that was the way he was. He’d been born of two warriors, had come to age in a warrior court. The civilized graces had never been a part of his education, and while he had seen the effectiveness of a silver tongue, it was a skill that would fit him as well as a dainty rapier would his hand.

“Raphael doesn’t keep a court,” Dmitri said, sliding out a small, gleaming blade from a wall bracket, and throwing it toward the high ceiling of the salle without warning.

Illium flew up as if he’d been thrown from a slingshot, snapping the blade out of the air one-handed and spinning it back at Dmitri in the same motion. The vampire gripped it by the hilt just before it would’ve slammed into his face. Baring his teeth in a feral grin at a smiling Illium, he said, “Doesn’t see the point of pretty people floating around doing nothing.”

Galen watched Illium land with a precision he’d witnessed in no other, the beauty of the youth’s wings doing nothing to hide the muscle strength required to pull off the maneuver, and realized the other angel gave the impression of being an ornament, handsome and amusing, on purpose. No one would ever suspect him of dangerous intent.

Illium’s response to his candid appraisal was a bow so graceful and ornate, it would have done one of Lijuan’s stuffy courtiers proud, his wings spread in stunning display. “Would you like a dagger in your throat for breakfast today, my lord?” The tone was pure aristocrat, with a side dish of golden-eyed flirtation.

“Do you let him out alone?” he asked Dmitri, already calculating the potential advantages of Illium’s skills.

“Rarely.”

2

It wasn’t until the hushed time after dawn the next morning that he saw the tall, thin angel again. She walked alone along the marbled path that led to the doors of the great library in the Refuge, disappearing and appearing out of the mist as she passed on the other side of the columns that guarded the structure.

She carried what appeared to be a heavy book in her arms, her shining chestnut brown hair braided into a long tail down her back, her gown—of some fine sky blue material that echoed the mist—swirling and whispering around her ankles like a familiar lover. Not quite understanding why he did so, he changed direction to intercept her, the wind crisp and cool against his skin as he cut through the air.

A wordless cry, a startled gasp, as he landed in front of her.

Folding back his wings, he said, “I’ll carry that,” and took the gilt-edged tome from her hands before she could catch her breath and demur.

She blinked, thick, curling lashes coming down over eyes of lush brown, the color holding a warmth that reminded him of the finely mixed pigment used by an artist who’d once visited Titus’s court. “Thank you.” Her voice was even, though her pulse thudded in her throat, a delicate beat against creamy skin stroked with a hint of the sun. “Aren’t you cold?”

He wore only a simple pair of pants made of a durable material, in which he could fight with ease, paired with sturdy boots. His sword was strapped along his spine, the leather straps crisscrossing his chest. “No,” he said, conscious he looked the barbarian Dmitri had called him—all the more so next to her ethereal beauty. “You wake early, my lady.”

“Jessamy.” The single word brought her lips to his attention. Soft and just full enough to tempt, they would’ve dominated her face if not for those compelling eyes dark with unspoken mystery. “When did I teach you, Galen? I can’t seem to remember.”

Curling his fingers into his hand, he fought the urge to reach out, rub away the lines that had formed between her eyebrows. She was too fine a creature for him, his touch far too rough. And yet he didn’t walk away. “Why should you have taught me anything?”

Another blink, more lines. “I teach all our babes, have done so for millennia. You must have been one of my students—you are so very young.”

In his two hundred and seventy-five years on this earth, he had walked in battle and bathed in blood, felt the hot kiss of a whip on his back, the cold thrust of a knife into his gut, but never had he been called an infant until this moment. “I spent my childhood in Titus’s court.” It was an unusual thing for a child to grow up outside the Refuge, but no one would have dared harm the son of two warriors, a boy Titus himself had placed under his protection. “I had a tutor,” he added, because he did not like the idea of her thinking him an unlearned savage.

“I remember now.” Jessamy’s liquid silk voice pouring over him in an unintentional caress. “Your tutor was a former student I recommended for the post—he told me you were taught alone.”

“Yes.” Titus had not wanted the feminine softness of his daughters to affect Galen’s development.

“A lonely life.”

He shrugged, because he’d survived and he’d grown up strong—he’d been a capable fighter at an age when most angels were yet considered children. Perhaps he had not had the usual playmates, but it was all he knew, and a life that had formed him into the man he was today. That man wanted to bend, sniff the scent at the curve of Jessamy’s elegant neck. “I’ll escort you the rest of the way,” he said, rather than giving in to the primitive urge.

Jessamy fell into step beside the big—and rather physically overwhelming—angel, his wings raised up off the floor with such effortless ease, she knew it was no conscious choice, but the honed training of a warrior. No one would ever trip him up by using his wings, this male who had looked at the book he held as if at some foreign object. “Do you read?” she asked without thought.

The incredible, exquisite red of his hair shimmered with droplets of mist that had collected on the strands as he shook his head, and she wondered if the color would stain her skin a glorious sunset should she weave her fingers through the thickness of it.

“I can,” he added almost curtly, “but there’s not much use for it in my world.” An unexpected brush of heat across his cheekbones. “My reading skills are… rusty at best.”

Jessamy didn’t understand how anyone could live without words, without story… but then, she had been entombed in the Refuge for millennia. If she, too, had wings as magnificent as Galen’s, perhaps—though it seemed an altogether impossible thing—she would not have cared so much for words either. “I can’t fly,” she found herself saying, because she’d embarrassed him, and she hadn’t meant to. “It gives me much time to read.”

Galen didn’t turn, didn’t stare at the twisted wing that meant she’d never take flight. Keir, their greatest healer, had tried to heal her a thousand times over the years as his strength grew with age, but her left wing always formed into the same twisted shape, regardless of how many times it was broken and reset, or excised and allowed to grow back. Until she had said enough. No more. No more.

“Your inability to fly,” Galen said even as she fought the painful echo of a decision that had broken her heart, “is obvious.”

Her mouth fell open. No one had ever been so unkind about her disability. Most people preferred to pretend it didn’t exist, and she didn’t push them to acknowledge it. What was the point in causing those around her discomfort? As for her charges—and those like Illium who had once been her charges—they had only ever known her as Jessamy, who had a twisted wing and whom they had to behave with, because she couldn’t chase them into the sky. All she had to do was step outside the schoolroom and raise her arm, and even the naughtiest child came back down to earth at once.

This one, however, she thought, glancing askance at the large male she couldn’t imagine as a lonely boy making his way in a court filled with the clang of blades and the cries of combat, would have done exactly as he pleased.

“Were you born this way?” he asked, blunt as the edge of a dull axe.

Jessamy decided he wasn’t being rude, at least not in a purposeful way. “Subtle,” as Illium had said, didn’t seem to be in Galen’s vocabulary. “Yes.”

“They say Keir is a talented healer.”

“He is… He did his best.” And he had blamed himself when he failed. She didn’t blame Keir. Neither did she blame her mother—who found it difficult to look at the child she’d borne, though not because of a lack of love.

“Her guilt is too huge.” Keir’s young-old eyes, his voice layered with potent emotion. “She will not listen when I tell her there is no need for it. Nothing she did or did not do caused your wing to form as it did.”

Jessamy’s mother wouldn’t listen to her daughter either, not for the longest time. Even now, there was a haunted kind of pain on Rhoswen’s fine-boned face on the rare occasions Jessamy caught her looking at her child’s malformed wing. Rare… and getting ever rarer, as the wrenching silence between them, created of all the things they did not say, grew into an impenetrable black wall.

The heavy wooden doors to the library appeared out of the mist at that instant, as impenetrable in their bulk, the gold that inlaid the exquisite carvings waiting for the sun’s kiss to shine. Reaching out, Galen pulled open one of the doors, the ropes of muscle on his arm flexing and bunching in a way that had her mouth going dry, her heart slamming hard against her ribs.

Shaken by the depth and swiftness of her response—unmistakably physical and carnal—she averted her gaze and held out her hand for the book.

“Do you not eat?” he asked, sliding it into her hold, a jaundiced look in his eyes as he ran his gaze over her body.

The dark pulse of attraction morphed into sharp irritation. As a young woman, she’d attempted to do everything in her power to put more flesh on her bones, to no avail. This was simply how she was meant to be. “No,” she said, ice in her tone, “I prefer to starve,” and stalked into the library, certain the infuriating male had been raised by wolves.

It was not long afterward, the sun’s blaze having burned away the mist to reveal the bright flecks of precious metals embedded in the marble buildings of the Refuge, that Galen saw Illium’s distinctive wings sweep out and over the gorge. The younger angel headed into the clouds and across mountains where no one and nothing lived.

“A woman,” Dmitri said from beside him, the wind lifting his black hair off his face to reveal “a dangerous male beauty”—or so Galen had heard it said by more than one woman, angel and vampire both. What Galen saw was a ruthless kind of strength, strength that demanded respect.

“Mortal,” the vampire added.

Galen might not know how to talk to women outside of other warriors, but no one had ever accused him of being stupid. “You worry for him.”

Dmitri’s gaze lingered on the clouds where the angel had disappeared. “Mortals die, Galen.”

Galen shrugged. “So do we.” The mortals called them immortal, but angels and vampires could die—it just took a great deal of effort. “Does she make him happy?”

“Yes. Too much.”

Galen didn’t ask him to elaborate. He’d known immortals who had fallen for mortals, seen how they mourned when those bright firefly lives were extinguished. He’d never felt such depth of love, but he could comprehend grief. “Jessamy,” he said, his mind on a woman who wasn’t mortal, but whose slender form seemed far too vulnerable for his peace of mind, “does she have a lover?”

Dmitri’s sophisticated elegance broke to reveal utter astonishment. “What?”

“Jessamy,” he repeated patiently. “Does she have a lover?”

“She’s the Teacher.”

“She’s also a woman.” And if the men around her had been too stupid to notice, Galen wasn’t going to lose sleep over it.

A startled pause, a shake of Dmitri’s head that had blue- black highlights glinting in the sun. “No,” the vampire finally responded, “she doesn’t have a lover as far as I know.”

“Good.”

Dmitri continued to stare at him. “You do realize she’s over two thousand five hundred years old, speaks at least a hundred languages, and has such a depth of knowledge the Cadre comes to her for advice and information?”

Galen had no doubt all of that was true. “I don’t intend to get into an intelligence contest with her.” No, he wanted her in a far more primal way.

Dmitri blew out a breath. “This should be interesting.”

They watched several angels wing their way out of the aeries that lined the gorge, the light making their wings shimmer and glitter. “Trust,” Dmitri said when the last of them rose up into the cerulean blue sky, “is earned.”

“Understood.”

“For now, you’ll remain in the Refuge, charged with training the young ones who have joined Raphael.”

“They say Lijuan likes him,” he said, mentioning one of the oldest members of the Cadre.

“She might not wear cobras like Neha,” Dmitri muttered in a voice stripped of all traces of civilization, until it was a naked blade, “but Lijuan is no less poisonous.”

Galen thought over what he knew of Lijuan, realized it wasn’t much. “Such information was not shared with me in Titus’s court. If I am to be a true weapons-master, I must know of the politics that might inform tactics.”

Dmitri’s smile was slow. “In that case, you should talk to Jessamy.”

Folding his arms, Galen met the vampire’s innocent gaze. “Should I?”

“What many don’t know is that aside from being the Teacher, Jessamy keeps our histories. I’d say there’s no one better if you want to learn the subtleties of the politics that underpin and maintain the balance in the Cadre.”

Galen knew Dmitri was amusing himself by pointing him in Jessamy’s direction, but he now had a reason to be in her company. Nonetheless, he said, “Have you forgotten that I am quite capable of killing you?”

“That was a lucky strike, Barbarian.” The vampire thrust a hand through his hair, said, “Your skills as weapons-master may be necessary sooner than you realize,” in a far more serious tone. “Alexander has begun amassing his army—he has never believed Raphael should have become Cadre at so young an age, and now it seems he is willing to use force to impose his will.”

Alexander was the Archangel of Persia, had ruled for thousands upon thousands of years. “He’s stronger than Raphael.” Age had edged his power to a piercing gleam.

Dmitri’s expression was inscrutable. “We shall see.”

Galen wondered if Dmitri had told him of the looming war only because it was already being whispered of among the populace. It was no secret. But then, as the vampire had made clear—trust was earned. Galen had expected nothing less. “He will have spies in Raphael’s territory, in the Refuge and out.”

“Of course. So keep your eyes open.”

Galen’s eyes were wide-open that afternoon as he flew over the gleaming white buildings that hugged the craggy landscape of the mountain stronghold, having tracked Jessamy to a small clifftop house on the far edge of Raphael’s Refuge territory. For a woman who was so beloved of children and adults both from what he’d learned today, she chose to live in relative isolation. Her home was separated from others by a jagged wall of rock, and accessible only from the air, or along a single narrow trail.

Sweeping down to land in her front yard—paved with tiles of sparkling blue and delicate gray, the earthenware pots along the sides overflowing with hardy mountain flowers in white, yellow, red, and indigo—he had the sensation of being a great lumbering beast as he folded his wings neatly to his back. But feeling out of place wasn’t enough to stop him in his pursuit of this angel with her fine beauty, and eyes dense with secrets.

As for the physical aspect—he couldn’t lie. He was a man with raw appetites, and Jessamy spoke to every single one. It had been a selfish need that had led him to ask the question that had annoyed her so. He’d wanted to be certain she wouldn’t fracture under the strength of his touch. Some might say he was being presumptuous in assuming she would even permit him to court her, much less caress that creamy skin with hands rough and hardened from constant weapons-work, but Galen didn’t believe in going into battle without intending to win.

Striding toward the open door, he was about to call out her name when he heard something crash, followed by a terrified feminine cry. Ice chilling the embers in his blood, he ran inside, drawing his sword as he did so. The noise had originated from the back of the house and when he felt the slap of the wind on his body, he knew the door on the other side was open to the steep drop below, a drop lined with brutal spikes of rock.

It would’ve meant nothing had it been another angel… but Jessamy couldn’t fly.

3

He entered to see her fighting with grim-jawed determination against a vampire who had her backed up almost to the gaping emptiness of the open door, trickles of dark red running down the side of her face.

A sudden, cold rage.

Roaring a battle cry, he lunged and ripped her assailant off her to throw him to the wall so hard something broke with an audible snap. He grabbed Jessamy with his other arm in the same movement and kicked the door shut. “Stay,” he ordered, perching her on a table and swinging out with his sword as he felt the air move at his back.

Fangs bared, one of his shoulder bones having punched through his shirt to gleam rust white in the air, the vampire screamed in bloody defiance and cut a line of fire down Galen’s chest with a heavy hunting knife. Galen ignored the scratch and the other male’s head was rolling off his neck to land on the floor with a wet thud the next instant, blood gushing out to spray the wall as the man’s body spasmed before collapsing.

Damn.

Jessamy would probably make him clean that up, he thought, watching the corpse continue to twitch. Vampires were almost-immortals, but—regardless of the sporadic motions of the body—they couldn’t survive decapitation. Still, he made the kill certain by walking over and thrusting his sword through the dead vampire’s heart, cutting it up into tiny pieces inside his chest.

Only then did he turn to the woman who sat on the table, face white and eyes huge. Having wiped his sword on the vampire’s clothing, he slid it into the sheath on his back and crossed the distance between them to place his hands on either side of Jessamy’s slight body. “Look at me.”

Jittery brown eyes met his. “You have blood on you.”

Cursing inwardly at the evidence of vicious violence, violence that was an integral part of his life, but no doubt a stranger to her, he would’ve drawn away to take care of it—but she pulled off some kind of silky scarf thing from around her waist and began to wipe his face clean. It carried her scent.

Locking his muscles, he stayed in place. His eyes fell to the graceful curve of her neck and to the straps that held up the bodice of her gown, the knot tied at her nape, streamers of fabric falling gracefully down her back. A single drop of blood marred the fine blue, but her gown had otherwise escaped damage.

“Done?” he asked when she dropped her hand, raising his own at the same time to angle her face to the light so he could examine the cut on her temple. Already healing. Good. But he borrowed her scarf to wipe away the streaks of red that enraged him, the scent of her blood a vivid thread in spite of the carnage.

Taking the cloth when he returned it, she reached out to run it over his chest. “Do you own any shirts?”

Enjoying the tender touch quite unlike those of other warriors who might have sewn up dangerous injuries in battle so he could continue to fight, he said, “Yes. For formal occasions.” Though in Titus’s court, even those occasions hadn’t often required a shirt.

Jessamy laughed… right before her face crumpled. Gathering her into his arms, he stroked his hand over her back as she wrapped her own arms around his neck and sobbed. He was careful to avoid the sensitive area where her wings grew out of her back, the feathers there a rich, evocative magenta that faded into blush, then pure cream in the body of her wings. To steal that intimacy would be to devalue its worth—he would wait until Jessamy invited the touch.

Her breath, ragged and hot, blew across his skin as she tried to get even closer. Nudging his way between her knees, the gossamer skirts of her gown frothing around them, he cradled her tight. So slender was her body, so terrifyingly fragile. But not bony, he now realized, for all her appearance of painful thinness. It was as if her frame itself was so very fine that the flesh upon it need only be the gentlest of layers. There was a sensual grace to her, exquisite and beautiful.

“He can’t hurt you now,” he said in her ear when her sobs quieted, her hair as soft as fur under his hand, against his face.

A hiccupping breath before she sat up again, drawing her dignity around herself like a shield. “Thank you.” Glancing down, she colored at the way her knees spread on either side of his thighs.

He stepped back so she could close her legs, settle her skirts. Barbarian or not, he understood that as a warrior needed his weapon, Jessamy needed her pride. “Who was he?”

“I don’t know,” she said, wiping away her tears until her face bore no evidence of the emotional storm that had just passed. “He came into the house while I was in the kitchen—I thought it was one of my students. They know to knock, but the littlest ones sometimes forget.”

“Did he say anything?”

“That I knew too much,” Jessamy said, forcing herself back into the nightmare. “They couldn’t take the chance.” The vampire had fallen on her before she’d realized the import of his words. Driven by instinct, she’d managed to cut him with the small knife in her hand before he hit her head against the edge of the door he’d ripped open, dazing her enough that he’d almost succeeded in shoving her out onto the unforgiving rocks below.

Jessamy was more than two thousand years old, and while not the strongest of her kind, she was in no way weak—the fall wouldn’t have killed her, but it would have shattered her into so many pieces that it would’ve taken years, perhaps a decade, for her to recover. In the interim, she’d have lain mute and still as death. Plenty of time for anyone who didn’t wish his plans exposed to bring them to fruition. “You saved me from terrible pain.”

Even as she spoke, she waited for Galen to berate her for having a clifftop residence when she couldn’t fly. How could she explain to him that she had the same soul-piercing hunger for the sky as her brethren, the same need to soar? Her house was as close as she could get to the clouds. However, the expected recrimination didn’t come from this warrior male who’d stroked her with shockingly gentle hands, his voice low and deep against her ear. Instead, he frowned, his attention on her attacker. When he pulled away from the table, she had to bite down on her lower lip to keep from begging him to stay.

The rawness of her need rocked her. She’d been on her own for decades even before she reached the hundred-year mark that constituted adulthood among angelkind. It was highly unusual for an angel to request emancipation as an adolescent, but the constant presence of her mother’s guilt had been a shroud that threatened to suffocate Jessamy. Keir had spoken for her with Caliane—into whose section of the Refuge she had been born, convinced the archangel Jessamy was mature enough to be trusted on her own.

Over the years, her aloneness had become something she’d embraced, as much a part of her as her twisted wing and brown eyes. But today, she wanted nothing more than to be held, to be protected by the big stranger who was currently going through her assailant’s pockets with grim efficiency. She should’ve hopped down from where he’d put her, ordering her to “Stay” like she was a pet or a sack of potatoes, but the truth was, she wasn’t sure her legs would support her.

“What have you found?” she asked when he withdrew something from the vampire’s pocket.

Rising, he walked over to hand her the piece of paper. She opened it, felt her heartbeat shudder. “It’s a time and a place. My house, at this time of day—I often come home to eat something before going to the library to work.” It was in the mornings that she usually taught, though she did sometimes change the lessons to the afternoons, especially when the days grew dark and cold. The children never wanted to wake up.

“So,” Galen said, his shoulder flexing as he put one hand on the table beside her hip, the primal heat of him unfamiliar, but not unwanted, “someone either knew, or watched you long enough to learn your patterns.”

Her eyes lingered on the dead vampire’s body. “What a waste.”

“He made his choice.” With those pitiless words, Galen looked at the body again, at the wall splattered with red congealing to black. “I’ll clean that up, but first, I have to inform Dmitri. We’ll fly to him.”

“No.” She pushed at his shoulders when he went as if to gather her up in his arms.

Galen’s scowl turned the pale green of his eyes into stormy seas. “I won’t drop you.”

“It’s not that.” Her resistance to being flown had its genesis in the agony of a realization she’d had long ago—that each taste of the sky only deepened the bruise of loss. Not even the best of friends could ever take her flying for as long as she needed. “I don’t fly with anyone.”

“I’m not leaving you here alone.” Deep voice, a wall of unyielding muscle.

“I’ll be fine.” Her eyes skated away from the bloody ruin of the corpse. Fighting the bile burning her throat, she said, “I’ll wait in the front yard.”

Galen snorted, put his hands around her waist, and picked her up so her toes hung above the ground. Grabbing onto his shoulders, the heat of him burning through her palms, she said, “What are you doing?” her voice breathless.

He answered by carrying her out of the kitchen—to her silent thanks—and to the paved courtyard she’d bordered using colorful pots spilling a wild cascade of blooms. Where he finally put her on her feet and glared. “Wait.”

“Stay. Wait,” she muttered to his broad back as he strode inside, doing her best to be insulted—but the truth was, he’d not only saved her from unimaginable agony; he’d made her feel safe enough that she’d cried… and then he’d held her with a sweet, rough tenderness. Anger was not the dominant emotion she felt toward Galen.

When he returned with her sandals and went down on one knee to slide them onto her feet, his wings a rich, dark gray against the paving stones, she started to argue that she could do it herself. But Galen, as she’d already begun to learn, was an irresistible force when he wanted something, and he had her feet in the sandals moments later, the skin of his hands callused, the touch intimate in a way that made her abdomen clench. Rising, he took her hand, enclosing it in his own. “Come.”

She didn’t break the proprietary hold, vestiges of the terror she’d felt as she fought not to be thrown into the serrated jaws of the gorge continuing to whisper cold and oily through her veins. “My closest neighbor, Alia, is through there.” She pointed to the narrow pathway between the rocks up ahead. “I’ll stay with her, while you fetch Dmitri.”

Galen wove his warm, strong fingers with her own, spreading one wing protectively behind her at the same time, the feathers that made up the white striations glittering with hidden threads of white-gold.

Beautiful.

Galen spoke on the heels of that wondering thought. “Did your father take you flying?”

Pain twisted through her heart and she stepped up her pace in a futile effort to outrun the question. “Don’t ask me such things.”

“Should I simply ignore the fact that your wing is twisted?”

“Titus has manners,” she said, infuriated at how easily he arrowed in on the oldest, most painful of the wounds that scarred her. “Why don’t you?”

Galen’s wing brushed her back, heavy and warm, but his words were merciless. “I think people here tiptoe around you on the subject of your wing, and you let them.”

Trying to tug her hand from his was akin to trying to remove it from solid rock. “I can walk the rest of the way on my own.” Her neighbor’s house was now in sight. “Go, inform Dmitri.”

Instead of obeying, he continued to walk and she had to move with him or risk getting dragged. “I thought you had more courage than that, Jessamy.”

She wanted to hit him. Kick him. Hurt him. The urge was so unlike her that she forced herself to take a mental step back, draw in a deep draught of the cool mountain air. “I have more courage than you’ll ever understand,” she said as they came to a stop in front of Alia’s home, her back stiff with pride.

How dare he say that to me? How dare he?

This time when she tugged, he released her hand, and she made her way to the door. It knotted up her spine that he had such a perfect view of the wing that had forced courage on her when most angels were laughing babes, but she didn’t falter, didn’t hesitate. And she didn’t look back.

Dmitri glanced at the body, then at the red-black spray of blood on the wall. “How is Jessamy?”

“Fine.” So angry with him that her bones had cut sharply against gold-dusted skin he wanted to taste with his mouth, the urge primitive. As primitive as the craving he had to stroke his hand over the lush sweep of her wings, the softness of her feathers an exquisite temptation—until he’d picked up one silken feather from her home, hidden it carefully in his palm. “Once the shock of the attack wears off, she’ll want to know the reason behind it.”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Dmitri focused on the dead vampire’s face. “He’s not one of Raphael’s, but someone will recognize him. I’ll have a sketch circulated.”

Galen nodded, walked outside with Dmitri. “Jessamy will want to return to her home.” From the waterfall of flowers, to the thick cream of the carpets, to the children’s drawings framed and hung with care, this place carried her imprint—a woman didn’t easily walk away from a place she’d made so much her own. “I promised her I’d clean it up.”

“I’ll take care of that, but it won’t be ready for her until tomorrow.” Dark eyes flicked to Galen. “She needs a watch on her.”

“Yes.” There was no need to volunteer for the task when they both knew he’d allow no other warrior near her when she was so vulnerable. “Aren’t you afraid I might be behind all this?” He was the unknown element, the stranger.

“No.” A single, resolute word. “You aren’t the kind of man who would ever assault a vulnerable woman. And,” the vampire added, “if you had orchestrated this, she wouldn’t still be breathing—she’d be in torn, bloody pieces on the wall of the gorge.”

Galen flinched inwardly, but Dmitri was right on both counts. “I’ll make sure no one reaches her.” Whether she welcomed his protection or not.

4

Sunset was whispering on the horizon when he returned to Jessamy, a small bag of her things in hand. “My aerie,” he suggested, “would be the safest place for you.” The openness of her current surroundings made the back of his neck itch.

Shaking her head, however, she said, “Alia has already offered me a room.”

“She has a child.” He’d glimpsed the toys scattered on the roof, where a curious young angel might choose to play.

Comprehension ran swift and dark across Jessamy’s face, infiltrated the deep brown of her eyes. “Yes, of course. I would never put a child in harm’s way.”

“Adults are fair game?”

She sucked in a breath, holding a fisted hand to her abdomen. “You really believe there will be another attempt on my life?” It was couched as a question, but he knew she was already aware of the probable answer. Her next words confirmed it. “There’s a small room in the library equipped with a bed. I can stay there.”

He gave a curt nod. “Very well.”

Jessamy didn’t trust Galen’s immediate agreement, but he didn’t push at her to change her mind as he escorted her back to the library, a silent, battle-ready presence by her side. His gaze took in every tiny element of their surroundings until his protective watchfulness was a pulse against her skin.

“See,” she said when they reached the room in the library, her chest tight, as if her breath had been stolen, “no large windows and only one door.” No one would be able to get to her once she bolted that door from the inside.

Giving a silent nod after checking the walls to ensure their thickness and stability, he allowed her to close the door behind him. Trembling, she collapsed on the narrow bed meant for scholars who wanted to find a little rest. It had to be the lingering shock of the attack, she thought. She was too old and too sensible to react with this strange mix of fear and exhilaration because of a man. Especially a man who had left her all but blind with anger not long ago.

Relieved at the explanation, she picked up a book from the table beside the bed, opened it to the first page. It was but a fraction of a moment later that she heard the scuff of Galen’s boot as he shifted outside and belatedly realized he intended to stay at her door through the night. Because that was the only way to protect anyone in this room—the library had too many exits and entrances for him to keep watch at any other location.

She knew he’d come to no harm. He was an angel. A powerful one, regardless of his age—some angels never grew in power after reaching adulthood, while others, like Jessamy, gained it incrementally. Galen, by contrast, was one of those who was escalating in huge surges, part of the reason he made such a good candidate to be weapons-master for an archangel—a night on his feet without sleep would cost him nothing. Yet guilt twisted inside of her, a hard-edged blade. He’d saved her life, bled for her, and she was being childish about sharing his living quarters, where he could rest easier, because she had never lived with a man in any sense.

More than two millennia, and she had allowed no male so close.

It hadn’t been a choice at the start. It had simply happened. She’d been shy and self-conscious about her misshapen wing, had hidden herself in the library. Later, when she’d gained enough confidence in her abilities to walk taller, she had been approached. There hadn’t been many of course, but there had been enough that she’d had more than a single option.

At the time, young and still unbearably sensitive about her wing in spite of her outward confidence, she’d believed the men had asked her out of pity, that each would play the part of a kind suitor only long enough to assuage his conscience. So she’d repudiated them before they could do the same to her.

She knew she’d been right about the motivations of at least one of those who had attempted to court her. But the others… perhaps she had been wrong. But one thing was indisputable—it had soon become “known” that Jessamy preferred her peace, that she was a scholar and a teacher. Everyone had forgotten she was also a woman, with hopes and dreams of a mate, a family, a home that wasn’t always so silent when night fell in a soft hush. She’d tried very hard to forget the truth herself because it hurt so much less.

“I thought you had more courage than that, Jessamy.”

Her nails cut into her palms. Hating her life at that moment, a life she’d built brick by brick, until she’d entombed herself in it, she stood, picked up the little bag Galen had packed with her things—such an unexpected, bewildering thing for him to do—and pulled the door open. “Your home,” she said, before her courage deserted her, “would be easier to guard?”

Galen gave a small nod, the pure red of his hair sliding over his forehead before he shoved it back with an impatient hand. “It’s on the wall of the gorge. One entrance. No steps.”

So she would have to permit him to fly her down in his arms.

Continuing to watch her, Galen added, “It’s not far,” the wild sea of his eyes telling her he saw too much. “A heartbeat or two of flight.”

Sweat broke out along her spine and she had to swallow twice before she could get the words out in a husky rasp. “All right.”

Galen said nothing until they were on the very edge of the cliff overlooking the magnificent danger of the gorge. “Hold on,” he murmured, picking her up and tucking her against him with one arm bracing her back, the other under her thighs, “and think of all the bad words you know you want to call me.”

Surprised delight filled her with laughter… just as he stepped off the cliff and angled down toward his aerie, his wings a stunning creation of light and shadow above them. The wind tugged at her gown, played with her hair, had her stomach falling for the infinitesimal amount of time they were in the air. When they landed, she glanced up with her lips still curved to find Galen looking down at her, a slow smile dawning on his face. “You aren’t afraid.”

“What?” Dropping her bag to the ground, she waited for him to put her down—even as she barely resisted the urge to use their proximity to push back that too-long hair of his, the strands once more brushing his eyelashes. “No. That’s not why I don’t fly.”

Galen continued to examine her with those eyes of ice and spring, until she had to answer, to confess a secret so terrible and deep, she’d never before spoken it to anyone, not even to Keir, who had known her for millennia. “It’s because I want it too much.”

Vulnerability hit her on the heels of her confession, a punch to the gut that would’ve had her crumpling if she hadn’t been held in arms of heated, living iron. “Put me down.” She couldn’t bear to see pity mark the hard lines of his face.

“Since I already know your secret,” Galen said instead, nuzzling his chin against her hair, “do you want to go flying?”

Jessamy’s heart stopped. “It would only make the hunger worse,” she whispered, lifting a hand to brush back that thick, silken hair the color of the brilliant heart of a mountain sunset.

“I can fly for hours without faltering.” He settled her even closer, the wild heat of him burning into her skin, infusing her blood. “And,” he murmured, holding her gaze, “you’ll be far safer in the air than anywhere else.”

It terrified her, what he was offering. Not just his wings… but the molten emotion he made no effort to hide. It had nothing to do with pity. “Galen.”

Bending his head, he spoke so close, it was almost a kiss, his lips but a breath from her own. “Hold on tight.” And then he stepped backward off the ledge of his aerie.

She screamed as he dropped off, and it was half delight, half shocked surprise. “I didn’t mean ‘yes’!” Her arms locked around his neck.

Pretending deafness, he dipped and spiraled down the massive walls of the same gorge that had sent terror into her veins earlier that day. Not now. Not in Galen’s unbreakable grip. A dizzying thrill ran through her blood and she found herself laughing again. He was like one of her charges, ignoring her in the hope she’d forget the reproof she’d meant to give. And in this, he was probably right—because Galen could fly.

After winging down until they were sweeping just above the roar of the river below, he skimmed along the water. The spray kissed her sandaled feet, her face, and she rubbed that face against his neck in spontaneous affection. Dipping his head, he gave her a berserker’s grin before flying up and up and up until they were high in the insubstantial cotton of the clouds, the sparkling mineral-flecked buildings of the Refuge hidden behind a mountain range that was an impenetrable natural barrier to those without wings, the land below a wild tapestry she’d seen for the last time so very long ago, when she had been a child… and her father had taken her up into the sky.

“Thank you, Father.”

“You’re my child, Jessamy. I’d do anything to hear you laugh, see that beautiful smile.”

Her father loved her. As did her mother. But there had always been such sadness behind their happy expressions when they returned to the earth, until Jessamy could no longer bear it. So she’d grounded herself. Her decision had been met with sorrow, but that had passed. Sometimes now, her parents were able to forget her disability, and treat her simply as their daughter, cherished and with achievements that made them glow with pride.

A sheet of brilliant light, scattering the bleak memories like jeweled pebbles.

She looked down to see a mirror-perfect lake reflecting the setting sun in all its shattering glory, the water a cauldron of fire, the sky a lick of flame.

Lips brushing her ear, a warm breath. “Do you want to land?”

She shook her head, never wanting to touch the earth again. Dipping down to surf a lazy wind, Galen swept them out farther, until she was traveling over areas she’d never seen with her own eyes, only heard about from others. Her soul soaked up the sights, the sensations—the air crisp against her cheeks, the wind playful—parched ground finally having its thirst assuaged. The beauty and grandeur of it stole her breath, and still Galen flew, showing her wonder after wonder, his wings tireless.

There was no light in the sky, the stars glittering like faceted gemstones overhead when she sighed, so very full of joy that another drop would make her burst. “Yes. We can go home now.” Golden lamplight glowed in a bare few windows as Galen winged them back to the aerie, the Refuge quiet, his heartbeat steady.

Landing, he set her on her feet. She grabbed at him as her legs wobbled, the feel of his big body no longer so strange and intimidating—though it would’ve been a lie of the highest order to say he didn’t affect her. There wasn’t a single part of her own body that wasn’t aware of his every breath, his every move. “Thank you,” she whispered, hands still splayed on a male chest she wanted to pet and stroke.

He shook his head, refusing her gratitude. “I want payment.”

It was the last thing she’d expected to hear. “What?” His skin, it was so hot, she wanted to rub up against him like a cat.

“For the flight,” he said, tugging her closer with his hands on her own. “I want payment.”

Hard, he was built so hard and strong. “If I refuse?” It was becoming difficult to talk, to breathe.

A slow smile that softened the brutal masculine lines of his face. “Don’t refuse, Jessamy.”

The coaxing murmur wrapped her in unbreakable bonds, the vibration of his words a rumble against her palms. Startled, she went to pull away hands that had turned caressing over the tensile strength of him, but he wouldn’t let her go. “A kiss,” he said in a low, deep voice that felt like the most decadent silk over her skin. A little rough… but oh so exquisite. “Just one.”

Enthralled as she was by his voice, it took a moment for his words to penetrate. Shock, pain, anger, it all roared to the surface. “I don’t need your pity.” She wrenched at her hands.

He didn’t budge.

“Release me.”

“It’s an insult you’ve given me, Jessamy.” His tone was one she’d never before heard from him. “But since I caused you hurt earlier, I will declare us even.” With that, he let her go and entered the aerie, waiting only until she was inside to light a lamp, and pull the heavy wooden door shut.

Standing there watching him move around the room with muscular grace, lighting other lanterns until the aerie glowed with warmth, gilding Galen’s skin and hair, she knew that, driven by a self-protective instinct that had become a second skin, she’d behaved badly. Galen meant what he said and said what he meant. She had no right to judge him against the example set by weaker, worthless men.

Hand clenching on the handle of her bag, she tried to think of how to make amends, couldn’t quite find the words, settled for seeing if he was too angry to speak to her. “You don’t have many things.” The stool off to her left, a small table, a thick rug with comfortable-looking cushions in one corner of the polished stone of the floor.

“I need little,” he said, no coolness in his tone. “But there is a bed through there.” He lit more lamps as he nodded to the back of the aerie. Walking closer, she saw the “bedroom” was another corner of the single room, but one with a heavy curtain that could be pulled across for privacy. The bed was a large one, as befit someone of Galen’s size.

“I’m taking your bed,” she said, a strange discomfort in her blood that had nothing to do with stealing his rest.

He shrugged. “I have no plans to sleep.” Leaving her beside the bed, he walked back to the living area, and slid off his sword and harness. The movement of the leather across his sun-kissed skin caught her eye, held it, the shift of muscle beneath his—

Coloring when he looked up and caught her staring, she pulled the curtain shut and, kicking off her sandals, sat down on the bed. She couldn’t recall ever reacting in such a way to a man, until she didn’t know who she was anymore, this woman whose mind was overwhelmed with naked emotion, whose blood ran so hot, whose hands still bore the imprint of a firm male chest.

Perhaps she might have felt such need as a young girl, but she didn’t think so. Back then, she’d still been walking with her head downbent, angry and torn by an envy that had made her feel a hateful creature.

Her chest ached.

She wished she could go back to that lonely, self-conscious girl and tell her it would be all right, that she’d build a life for herself that would give her contentment. Her hand fisted. No, perhaps she didn’t wish to go back—what girl would want to hear of “contentment” when she dreamed of searing joy and shimmering passion?

That yearning hadn’t died so much as been crushed under the weight of truth. Oh, she’d realized as she’d grown older that she could find a lover if she so chose, someone who would teach her the secrets that flirted in the eyes and on the lips of other women, but she’d also understood that any such relationship—even if there was true desire involved—would be a temporary one. It would end the instant her lover understood that she was bound to the Refuge.

Unlike him, she could never fly beyond the mountains, never live in the outside world—because the angels could not be seen as weak. Mortals had an awe of the angelic race that kept them from attempting insurrection that could only ever end in the deaths of thousands. An angel so imperfect… it would shake the foundations of that awe, lead to bloodshed as mortals thought to see in her a truth about the angelic race that didn’t exist. Jessamy was one of a kind.

Better, she’d long ago decided, far better that she assuage her painful hunger to see the world through the pages of books, than to incite mortals into an act that would stain the ground darkest red. As for intimacy… Her hand clenched on the sheets again, on the bed of an angel unlike any other, one who stirred things in her that could not be allowed to be stirred, not if she was to survive the millennia to come.

Because her beautiful barbarian, too, would one day fly away, leaving her behind. And still she rose, pushed the curtain aside, and padded on bare feet to the living area… where Galen, dressed in nothing but those pants of some tough brown material, his wings held tight to his back, was lying parallel to the floor with his palms flat on the ground, his entire body a straight line. As she watched, he pushed up, veins standing up on his arms as his muscles strained, went down, repeated.

“You’re already strong,” she said, her eyes lingering on the bunch and release of an unashamedly powerful body that made butterflies flitter in her stomach. “Why do this?”

“A warrior who considers himself the best,” he said, never pausing in his actions, “is a fool who’ll soon be dead.”

A blunt answer from a blunt kind of a man. He wasn’t like the scholars she spent the majority of her time with, wasn’t even like the lethal archangels. Raphael, with his power honed to a cruel edge, was as different from this man as she was from the angel Michaela—the scheming, intelligent ruler of a small territory whose strength had grown so acute, Jessamy was certain the stunning immortal was on the verge of becoming Cadre.

“You should rest,” he said when she didn’t reply.

She scowled. “I’m older than you are, Galen.” No matter if she appeared breakable, she could go for even longer periods without sleep. “Perhaps you’re the one who should rest after this exertion.”

A hitch in the smooth rhythm of muscle and tendon, a small pause as he caught her gaze with eyes of some rare, precious gemstone that seemed to see into her soul. “Are you inviting me to bed, Jessamy?”

5

“No.” It came out a croak, and she was so frustrated with herself for letting him rattle her that she said, “I am not a carnal creature,” her words made a lie by the slumberous heat that lingered in her even now.

Pushing up and to his feet in a smooth motion that belied the bulk of his body, Galen shoved back his hair. Then he took a step forward. Another. And another. Until she thought he’d back her against a wall… but he stopped with a single breath between them, the dark, hotly potent scent of him overwhelming her senses. “Are you sure?” Reaching out, he ran his hand over the arch of her right wing, the twisted reality of the left hidden behind the fall of her hair.

“Even in Titus’s court,” she said, fighting the excruciating pleasure that threatened to ripple over her skin, “that would’ve been an unacceptable act.” It was a touch permitted only to a lover.

Hands at his sides once more, he raised an eyebrow. “If you aren’t a carnal creature”—a challenge—“it means nothing.”

“The sensitivity of that region springs not only from base urges.” It scared her, how much he made her need, how effortlessly he shattered defenses built up over the endless eon of her existence. He had no comprehension of what he was asking.

Two thousand six hundred years she’d been alone and trapped in the Refuge. She’d had to find a way to survive, to become more than a ghost who lingered on the edges of other people’s lives. She’d made herself—into someone who was respected by adults and loved by the children she taught. It wasn’t a glorious life, but it was a life far better than the painful existence of her youth.

To risk the small happiness she’d found by jumping into the unknown, trusting that this warrior, this stranger who wasn’t a stranger, would catch her? It was a terrible thing to ask… but even as she thought it, she knew she might well be willing to pay the price for the chance to know Galen body and soul. Because this man, he didn’t simply look at her. He saw her.

“And yet,” he said, responding to her argument when she’d almost forgotten what she’d said, “it’s a caress shared between lovers alone.” With that, he stalked over to take a seat on the stool beside which he’d left his sword and, picking up the weapon, began to clean it with a soft cloth.

She wanted to shake him, this big boulder of a man who thought he was right in everything. “Do you think you’ve won?” Do you know what you’re doing to me, understand the fractures you’re creating?

Smooth, slow strokes on the gleaming metal. “I think we need to find out what you know that is so important, someone would seek your life for it.”

The chill she’d almost managed to overcome invaded her bones again. Rubbing at her arms, bared by the design of her simple gown, she walked into the tiny kitchen area and started to open the cupboards. Whether Galen cooked or not, one of the angels in charge of keeping the warrior quarters supplied would have stocked it with the essentials. She found flour, honey, butter in a cooling jar. A little more hunting and she had dried fruits, and eggs. “Do you have wood for the oven?”

Galen got up in answer, and walking to a corner of the aerie opposite from where she stood, reached into a basket to bring out two small logs, which he placed in the oven. A bit of tinder, and the fire was lit, the door closed. Designed for the aeries, the smoke from the stove would vent into the gorge, while the heat would remain inside. Angels didn’t feel the cold as mortals did, but warmth was always welcome in the mountains.

Returning to his sword, Galen continued to clean the already pristine blade, but she could feel him watching her, the sensation an almost physical touch. “What are you making?” The faintest hint of some gentler emotion.

Longing?

She went to dismiss it, hesitated. He’d been raised in a warrior court—had that small boy ever been made a treat, or had he been considered a warrior-in-training from the cradle, taught only discipline and war? “A cake with dried fruits,” she said, shaking off the idea, because his mother had surely lavished him with affection—if she knew one thing, it was that angels adored their babes. Jessamy might not be able to live with Rhoswen’s guilt, but she’d never doubted her mother’s love.

“It would be better if the fruit had soaked overnight,” she continued, heart settling, “but I don’t want to wait.” Picking up the kettle on top of the oven, she poured some of the already hot water on the dried apricots, berries, and slices of orange. “And I know many things, Galen,” she said, forcing herself to face the nightmare because it wasn’t going to disappear. “I’m the keeper of our histories.” A million fragments of time, more, they existed inside her mind.

Rising to place his sword on a bracket on the wall, Galen began to stretch slowly in the center of the room while they talked. She realized she’d interrupted him earlier, was glad, for it meant she could watch him now. No matter what she’d argued, what she knew to be the safe choice, she was a woman who ached for something that might well break her forever… and he was a beautiful man.

“But,” he said, twisting in a move that had his abdomen clenching tight, the filaments of white-gold in his wings glittering in the lamplight, “we only need to pay attention to that which could influence something important at the present time.”

Concentrate, Jessamy. “There are always a thousand small politics happening among the powerful.” No one who wasn’t immersed in that world could comprehend the labyrinthine depths of some of what went on. Which made her think— “If you are to be Raphael’s weapons-master, you must know all this.” Success would take him from her, from the Refuge, but she would never stand in the way of this magnificent creature.

“Dmitri suggested I come to you.”

“He was right,” she said, wondering if Galen had the personality to absorb what she had to say. She didn’t make the mistake of thinking him stupid. No, she’d spoken to several knowledgeable people from Titus’s territory in the hours after she’d first felt the impact of those eyes that reminded her of an unusual gem called heliodor, curious in a way she hadn’t then been ready to accept.

A little subtle direction and she’d learned that Galen wasn’t considered only a master tactician, but a man capable of building loyalty and leading armies onto enemy soil—and coming out the winner. Titus was furious to have lost him, though Orios was not—a true compliment from a weapons-master considered the best in the Cadre.

However, Galen’s mind, from what she’d learned of him, was a place of clean-cut lines, of good and bad, shades of gray few and far in between. He would bleed for those he gave his loyalty, and once given, that loyalty would be enduring.

The woman he took as his own would never, ever have to fear betrayal.

Consciously relaxing her grip on the wooden spoon she was using to stir the mixture, she took a deep breath, but he spoke before she could. “We don’t need to focus on the small intrigues.” He spread his wings, folded them back in neatly. “Putting aside any personal connections you have with other angels, your position itself is considered sacrosanct, given the impact your loss would have on the children—enemies would band together to avenge any harm done to you. To chance such reprisal, the stakes must be high.”

She halted in the process of pouring the mixture inside a small pot that was the only thing she’d found to bake in. “You’re right.” She had so much knowledge inside of her, she sometimes got lost within it. “Alexander’s planned aggression against Raphael is unquestionably the most important thing happening at present.”

“Yet it is no secret,” Galen said, his movements displaying a wild grace she wouldn’t have believed possible of such a big man. “So if your knowledge is connected to Alexander, it must relate to a hidden aspect.”

“If so, Alexander himself can’t have known of the planned assault,” she said, certain beyond any doubt. “He’d consider it an insult to his pride to corner me in my home in such a brutal fashion.” Had Alexander wanted her dead or incapacitated, one of his assassins would have quietly, efficiently taken care of it—she’d never have felt an instant’s fear.

Galen’s nod was firm. “Agreed. Who else?”

“I’ll think on it.” The blast of heat from the oven seared her skin when she opened it to place the pot inside, but it was the quiet warmth inside her that was the more dangerous—because this, being with Galen, talking with him as if they had spent many a night doing the same, it was the kind of emotional intimacy she craved. “Alexander surprises me with his intransigence about Raphael.” To be an archangel was to be Cadre. It was as simple and as immutable as that. “He has never before been unreasonable to this degree.”

“Raphael’s far stronger than he should be for his age,” Galen said, picking up the sword harness he’d left by the stool and hanging it up. “Titus has openly said he has the potential to lead the Cadre.”

“And Alexander considers that his position.” While the archangel was a great leader, he also had the arrogance of an ancient being of power, would’ve considered any such whisper a challenge.

“But,” she said, pouring hot water for some tea after she’d finished cleaning up, “we cannot discount Lijuan.” The oldest of the archangels after Alexander, Zhou Lijuan had committed atrocities it had chilled Jessamy to record in the secret histories she kept on each member of the Cadre. “She appears to have a partiality for Raphael, but her intrigues run deep.”

“Her troops are currently scattered across her territory, with no indication they’re planning to amass for an assault.”

Leaving the tea to steep, she looked up just as Galen shoved his hair back again. “You need to cut that.”

“I meant to do it last night.” Pulling off the knife at his belt, he hacked off a chunk.

“Galen!”

A questioning look.

Incensed, she grabbed the knife from him. “Sit down before you butcher all this glorious hair.” The color was so vibrant, it seemed to glow with life.

He obeyed with suspicious meekness, not saying a word as she trimmed his hair with care. It was only when she was halfway done that she realized she was standing in the middle of his parted thighs, his breath warming her through the thin material of her gown. A languid heat curling her toes, she finished and stepped back. “There,” she said, voice husky. “You can clean up.”

He stood instead, his face all hard, blunt lines, his body brushing her own… and his thumb rubbing her lower lip. The touch tugged at things tight and low in her body, until she ached, her breath coming in soft pants.

Galen had behaved for far longer than he’d thought himself capable of behaving where Jessamy was concerned. He’d flown with her so trusting and delighted in his arms, imagined her sleeping in his bed, and luxuriated in her presence as she filled his kitchen with warmth. It had taken all his willpower not to put his hands on her hips while she stood between his thighs, and tumble her into his lap.

Now…

Her skin was delicate under the roughness of his own, her breath sweet, and her lips when he claimed them parted on a soft gasp. Hand clenching on her back, he forced himself not to thrust his tongue into her mouth, not to maraud. Part of him was waiting for her to shove him away, and when she didn’t, he had to fight a roar of savage satisfaction. In its stead, he pressed down on her chin and slanted his mouth more fully over hers, his cock pushing against the fabric of his pants and into the gentle curve of her abdomen.

A flutter on his chest, a slender hand spreading over his skin as Jessamy rose on tiptoe to follow his mouth. Groaning at the feel of her high, taut breasts rubbing over his chest, he licked his tongue across her lips, wanting to know that he was welcome before he swept in to devour, to savor. Her nails dug into his skin, a tiny bite that made his entire body throb… before she pushed at him, turning her head away at the same time.

Freezing, he dropped his hand from her cheek and took a step back, making no effort to hide the jut of his arousal. “Should I apologize?”

Jessamy gave him an incredulous look out of those pleasure-smudged brown eyes… Then she laughed, the vibrant color of it filling his aerie, sinking into his bones. But the laughter faded between one breath and the next, her expression betraying a stark bleakness before she blinked and he was faced with warm elegance again, so gentle, so unimpeachable. “I’m the one who should apologize,” she said, fixing her gown though it needed no fixing.

His eyes narrowed. “Is it because I’m not learned?”

“No!” She reached out a hand, dropped it midway. “No, Galen.” Distress darkened her eyes, made her face pale.

There. A weakness, a chink in her armor he could use to batter his way inside. Except sometimes, it was better to allow your opponent to believe she’d won. “Perhaps I’m not learned,” he said, quickly cleaning up the area where she’d trimmed his hair, “but I understand I need to know what you can teach me. Will you?”

Jessamy hadn’t felt so turned around since she was a child. “I—of course,” she said, the answer instinctive. “Perhaps in the evenings after you’ve taken care of your own students.”

A nod. “So, Alexander, perhaps Lijuan. Anyone else who might find your knowledge problematic?”

She watched in silence as he strode to the cushions in the living area and sprawled with his hands under his head, looking up at a ceiling that glittered with the minerals embedded in the stone. Just like that, she thought, anger simmering in her veins, he’d moved past a kiss that had aroused her beyond need, beyond want. A lick more and she’d have allowed him to bare her to the skin, stroke those big hands anywhere and everywhere he pleased, pin her against the stone wall if he so desired… except it appeared only one of them had been so deeply affected.

Wanting to shake him and kiss her way across the muscled breadth of his chest at the same time, her emotions jerking between one extreme and the next, she went to take a seat on the stool, when he said, “It’s more comfortable here,” in a low purr of a tone.

It was a dare, no doubt about it.

Shoulders set and eyes narrowed, she crossed the distance between them to take a seat against the wall. It put her in the corner, but there was more than enough room that she didn’t feel constrained. As the sweet, spicy smell of the cake filled the aerie, she kept her eyes focused straight ahead rather than on the man beside her.

“There is also Michaela,” she said. The angel’s beauty was legend, so much so that it blinded people to both her capriciousness and the sheer power she carried in her bones. “If she has a vulnerability, she might not want it known so close to her entry into the Cadre.” Jessamy could think of nothing that would cause Michaela such concern, but she would research her files when day broke. “There is a flaw in your theory.”

A sense of movement, the caress of a hot, masculine scent that made her breath catch.

“No archangel,” she said, “or powerful immortal, would have sent a lone vampire if he or she had wanted to ensure my death. It would’ve been far more effective to have had a team of angels pick me up as I walked to my home and drop me into the gorge.”

Galen’s entire body went motionless—as if his very breath was suspended. It was then that she realized she was looking at him again. Not only looking, but admiring. Beautiful, infuriating creature. One who could kiss and forget in the blink of an eye, when her skin continued to burn with the sensory echo of his touch, when his taste—so wild, so male—lingered yet on her lips.

“Jessamy?”

Caught by the quiet, intense timbre, she said, “Yes?”

“I say this because I believe in giving fair warning.” His voice infiltrated parts of her he shouldn’t have been able to reach, they were so well hidden, so fiercely protected. “I’m very good at tactics. I know when to retreat, when to lull my opponent into a false sense of security… and when to launch a final, victorious strike.”

6

Drawing in a shuddering breath, she rose to her feet, ostensibly to check on the cake. “I’m not a campaign to be won, Galen.”

Her anger at her limited existence—and her visceral response to Galen—aside, flirting with what he was offering was pure lunacy. When Galen spread his own wings and flew from the Refuge in service to Raphael, perhaps for a decade, perhaps a century, it would hurt her. She’d known that when she walked out of the bedroom, been willing to risk it. But his kiss… oh, that sinful, addicting kiss had dangerously shifted the balance.

If she allowed this to go further, it wouldn’t just hurt her when he left. It would break her. “Don’t waste your efforts on me.” I have to live an eternity as I am, an earthbound angel. Don’t show me a glimpse of what could be, only to snatch it away.

Galen said nothing in response, but he ate the cake with open appreciation when she declared it done, and sat in silence while she read aloud from the book he’d packed in her bag—how had he known she couldn’t live without books, without words, this warrior barbarian? Later, she began to teach him the intricate power structure of the Cadre and, thus, of the world.

It was a strange, lovely night, a hazy dream.

Jessamy didn’t want day to break, but it did—in a spectacular splash of color across the skies. Flying her home, Galen walked with her through to the kitchen. It had been meticulously cleaned in her absence, until she could almost believe she’d imagined the arcing spray of darkest red.

“Do you wish to stay here, Jessamy?”

“Yes.” The night was gone, and with it, a mirage that could destroy her. This home was her haven, years of care in its making, and she would not allow it to be tainted or stolen.

Galen nodded, turning to head back to the courtyard. “It is defensible if you cooperate with your guard.”

“Of course.” The paving stones were warm beneath her feet as they stepped out into the morning once more, the kiss of wind from the black-winged angel landing a small distance away, cool. “Jason.”

Galen spoke several quiet words to Jason before returning his attention to Jessamy. “He will watch over you this day. I’ll return to tell you once it’s safe for you to teach at the school.” With that, he spread his wings and rose into the sky, a creature of pure, raw power… one who hunted those who would’ve silenced her in the cruelest fashion.

A rustle of wings.

Wrenching her attention from the now empty sky, she said, “I’ve kept a new book for you,” to Jason, this angel who was another one of those she hadn’t taught—he had simply appeared in the Refuge one day as a boy full-grown.

Jessamy had never asked Jason what his life had been before he arrived in the Refuge, but she knew it had scarred him, damaging his emotional growth to the extent that he had trouble forming bonds of attachment. There was a piercing loneliness in him that resonated with her own, but the enigmatic angel kept his distance even from the women who would’ve lain with him given the slightest encouragement, preferring to court the shadows.

“Thank you.” The light glanced off the shine of the hair he wore to just above his shoulders, the ebony strands cut in layers that shadowed the clean lines of his face and the swirling mystery of the dramatic tattoo that covered the left-hand side. “The vampire who attacked you has been tracked to Alexander’s court. His people deny all knowledge of the male’s actions.”

“What is your opinion?” she asked, because Jason—in spite of his scars, or perhaps because of them—had a way of seeing through to the heart of things, not blinded by prejudice or emotion. In many ways, he was Galen’s opposite, as subtle and cunning as Galen was blunt and direct.

“I know when to retreat, when to lull my opponent into a false sense of security… and when to launch a final, victorious strike.”

She’d told him not to waste his efforts on her, but deep in the most secret part of her lay a small, reckless voice that wanted him to push, to pursue, to force his way through the defensive barriers she’d put in his path. Dangerous, it would be heartbreakingly dangerous to give in to him in any way, but to be so wanted, it might be worth the agony to come.

“I think,” Jason said, his voice sliding into her consciousness like dark smoke, “that Alexander’s court tells the truth in this. He has his stable of assassins. Even the worst of them is ten times better than the vampire Galen executed.”

“Raphael knows to be careful?” As the keeper of their histories, Jessamy should have been a neutral party in the looming war, but she had a soft spot in her heart for the youngest of the archangels. He’d had such a delighted laugh as a boy… at least until his father’s inexorable madness, and his mother’s terrible decision—to end the life of the mate she loved with every breath in her body.

Even when it became clear at a very young age that his power far outstripped her own, Raphael had always, always, treated her with respect. Though he, too, was changing. Perhaps it was inevitable, the cold arrogance that came with that much power. Each time he returned to the Refuge, she saw less of the boy he’d been, and more of the lethal creature who was one of the Cadre.

“Dmitri,” Jason said in response to her question, “has made certain no spies are able to get in close enough to cause concern.”

“And you have ensured Raphael has his own spies in Alexander’s court.”

Jason kept his silence on the point, his face—marked by the haunting curves and lines of a tattoo he’d never explained, and that could be either a tribute or a reminder created in exquisite pain—remaining unchanged in expression, but she’d known him too long to be fooled.

Holding her gaze, he said, “Galen has no wife, no lover, has made no promises to another.”

She’d long ago stopped being startled at how Jason knew what he knew, but his words made her breath catch, her heartbeat accelerate. “Am I so transparent?” she asked, feeling vulnerable, exposed.

“No.” A pause. “But Galen has made his claim patent.”

Stroking his finger over the creamy feather touched with the faintest hint of blush that he’d stolen, Galen considered what he’d learned about the dead vampire’s loyalties from Dmitri. Alexander was unlikely to be involved, but someone in his court had a bone to grind with Jessamy. The problem, of course, was that Alexander’s territory was vast, his court a sprawling hive. It wouldn’t be easy to narrow down the target—but Jessamy was safe, would remain protected so long as it was necessary.

Galen didn’t trust easily, but he’d known of Jason before he arrived at the Refuge, seen the shadow-cloaked angel fight with that strange black sword of his, a lethal, violent storm. It was the only reason he’d left Jessamy in the other angel’s care. He had every intention of being the one on duty at night.

No other man was going to sit in her kitchen and watch her move with a graceful economy of motion as she cooked… and fought not to look at him. Each stolen glance had been a caress, a crack in the wall of her armor. He’d wanted to haul her flush against his rigid cock, tell her she could touch him as often as she pleased, and that he’d be her slave if she’d use her mouth, too.

Everywhere.

Vowing he would one day glide his hand over those subtle curves, that silken skin, while she writhed beneath him, helpless in her pleasure, he slid the feather safely away and snapped out his wings. It was nearly time for him to take flight with a group of the warriors Raphael had stationed in the Refuge, the first step in evaluating their battle readiness.

However, a tall, sleek angel with skin of lush ebony and wings patterned akin to those of a butterfly famed for its orange and black markings landed on the path in front of him before he could rise. “Sir.” Folding back her wings, she inclined her head in a small, respectful bow, her mane of tight curls braided close to her skull.

“I’m no longer your commander, Zaria.”

Small white teeth flashed in a gamine smile, dimples forming in both cheeks. “In Raphael’s territory or in Titus’s, you are my commander. Augustus agrees.”

He had hoped that some of those he’d led would follow him, but had not expected it of such experienced warriors, both of whom held high posts in Titus’s army. “You are welcome,” he said, clasping her forearm in a familiar greeting, “but you will have to prove your loyalty to Raphael.”

A raised eyebrow. “You think me a spy?” No insult, only the curiosity that made her such a gifted scout.

“I think being weapons-master has far more nuances than I ever before understood.” He nodded at her to follow him back into the stronghold—she was too dangerous in her strength not to be brought immediately to Dmitri’s attention. “How is Orios?”

“Content. Proud as a father.” Another sparkling smile. “Titus is a wounded boar torn between the same pride and fury at being stripped of your skill, but the flitterbies know how to soothe him.”

Children were rare, so rare among the immortals, and Titus had none of his blood, but he’d adopted the children of his warriors who had fallen in battle, given the little ones lives that had resulted in their becoming spoiled, indulgent adults who were nonetheless sweet of nature. “They do have their uses.” It was only once he and Zaria were inside the cool stone walls of the stronghold that he said, “My parents?”

“Your father keeps an eye on Alexander’s forces.”

Galen had expected as much; his father was Titus’s second.

“Your mother”—Zaria deliberately touched her wing to the stone, as if testing the texture—“has begun to train the new crop of recruits.”

Tanae had to have known of Zaria’s decision to defect—it was an expected and watched-for consequence on the departure of a commander—and yet she’d sent no message with the scout. His father, Galen had never expected anything from beyond his warrior’s education, but he’d spent decades trying to earn a word of praise from his mother… all the while knowing the quest to be a futile effort.

The fact of the matter was that Tanae was an anomaly among angelkind. A warrior, talented and proud, she had never wanted a child. To her credit, she had raised Galen with scrupulous care, and while the flitterbies had attempted to make a spoiled pet of him—an attempt he’d repudiated with childish fierceness—it was always Tanae he strove to impress. Until he’d understood that her indifference wasn’t feigned to motivate him to greater heights. It ran bone-deep.

The realization had broken the heart of the boy he’d been.

“I’ll need to return to Titus’s court to take my formal leave,” Zaria said, her tone telling him she’d thought nothing odd of his questions. “I can carry a letter back to your parents.”

The wounded boy he’d once been was long gone, replaced by a man who had never hidden from anything, no matter how devastating. “No, there’s no need.” So distant from the court his mother called home, he could finally give Tanae the one thing she’d always wanted—the liberty to forget she’d ever been forced into despised weakness by the child she’d carried in her womb.

“Keir comes,” Jason said, an instant before the healer’s face appeared in the doorway of the library room where Jessamy sat. Old eyes in a youthful face, the slender, graceful body of a dancer, Keir was angelkind’s most gifted healer, his features so fine they were almost feminine… but no one would ever mistake him for a woman.

Entering on feet as silent as those of the feline weaving around his ankles, he took a seat across from her, the golden brown of his wings stroking down to kiss the thick copper-hued carpet. “Hello, Jason.” The cat jumped up to settle on the table beside him as he spoke, a small smoky gray Sphinx with eyes of luminous gold.

“Keir.” The black-winged angel whispered away and out of the room, pulling the door shut behind himself.

“I worry about our beautiful Jason,” Keir said, his gaze on the heavy slab of wood beyond which Jason stood guard. “When you’ve survived what I suspect he has, there really is nothing left to fear.”

Jessamy’s hand fisted in the pale yellow of her gown, her mind circling around the quiet panic that had colored her interactions with Galen. “Isn’t that a gift?”

Keir shook his head, his silky black hair brushing his shoulders. “We should all have something to fear, Jessamy.” The feline purred as he stroked slender fingers through its fur. “As we all should have something to hope for. Jason has neither.”

“And such a man,” Jessamy whispered, “has no reason to go on living.” Worry pierced her soul for the angel who had a voice so haunting it rivaled Caliane’s, but whose song made tears form in her heart. “Raphael,” she said, her voice trembling with relief. “Jason has given his loyalty to him, and Raphael will not let him go.”

“Yes. There is something to be said for that young one’s arrogance.” A slight smile, because Keir had a favorite, too. “So, I hear the big brute Raphael has accepted as his weapons-master is courting you.”

Jessamy jerked up her head. “Jason’s knowledge, I understand, even if I can’t explain it. But you’ve been working in the Medica for days.” A fragile newborn, the first child born in the Refuge for five long years, was commanding Keir’s interest. “The babe?” Keir had forbidden visitors—for the hall of healing would’ve been buried in wings otherwise.

“Her angry screams summoned me deep in the night; tiny she might be, but she does not like being ignored. I rather think our little sprite will be a warrior.” Eyes sparkling with a light that was unique to Keir, he leaned forward on the gleaming wood of the table. “As for your brute—you allowed him to fly you. Did you think no one would notice?”

Jessamy swallowed. “It can’t be, Keir.”

“Why?”

Forcing her fist to unclench, she held that warm gaze of uptilted brown, tore the scab off her most vicious wound. “I think he does truly want me”—a memory of the hard length of him pushing into her abdomen, his mouth so hungry on her own, his hand gripping her jaw with masculine possessiveness—“and I will not deny the depth of my own attraction.” Such a pale word that was, to express the wildness of what Galen aroused in her.

“Yet something’s holding you back.”

“Even knowing I’m thinking too far ahead,” she said, rubbing a hand over her heart in a futile attempt to still the ache within, “I can’t help but imagine his bitterness when he realizes that being with me means having his wings clipped, his lineage ended.” For Jessamy would never chance subjecting a child to the same painful existence she’d endured. “I will not be the weight that drags him out of the skies.”

Keir’s tone was soft when he replied, his words without mercy. “Galen does not seem to be a man who lacks in courage. That you say this about him makes me think less of you, old friend.”

Ice trickled down her spine, Keir’s words a painful echo of what Galen had said on the ledge outside his aerie. “You’re calling me a coward,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “You’re saying I’m hiding behind my wing.”

7

“I didn’t say that, but you heard it.” Reaching across the table, he closed his hand over her own, his skin smooth, so unlike another man’s far rougher touch. “Is that how you see yourself?”

Emotions choked her throat, tore up her chest, turned her voice raw. “I’m making the right decision; you must see that. If I allow him in and he rejects me, I couldn’t bear it.” Not when it was her infuriating, maddening, magnificent barbarian, a man who looked at her as if she was beautiful, awakening dreams she’d buried deep so she could survive and be content, not a resentful creature eaten up with envy.

Keir’s expression was tender. “Everyone learns to survive heartbreak.” Releasing her hand, he rose and came to lean over the back of her chair, his arms around her neck, his cheek rubbing against her hair. “Your disadvantage is that you did not have to face it early, when you were younger, more resilient. Now, sweet Jessamy, I think you are afraid.”

Swallowing the knot in her throat, she put her hand over the supple muscle of his arm. “Shouldn’t I be afraid? My life has not been akin to the lives of those who can touch the sky at whim.” Her years of learning to live with a desolation, a sense of aching loss no other angel could understand, had made her brittle on the inside. “Have I not earned my peace?”

Keir’s lips brushed her cheek, the scent of him a languid caress. “You never wanted peace, my darling. The only question is, are you strong enough to reach for what you do want, knowing the joy may be followed by terrible sorrow?”

The door opened on the lingering echo of his final words, to reveal not Jason, but Galen, eyes of sea green incandescent with fury. “You are now free to teach at the school,” he said. “Illium and Jason will be present to ensure the safety of you and your students both.” With that curt pronouncement, he was gone.

Her hand tightened on Keir’s arm. “He thinks we’re together.” It would be easy to allow him to believe her a liar, a woman who had betrayed her lover with a scorching kiss, a hundred hidden glances.

Her stomach twisted; her gut roiled. “Let me up, Keir.” When her friend released her, she rose, shook out the skirts of her gown. “The fear is like metal on my tongue—I’ve known him but a fragment of time, and yet I’m certain if I accept his suit, it will destroy a part of me when he leaves.”

Keir reached forward to tuck her hair behind her ear. “We’re all a little broken.” Quiet. Potent. “No one goes through life with a whole heart.” His eyes, full of wisdom too profound to belong to a man who was only three hundred years her senior, told her he saw her soul, tasted the salt of her loneliness.

But what even Keir’s eyes couldn’t see, she thought as she walked out of the library, Jason a silent shadow by her side, was that her heart wasn’t whole. It had broken long, long ago—the first time she’d looked up at the sky and realized it was forever out of her reach. The courage it was taking for her to reach out again was a tight rawness in her chest, serrated at the edges by the remnants of a thousand shattered dreams.

Galen put both vampires on the ground using a fury of kicks and hard whacks with the flat of his blade. “You made the same mistake twice,” he said, waiting only until their eyes focused after the stinging slap of the blade. “I gave you a warning.” Second warnings didn’t exist in his world.

Struggling to their feet, the two nodded. One wiped blood from the corner of his mouth. But neither demurred when he demanded they go through the exercise again. This time, they were so busy trying not to make the first mistake, they made a different one. Realizing both males were exhausted, he pulled his hits and called a halt. “Go,” he said. “Work on your own and against each other tomorrow. Day after, we’ll spar once more.”

The younger vampire hesitated. “We want to get better.” His partner nodded.

Impressed the two hadn’t made a run for it after the beating he’d given them, he forced himself to speak past the anger that was a violent storm in his body. “You will. I want you to go through the steps I showed you at the start again and again until the movements are second nature.” Galen had spent countless hours doing drills, knew their value. “Part of combat is being able to react without thought—you need to train your muscles to remember.”

The vampires left after asking several intelligent questions, determination writ large on their faces. Ignoring his audience as he had since she’d entered in an elegance of cool yellow, he picked up his broadsword and began to go through a complicated routine that would’ve left his opponents in tiny pieces in the blink of an eye. People often misjudged his speed because he looked big and heavy. In truth, the only one of Raphael’s people who might be faster, he thought, was Illium.

“I’ll have a class of disappointed babes if you force me to wait any longer.” Her voice was quiet, but it tore through the air of the salle, nails on his skin.

“Say what you have to and leave.” He forced himself to slow his movements so he could hear her past the whipping cut of the blade.

Silence.

If she thought he’d halt for her, she was very wrong.

“So”—a soft murmur—“this is the flip side to your determination and loyalty. Utter, obdurate stubbornness.” A rippling laugh. “I’m rather glad to find you have a flaw.”

Galen clenched his jaw because she was right. He was stubborn, a tenacity he’d made into an asset, but one that had often gotten him into trouble as a child. And he did have a tendency to hold on to his anger, but he was justified here. Jessamy had allowed him to taste her lips, allowed him to believe he might court her, when she belonged to another man.

Halting with the edge of the blade a hairbreadth from her neck, he growled, “That was a singularly stupid thing to do.” Coming up behind him was never a good idea.

Neither fear nor apology in eyes of lush brown he’d wanted to see soft and hazy in his bed. “I know you heard me.”

He lowered the blade, put distance between them, the warm, earthy scent of her threatening to compromise his honor all over again. “What is it you wish to say, Lady Jessamy?”

Jessamy’s heart thudded at the naked fury on Galen’s face. All heavy muscle and gleaming skin, he made her think thoughts that were not the least bit civilized. And fear… yes, it lingered, but not of him. Of this, what she was about to do. It might well go down as the worst mistake of her life, but she knew there was no other choice. Not when it destroyed her to have Galen thinking her disloyal.

“Keir,” she said, and saw the heliodor-green turn molten, “is my friend. My best friend. He has been thus for thousands of years.” Continuing to speak when he didn’t so much as blink, much less soften, she continued. “He invited me to his bed once, a long time ago. He wanted me to experience such intimacy.” It had been the heartfelt gesture of a young healer who could find no way to heal his friend. “But I said no—if I share a man’s bed, it will be because of passion, nothing less.”

Still no response from the angry, stubborn creature who fascinated her so. Realizing he was too deep in his anger to hear her—yes, his temper was another flaw—she turned to leave. The last thing she heard was the whir of his sword cutting through the air once more, vicious and precise.

Drenched in sweat and with his shoulder muscles aching from holding his wings too tight to his back, Galen finally stopped moving when Illium walked into the salle.

The angel whistled. “Do I want to know?” He looked pointedly at the blades embedded in the walls.

“I was practicing my throwing.” Pulling out the blades one by one, he began to stack them on the table. “You’re fast. I need to practice trying to pin you.”

“Just ask,” the angel said without hesitation. “No one’s ever succeeded yet.” Flying up to some of the higher blades and wrenching them out, he dropped them on the table. “Jessamy finished her lessons, so Jason is escorting her back home—they’re probably there by now. He’ll keep watch until relieved. I can—”

“No.”

Golden eyes tipped with black lashes dipped in blue were suddenly looking into his as Illium came to a precise landing in front of Galen. “I like you, Galen, but I love Jessamy. Hurt her and I’ll gut you.”

Galen looked the angel up and down. “Bluebell, you couldn’t take me if I was blindfolded and had both hands tied behind my back.”

“Bluebell?” Illium narrowed his eyes. “That’s it, Barbarian.” Throwing two of the knives to Galen, he picked up two of his own.

And then they were moving. He’d been right. Illium was faster than him. Much faster. The blue-winged angel could also do things in the air that should’ve been impossible, except that Galen had the cuts on his back and the bruises on his chest to prove they weren’t. But he was more than holding his own… waiting only until Illium made one overconfident move too many to pin the angel to the ground with a blade through the tip of his wing, where the wound would heal by morning.

Cursing with unexpected creativity for someone so pretty, Illium glared at Galen. “You set me up.”

“I had to gauge how fast you were, what you bring to Raphael’s forces.” Releasing the other angel, he rose to his feet. “You’ll do, Bluebell.”

Illium swore at him in rapid-fire Greek. Galen replied in just as blue French, ordering him to come back for further sessions to improve a technique that was damn near flawless except for one thing. “You’re too cocky. Need to have some sense whacked into you.”

Illium snarled but agreed to return— “So I can put you on your ass.”

Separating from the angel once they reached the cliff, he flew down to his aerie to clean up and change before flying back up right as the rays of the setting sun blazed across the sky in innumerable shades of gold and orange, with the slightest edge of blush. It reminded him of the feather he’d secreted away with such care, the feather he’d been unable to discard even when he’d thought Jessamy’s lovely face that of a liar.

It still bubbled in him, the rage that had roared to the surface when he’d seen the healer with his lips touching her skin, her face lifted up to his in absolute trust. Galen had no right to expect anything similar from her after so short an acquaintance, but the logic of it didn’t matter, because he did.

Landing on the gray and blue tiles shimmering with flecks of hidden elements in the dark orange light, he relieved Jason with a curt nod, waiting until the other angel took flight—his inky wings a dramatic silhouette against the cascade of color—to walk inside Jessamy’s home, bolting the door behind himself.

“Jason, did you—” Looking up from where she sat behind a harp, the thick silk of her hair cascading over one shoulder, her gown now a plain sage green that curved lower across her chest than the gown she’d earlier worn, Jessamy’s welcoming smile faded, her expression turning guarded, solemn. “Galen.”

It twisted something inside him to know he’d put that look on her face. “I have a temper,” he said, because it had to be said. “A terrible one.”

Her fingers danced over the strings of the harp with exquisite grace, filling the air with a ripple of music, pure and sweet. “I’ve seen you practicing, sparring—you fight as if you have no emotions, a man utterly contained. Is that why?”

Remaining in a standing position, he clasped his hands behind his back when the urge to fist her hair and tilt her head so he could take her mouth with primal possession, as he shaped the delicate mounds hinted at by her clothing, threatened to overwhelm him. “My father told me at a young age that if I didn’t learn to handle it, it would consume me.”

“Your father was a wise man.” Another lilt of music. “Sit. Or do you plan to loom over me until I submit?”

No one who had seen him in a temper had ever dared tease him before. He wasn’t certain how he felt about it, but he allowed himself to lower his guard now that she’d accepted him in her space and—stripping off his sword and harness—took a seat in the large armchair in front and to the left of her. “I’ve become legend for the depth of my control. No one has witnessed me rage in well over a century.”

The music twanged, stopped.

“You say such things, Galen… and I’m not certain how to respond.” Aching vulnerability twined around Jessamy’s heart. He would mark her, this man. Mark her so deep and true it would become a scar. But she’d made her choice, would not permit fear to steal it from her. “It’s time for another lesson about the Cadre.” She continued to play, noticing how his shoulders relaxed as the lyrical sound filled the air.

Checking his sword harness with absent attention, he nodded. “It’s becoming clear to me how much more I need to learn.”

He was a cooperative pupil, his mind quick and agile. In the conversation, it came out that he spoke not simply Greek and French with a native’s fluency, but also the myriad languages of Persia and Africa. Fascinated and wanting no distractions as they spoke, she stopped playing to slide into a chair at the dining table. He moved into the one next to it the same instant, asking her perceptive question after perceptive question. Most people, she thought, quite likely severely underestimated his intelligence because of his ease with weapons and war, the way he talked, and dressed—or didn’t dress.

It was impossible not to caress the ridged plane of his upper body with her gaze when he sat so close, his wing spread over the back of her chair, the heavy warmth of it a silent touch. The possessiveness of the act wasn’t lost on her, but she found herself spreading her own wing a fraction, so it would whisper against his.

“I am only a man.” It was a rumbling murmur, his eyes on her mouth. “If you continue to play with me thus, I’ll forget I came to apologize for my behavior, and act in a fashion that’ll have you angry with me all over again.”

Her lips felt swollen, her breasts tight, but she found the wit to say, “And when will I hear this apology?”

Shifting his focus, he held her gaze with eyes she knew she’d never forget, not if she lived ten thousand years. “I am sorry for doubting your honor, Jessamy.” A pause. “I’m not sorry for wishing to separate Keir’s head from his body.”

“Galen!” Laughter bubbled out of her, bright and unexpected and so very real that it brought tears to her eyes. “Oh, you are a barbarian.”

His cheeks creased, one hand coming up to play with her hair, twining strands around a thick finger. When he tugged, her stomach dropped, but she leaned forward. She expected to feel his mouth on her own, but he angled his face and brushed his lips over the top of her cheekbone. Shivering, she curled her hand around his nape, the feel of the tendon and muscle moving beneath the heat of his skin a seductive intimacy as he continued to brush kisses down the edge of her face, until he reached her neck.

“Oh.”

8

He nuzzled the place he’d kissed, the skin so sensitive that the hot gust of his breath made her toes curl. A fraction of a moment later, the pleasure and power of him were replaced by a shock of air as Galen ripped himself from her and retrieved his sword in a single savage motion. Attempting to quiet her gasping breaths, she stared around his battle-ready form, saw nothing. An instant later, a footfall sounded on the front path, followed by a knock.

“Wait,” Galen said when she would’ve risen. “It may be a ruse.”

He was gone the next instant, moving with predatory menace to greet a visitor who could mean her harm. Standing, she looked for a weapon to aid him if needed, and had settled on a small statuette when she heard the sounds of male voices in conversation. Recognizing the second voice, she replaced the statuette and stepped out into the hall. “Raphael.”

The archangel with his eyes of impossible blue and hair of midnight silk was pure male beauty. Next to him Galen was all hard, rough edges, a warrior who had lost none of his raw power in the face of Raphael’s strength. He watched with cool eyes as the archangel walked forward to take the hands she held out.

“Have my people been looking after you well, Jessamy?”

“Always.” Rising, she brushed a kiss over his cheek, but concern had her asking, “What are you doing here?” Alexander was fully capable of using Raphael’s absence to force his way into Raphael’s wild new territory.

“Alex, as Illium calls the vaunted Alexander”—a gleam of humor—“is currently in seclusion with his favorite concubine, and appears to have no willingness to leave his palace. I will have warning if he or his army look to be preparing to move.”

Something about the report on Alexander sang a sour note to her, a harp string damaged, but she couldn’t reason why. Abandoning the thought for the present when it stayed frustratingly out of reach, she released Raphael’s hands. “I’m glad of your visit. Come, tell me of your lands.”

As they sat and spoke, Galen stood guard by the doorway. Neither by look nor word did he betray to his archangel what he and Jessamy were becoming to each other… and a seed of doubt bloomed in her mind. His reticence could be born of any number of reasons, including the fact that Raphael was certainly here to evaluate the man who would be his weapons-master, but she kept circling around to a single horribly painful con-clusion.

Shame.

He might have taken her flying, but that could be explained away as a gift given out of pity. He hadn’t actually done anything in public that would make people talk, regard them as a couple. And it was an ugly image when she considered it without the blinders of hope—her, deformed wing and stick-thin frame, paired with Galen’s primal power and raw mascu-linity.

No, she thought, no, beyond angry with herself. She had to stop this. Galen did not deserve to be tarred by such fear-driven suspicions. He’d never lied to her, not even about his temper. Wanting to laugh at the giddiness of her relief, she promised herself she would make it up to her barbarian.

Galen watched in silence as Raphael bid Jessamy good night before nodding at Galen and rising into the stars glittering against a night sky so pure, it was ebony. Galen understood the silent command. A weapons-master held considerable power and influence in an archangel’s court, and Raphael would give the position to no one he didn’t trust on every level—tomorrow, Galen would be judged.

He felt no anxiety. He knew his own strength, knew he would not fail. And he knew he would judge Raphael in turn, for this was the man for whom he’d lift his sword for centuries to come, perhaps until the end of his immortal life. It was no light choice for a warrior.

Jessamy’s gaze tracked the archangel until his wings disappeared beyond the mountains, and he could almost taste the keen edge of her hunger. It angered him that she didn’t ask him for what she needed, but he tempered the response—it would take time for her to understand that he would fly her anywhere she wanted to go, whether they had harsh words between them or tender.

He held out his hand. “Come.”

She hesitated.

Unwilling to let anything go when it came to this complex, lovely woman who was a mystery that compelled him, he closed the distance between them. “Have you not yet forgiven me for my rage?”

“You apologized.” Laughter tugged at lips he wanted to suck and bite, but she didn’t come into his arms.

“Then what? I am not the most sensitive of men”—a weakness he’d realized long ago—“so you must make it clear.”

Her eyes widened. “Are you always so blunt?”

“No.” He could play games—he had grown up in an archangel’s court, after all. “But I have no liking for games, would rather not ever play them with you.”

Reaching out, she spread her hand over his heart, the touch going straight to his cock. “You have a way of destroying my foundations.” Stroking her fingers down his body with luscious concentration, her lashes obscuring her expressive eyes, she moved close enough that their bodies aligned.

His rigid cock pushed demandingly into the curve of her abdomen.

“Galen.”

“Jessamy.” When she didn’t break the intimate contact, cuddling even closer, he wove his fingers into her hair, wanting to push, to urge her to put her mouth on his skin. “You’re seducing me to get your own way.”

A husky laugh. “It’s quite pleasurable.” Another petting caress. “I do believe I should have bad thoughts more often.”

Realizing he’d been beaten, he decided on a strategic retreat—for tonight. “All right, keep your secrets, Jessamy mine.” Shifting his hold without warning, he swung her up into his arms.

“Galen!”

Three powerful wingbeats and they were in the air, Jessamy’s arms locked around his neck, her body tucked into his chest. “You can’t just trick me into flight every time,” she said, but she was laughing.

“I’ll always fly you. No matter what happens.”

She, in place of an answer, nuzzled her face into his neck. Her touch was welcome, her avoidance of his declaration not, but this night was too beautiful to mar with arguments, and so he swept her across the glittering landscape of the Refuge, and toward the east. As he rode the air currents with her slight weight in his arms, what he felt was nothing he could name. It was simply there, a quiet, deep knowledge, a sense of inexorable rightness.

It was much later that he took them down to land on a promontory that overlooked the Refuge, the lights within the homes a thousand fireflies in the dark, the majority of the residents wakeful yet. “This is my favorite vantage point,” he said, taking a position behind her, his arms around her shoulders. Her wings were soft and warm between them, the feathers silken against his skin.

Continuing to hold her with one arm, he used the hand of the other to stroke the twisted line of the wing that had never formed correctly, felt her stiffen. “I once lost my leg,” he told her, not breaking the touch. “I was young—it took years to grow back. The same could happen again in battle. Would you repudiate me?”

The stiffness of her didn’t abate. “It’s not the same, Galen.” A raw kind of pain in her words. “Eternity is a long time to live broken and malformed.”

He didn’t do her the insult of disregarding the suffering that had forged her. “Many would have chosen Sleep.” Decades, centuries, even millennia could pass while an angel Slept. “Yet you chose to live.”

“I’m not brave,” she whispered. “I just didn’t want to give those who pitied me the satisfaction of seeing me give up on life.” Turning in his arms, she wrapped her own around his waist, pressing her cheek to his chest. “I didn’t want to be seen as weak.”

One hand on her nape, beneath the warm fall of her hair, the other on her lower back, he bent his head to speak with his lips brushing her ear. “Many a young warrior has gone into battle with the same motivation. There is no shame in fear that drives.” He widened his stance to tuck her even closer, and he thought that, perhaps, she had shown him a secret part of herself. “I was,” he said, revealing the same within him, “one of those young warriors.”

Tanae had always been so unflinching in her courage, and Galen had never wanted to shame her. “My mother looked at me with disgust when the blood and gore and horror of my first battle had me emptying my stomach, and I didn’t know how to tell her that I had never tasted true fear until that moment. Instead, I learned to be harder, better, stronger.”

“Your mother… she sounds a harsh taskmaster.” It was a hesitant statement.

“She is a warrior.” Galen had no other words, because the words he’d already spoken described Tanae’s soul.

It was Jessamy’s hand that stroked him now, her touch tender and careful over his wing, and he was startled at the realization that she was attempting to comfort him. It was a strange sensation. No one had ever coddled him after he’d snarled at the flitterbies, determined to become tough.

Jessamy would probably not handle snarling well, so he’d bear the gentle petting. “Jessamy?”

“Hmm?”

Fisting his hand in her hair, he tilted back her head. “I’m going to kiss you now.”

As the stars flickered overhead, icy gemstones lit with cold fire, he took her mouth the way he’d wanted to from the first. He demanded entrance and she opened for him, the softness of her his to ravage. Mystery, that was what Jessamy tasted like. Sweet and dark and with depths it’d take a man an immortal lifetime to explore. Gripping her chin with his free hand, he angled her just as he liked and then he devoured her.

A tiny push, a hint of teeth.

Listening, he gave her a bare instant to breathe before he plundered her mouth again, her sensuality a deliciously slow-burning ember that had her nails digging into his nape, her tongue stroking against his with carnal curiosity.

He groaned and angled his body, the spread of his wings blocking the view of the Refuge as he cupped the gentle curve of her bottom and lifted her up to cradle the hard ridge of his need.

“Galen.” Breathless.

He was moving too fast. But when she rubbed her lips over his, licking out her tongue to taste him, it would’ve taken a stronger man than Galen to resist her.

Galen was unsurprised to find Raphael in the practice salle the next morning, stripped down to wide-legged black pants held up by a thick fabric belt tied at the side. It reminded Galen of the gear worn by Lijuan’s men when they occasionally came to train with Titus’s, the two archangels maintaining a relatively cordial relationship this century.

He’d worn pants of a durable brown material today, along with his favorite worn-in boots, his sword in its usual position along his spine. Now he removed boots and sword. “Are you going to execute me if I pin you to the floor?”

Raphael’s lips curved at the practical question. “I’m not Uram, Galen. I suppose I’m more like Titus in this—I want men who aren’t too afraid of me to tell me the truth.”

Galen had thought as much. It was why he was here. “Hand to hand, no weapons.”

“Agreed.”

A whisper of blue flickered on the periphery of Galen’s vision as Illium entered, spreading his wings to fly up and perch on a beam. Dmitri was no longer in the Refuge—he’d gone, Galen had realized, to hold Raphael’s territory while the archangel was here. Jason had also disappeared, having left a message for Galen about which warriors could be trusted with Jessamy’s safety.

Important as she was to him, Galen wouldn’t have placed faith in even Jason’s astute assessments, except that he’d already decided on half the men and women on the list—so he allowed them to watch over her as he saw to his duties. “Yes?”

Raphael gave a single nod.

They met in the middle of the salle, two men with wholly dissimilar fighting styles. Galen was a blunt force who had just enough grace that he could surprise opponents, while Raphael was pure lethal elegance. Unlike when he was fighting with an inexperienced adversary, Galen used his wings, and so did Raphael. It took incredible strength to achieve a short vertical liftoff without exposing vulnerable parts of yourself, but Galen had learned to do it through constant and unrelenting practice. Raphael, meanwhile, seemed to do it instinctively.

Respect for the archangel grew deeper in Galen as Raphael almost brought him down, twisted to block a strike, and recalculated his attack. The archangel was cold-blooded enough to strategize, warrior enough to take pleasure in the dance. Galen had the sudden thought that if this was the truth of who Raphael was beneath the veneer of civilized sophistication, then he wouldn’t only work for the archangel; he might just serve.

Slamming the archangel to the earth, he went to pin him, but Raphael was already gone, having rolled and risen to come at Galen’s back… except Galen was twisting to meet the attack, their arms thrusting up to halt each other, elbows and biceps locked.

“Stalemate!” Illium called out.

Amusement colored Raphael’s expression, though he continued to hold the strained position. “I would agree.”

Nodding, Galen stepped back at the same time as the archangel. “Well played.”

“You’re better than Titus’s people led me to believe.” A gleam in the relentless blue. “I think he’s hoping you’ll return to his court.”

“I’ve made my choice.” He began to cool down, conscious of Raphael doing the same beside him. “If there’s no place for me here, it’s not to Titus’s court that I would go.”

“Where, then?”

Galen considered his options. “There aren’t many for whom I might choose to raise my sword, fewer still who are strong enough not to consider me a threat. Elijah would head the list.” The archangel was older than Raphael, but not lost to the cruelty power engendered in so many. “However, he has a weapons-master he trusts and respects.”

“You have the potential to rule within an archangel’s wider territory,” Raphael said, resettling his wings as he brought himself to a halt. “Why not petition the Cadre for a change in status?”

Galen, too, came to a standstill. “I am a weapons-master.” It was what sang to his blood.

Picking up a set of throwing knives, Raphael gave them to Galen before taking a set for himself. When he raised his eyebrow, Galen grinned and looked up. “Let’s see how fast you really are, Bluebell.”

“Bluebell?” The archangel laughed as Illium swore to get even, and then the first knife was flying from his hand.

Twenty knives later—ten each—Illium smirked from his high perch. “Oh, you both missed.” Faux disappointment, embellished with theatrical sighs. “Poor, poor dears.”

“In case you’ve forgotten, I am an archangel,” Raphael reminded the irreverent angel, his tone dry.

Illium grinned, unrepentant. “Want to try again? I’ll move extra slow—you are both so much older, after all.” The last words were a conspiratorial whisper.

Galen glanced at Raphael. “How has he survived this long?”

“No one can catch him.”

As Illium laughed and attempted to get Raphael to commit to a wager, Galen felt a sense of absolute rightness. This, this was his place, with these warriors tied together by more than fear or subservience, but most of all, with the woman who had marked him with the erotic promise of her kiss.

He wondered when Jessamy would realize what he’d done.

9

Jessamy said, “Saraia,” in a stern tone.

“Sorry, Jessamy.” Pulling her drooping wings back up, Saraia looked to Jessamy for praise.

She smiled. “Good girl.”

Satisfied, Saraia continued reading out the passage she’d been assigned.

Jessamy knew her charges thought her merciless for the way she constantly reminded them to raise their wings, but the fact was, their bones were still forming. The more effort they put into the task, the stronger they’d grow, until the heaviness of their wings became near weightless.

However, in spite of her correction, her mind wasn’t completely with the children. Part of her remained in Galen’s arms, her mouth burning with the imprint of his own. When he’d offered to fly her, she’d felt such guilt for the awful thought that had wormed its way into her mind earlier, but Galen had certainly not minded her efforts at a silent apology.

“You’re seducing me to get your own way.”

A giddy smile more suited to an adolescent threatened to break out over her face.

“Jessamy?”

Glancing up, she saw Saraia looking at her with a hesitant smile, the book closed.

“Well-done,” she said, wrenching herself back to the present, and to these precious souls who needed to learn what she had to teach them. “You have a lovely way of reading.

“Now,” she said, once Saraia had returned to her firm but comfortable stool in the circle of young ones, Jessamy’s older students having already had their lesson, “it’s time for our discussion. Have you all thought of a subject to talk about?”

A hand went up, waving wildly.

“Yes, Azec?”

The boy’s wine-dark eyes sparkled as they met her own, the naughtiness in them so apparent she had to fight a laugh. This one reminded her of Illium—whom she’d had to threaten with dire consequences more than once when he wouldn’t concentrate on his lessons. He’d always kissed her on the cheek afterward and apologized with such sincerity, the little mischief-maker.

“Miss Jessamy,” Azec said, all but vibrating with excitement, “do you like the new angel, the big one?”

“Galen,” the girl next to him supplied in a loud whisper. “My mother said his name is Galen.”

Jessamy blinked, so startled she could only say, “Why?”

Azec stood, wings spread, and hands thrown victoriously in the air. “Because you were kissing him!”

Giggles erupted around the room, while Azec sat back with a bright grin, satisfied he’d trumped all his classmates. But his elevated status didn’t last long.

“I saw, too!” another girl cried. “Up on the cliff.” Kicking out her legs, she beamed at Jessamy, her wild tumble of sun-colored curls held back with a pretty lilac ribbon. “I could tell it was you because of your wing,” she said with the unvarnished honesty of youth.

All at once, Jessamy remembered how Galen had blocked the view with his own wings when things became heated—he’d known their silhouettes would be visible from certain areas of the Refuge, had to have realized the kiss would be all over the angelic city by morning. She had been, she realized, expertly outflanked. No wonder so many people had looked at her with secret smiles on their lips this morning. Not smirks, but smiles full of delight.

Such as those on the faces in front of her.

Their joy for her shattered something inside her, some brittle, hard shield. “I did kiss Galen,” she admitted, because you couldn’t lie to children and expect to keep their trust.

Azec and Saraia both spoke at the same time, their voices tangling in playful innocence. “Did you like it?”

“Yes.” Until she didn’t know the passionate, demanding stranger she’d become.

Having caught more than one speculative look directed his way as he walked through the artisans’ section of the Refuge later that day, Galen bit back a smile of primal satisfaction. No one was now in any doubt about his claim when it came to Jessamy.

Illium knocked on the door of the home where he’d led them, eyes of deep gold narrowing when his gaze fell on Galen. “It might be better for your health not to look like the cat that got into the cream when you see Jessamy next.”

Galen bared his teeth. “A man has a right to declare his courtship.” And make it clear that anyone who got in the way would be eviscerated.

The blue-winged angel shook his head. “Barbarian, there’s declaring and then there’s beating the point home with a club.”

Right then, they heard a faint “It’s open” from within the house.

Following the flirtatious wind in the hallway, they came out onto a railing-less balcony that hung out over the gorge, appearing to be suspended against the cerulean blue of the sky. The angel who sat with his back to the house, his face and hands streaked with red and blue and yellow, a color-drenched canvas on the easel in front of him, was created of fractured pieces of light.

His wings were diamond bright, refracting and breaking the piercing beams of sunlight; his hair the same pale, paradoxically dazzling shade; his eyes, when he turned to glance over his shoulder, splintered outward from the black pupil in shards of crystalline blue and green. A sculpture in ice, but for the fact his skin held a golden warmth that likely made him an object of desire, though he was a youth yet.

Rising the instant he saw that Illium wasn’t alone, the angel took a respectful stance beside his easel, the blue paint on his cheek a primitive tattoo.

“Galen, this is Aodhan. He serves Raphael.” Illium made the introduction with a courtly grace that wouldn’t have been out of place in the palace of Neha, the Queen of Poisons. “Aodhan,” the angel continued, “meet Raphael’s new weapons-master.”

“Sir.”

Raphael’s people, Galen thought, fit no predictable pattern … but one. “Your aerie is well situated,” he said, considering the quiet, implacable loyalty he’d sensed in both Dmitri and Illium. An archangel who inspired such fidelity in men of strength was indeed a power Alexander should fear.

Aodhan’s wings rustled as he moved to join Galen near the edge of the balcony. “The light,” he said, a shy smile in his eyes, “it’s perfect for painting.”

Shy perhaps, Galen thought, but intelligent, and, from the way he moved, highly capable in some kind of combat. “The blade,” he murmured. “Rapier?” The delicate but deadly sword would fit the angel’s graceful step.

But Aodhan shook his head. “Too light for me. I prefer a more solid blade.” He pushed back his hair, leaving a red streak on his forehead and in the strands. The color glittered.

“You returned to the Refuge this morn?” He’d give the young angel time to rest, after which he wanted to see him in the salle—as weapons-master, he had to know the strengths and weaknesses of all of Raphael’s trusted people.

“Yes. I’ve been acting as a courier for the sire this past year.”

“You’re very young for the task.”

“I was given special dispensation,” Aodhan began, just as wings of white-gold swept down from the sky to land on the balcony, the wind of Raphael’s descent blowing Galen’s hair back from his face.

“You’re all here,” the archangel said, folding his wings tight to his back. “Good.”

Caught by the tone of his voice, they converged around him.

“It’s time I returned to my territory,” Raphael said. “It seems Alexander is stirring. Galen, you come with me.”

Cold in his veins. He’d always known he would be needed at Raphael’s side should war beckon. Except— “We can’t leave Jessamy unprotected.” His fury reignited as he remembered how she’d cried against his chest, his strong, intensely private Jessamy.

“Aodhan, Illium, and Jason, when he returns tonight, will make certain she’s never in any danger.” Raphael glanced at the other two angels, received immediate nods. “Jessamy is a woman of intelligence—she will not foolishly put herself in harm’s way.”

Galen knew that. He also knew she was his to protect. “May I speak to you alone?”

“Illium, Aodhan.”

The two angels swept off the balcony at the quiet command, their wings making a brilliant show of shattered light and wild blue against the jagged stone of the gorge as they attempted to outfly each other.

“You court Jessamy,” Raphael said, his attention on Galen, the staggering power that ran through his veins a near-visible presence. “She understands the world as not many do, will recognize why you cannot remain in the Refuge at this time.”

Galen shook his head, determined to fight for this. “The flight to your territory is long and will require us to move at a steady pace.” Unlike Illium and Aodhan’s game, it would be about endurance. “A light passenger won’t slow us down.”

Raphael’s eyes darkened in surprise. “Jessamy does not leave the Refuge.”

“No.” Hands at his back, he gripped the wrist of one with the other. “Jessamy cannot leave the Refuge.”

The archangel’s motionlessness was nothing mortal, nothing even an ordinary angel could emulate. It was utterly and completely of himself. “You shame me, Galen,” he said at long last, the golden filaments in his wings catching the sunlight. “So many centuries have I known her, and not once have I ever asked if she would like to visit other lands.”

“Jessamy,” Galen said, “is not a woman who shares her innermost thoughts with the world.” It was a gift to be allowed to see beyond the gauzy, impenetrable veil of her composed grace.

Raphael gave him an oblique look. “And yet she shares them with you?”

“No, but she will.” Galen wasn’t budging, wasn’t ever changing his mind, and he wasn’t leaving her behind. “Illium says I have all the subtlety of a bear with a blunt club, but bears with clubs get results.”

Raphael laughed; however, his words were practical. “You’re the only one Jessamy has ever allowed to fly her as an adult, but if you can gain her cooperation, we can alternate. We leave with the next dawn.”

As Galen flew off the balcony not long afterward, the wind rippling through his hair, he thought of what he’d said to Raphael, considered every facet of it. Jessamy was a woman of secret passions and dreams, of hidden layers and intimate mysteries. He wondered if he would ever truly know her. The idea of always being on the outside made pain shoot down his clenched jaw, but regardless of his comment to Raphael, she was no enemy he could conquer with brute power. The campaign to win Jessamy must be a subtle thing.

Landing in front of the school, he saw the closed door and realized lessons must be over. He was readying himself to fly to the library when a tiny creature with sun-bright hair dropped down from the sky in a crooked dive. Catching her to stop her from crashing to the earth, he held her away from him with both hands around her waist, and scowled. “Your flight technique is faulty.”

Big brown eyes with lashes the same light shade as her curls stared at him. “You’re big, Jessamy’s angel.”

Jessamy’s angel.

Deciding he could handle the invasion of tiny creatures—because two more had managed to land around him—he put the girl on her feet beside her friends. “Why are you here? The school is closed.”

It was one of the boys who replied. “We’re allowed to play in the park.” He slid his hand into Galen’s in a trust that made something go hot and tight in his throat. Children were an unknown species to him—he’d spent his life with warriors, even when he was a babe himself.

“Will you play with us?” the girl asked, tipping her head back in an effort to meet his gaze… so far back that the weight of her wings toppled her over.

Reaching down, he tugged her up with one hand. “No, I think you all need a lesson in flight.”

So it was that he spent time he didn’t have drilling three excited babes who held his hands when it wasn’t their turn to fly, and who called him Jessamy’s angel. “I’m leaving the Refuge,” he told them afterward, for to disappear without warning would be to betray their trust. “And I’m taking Jessamy with me.”

Sadness blunted the shine in their bright eyes. The little girl’s lower lip wobbled. “Will you bring her back?”

Hunkered down before them, he gave a solemn nod, because he understood what he was asking. “Yes, but now it’s time for Jessamy to fly.”

Stalking into the library after the children assented that he could “borrow” Jessamy for a while, he felt the hush of the hall of learning attempt to cloak him. It snagged, tore. He was as out of place here as he would be in Jessamy’s bed, big brute that he was… but that mattered little. Not when she looked up from the book in which she was writing, the ink flowing gracefully across the page, and smiled. “There you are, devious man.”

Fisting his hand in her hair, he claimed a kiss, the contact a raw melding of mouths. “I have something to ask you,” he said, taking another sipping taste of her mouth as she spread her fingers against the sensitive inner surface of his wings.

“Hmm?”

He told her of the trip they’d be making, saw her passion-dazed expression skitter between dazzling joy, disbelief, and finally despair.

10

“It’s impossible,” she whispered at last. “The distance… even you can’t carry me that far.”

“I can carry you anywhere you want to go.” That was why he was so strong, so big—he’d been born for her. “But if there is need, Raphael requests you allow him to fly you, too.” Galen trusted the archangel—never would he put Jessamy’s life into the hands of a man he didn’t believe would fight to the death to protect that life.

Jessamy’s throat moved as she swallowed, her fingers motionless on his wing. “No one wants a malformed angel out in the world.” The statement was bleak, the rich brown of her eyes dull. “The mortals cannot see us as weak.”

He hated how she described herself, but he’d foreseen her concern, discussed the details of Raphael’s territory with the archangel. “There is a mortal settlement near Raphael’s tower,” he said. “But it’s at such a distance that they would need the sight of an eagle to glimpse you. No mortals work in the Tower itself, and there is significant open land around it, so you will not be trapped within.”

Jessamy’s response was a halting whisper. “I-I’ve become used to the Refuge, to the limits on my existence.” The elegant bones of her face cut against her skin as she angled her head in thought, her hair falling soft and luxuriant over her shoulder. Reaching out, he played with the strands, twining them around his finger as he would twine them around his fist when he had her beneath him.

No, he wasn’t the least civilized when it came to Jessamy. The wonder of it was, he was starting to believe she didn’t care.

Jessamy wanted to bask in the wild heat of the warrior who had invaded her sanctum. His thickly muscled thigh was close enough to touch, the warmth of his wing seductive under her palm, his feathers incongruously silken. Even the terrified joy she felt at the gift he’d laid before her didn’t squelch her piercing awareness of him, this weapon of a man who was somehow becoming hers.

“I can carry you anywhere you want to go.”

No one had ever offered her such freedom. No one had ever fought to show her the world. And she knew he must have fought. Because until Galen, no one had seen beyond the twisted wing and to the hunger within. The one thing she’d never ever factored into her decision to dance with him was that he’d take her with him when he left. Heart tearing wide-open, she looked up to catch him watching her, felt her stomach clench. But she didn’t shy. Instead, she moved the hand she had on his wing to the taut muscle of his thigh.

His body went rigid.

Skating her gaze over the primal hardness of him, she stroked once before rising… and moving between his legs. Cupping his face when he bent toward her, his hands on her hips, so large and warm, she initiated a kiss for the first time. It wasn’t as difficult as she’d imagined it might be, not with a partner so very enthusiastic that she found herself trapped between two muscular thighs while her breath was stolen from her.

It was exhilarating and petrifying and rather wonderful.

When Galen’s hand fisted in her gown, she knew she should stop him—the library was by no means deserted during the day—but she didn’t. Instead, she wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her breasts to the heated iron of his chest, rubbing to assuage a sudden wild need. Galen’s groan was deep, his hand unclenching and fisting again in her skirts. “Is that a yes?”

Using her mouth to taste the thick line of his neck with the fascination of a woman who wanted to explore every tiny part of him, she drew the dark, unalterably male scent of him into her lungs. “Yes… and thank you.”

Galen went motionless, his hands closing over her arms to pull her away from his beautiful sculpture of a body.

“Galen?”

His jaw a brutal line, he said, “You understand you could be flying into war?”

For such freedom, she’d pay any price. “Yes.”

“We leave tomorrow morning.”

“The children—”

“You must know people who can step in to continue their education while you’re gone.”

“Of course. It’s their spirits I’m worried about.” It would be unbearable to reach for her dream knowing she’d left heartbroken children behind.

“Speak to the little creatures—something tells me they’ll understand.”

With that, he walked out of the library. No good-bye, no kiss. Arrogant, confusing barbarian of a man. One she was beginning to, quite simply, adore. “Bad temper, arrogance, and all.” Her laugh came from deep within, from the girl she’d once been.

That laughter reappeared again when she spoke to the children. The “little creatures” did indeed understand. Not only that, they admonished her to be careful of strangers and to make sure to send them a letter with every messenger. A hundred sweet, fierce hugs later, she walked down the pathway to her parents’ home… and though she tried so hard to hold on to it, the laughter faded.

“This Galen is strong?” Rhoswen asked, naked concern in the eyes she’d bequeathed her daughter.

“Yes. My trust in him is absolute.”

“Forgive me, Jessamy.” Rhoswen cupped her cheek. “A mother never stops watching out for her child. I wish we could’ve given you this—”

“You gave me everything in your power. Thank you.”

“My beautiful girl.” A hesitation, as if Rhoswen wanted to speak other words, but as always, she kept her silence.

Heart full of love and pain both, Jessamy walked into her mother’s embrace. Later, her father kissed her temple and squeezed her hard enough to leave bruises.

“I love you,” she whispered to them both, and then she turned and walked away, a knot in her throat. To look back might be to see tears, bright as diamonds, marking Rhoswen’s face.

The sun was but a mirage on the horizon the next morning when Galen lifted into the air with Jessamy in his arms. Her legs, long and slender, lay over his arm, clad in thick woolen stockings of purest black, her tunic—the color of autumn leaves—ending just above the knee. It was strange to see Jessamy in clothing other than the long, graceful gowns that flowed around her as she walked, and he could tell she wasn’t quite comfortable in her attire, but it was practical for the long flight.

He and Raphael carried nothing beyond the weapons they’d strapped on. Like every archangel, Raphael had “journey’s rest” stations spread across the world, stocked with everything from food, to clothing, to replacement weaponry. It was an unspoken rule that no such location was ever to be compromised or utilized as a place of ambush, as every angel was welcome to use the stations. However, Raphael had made certain of the safety of his by posting guards at the remote outposts. Each pair served a season before rotating in to the Refuge, ensuring no team was ever too long isolated.

Jessamy shifted a fraction, her wing muscles moving against his arm. He hadn’t kissed her this morning, seen frustration dig grooves in her forehead. She couldn’t know what the restraint cost him, but the one thing he would never accept from Jessamy was her gratitude. It would be a slow death.

“Stubborn,” Jessamy said, her breath an airy kiss against his neck, “has a terrible temper, arrogant, with a tendency to sulk. Your flaws are growing.”

Squeezing her, he dipped his wings, making her cry out, tighten her hold around his neck. “Stop that.” It was a laughing censure, the softness of her mouth pressed to his skin sweet agony.

In front of them, Raphael swept down and out of sight along a young, green valley, scouting ahead. The archangel’s wings glittered in the rising sun, his flight so smooth as to create not a single ripple in the air. Then he was gone, leaving Galen and Jessamy with the sky to themselves, the clouds soft white puffs he deliberately flew into.

Jessamy ran her fingers through the insubstantial filaments. “Oh Galen. I’m touching clouds.” The wonder in her made everything worth it, even the pain that might yet come… as Jessamy found her heart’s wings, and flew away from him.

He should have thought ahead, should have comprehended the consequences of her first taste of true freedom. Of course she’d be thankful to the man who’d taken her into the skies, but even had he known that from the beginning, he would’ve still done everything in his power, fought an archangel, to allow Jessamy to touch the clouds. His selfishness was only a small one—he wanted her to need him, want him, for himself. No one in his life had ever cared for him just because he was Galen.

“Are you planning to ignore me the entire way, you stubborn beast?” Jessamy murmured as they came out into the unbroken blue of the sky once more, the landscape below a verdant green interspersed with the snaking sparkle of water.

Realizing he had no will to resist her when she teased him with such unexpected affection, he said, “It is a long flight,” attempting a small tease of his own, when he’d never done such a thing. “If we use up our conversation now, the final leg will be deathly silent.”

Her laugh tangled around him, wrapping him in silken chains that might yet make him bleed. “I will never run out of words, Galen.”

“Then tell me things,” he murmured, stealing this time with her. No matter what happened once they reached Raphael’s territory, she was his for this journey and he wasn’t too proud to pretend that she did care for him the way he needed her to. “Tell me about Alexander. I have studied him, but never seen him.”

“Alexander,” she said thoughtfully, “is the oldest of the archangels. Caliane alone was older than him, and she disappeared when Raphael was a youth.”

Jessamy would never forget the haunting sound of Caliane’s song as she rocked her cherished baby boy. The archangel had had the purest of voices… so beautiful that she’d sung the adult populations of two thriving cities into the sea in a successful attempt to avert war. Except that it had meant the death of every one of those people, and later, of most of their children.

It was as if the shock and grief had hollowed the little ones out, turning them into mute shells who breathed—until one day, they began to curl up and die. Jessamy would never forget the dark history she’d been forced to write that year, the sketches she’d been sent to place within the pages as a silent testament to the terrible price paid by the innocent… sketches of a hundred, a thousand, babes wrapped with tender care for burial.

Dead of hearts broken, Keir had said when he returned to the Refuge, his eyes haunted. Dead of such sorrow as immortals will never know.

“Alexander,” she continued, her throat thick with the echo of memories as painful as when they had been formed, “is also a handsome man.” Golden haired, silver-eyed, and with a chiseled profile, his body honed in war, there was a sense of physical perfection to Alexander even before you got to the stark beauty of his wings—of a pure, metallic silver. “He is, in fact, so striking I believe Michaela hopes to bear his child.”

Galen chuckled. “She aspires to birth a son or daughter in the image of the two most beautiful angels in the world?”

“Yes, but I don’t think she will succeed—quite apart from the fact he already has a son, Alexander is not like her other conquests.” He was too intelligent, saw beyond the exquisite lines of Michaela’s face to the coldly ambitious heart within. “He once told me it would be akin to coupling with the black spider that eats its mate.”

Jessamy had always respected Alexander for his perspicacity, though she didn’t agree with his stance toward Raphael. “Why,” she said, “didn’t you attempt a position in Alexander’s court?” Titus and Alexander had dissimilar styles of rule, but they were both men of war.

“His age and power threaten to blind him to the reality of the changing world,” Galen answered. “If Alexander were to succeed in his goals, we would remain forever locked in time, fireflies in amber.”

Jessamy couldn’t disagree. Alexander had said something analogous to her on his last visit.

“I am too old for this world.”

His words had been a startling contrast to the ageless perfection of his looks. But that wasn’t all he’d said. Frowning in thought, she followed the fragment of conversation to its roots in a dialogue that had taken place near to two years ago.

“I’m tired, Jessamy.” Silver eyes so bright, they would never belong to a mortal. “Tired of war, tired of bloodshed, tired of politics.”

“You can choose peace.” She didn’t touch him as she might have Raphael—Alexander was far, far older than her, for all that he sometimes sought her counsel. “There is no need to raise an army against Raphael as I know you’re considering.”

A faint smile that held no humor. “Peace is a mirage… but yes, perhaps you are right in your counsel. Perhaps it is Raphael’s time.”

Sucking in a breath as she realized the import of the memory, she shared it with Galen. “No one suspects or expects Alexander to lay down his weapons.” Even she had taken his words for an idle musing, forgotten as soon as the lust for battle blazed once more.

The opulent red of his hair whipping off his face, Galen angled himself so she was in no danger of being buffeted by the wind. “Yet his armies amass even now.”

Jessamy examined each facet of the memory, each subtle shift of Alexander’s expression, but the fact was, it was one memory among thousands, hundreds of thousands, could mean nothing. “He’s an archangel,” she said. “They can be unpredictable.”

Galen began to drop from the sky in a slow glide. “We’ve reached the first station—Raphael will want to hear of your remembrance.”

The landing was flawless, Galen’s wings powerful. He didn’t resist when she reached out to massage her fingers across his shoulders. “Are you tired?” It was not good of her, but she wanted to be in no one’s arms but Galen’s.

A shake of his head, his face angled toward where Raphael stood talking to the guards. “Come.”

She waited until they were alone with Raphael inside the large domed cabin to speak. The blue of the archangel’s eyes seared her through and she wondered if the staggering strength of it was a harbinger of things to come. Caliane had had the power to tear apart the minds of other angels, and Raphael was, in many ways, his mother’s son.

“Jason,” the archangel said in an apparent non sequitur, “has been frustrated for seasons. He was able to get one of his people into Alexander’s stables; and has picked up pieces of knowledge from the gossip of the servants and the soldiers when they frequent the taverns, but he cannot get anyone into Alexander’s court itself. More, he hasn’t been able to find a way to see Alexander in public, attempt to judge his frame of mind.”

Galen’s wings rustled as he settled them. “That isn’t unusual. Titus’s court would be impossible to infiltrate, and Alexander is a warrior, too.”

Shaking her head, Jessamy put her hand on his wing. “No. Alexander has long made it a policy to walk and fly among his troops once every five days. He does it rain or shine, hail or snow. He has always led from the front.”

“The irony,” Raphael continued, “is that I took my example from Alexander on this. Yet Jason has not seen him appear to perform his duty in recent memory.” The archangel paced the confines of the cabin. “While word in the taverns is of his favorite concubine, I assumed that in truth, he was holed up with his generals, in a deliberate attempt to ensure nothing could be gleaned of his battle strategy.”

“That remains a possibility.” Galen rubbed at his jaw. “But Alexander also has a son. His weapons-master, Rohan.”

Raphael’s eyes met Galen’s. “Yes. And Rohan is quite capable of mounting a battle campaign.”

Jessamy’s blood turned ice-cold, as she registered the implications of Galen’s suggestion. If Alexander was dead… but no, how could that possibly be? Only another archangel could have killed him, and such killings were always catastrophic events that sent tremors across the world—archangels did not easily die. They took people and places with them. No poison, no stealthy—

Oh no.

11

“Only an archangel can kill another archangel,” she whispered. “But if he was betrayed by someone he trusted, he could be entombed.” Such a horror had happened just once, long before even Lijuan had been born.

Cut into pieces after being ambushed in sleep by those he considered friends, the archangel’s body had been scattered and buried deep in far corners of the earth. But archangels could regenerate even from ash. This time, the piece that regenerated into the whole man was buried in a mountain range deep in what was now Uram’s territory.

That mountain range no longer existed, and neither did anyone who bore even a single drop of blood related to those who had buried the archangel, the carnage so absolute that no one sane would ever dare such an act again. She swallowed, continued. “I don’t think Rohan would be disloyal to his father”—they had a true father-son bond—“but if Alexander is missing, Rohan may well be running the battle campaign, certain his father will soon rise.”

“Jessamy is right,” Raphael murmured. “But if Alexander has indeed been missing so long, then he is likely to be dead.” A reminder that an archangel regenerated at a speed no ordinary angel could comprehend, and that nothing could keep him contained, earth or rock or water. “If he fell into anshara for some reason,” Raphael continued, naming the deepest of healing sleeps, “and was betrayed to an archangelic enemy, even Alexander may have been unable to fight a burst of angelfire direct to the heart.”

The ability to create angelfire, Jessamy knew, was a rare gift—and a lethal one. Caliane had possessed it, but her son did not… not yet, his power escalating at too rapid a rate to predict anything. “So far as I know, four of the Cadre can call angelfire.”

“Would the victor not claim Alexander’s territory?” Galen said.

“It may not have been about territory.” Raphael blew out a breath. “There are some in the Cadre who would find pleasure and amusement in the game, in the kill, and in watching the resulting disintegration.”

A terrible feeling bloomed in the pit of Jessamy’s stomach. She liked Alexander, though he was an Ancient, with an Ancient’s conceit. He was intelligent, could be kind in the absent way of a being of such power, had led his people well. It sickened her to imagine him killed with such stealthy malevolence. But that was not the worst of it—if an archangel was dead or missing, and no one had informed the entirety of the Cadre, then his territory was currently under the rule of an angel who had no right to rule.

It wasn’t simply politics—it was brutal fact. Archangels ruled because they had the vicious power to control the vampires who were their servants. Without an archangel at the helm, the chances of the more violent of the Made turning feral, driven by the unthinking fury of blood hunger, were catastrophic. “The entire mortal population of his region could be wiped out in days.” Horror was an iron-dark taste on her tongue.

“It also explains why a vampire came to kill you.” Galen’s words were so contained she knew he was fighting rage. “At least some of the Made have noticed and realized the likely true reason behind Alexander’s absence.”

Jessamy’s mind flickered once more to the memory of that unexpected conversation with Alexander. “There was a vampire with him when he visited—she stayed by the door while we spoke, was in earshot. A tall, blue-eyed creature with skin of ebony.” The startling contrast of ice-blue eyes against dark skin was why the woman had remained so firmly embedded in her memory.

“She was a senior member of his court.” One who might just have turned traitor. “If she’s behind this, she may see it as a rebellion against the servitude demanded in return for being Made a vampire”—of a hundred years duration—“but once she turns that key…”

Raphael completed her thought. “She’ll learn why the archangels are so pitiless with some of her brethren.”

Galen and Raphael began to talk of how they might confirm the possibility of Alexander being dead. But Jessamy, pacing back and forth, kept thinking something wasn’t right. Raphael had been correct about her entombing scenario being unlikely given the time that had passed, but even if Alexander had been ambushed, his death still wouldn’t have been a quiet thing. He was an Ancient.

Yet no one had reported any devastation, and surely Jason would have noticed such destruction in the archangel’s lands. Sleeping or awake, Alexander— “He may have chosen to Sleep,” she said, the words spilling out before she’d consciously completed the thought.

The men stopped midword, frowned, before Raphael shook his head. “He had to know if he did it without warning, it would cause chaos not only in his territory, but across the world.”

“Not if he trusted his commanders, especially Rohan.” Galen scowled at the floor, his mind clearly elsewhere. “He may well have gone to Sleep in a secret location, leaving instructions for the Cadre to be informed once there was no chance of anyone tracing his whereabouts.”

A little of the sickness in Jessamy’s stomach settled, because she could see Alexander doing exactly that. Angels in Sleep were inviolate. It was one of their most fundamental laws. But no archangel would ever choose to Sleep in a place where his enemies might find him while he was vulnerable.

“Rohan,” Raphael said, wings flaring, “is strong, perhaps strong enough to believe he can rule in spite of whatever instruction Alexander gave.” His anger was a glow off his wings, an icy burn that augured nothing good. “If he has indeed been fool enough to do this, his arrogance will lead to Alexander’s people being butchered.”

Jessamy thought of the times in their history when angelkind had not understood the depth of the bloodlust that lived within the Made, but they had learned. The cost had been paid in the lives of thousands of mortals.

“The Cadre must be informed.” Cold words. “I will return to the Refuge and have Illium fly to Titus and Charisemnon.”

“Do you wish me to fly to Neha and Lijuan?” Galen asked, naming the other two archangels close to Alexander’s territory.

Raphael shook his head. “No, Lijuan will take it as an insult if I do not inform her myself. I want you to continue on toward my territory. If we are wrong and Alexander is alive, awake, and strategizing, then we must be ready for his assault.” His gaze fell on Jessamy, the ruthlessness in it chilling, though she knew it wasn’t directed at her. “You’re safer with Galen than in the Refuge.”

“I’ll slow him down,” she said, practical because sorrow was no use in a situation so grave. And Galen… Galen had promised to fly her wherever she wanted to go, so she would get the chance to touch the clouds again. “I can remain here. No vampire could reach this location.”

“There is a small possibility the vampire who attacked you was working for Rohan—and Alexander’s son has angels under his command.” Galen’s wing brushed her own, a heavy, intimate weight. “We can’t risk you.”

“He’s right,” Raphael said. “You’re too important to the Refuge.” With that, he nodded at Galen. “Go as fast as you can. Dmitri has the situation under control, but I don’t like the picture we’ve painted—if Rohan gets wind of the fact the Cadre knows of Alexander’s disappearance, it could panic him into moving faster.” A pause that said a thousand things. “I give you my trust, Galen.”

“Sire.” A single word that made Galen’s loyalties crystal clear.

Galen had wanted to give Jessamy a gift, but this flight was a hard march through the skies. As the night cloaked them in velvet darkness, the stars glittering into being overhead, he knew she ached for them to land so she could look up in wonder. “After this is done,” he murmured into her hair, “we’ll fly the journey again.”

Her response was a kiss pressed to his jaw, her braid brushing his forearm. “I adore you, Galen.”

The words threatened to undo every one of his vows to have more from her than a gratitude that would destroy him drop by slow drop. “That’s permissible,” he said, rather than tearing open the wound she’d unknowingly inflicted.

Jessamy’s laughter wrapped around him as they continued to fly. Over mountain ranges groaning under the weight of endless snow, and rivers roaring from the thunder of the water’s passage. Over tiny villages perched on rocks, and scattered habitations over sprawling grasslands. Across the wild beauty of the crashing sea, stopping on the rare tiny island in the endless blue, and once on the white sand beaches of a pristine lagoon. Over primeval forests and new paths, until they were heading toward the cloud-piercing form of a tower rising from the untamed land around it.

They came in just as another dawn broke, and it appeared as if the structure, formed of rock and wood and glass, was aflame, a brilliant pillar visible from every direction. It was an impressive achievement and an impressive statement. Raphael clearly understood that for some, power had to have a physical form.

Landing on the wide, flat roof, he set Jessamy on her feet and folded in his wings before meeting Dmitri’s dark gaze where the vampire stood waiting for them. “Any developments?” he asked, well aware Raphael had to have a relay set up that could move information at speeds no mortal would believe.

“The Cadre is converging on Alexander’s territory.”

“So quickly?” Jessamy’s eyes widened as she stretched out her legs, but not her wings. It was why Galen had made a pretext to land before sunrise—he’d wanted her to have the privacy to exercise those muscles. That she hadn’t hidden from him as she did so, it was another root digging into his heart.

“It appears,” Dmitri said, “that no one in the Cadre has seen Alexander for two seasons at the very least—proof enough for them to take Raphael’s concerns seriously.”

Dmitri opened the door for Jessamy, waited until they were inside the tower before continuing. “A demand has been made for the archangel to show himself.”

“His son has troops ready.” Galen had an excellent idea of their numbers and strength, given the information Raphael had shared with him after the archangel first arrived in the Refuge. “He may engage rather than comply.”

“Neha and Uram are close and have moved their armies in.”

It was, Galen knew, a significant act. Archangels did not interfere in the affairs of others in the Cadre, or even in wars fought between particular archangels. However, if Alexander was dead or in Sleep, his territory could not be permitted to collapse into bloodrage and violence, and regardless of its flaws, the Cadre could, and did, work effectively as a unit when necessary. “How long before we can expect an answer?”

Dmitri glanced at Jessamy.

“If,” she said, lines forming between her eyebrows, “Alexander is alive and awake, he won’t hesitate to use violent force to repel the others from his territory. The more time that passes, the more certain it becomes that he’s no longer in charge.”

Dmitri waved to a door, the dark elegance of his movements striking. Jessamy could appreciate it, appreciate him, but she felt no draw toward this sensual male creature. Her body was attuned to another’s, the warm, earthy scent of Galen imprinted in her skin, the deep timbre of his voice one she wanted to hear as they spread their wings in bed. Somehow, with Galen, she forgot she was crippled, forgot the ugliness of her wing and simply existed.

“Jessamy, you have time to change, rest a little. Your room should have everything you need.” Dmitri’s voice broke into her thoughts. “I’d like you to join us after—but we will talk war.” The question was unspoken.

Jessamy was a historian, one who stood on the sidelines and watched. She did not interfere. But there were times in any life when a stand had to be taken, a side chosen. “I’ll come,” she said, meeting eyes of heliodor-green.

If they were to be together, then her loyalty had to be Galen’s.

The day passed in a fury of planning and concordant action, and it wasn’t until after sunset that Jessamy found Galen standing on the roof, his wings held with warrior discipline as he stared out at the flights of angels leaving the tower in perfect formation. They were the first wave of defense, sentries and messengers experienced enough to patrol the borders. Dmitri had already had a skeleton crew doing the task, but had held back the majority so Galen could personally gauge the readiness of Raphael’s men and women.

Below the night-shadow of wings beating in a smooth, fast rhythm marched an army of vampires, a ground guard that moved at a crisp pace to take up defensive positions at a distance Dmitri and Galen had determined would provide optimum protection without compromising the Tower’s defenses.

In spite of the hundreds of pairs of wings that sliced through the air, the mass of vampires on the ground, the night was eerily quiet. It was a whispering darkness, she thought, a portent hanging over their heads. Soon, either Alexander would retaliate against the invasion of his lands by the Cadre, or he would not… and they would know.

Jessamy hoped he Slept, for the world was not ready to forever lose the deep wisdom of an Ancient.

“You are the only one who calls me wise.” Alexander’s silver eyes, so inhuman that he was beyond even their long-lived race. “Everyone else believes I am a being of violence and war.”

“You are both, Alexander. You always have been.” She had read the histories, knew what so many had forgotten. In times past, Alexander had brokered peace, saved the world from unimaginable horror. “I think, if the test came again”—not petty arguments or battles engendered in pride and power, but a true question of good and evil—“you would stand on the side of right.”

A faint smile. “You are so young, Jessamy. Foolish, many would say.”

“Did they not call you the same when you stepped between two warring Ancients?”

His laughter rang deep and real, the silver molten. “Come, young one. Walk with me and tell me tales of when I was a hot-tempered youth.”

Smiling at the now-bittersweet memory, she leaned against Galen, this man who would break her heart into innumerable shards should he ever choose to Sleep. “This is not,” she said when the angels disappeared from view, the vampires long devoured by the dark green forests that bordered the Tower, “how you imagined your life in Raphael’s service would begin.”

He wrapped an arm around her waist, trapping her wings to her back. “I am what I am, Jessamy.” Quiet words. “War and weapons will always be a part of my life.”

“I know—I’m not compelled toward some fantasy man, Galen.” Perhaps this, she thought, hoping against hope, was the cause of the subtle distance he’d put between them, distance that hurt. If so, she could end it. “It’s you I’ve seen from the first, you I want.”

Spreading his wings at her back in a protective move that had become intimately familiar, Galen fisted his hand in her hair. The possession in it was unmistakable, but he didn’t kiss her, hadn’t kissed her the entire journey. And yet the slumberous heat in his eyes, the blatant hardness of his body when she pressed close, said he wanted her as he always had. “Talk to me, stubborn man.”

Lashes coming down over eyes so beautiful, she wondered how it was she hadn’t immediately fallen into them when they met. “I want you with my every breath.” Unadorned. Rawly honest. Galen. “But gratitude is not what I need from you.” Cupping her cheek with unexpected tenderness, he said, “If that’s all you feel, it’ll cut me in two, but it won’t stop me from being the best friend you will ever have. Anywhere, Jessamy. I will always fly you anywhere you want to go.”

The words, his vow, reverberated inside of her, but she kept her silence, unsure what to say. How could she not be grateful for everything he’d done? Not just for the gift of flight, but for forcing her to wake up, to truly live again.

“There is no debt between us, no commitment you must feel compelled to honor.” Galen’s words were harsh, his touch holding a rough gentleness. “You’re free.”

12

The night passed with painful slowness. Unable to sleep—and trailing her right wing on the floor like one of her charges—Jessamy walked into the Tower library in the gray time before the paintbrush of dawn streaked the sky. A lamp burned within, and the man who stood by the mantel, a glass in hand, was taller than her, slender in the same way, and had no wings on his back. “Lady Jessamy,” he said in a languid tone that was a purr over her skin.

Dangerous, she thought, keeping her distance. “You have the advantage.”

“Ainsley at your service.”

“Ainsley?” It in no way fit this vampire whose very voice was an invitation to sin.

His lips quirked up, the lamplight igniting the ruby red of the liquid in his glass to glittering brilliance. Blood. “That’s why I usually kill people who use my given name,” he murmured. “Most call me Trace.”

A strange name. Her eyes took in his lithe form again, made the connection. “Is that what you do?”

An easy nod. “It’s wild country out here. Many things get lost. I find them.” Sipping at the blood, he continued to hold her gaze with eyes that might’ve been darkest green or unbroken ebony. “You’re a tall woman.”

Yes, she was. Even among angelkind. Though standing next to Galen, she felt positively petite. And when he took her into his arms…“What are you doing in the library at this time of the morning?” she asked, resisting the need to rub a fisted hand over her heart to ease the ache within.

Trace brought up the hand at his side to reveal a book. “Poems.” An almost sheepish glance out of those eyes that had no doubt coaxed more than one woman into addictive decadence.

Jessamy rethought her initial conclusion—that he was dangerous was indisputable, but he was also not a man who would harm a woman. He enjoyed them too much. “Poems?”

A slow smile creased his cheeks. “Would you like to hear?”

No man had ever asked to read her poetry. But then, her whole life was changing. So she said, “Very well,” and crossed the carpet toward him.

They took seats opposite each other, and, putting down his glass, Trace read her haunting poems of love and loss and passion in a rich, evocative voice meant for seduction. It was only after the third poem that she realized she was the target. Startled, she looked at that face of sharp, angular beauty, that shock of silky black hair, that slender form she was certain could move whiplash fast when necessary, and wondered at his motivation. “There are other women in the Tower,” she said when he paused for breath.

A look through his lashes, his eyes revealed to be the deepest green she’d ever seen. “I know that full well, but I’ve wanted to run my fingers over your skin since the first time I saw you at the Refuge.” Another pause, his perusal more open and frankly sensual. “The only reason I didn’t court you then was because I was told by more than one person that you preferred solitude, and it would distress you to be approached.”

“I see.” His words caused a tremor inside of her, dramatically reshaping her world. It was one thing to consider that perhaps she had been the cause of her own isolation, another to know it. “You realize my wing is not what it should be,” she said, and it was a question within a statement.

A shrug, fluid and graceful. “You’ll notice I can’t fly either.” Finishing off the liquid in his glass, liquid that sang with life and death both, he said, “Tell me, do you belong to him?”

There was no need to ask who he meant. “If I do?” she said rather than answering, because what she had with Galen was precious, private.

“I might be many things,” he murmured, “but I don’t steal women… at least not those who don’t want to be stolen.”

“It’s time for me to go.” The night and this morn had thrown everything she knew into confusion—it was no time for her to be crossing words with a vampire who was clearly an expert in the art of flirtation.

“Until next we meet, my lady.” The dark promise followed her as she left the library and walked up to the roof, and out into the crisp morning air. If Trace spoke the truth—and he had no reason to lie—then it might well be that other men would approach her now that they knew she was open to the idea of a courtship and relationship.

“If that’s all you feel, it’ll cut me in two, but it won’t stop me from being the best friend you will ever have… You’re free.”

Her heart clenched at the thought of never again tasting Galen’s kiss, but no matter if it made her bleed inside to accept his decree, he was right in this. If she gave in to the unquenchable need deep within her, need that bore Galen’s name, and went to him now, the specter of gratitude would always lie between them. It would hurt and it would corrode, and it would destroy. No, she thought, nails digging into her skin, she wouldn’t do that, not to Galen, and not to herself.

The first rays of the sun hit the horizon at that very instant, its golden fingers bringing the world to life.

Word came two days later.

“Alexander Sleeps,” Dmitri said, joining her and Galen where they stood on a high Tower balcony, “in a location known only to him.”

“The vampire who attacked Jessamy?” Galen asked, expression grim.

“An acolyte of Emira, the vampire you”—a nod toward Jessamy—“described as being with Alexander the day you spoke. Emira was one of his elite guard.”

“It surprises me,” she said, absently tucking a tendril of hair behind her ear. “Alexander’s people are loyal.”

“Emira was, too, but her loyalty was to Alexander and she considered her duty complete the day she knew he was safe in his place of Sleep.” Dmitri’s eyes met Jessamy’s own, the darkness in them impenetrable. “Still, I think she would’ve held her peace if she’d believed Rohan would fulfill his promise to Alexander—to inform the Cadre of his father’s decision. When she realized he had no intention of doing so, it hardened her resolve not to serve him.”

Galen’s hair flamed in the sunlight pouring down on them. “It’s certain, then—Rohan did attempt to seize the territory?”

Dmitri nodded. “Never realizing the vampires under his command were planning insurrection. The only thing that worried Emira was that someone would become suspicious about Alexander’s continued absence.”

“A needless worry.” Jessamy shook her head. “Without the assassination attempt, who knows if I would have ever recalled the memory of my talk with him.”

“However it came about,” Dmitri said, “the end result is the same. Without Alexander, the region is no longer stable. The Cadre is currently working on a caretaker regime until another angel comes into full power.”

“Michaela,” Jessamy said quietly. “She is on the cusp.” No one knew what the line in the sand was, but they all knew when an angel was approaching it. An archangel would be born in that moment of change, and they were as different from angels as mortals were from vampires.

Neither male said anything, their attention on the cloudless sky beyond, where angels dived and flew in training for a war that would not happen—at least not this time. Her own eyes, however, lingered on the muscular body of the barbarian who had kissed her, courted her, promised to fly her wherever she wanted to go… and she wondered who he was to her.

Galen saw Jessamy laughing with the one they called Trace the next day, and had to turn away before he gave in to the primitive need to pound the skinny vampire to the ground. One or two well-aimed punches to that pretty jaw, those bony ribs, and the man would shatter like pottery.

“I’m surprised Trace is still breathing,” Dmitri said as they walked across the trampled grass leading away from the Tower. “You don’t strike me as the kind of man who shares.”

Galen didn’t answer until they’d almost reached the angelic squadron that waited for him. “He makes Jessamy smile.” It was the only answer he could give, the only answer that mattered.

Dmitri’s response was quiet, his words whispering of age and pain both. “Love has a way of crushing a man until nothing remains. Be careful.”

Dmitri’s words reverberating in his mind, foretelling a future he didn’t want to imagine, Galen spread his wings in a silent call for attention, and took the squadron up into the sky for an air-combat drill, while Dmitri worked with the vampires. Later, they’d merge the two groups, make certain they could function as a sleek unit in battle.

Raphael’s people were good enough that it wouldn’t have been a slaughter if they had gone to war—but neither would they have emerged without massive loss of life. Now that they had the time, Galen wanted to lay a stable foundation, ensuring the next battle would not obliterate Raphael’s forces, leaving him vulnerable to a secondary strike.

“The work will take us into winter,” he said to Jessamy at the end of the day, the sky the dark orange of sunset. “It’ll be too dangerous to fly then.” Angels didn’t feel the cold as mortals did, but flying through the relentless heavy snow that fell in certain parts of the route to the Refuge could crumple an angel’s wings, crashing him to the earth. Depending on the age of the angel and the nature of the injuries, such a fall could be fatal—immortality was not an equal gift, took time to set in stone.

Regardless, it would be an uncomfortable flight, interrupted as it would be by snow and sleet. “If you wish to leave for the Refuge, I can fly you back and return here before the snows.” He knew it was a big thing to ask of her—to remain in Raphael’s territory for a full turn of the seasons, but he wanted her with him, even if she was no longer his. The thought was a huge granite fist in his chest, a heavy, brutal thing.

“I won’t say it’s not a little overwhelming being in the world,” Jessamy said slowly, “but I’m finding I have more strength than I knew. I’d like to stay.”

“You’re certain?” he asked, because he would not have her unhappy, not Jessamy.

“Yes.” Tilting back her head, she watched the bright palette of the sky, striped as vibrantly as a tiger’s coat. “Even the sky is wild here.” A secret smile that tugged at the primal core of him.

But he didn’t follow her when she walked away, didn’t rip the vampire who came to meet her limb from limb. Instead, he flew far and distant, until the sky was an endless blue and he could almost forget he’d left Jessamy with another man.

Jessamy felt herself growing ever stronger as spring passed into summer, a flower opening to the sun. As she stood on the roof, watching the drills in the air below, her eye followed the solid form and striated gray wings of the man who never left her thoughts, whether she lay awake, or danced in the heated dark of her dreams.

Galen flew in the center of the unit, undoubtedly giving orders in that quiet voice that worked more effectively than any shout. She saw one angel’s face brighten visibly at something Galen said, and knew he’d given one of his rare words of praise. Such words were never flowery. Sometimes all his warriors received was a curt nod, but those small actions and infrequent words meant the world to them, because each and every one knew it was praise earned. Galen didn’t do false flattery.

Yet he told her she was beautiful.

Two days ago, she’d curled into his embrace and he’d taken her on a sweeping exploration of Raphael’s territory, this untamed land of mountain and forest, water and sky. She’d seen a wolf pack stalking a herd of grazing deer; laughed in wonder as a mated pair of eagles joined her and Galen for a long, lazy distance; walked among a field of daises, bold and cheerful.

It had been the first time she’d asked him to fly her since she’d arrived in this burgeoning city, and it had felt like coming home, the scent of him familiar enough to hurt. She hadn’t wanted to release him when they’d returned to the Tower, and he’d held her a fraction too long, too. But though his need had been raw, unhidden, he’d stepped back, stepped away.

Her lips tingled with a hunger that was beginning to claw into her very bones.

“Sweet Jessamy.”

Trace’s silken purr whispered into her mind, reminding her of the evening past. In spite of the fact that Galen had set her free, she’d felt the betrayal keenly—and yet she’d known she must accept the vampire’s kiss. No blood, only a simple play of mouths. Trace was an expert in sensuality, and it had been a pleasant experience, but her heart hadn’t thudded in her throat; her blood hadn’t burned. All she’d been able to think was, He feels wrong.

In that instant, she’d understood any male but Galen would feel wrong.

Trace was no fool. Stepping back, he’d put his fingers under her chin and tipped up her face. “So,” he’d said in that voice meant for midnight sins, “you do belong to him.” A wicked smile. “Just as well. I don’t fancy getting my bones broken into tiny pieces.”

Catching a feather that floated down from above, she saw it was white streaked with gold. Raphael. The archangel had returned late last night, spent candlelit hours with Galen and Dmitri in his study. It was clear to her that Galen was becoming an ever more integral part of Raphael’s Tower. There was a chance he would not want to return to the Refuge.

If he didn’t…

Jessamy felt nothing but joy at the freedom that had allowed her to see the world, to fly the skies, but the Refuge was her home. Her books were there, the histories she was charged with keeping. And oh, how she missed the children. There were no children in the Tower.

A wave of wind, feathers of white-gold on the edge of her vision as Raphael folded away his wings. “What will you write in your histories about my territory?”

“That it’s a place as wild, and with as much promise, as you.” He was an archangel, but he’d also been her charge once, and sometimes, she found she forgot and spoke to him thus.

Raphael’s lips curved, but there was a growing hardness to his eyes—so blue, so extraordinary—that hurt. It was changing him. The politics. The power. “Alexander’s land?”

“Stable for now.”

“And you?” Her eyes lingered on a profile that was becoming ever more savagely beautiful, until, she knew, one day soon, no one would remember the boy he’d been.

“I have a territory to consolidate.” He stepped closer, took her hands. “You are always welcome in that territory, Jessamy—the rooms you occupy are yours.”

He saw too much, she thought, but then, that was why he was an archangel. “The Refuge is where I belong.”

“Are you certain?” He angled his head toward the squadron of angels now diving and cutting in the thin air of the clouds.

Following his gaze, she watched not the squadron, but their commander. Her soul ached with inexorable need, but she knew it wasn’t yet time. “The heart,” she whispered, “can be a fragile thing.” And this love that grew between her and Galen, even in their silence, was even more so.

13

Galen watched as Trace left the Tower, dressed in the smudged green and brown clothing of a scout. The vampire was good—Galen could glean no trace of him once he’d blended into the forest. But Trace wasn’t the only one who had noticed Jessamy now that she’d flown down from her isolated perch in the Refuge.

Galen watched, didn’t interfere… and beat Dmitri into the earth on a regular basis.

Wiping off blood from a split lip after their latest round, the vampire shook his head. “I must be a glutton for punishment, to keep coming back for this.”

“No, you’re just determined to be better.” The truth was, the vampire was real competition. Galen left with cuts and bruises more often than not, and Dmitri had even managed to injure his wings a time or two. They were learning from each other, developing into deadlier fighters.

Pouring water over his head using a pitcher set beside a pail of the cool, clear liquid, Galen pushed back his wet hair and said, “I need to get away for a day, perhaps two.” He trusted Dmitri now, knew the vampire, along with Raphael himself, would watch over Jessamy, make certain no man dared harm her.

“Another angel wants to fly her”—Dmitri’s expression was watchful—“except he’s afraid you’ll kill him.”

The pitcher shattered under the force of his grip. Ignoring the blood, he spread out his wings in preparation for flight. “I would never cage her.”

Rising into the sky, he stopped for nothing, flying hard and fast into the coming edge of dusk. Several squadrons passed him, but none attempted to intercept, as if able to sense the black mood that had all but swallowed him whole. Flying as if he was fighting for his life, he raced the air currents until the sky was a bleak emptiness on every side, the land dark and forested below him.

Alone.

After growing up as he had, he’d believed himself immured to such pain, invulnerable to the invisible cuts that could eviscerate. But the love-hungry boy he’d been, he still existed inside the man, and both parts of him bled without surcease at sensing Jessamy leaving him in a thousand tiny steps. Diving down to the ground and the edge of a small stream, he permitted himself to stop, to breathe, to think. Except his thoughts kept circling back to the same thing—Jessamy in the arms of another.

Rage tore out of him in a savage roar that went on and on, having been held inside for far too long. The autumn chill didn’t settle in his bones as he gave voice to his fury, didn’t do anything to quiet the fever in his blood. And when he soared into the air again, he knew he was going back. If he saw Jessamy flying with another man, he wouldn’t murder, wouldn’t rampage, even if it killed him.

He’d simply watch, make certain the other angel didn’t hurt her.

But when he returned, the Tower was quiet, most of its windows devoid of light. No one, barring the sentries, flew in the sky as far as the eye could see, and when he came to a silent landing on the balcony outside Jessamy’s room, he found her door open. He fought himself and lost, entered—to see her walking toward him, as if she’d been about to step out onto the balcony.

“Galen!” Hand rising to her heart, she halted, the misty green of her long-sleeved gown brushing her ankles in a soft kiss.

And he realized he’d been lying to himself. “I will fly you.” It came out a growl. “I gave you my word that I’d take you anywhere you wanted to go. Why didn’t you ask me?” Instead of accepting the offer of someone who wasn’t as strong, couldn’t take her as far, keep her as safe?

A pause, and he thought she was holding her breath. Fear? Blooded warriors had quailed at his temper and he’d unleashed it on the one person who mattered more than anything. His muscles locking, he went to back out of the doorway, but she stopped him with a simple, “Don’t you dare leave like that again, Galen.” Not fear. Fury.

He raised an eyebrow.

“You left without telling me.” Stalking across the fine Persian carpet of red and gold, she shoved at his chest with her hands, the action having no impact on his stability or balance, but sending a shock through his system nonetheless. “I had to find out from Dmitri.”

Galen’s own anger smoldered. “I wasn’t aware my presence was needed.” Or even noticed.

Jessamy had never dealt much with men on an intimate level. The past two seasons had been a revelation. She’d been flirted with, courted, and even kissed. None of it by this infuriating wall of a man who thought he had the right to yell at her. “If anyone should be complaining about being unnoticed,” she said, “it should be me.”

“Leave me alone with Trace for just a moment,” Galen said, the heated words in no way quiet or contained. “I’d pin him to the ground with my sword, rip his skinny limbs off.”

“Very romantic.” She resisted the urge to kick at him. “I am so angry at you.” For teaching her about passion, only to leave her to starve, for showing her the sky, only to use those skies to avoid her, for being so stubborn and so male! “You shouldn’t be here. Go away.”

A rustle of wings, that big body suddenly closer. “You’re angry with me?”

The heat of him seeped into her bones, threatened to melt her anger to molten desire, but she mustered up the strength to stand firm. “Very.”

“Good.”

Her mouth dropped open… and he took it, took advantage, his tongue licking intimately against her own as he ignored the preliminaries to demand a raw, wet, openmouthed kiss. Legs about to buckle, she gripped at the thickness of his arms in an effort to stay upright. Galen made a low, deep sound in his chest at the contact, and slipped one arm around her waist, pinning her to him as he marauded. This was no tender caress, no gentle loverlike touch. It was a primal assault on her senses, a rough need that would only be satisfied with her utter surrender.

Gripping the side of his neck with one hand, she flattened the other over the thudding beat of his heart, the rapid pace a tattoo that matched her own. And below… The hardness of him jutted demandingly against her abdomen, barely constrained by his pants and her gown. Gasping again, she found her mouth taken even more thoroughly. More out of passion-drenched desperation than technique, she stroked her tongue into his own mouth.

A sudden, absolute motionlessness.

And then she was being crushed and lifted until her mouth was even with his and he was devouring her like she was a delicacy he’d waited a lifetime to taste. A woman would have had to be stone of heart to remain unaffected, and Jessamy was nothing close to stone when it came to Galen. She sucked on his tongue, licked over his lips, used her teeth in playful bites that made his chest rumble against her breasts, her nipples tight, hard points.

One arm locked around her waist, Galen moved his other hand down to sit proprietarily on the curve of her hip, before shifting down to stroke her lower curves, his touch firm, utterly possessive. Gasping, she broke the kiss to stare into eyes gone a deep, smoky emerald. His lips were bruised from her ravaging kisses, his skin flushed with heat. And his hand… “Galen.”

He nuzzled at her throat, continuing to shape and pet her with scandalizing thoroughness. “Let’s fly.”

“Yes.” She wanted to be alone with her barbarian.

The air was crisp against her skin, the night silent, but she didn’t make the mistake of thinking they were the solitary beings out here, not until Galen had flown them far beyond the Tower and toward the mountains in the distance, the world hushed around them. Landing in a small grassy clearing surrounded by trees majestic and huge, he slid her down his body with erotic deliberation, her gown whipping around to tangle with his legs as her body demanded she rub harder against him.

She went to pull away the strands of hair that had licked across her face, but he was already doing it, his skin rough against her own. Turning her face, she pressed her lips to his palm. “If you disappear like that again, I’ll beat you with your own leg.”

“You’re a terrifying woman, Jessamy.”

Shoving gently at him for the tease, she stood on tiptoe and spoke against his dangerous, passionate mouth. “You, Galen. I want you. Only you.” It didn’t matter if she hadn’t had a hundred different lovers, she knew what he was to her—everything. If she’d met him at the dawn of her existence, or at the end, it would not have changed that simple, immutable fact.

Moving both hands down to her hips, he aligned them chest to toe. “I should wait, I know.”

Her breath locked in her throat, her heart clenched.

“But I can’t.” A primal confession.

A single beat later and she was arching into his kiss once more, arms rock-hard with muscle clasping her close, her breasts crushed against his bare chest, his thighs set wide until she was nestled between.

Possessed.

Seduced.

Cherished.

If any part of her hadn’t already belonged to him, it became his when he cradled her face in his hands, and whispered, “Tell me to stop, Jessamy.” It was the plea of a man who had lost control.

It wrecked her that the weapons-master known for his calm under the most brutal pressure felt such hunger for her. “I don’t want you to stop.” Weaving her fingers into the liquid fire of his hair, she tugged his head back down.

When he said they should return to the Tower, so that she wouldn’t have to lie in the grass, she stroked her hand down the ridged lines of his chest and over the proud hardness that thrust against her abdomen. Only with Galen could she be this bold, this shameless. He made a low, rumbling sound that made her thighs clench, and then there was no more talk of delaying. Her clothing all but torn off her, she found herself spread out on the grass like some pagan sacrifice while he looked down at her as he undid the closure on his pants, a big man who should’ve scared her.

She parted her legs. “Galen.” Maybe she’d been sheltered, but she was a woman grown, a woman who had found her passionate lover.

His hand was gentle on her thigh when he came down over her, the touch of his blunt fingers even gentler as he worked her until she was whimpering and so needy it hurt. Chest heaving, he said, “Jessamy?”

Wrapping her legs around his waist, she rubbed the pulsing slickness between her thighs against him in answer. He gave a shuddering groan, and then he was pushing inside her. She’d heard the stories other women told, but nothing could describe this wild, beautiful sensation of being possessed and possessing at the same time. Crying out at the burning pain as her tissues struggled to accommodate him, she twined her arms around the man who loved her, and breathed in the dark musk of his scent, her wings shifting restlessly against the cool blades of grass.

A callused hand stroked her leg off his waist, spreading and bending it at the knee. The act opened her wider, Galen’s hardness settling deeper inside her. It tore a gasp out of her, but when he hesitated, she kissed and caressed him until he moved again. Shallow and slow, allowing her to get used to the weight and power of him.

“Jess.” Muscles strained taut, lips against her ear. “Is it too much?”

Yes. Gloriously, wonderfully too much. “Don’t stop.” Arching up beneath him with a sumptuous roll of her hips, she welcomed his strokes. He continued to slide in and out so very slowly, but went deeper with each stroke, his mouth claiming hers at the same time—in a kiss that mimicked the carnal ecstasy of their mating.

The shock of her body coming apart without warning had her breaking the kiss, her head thrown back, the dark beauty of Galen’s wings spread in powerful silhouette above them. He rode her through the clenching pleasure, one big hand squeezing and shaping the slight but exquisitely sensitive mounds of her breasts as he laved kisses down the line of her throat, the other fisted in her hair to arch her neck for him.

Wrung out, her body feeling hotly, erotically used, she wove her fingers into flame red silk as the final opulent wave of pleasure rippled through her… and held him when he shuddered and spent himself inside her in hard pulses of liquid heat, calling her name at the end, whispering it over and over as his body continued to thrust into hers until he trembled, stilled, burying his face in the curve of her neck.

My man. Mine.

Autumn bled into winter and then into the very heart of snow and ice. As the days shortened and darkened, Jessamy spent her nights tangled in Galen’s arms when he wasn’t on watch or leading a night-training exercise, and reading into the dawn hours when he was. It was a time of discovery and play and joy, but for the quiet, creeping knowledge that her big barbarian was being very, very careful not to break her.

She hadn’t understood at first, too blinded by the splendor of what they did to each other to realize that loving wasn’t only a slow dance. But now that the naked edge of their hunger had been soothed, now that she’d spent more than one night exploring Galen’s beautiful body while he “suffered” for his lady’s pleasure, she could feel the taut tendons, the rigid muscles as he held himself back from expressing the violent force of his passion.

It hurt her that he never set himself free to take the intensity of pleasure he lavished on her, but she felt no anger. How could she be angry with a man who looked at her as Galen did? He might never say poetic words of love, but she knew what he felt for her in every fiber of her being, felt his devotion in every caress, every new wonder he searched out to show her… every secret he shared.

“My mother has written to me,” he’d said last night as they lay in bed.

Aware of the painful relationship he had with Tanae, she’d placed her hand over his heart and simply listened.

“She tells me to return, says Titus has agreed to give me command over half his forces. Orios will remain weapons-master, but I would be his lieutenant.”

Rising up on one elbow, she’d scowled. “Why would she offer you a lesser position than you have with Raphael?” Perhaps Raphael’s army was not yet as impressive as Titus’s, but it was Galen’s to train, to lead. Even Dmitri, Raphael’s second, bowed to Galen’s expertise when it came to their troops.

Galen’s smile had held a bleakness she’d never before seen in her warrior. “Because she knows I have ever striven to please her. As a child, I thought if I was good enough, strong enough, I could earn her love.”

Her smoldering anger at Tanae, having built over the seasons with every small truth Galen betrayed about his barren childhood, had ignited. “You have no need to please anyone, Galen. You are magnificent, and if she can’t see that, then she is a fool.”

A dawning light in the sea green, until it was translucent. “Magnificent?”

Caught by the vulnerability he showed no one else, she’d whispered her answer in a kiss. “Utterly.”

Now, having made her way to her favorite vantage point on the roof, she thought of how much that small conversation had told her about her barbarian. He might be brash and blunt on the surface, but there was a terrible wound on Galen’s heart, one that led him to take such exquisite care with her—as if he did not ever want to do anything that might drive her away now that she was his.

A single tear trickled down her cheek.

14

Galen finished the drills early as the winter darkness closed around them, the air clear of snow today, though a thickness of it covered the ground. Scowling at the whispers that passed from warrior to warrior about their weapons-master’s desire to get home, he nonetheless waved the grinning lot of them off without reprimand. Maybe he was getting soft, but he was happy in a way he’d never before been happy. It made him tolerant.

Winging his way to the balcony of the apartment he now shared with Jessamy, he found the rooms empty. Disappointed, he decided to head out to bathe. He’d just grabbed a change of clothes when Jessamy walked into the room. His heart stopped as it always did. Flowing into his arms, she kissed him with the wild joy of a woman who loved his touch. Such constant affection could make a man lose his head, come to believe that he was the magnificent creature he saw in her eyes.

“Are you going to bathe?” She nuzzled at him, her hands caressing his chest with delicate proprietariness over the top of the shirt he’d taken to wearing when the snows came. Jessamy worried otherwise.

“I’ll be back soon.” The river water was icy even for an angel, didn’t tempt him to linger.

Slow and wicked, Jessamy’s lips curved in a smile only Galen ever saw. “I’ll scrub your back.”

He should’ve told her to remain in the Tower, where she’d be warm and comfortable, but he needed her too much. Giving her the clothes to hold, he scooped her up and flew them not to the nearby river, but to a small pond at the foot of the mountains in the distance, where the water ran clear and sweet yet. It was a considerably longer flight, but it mattered little since he had Jessamy with him.

“Is anyone likely to disturb us?” she asked when they landed, spreading her wings out to stretch them, a tall, beautiful woman in an ankle-length gown the color and lightness of seafoam, the buttons that closed the wing slits at her shoulders made of square-cut crystals in a more vibrant shade of blue.

“No. We’re alone.” Unable to resist, he stroked the sensitive arches of her wings to her quiet shiver of pleasure. “This area is far out from the angelic patrols, and uninhabited. The mountains are as wild as they were at the start of time.”

Her smile held a sultry anticipation that made his cock jump. “Don’t you have to bathe?”

Laughing at the way she sat down on a nearby rock, like a great queen about to enjoy a private performance, her wings brushing the snow, he began to strip. He’d never been self-conscious about nudity, but seeing Jessamy’s delight in his body had made him an exhibitionist… but only with her. Bare to the skin—and blatant in his desire—he sucked in a breath and dived under the chill surface of the deep pond fed by mountain rains.

The icy cold was a shock, but nothing his body couldn’t handle. Rising to the surface, he blinked the water from his eyes to see Jessamy’s gown and undergarments pool at her feet, leaving her a long-limbed goddess, her flesh in perfect proportion to her fine frame. Her curves were slender, but very much apparent, her breasts taut mouthfuls he loved to taste and tease. His historian was very sensitive there.

Sitting down on the verge of the pond after dropping his discarded shirt on the snow, her legs hanging over the side and into the water, she shivered. “Come here.”

“As my lady wishes.” Her laugh, soft and intimate, wrapped around him as he floated to settle between her knees, spreading her thighs wider to her blush. He watched the progress of the wave of hot color as it pinkened her breasts, her nipples tight pouting points he had to taste.

“Oh.” Her hand fisted in his hair.

Pleased, he used his thumb and forefinger to pluck the nipple of her neglected breast while drawing deep on the other with his mouth. She was so small, so perfect, that he could take her fully into his mouth—to suck and mark and lick. Releasing her with slow reluctance, he enjoyed the sight of her breast glistening from his loving, so rosy and beautiful. When she tugged on his hair, he smiled, licked out at her other breast.

By the time he stopped, the sweet musk of her was in his every breath. “Jess.” It came out raw.

“Yes.” She parted her thighs wider as he kissed his way across her navel and to the tart sweetness hidden by fine chestnut curls. He’d feasted on her before, loved the little sounds she made when she quickened on his tongue, but tonight, he found his control frayed to a ragged edge by the wild sensuality of her invitation. His strokes were rougher, his grip on her hips tighter.

Instead of shying, she lifted toward him.

He was a man. A man who craved her. It had the effect of snapping the leash. Licking, sucking, and even nipping with his teeth, he pushed her to a hard, fast peak. She shuddered, the taste of her pleasure erotic on his tongue. Aware how sensitive she was after a climax, he backed off to suckle a hot, wet kiss on the inside of her thigh. “The water’s not that cold,” he cajoled, wanting her in with him so he could push his cock—rock-hard in spite of the chill—into the molten tightness of her core.

Her eyes glinted. “Liar.” Hands massaging his shoulders, she leaned forward with wings spread to claim his mouth, her sexuality unashamed and intoxicating. “I want something else.”

Intrigued, he pushed up with his arms on either side of her, nuzzling and kissing the graceful line of her neck. “Anything.”

Fingers weaving into his hair as he slid back down, she lifted her eyes to the night sky, lit only by the delicate sliver of a sickle moon and the ice-cold fire of innumerable stars. “I want to dance, Galen.”

His hands clenched on her thighs. “Jess.”

Jessamy kissed him again, soft and lush and seductive. “I never thought, never dared dream I’d have that, but you promised me, Galen.” Teeth on his lower lip, the soothing warmth of her tongue, heated suckling. “You said you’d fly me wherever I wanted to go.”

Those tiny kisses driving him a step closer to insanity, he moved his hands up to close over her breasts, forcing himself not to be too rough with her. If he hurt Jessamy, he’d cut off his own hands, cauterize the wounds with heated metal so they wouldn’t heal for a season. Then he’d do it over again.

“Harder.” A husky whisper against his mouth. “Please.”

He gritted his teeth to keep from spilling in the water right then and there. Jessamy continued to kiss and pet him as he fought the need, and then his hands were moving, squeezing and tugging harder than he’d ever before done, her creamy skin reddened by the coarse demand of his touch.

Shivering in a way he knew had nothing to do with the cold, she ran her hand over the arch of his wing, long fingers rubbing the sensitive edge where it grew out of his back. It felt as if she was fisting his cock. He wrenched away, pushed himself to the middle of the pond and dived. She was sitting where he’d left her when he surfaced, her chest heaving, her hair tumbling around her shoulders to hide her breasts—but for the plump points of her nipples.

A wood nymph come to life. To torment him.

“The cold isn’t helping,” he muttered, shoving forward to grip her hips and suck the taut pink tip of one breast into his mouth without warning. Her cry was the sweetest music. Shoving aside her hair, he molded her other breast with his hand, using the pressure she’d just taught him she liked, his cock thick and ready between his legs.

Then she whispered, “Dance with me, Galen.”

Letting her nipple pop from his mouth, he met her gaze. “I won’t be able to control myself.” The dance was the most primal of matings.

“Did I ask for control?” With that arch reminder, she rose to her feet and held out a hand. “Now come.”

He could deny her nothing. Rising from the water, he didn’t scoop her up in his arms as he usually did. Instead, he held her to him with one arm around her waist beneath her wings, the other around her upper back. His cock throbbed between them. Rubbing gently against it, Jessamy wrapped her arms around his neck.

Glaring at her—to a sinful smile—he said, “Tighten your wings.”

She brought in her right wing, her left already smaller and flatter to her back, the light dimming from her eyes without warning. “Will my weight be dangero—”

“You weigh less than a feather.” So fragile, she was so very, very fragile. His hunger, by contrast, was such a vast thing—he was terrified it might crush her. And he couldn’t bear to imagine Jessamy turning from him, scared and disappointed. Especially when he could almost believe the emotion he saw in her eyes was that rare gift no one had ever before given him.

Vowing to hold her safe even from himself, he rose into the night sky, Jessamy’s body aligned to his. He flew high, higher than he’d ever before taken her, until they could’ve touched the stars, the air cold and thin. No playful flying today, just a brutally straight line—he had no patience for making this anything beyond hard and fast, but for Jessamy, he’d try.

“Don’t fight it, Galen,” she said when they halted, so high up that frost formed on their lashes. “Surrender.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.” She was the most precious thing in his life.

“I’m an angel, too. An immortal. Treat me as one.”

The haunting plea beneath the demand broke him. He’d lay the world at her feet if she so asked. “Promise me you’ll stop me if I’m too rough.”

Huge dark eyes looked into his, raw with desire and a need that rivaled his own. “I promise.”

Taking her at her word, this woman who understood pain on a level most would never comprehend, he tightened his grip to steel and ravaged her mouth as he held them in position with faint movements of his wings. When she slid up just enough that she could cradle him between her thighs, he angled them until they faced earthward, bit down on the curve of her shoulder… and shut his wings.

They plummeted.

Jessamy’s scream held wild delight, no terror. Teeth bared in fierce joy, he snapped out his wings again right before they would’ve crashed into the mountains, dipped left and took them on a heart-stopping flight into and through a large cavern, barely avoiding the razor-sharp edges of rock that would have cut and bruised, before shooting out a jagged hole caused by some long-ago event, and spiraling up into the night sky once more.

“That was wonderful!” Jessamy’s grin was as feral as his.

Laughing in primal happiness, he stole a kiss before breaking it off to concentrate on beating his wings ever harder as he pushed them high, high up into the sky. When his mate rubbed with feminine impatience against him, he was so deep into the dance that he hooked her leg around his waist and slid into her in a hard, almost brutal thrust. Too late, the mists parted. “Jessamy, did I—”

She squeezed her inner muscles, cutting off his words. “Let’s fall again.”

Perfect, she was perfect. The most primitive pleasure in every drop of his blood, Galen didn’t do a straight vertical drop this time. Controlling their descent with the brute power of his wing muscles, he dropped for a heartbeat before jerking to a sudden stop, his body rocking deep into her with the jolt.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Until Jessamy attacked his mouth, her hunger voracious. Any control he might have retained was lost, the thread snapping with an almost audible sound. Keeping her locked to him with one arm, he fisted his free hand in her hair, and took her down in an almost impossibly fast spiral that seemed destined to end with their bodies broken on the unforgiving mountains.

Pulling up at the last possible instant, he winged his way back to the skies without giving Jessamy time to catch her breath. No warning, no gentleness, he fell again, her body tight and hot and silken around him. Feeling her muscles start to spasm, pleasure rocking her body, he ran his lips down to the pulse in her neck as they rose, sucked hard as they fell.

Jessamy’s muscles felt like they’d turned to liquid, her thighs in danger of sliding off Galen’s body when he took them high into the starry night again, each beat of his powerful wings pushing the hard length of him inside her in a sensation so deep, she felt branded. Tiny inner muscles continued to clench and unclench with the aftershocks of the most violent pleasure she’d ever experienced.

Right when she thought she could bear no more, she glanced up, saw the naked passion of him, and felt her body quicken to shocking readiness. “Strong, gorgeous man,” she said, giving him words because her Galen needed words. “Just so you know—you’re mine. Always and forever. So don’t even think about changing your mind.”

Shuddering, he dropped his head, pressed his cheek to her own, and murmured words in a language both beautiful and ancient. Tears burned in her eyes, passion torn through with wild tenderness.

I’m yours.

So simple. So powerful. His heart laid at her feet.

He locked his mouth to her own before she could find her voice, and they plummeted in a passionate kind of insanity. Lost in the magnificent power of him, she hardly felt the spray of water on her back when he jerked them up above the pond, rising a bare wing-length before bringing them to a gentle landing on the snowy verge.

His clothing was soft beneath her back, the ground hard. And Galen… he was an inferno.

She screamed as he gave her his surrender, hard and hot and without restraint.

15

The exhilaration of their dance continued to hum through her veins days later, as she completed her notes about Raphael’s territory that she would enter into the histories when she returned to the Refuge.

Outside the library window, she could see the archangel drilling with a mixed unit of angels and vampires, the snow a seamless white blanket in every direction. Children’s laughter drifted up from the mortal city, carried by a whimsical wind, and she felt a poignant tug in her soul, an awareness of the forces and duties that pulled her to her home in the mountains… while her barbarian must wing his way back to Raphael’s territory, his task not yet complete.

But she would not think of it now. This was her time to love Galen.

That winter day, and the ones that followed were beyond beautiful, the skies a crystalline hue in the day, studded with gemstones at night. Jessamy spent the season in the arms of a warrior who told her she was his everything, even as his wounded heart struggled to accept that her love for him was no flickering candle flame but a light as constant as the sun.

Spring came as a blush, delicate and budding. Jessamy’s heart sighed at seeing the world awaken again, though it was a difficult time, too, for she had to say good-bye to the friends she’d made at the Tower. Difficult, but not painful, because she was no longer trapped in the Refuge. And so it had become home, rather than a cage.

Trace kissed her on the hand out of sight of everyone the morning of her departure. “If you ever tire of him, you know you have but to turn those lovely eyes my way.” Impudent words, true warmth.

“Thank you for being my friend.” He’d been a part of her journey, and she would never forget him. “You will come see me when you next visit the Refuge.”

“Only if you strip your barbarian of his weapons and tie him up for good measure.”

The memory made her smile as she stood on tiptoe not long afterward, and brushed her lips against Raphael’s cheek. “I’ll visit your land again. It has a claim on my heart now.”

“Do not wait so long this time.” Relentless blue eyes dark with an edge of sorrow, and she knew he was sorry to see her go, this ruthless archangel who had once been a boy she’d held when he bumped his knee. “The city will grow, but the skies and the lands around the Tower will be yours to explore so long as I rule.” He allowed her to step back, and into the arms of the man who would fly her home. “Take care with her, Galen.”

Galen didn’t reply, his expression making it clear the instruction deserved no response. Raphael laughed, the sound rare, a fading echo of that tiny blue-eyed boy who was the beloved son of two archangels. Beside him, Dmitri stood silent and watchful, but for the smile curving his lips. For once, it reached the vampire’s eyes. “Safe journey.”

They swept off the Tower roof on the heels of Dmitri’s words, escorted to the border by two wings of angels in perfect formation. She was the ostensible reason for the display, but she knew it was respect for Galen that drove the squadron. Pride filled her heart for the man who was hers, a man who’d forged his own place regardless of those who sought to stifle and crush him.

His mother had written again, urging him to return to Titus’s land, take up the lesser position and “improve his skills.” The subtle attack on Galen’s self-confidence had enraged Jessamy, but he’d simply shaken his head and said, “She’s afraid, Jess,” a depth of understanding in his eyes that would surprise those who saw only the hard, blunt surface.

Squelching her own anger, Jessamy had cupped his cheek. “Do you want to see her?” Tanae was his mother—as a child who loved her parents regardless of the oft painful quiet between them, she could understand the emotional need.

“Yes.” He’d put the letter aside, a calm strength to him. “But I will not chase her approval any longer. She can battle her pride and come to me.”

As they flew, Jessamy hoped Tanae did swallow her pride, because while Galen no longer needed her approval, he loved her still.

“Jess.” Warm breath, familiar voice. “Look.”

She glanced down, saw a snowy mountain range come alive with the sun’s rays, the snow seeming to ripple with waves of molten gold. “Oh…”

It was the first of the wonders they shared with each other, the journey home far different from the one to Raphael’s territory. Playful as children, they danced over isolated islands and primeval forests with sprawling canopies. Galen laughed with her as he never laughed with anyone else, teased her with sinful words, and listened in shock as she whispered of scandalous truths she’d learned over the ages.

“And to think I believed you sheltered and innocent.”

“My poor darling. Can your fragile sensibilities take the rest of the tale?”

A huge sigh, laughing eyes. “I’ll persevere if I must.”

It was only when they were almost to the Refuge that their joy whispered away to a quiet, solemn knowledge. “When do you leave for the return journey to Raphael’s territory?” Even though she’d known the truth since winter, when he’d murmured it to her in the pleasure-drenched dark, her heart clenched in pain.

Galen brought them to a cliff overlooking the river that scythed through the Refuge, a final private moment. “Tomorrow morn.” His hair flamed in the mountain sunlight as he held her face in the rough warmth of his hands, drinking her in with his eyes. “Raphael’s troops are strong, but not yet at a stage where they could repel the forces of another archangel with a single decisive action.”

Though Alexander Slept, might do so for millennia, Jessamy understood the world of the Cadre was never a peaceful place. “I know you’ll make them ready.”

Galen squeezed her hip. “I shouldn’t ask you to,” he said, devotion in every word, “but I’m going to. Wait for me, Jess. I’ll come back to you.” Naked emotion turned the sea green into hidden emeralds.

Pressing her fingers to his lips, she shook her head. “You never have to ask, Galen. Forever, that’s how long I’d wait for you.”

She loved him with passionate fury that night, speaking words of love over and over so he’d know she would wait for him. Morning broke too soon, and it was with a final kiss so tender it broke her heart that her barbarian flew back toward the lands of the man who was now his liege.

Galen was merciless in his training of Raphael’s troops. He’d left his heart in the Refuge, bled with the missing of it. It had been selfish of him to ask Jessamy to wait for him when she’d found her wings at last, was a woman many would want to court.

“I love you, Galen. So much it hurts.”

He held her words to his heart, polished them until they were faceted jewels, told himself no woman would say such sweet, passionate words to a man if she did not adore him. He hadn’t chained her with his request—she had chosen him. And still he worried that she would not look at him the same when he returned, her love eroded by the limits on her freedom his promise demanded.

The first letter was carried by a returning messenger, Jessamy’s flawless hand writing to him of her life, of the children she taught and the people she met, the histories she kept, connecting them though he stood half a world away.

My dearest Galen…

He ran his finger over the words so many times the ink smudged, his eyes burning until he had to put the letter away to read late in the night, when no one would disturb him and he could read it as slowly as he liked.

He sent his response—far shorter, for he had no way with words like Jessamy—with Raphael, when the archangel returned to the Refuge with a small wing of angels who would now be based there. Jason was currently taking care of his interests at the angelic stronghold, with Illium and Aodhan’s help, but the two angels were yet young.

Raphael carried Jessamy’s letter back to him.

Jessamy touched the letter for the thousandth time, tracing the hard, angular lines of Galen’s pen. She could almost feel his energy, his raw power in the terse words another woman might have taken as disinterest. Smiling because she understood that a warrior had no time or inclination to learn poetry and gentle wooing skills, she kissed the letter and put it on top of the book she was carrying as she headed home for the day.

“Daughter.”

Jessamy turned at the sound of that familiar voice, sliding Galen’s letter between the pages of the book as she did so—but her mother had already seen. “From your barbarian.” It was said with a smile, affectionate rather than judgmental.

Jessamy laughed. “Yes.” She didn’t tell her mother that Galen wasn’t as much the barbarian as he appeared—not only because the fact people constantly underestimated his intelligence gave him an advantage, but because he needed no such defense. She adored every part of him, the rough and the secret sweetness. Such as that which had led him to send her a daisy pressed in the leaves of his letter.

I flew past the field today, and I remembered how you talked to the flowers, he’d written, almost driving her to tears, the big beast.

“You love him.” Her mother’s words were followed by a deeper, yet somehow more tentative smile. “I can see it in your eyes.”

Unable to bear that hesitancy, Jessamy walked into the arms her mother held out. The scent of her was intimately familiar, warm and loving, a sensory reminder of the childhood nights Jessamy had spent silent and stiff in Rhoswen’s lap—after truly understanding that her wings weren’t ever going to form like those of her friends, that she’d never be able to join them in their sky games.

“I do,” she whispered, squeezing her mother tight, because Rhoswen had rocked her night after night, a fierce protective love in her voice as she attempted to give solace to a child who hurt too much to accept it. “And he loves me, too,” she said, aware her mother needed to hear it. “I’m happy.”

Rhoswen drew back from the embrace, a sheen of wet over the lush brown of her eyes. “No, you’re not.”

“Mother—”

“Hush.” Laughing through the tears, her mother squeezed her hands. “You ache with missing that warrior of yours.”

Jessamy laughed and it was a little teary, too, because she hadn’t realized until this instant how very much she’d missed talking about Galen with her mother. It hadn’t been a conscious choice not to, simply an extension of the painful silence that had grown between them over the years. “Will you come home with me?” she asked, reaching for Rhoswen’s hand. “I’d like to talk.”

“I’d like that, too.” Fingers, slender and long, stroking her cheek. “I’m so happy to see the sadness gone from your heart.”

That was when Jessamy realized the distance between them had had as much to do with her as her mother. She’d thought she’d masked her sorrow as she grew older and became a respected figure in the Refuge, but what mother who loved her child would not be able to taste the salt of that child’s hidden tears?

Linking her arm with Rhoswen’s, their wings overlapping in a warm intimacy between mother and child, she made a decision—no matter what happened going forward, Rhoswen would never again taste such pain in her daughter. Galen had helped Jessamy find her wings, but the joy of spirit that bubbled within her was hers to nurture and she would fight to hold on to it.

“What does he write, the big brute who kissed you in front of the entire Refuge?” Rhoswen asked with a teasing smile. “Do let me see.”

“Only if you let me see the love notes I know Father still writes to you.”

Her mother’s cheeks turned as pink as the color that marked the tips of her primaries, the very shade on the inner edges of Jessamy’s own wings. “Terrible girl!”

Jessamy giggled and held the book and Galen’s letter close to her heart. Those letters kept winging their way across the world as the seasons changed. She wrote pages and pages full of stories about life in the Refuge—including about the three small angels who were waiting for Galen right along with Jessamy.

They assure me their flight technique has improved considerably—they’ve been very diligent about the training exercises you set them, have even become instructors themselves to their schoolmates.

Illium, Jason, Aodhan, they all took her missives and flew back with Galen’s.

“Do you know I came to see you before my mother?” a tired Illium said one late summer’s day, handing her a letter. “Galen threatened to pull off my feathers one at a time if I didn’t.”

Loving him, this blue-winged angel who ever made her heart lift, she kissed him affectionately on the cheek. “Fly to the Hummingbird,” she said, speaking of the gifted artist who was his mother. “I know she has been watching the skies for you.”

He was a sight against the orange and gold of dusk, but she was already turning away, her fingers trembling as she broke the seal. As always, it was short, without embellishment. No words of love. Just Galen.

Tell my trainees I intend to test them rigorously on my return. Never too early to start training a squadron.

“Oh, wonderful man,” she whispered, because such words would mean everything to the little ones who hero-worshipped him.

There was no daisy this time. Only an unspoken request.

The feather I stole when I left is losing your scent.

She sent him a feather from the inner edge of her wings, where the blush was so deep it was magenta, and wrote to him of the summer blooms in the mountains, and of the political game playing she saw taking place as Michaela rode the razor’s edge between angel and archangel, wrote, too, of her worry about Illium.

The young angel had fallen in love with a mortal before he left the Refuge, and with each day since his return, that love grew ever deeper. Most shrugged it off as infatuation on his part, mistaking the wild beauty of his spirit for fecklessness, but she knew the power of Illium’s loyal heart.

I cannot imagine Illium without his smile, she wrote, as the blue-winged angel played with her students outside, while she sat at her desk in the schoolroom. Her death will haunt him through eternity.

Galen’s response was simple. He’s strong. He’ll survive. Then he added something that broke her heart. I’m not that strong.

Tears rolling down her face at the words he gave her, this warrior who was her own, she wrote to him of her adoration, because never again would she raise any self-protective barriers when it came to Galen. He would always, always know of her love. “Galen, mine.”

Autumn had fallen by the time a response arrived with Dmitri, who’d come via a swift seagoing vessel before hitching a ride with a wing of angels, so Illium could spend time at the Tower. Jessamy met the vampire’s gaze. “It’s no coincidence he’s been recalled so soon, is it?”

The sensual curve of Dmitri’s mouth was a thin line as he shook his head. “Raphael is worried about his relationship with the mortal girl. He may cross lines that cannot be crossed, speak secrets no mortal must know.”

Knowing the punishment that would fall upon the angel if he did divulge angelic secrets, Jessamy watched him go with a pained heart. “There’s no choosing safety in love, is there, Dmitri?”

“No.” A single word that held a thousand unsaid things.

Again, she wondered what lay in the vampire’s past, but those were not her questions to ask. “Raphael’s troops?”

“They profess to hate Galen on a daily basis, but would follow him to their deaths if he ordered it.” Curiosity overtook his expression. “I was wrong about the result of his courtship, and I still can’t determine why.”

Laughing, she touched Galen’s missive, hidden in a secret pocket of her gown.

It was in her next letter that she wrote of the one thing she hadn’t raised thus far—not out of fear, but because he made her forget that she was imperfect. I will never have a child, Galen. Keir cannot promise me I will not pass on my disability. And while she had found her happiness, it had been a road paved with broken dreams and haunting loneliness. It would destroy her to see such sorrow in the eyes of her child.

Galen’s response came in the hands of a beautiful warrior with the wings of a butterfly.

I would fly our child wherever she needed to go.

The words blurred. Wiping off the moisture on her cheeks, she continued to read.

The flitterbies might have air in their heads, but Titus has done a great thing in raising them. Bonds can be formed not only by blood. And Jess? I have no need to build empires and dynasties. I want only to build a home with you.

Her barbarian did know poetry after all, she thought, watching the ink smudge under a rain of tears that held no pain, only the ache of a love so true, it had forever changed her.

16

Illium told Galen of the things Jessamy didn’t write in her letters—that several other men, angels and vampires both, had made repeated attempts to court her. The only reason Galen didn’t beat the blue-winged angel bloody for being the messenger was that Illium conveyed the news with a scowl, adding, “Jessamy’s too polite to tell them to cease plaguing her, but each male knows if he pushes too hard and makes her uncomfortable, he’ll be dealing with Dmitri.”

Galen had the sudden understanding that until Illium left the Refuge, he was the one who’d been Jessamy’s champion. “Thank you.”

A glare, bared teeth. “Do you know how many people are calling me Bluebell now?”

Galen laughed, realized this pretty angel who looked like an ornament and fought like a gleaming, elegant blade had grown into a friend when he hadn’t been looking. “Come, then. I’ll let you attempt to knock me to the ground in recompense.”

As he continued to work with Raphael’s people through the crisp bite of autumn, the earth covered in a hundred shades of red, brown, and ochre, he thought of his precious store of letters, and of delicate feathers of blush and cream. Such beautiful words Jessamy wrote to him. Still, he was too honest to lie to himself—one fact nothing could change: that he’d been the first man to take the woman she’d become into the skies. By the time he returned, others would have… and so his historian would have a choice.

It might crush him to imagine her flying in the arms of another man, but he wanted her to have that choice, wanted her to never regret being with him. Because rough edges and all, every part of him bore Jessamy’s name. He needed her to be his in the same way.

Watching autumn glide into a brittle, harsh winter, Jessamy opened her histories and wrote of all that had passed in the previous season. The peace had held, with the archangels too busy with keeping an eye on the spectacle of Michaela’s ascension to the Cadre to play politics. Jessamy had to admit, the new archangel had come to power with awe-inspiring splendor.

In the far north, she wrote, the skies dance with color in winter, but when Michaela rose to her full strength, the skies danced across the world, whether in the tropics or in the Refuge, whether it was night or noon. Rich indigo, vivid ruby, iridescent green, colors that turned the world into a dream.

There had been other developments, of course, smaller in comparison but not unimportant. She noted them with a historian’s distance, even as her soul cried silent tears at some of what she had to write. But theirs was a long-lived race, loss and sadness as much a part of their history as joy.

Her own aching need continued to grow. She watched the skies for Galen’s distinctive striated wings each and every day, even knowing that he’d taken Raphael’s men and women on a winter march, so that they would be prepared for the harshest of conditions.

“Jessamy.”

She halted with her quill held above the page, finding herself looking into the lean face of an angel who was older than her by five hundred years. Not a pretty man, but one who had the kind of compelling presence that came with being honed by time and experience. “Yes?”

He held out a hand. “I would take you into the sky.”

Galen wanted to force spring out of the earth, not that it would do any good. He had to remain in the territory for another season, to ensure everything he’d taught had sunk in. “I’ll return when needed,” he said to Raphael, pacing across the cliffs that afforded a clear view of the Tower rising from the island on the other side of the powerful crash of the river. “But I’d like to be based at the Refuge.”

“I have no argument with that,” Raphael said. “I need at least one of my trusted senior people in the Refuge at all times.”

Trust had not only deepened, but become rooted between them. Still, Galen wondered if he’d have a subtle watch on him in the Refuge now that he’d have so much power. It was what he’d have done, and he told Raphael that. The archangel raised an eyebrow. “You make me stronger, Galen. That makes you a target. Be careful.”

“No one will ever take me unawares.” It wasn’t arrogance— he knew his strengths as he knew his weaknesses. Thanks to Jessamy, Dmitri, Jason, and Raphael, he was no longer a novice when it came to sensing and swiftly strangling subtle political intrigues that could steal even an immortal’s life.

Raphael’s hair blew back in the breeze. “Illium returns with you. He fades with the sorrow of being far from his mortal.”

“Would it not be better to keep him here?”

“Is that the choice you’d make?”

Galen thought of his tearing need to see Jessamy, considered what it would be like to know she would disappear from existence in but a mere whisper of time. “No. It would be cruel.” If Illium had only a whisper, that whisper should be his.

Raphael said nothing, but Galen knew the archangel was in agreement. There was cruelty in Raphael, that of immense power, but there was also a capacity for loyalty that spoke to the warrior in Galen. There would be no knife in the back from this archangel.

“Tanae,” the archangel said some time later, “has asked permission to enter my territory.”

“I see.” Meeting eyes of a blue Galen had seen on no other, mortal or immortal, he knew the request had been granted.

His mother, when she arrived at the Tower, was the same woman, the same warrior, she had always been, but he saw her through different eyes now.

She found herself facing a man who has no need of her support in any sense, he wrote to the woman who had taught him that he was worth loving exactly as he was, and she floundered, returned to Titus’s territory. But perhaps it is a start. We may yet find a new path.

Closing the letter, he didn’t write the one thing that screamed inside of him.

Wait for me, Jess.

Jessamy saw the silhouettes of two angels far in the distance, backlit by the setting summer sun. She shaded her eyes, trying to glean their identity, but the sun’s blaze turned their wings a uniform fire, except… she knew. She knew. Running toward the edge of the cliff with little care for the treacherous ground, she waited with her hands fisted in the sides of her gown.

A beam of sunlight, hitting the pure red of hair that felt like silk against her palms.

Tears rolling down her cheeks, she was barely aware of Illium peeling off to head down toward the human village some distance away. Her eyes were only for the lover who had finally come back to her. Flying to the edge of the cliff, he caught her as she jumped without hesitation, and spiraled down the gorge to the edge of the river that foamed over rocks and ran sweet and clear in the shallows.

“You’re home. You’re home.” She kissed his mouth, his cheeks, his jaw, any part of him she could reach. “I missed you so.”

It undid Galen, the depth of joy in the brown eyes awash with tears that met his gaze. Crushing Jessamy to him, he took her mouth, took her words, took her. “I don’t care,” he whispered, hoarse, rough, demanding, “who courted you while I was gone. I’ll be the only one courting you now.” He’d thought to give her a choice, but found he didn’t have that in him. “I’ll love you until my dying breath, give you anything and everything you want.”

“Poetry again. It’s not fair.” A trembling laugh, slender hands petting his chest as she was wont to do. “I have not flown since you left.” Tender words spoken with an intimate smile. “Will you court me in the skies?”

Stricken, he said, “I would never ground you.” Regardless of his jealousy.

“I know. Oh, I know.” Rubbing her wet cheek against his chest, she said, “I couldn’t bear to be in anyone’s arms but yours.”

“Jess.”

It wasn’t until much, much later, with the night soft and warm around them that Jessamy rose from the tangled sheets of the bed, and walked to the dresser in the corner. “What are you doing?” he asked, lying on his front watching the woman who was his own with possessive eyes. Her moon-shadow was as slender as a reed, her skin shimmering pearl bright, her feathers lush, strokable, exquisite.

Unashamed of her nakedness, she gave him a sweet, shy smile as she returned to the bed. “I have something for you.”

When he went to get up, she shook her head. “Stay. I like looking at you.”

“Good.” He bared his teeth. “I would keep you naked if I could.”

“Primitive!” Laughing, she slid something under his bicep and brought it around to click it shut. “Too tight?”

Looking down at the thin metal band that circled his upper arm, he shook his head. “I’m already tied to you, my demanding Lady Jessamy.” By bonds nothing would ever break. “Now you use manacles on me?” It was a tease, because he’d discovered he enjoyed teasing his historian.

“Hush.” She petted the metal. “There’s amber in the amulet.”

Wrenching her down below him, he covered her body with his own. “Are you claiming me, then?” Amber was for the entangled, a warning to others to keep their hands off.

Huge brown eyes met his. “Yes.”

He’d never been more delighted in his life. “Does the amulet have any other meaning?”

She blushed. “It’s silly… a mortal thing. A wish to keep you safe.”

Stroking her hair off her face, he nuzzled at her, and knew he’d never again wander forsaken, looking for a home. “Will you wear my amber, Jess?”

A smile that told him he was loved, was hers. “Always.”