Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 112287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Can you blame him? Raphael said. To wake up after who knows how long—and to Manhattan?
Man probably thinks he’s hallucinating half the time.
Ending the conversation on his second’s laughter, Raphael turned to Elena, who also lay awake beside him. “I’m going to go speak with Marduk. You should sleep, Elena-mine.” He’d talked her into a nap earlier in the day but knew she needed more hours of rest—she wasn’t yet old enough an immortal to keep skipping sleep.
“I am tired, and I want to get up early to visit Jeffrey,” she admitted. “I also have the feeling that Marduk will talk more if I’m not there. I’m getting ‘protect the woman’ vibes from him.” A curl of her lip. “Definitely one of your ancestors.”
Raphael kissed her scowling lips, his mark sparking as he did so. It had stopped throbbing, however, which was a mercy. “He’ll find out who you are soon enough, Guild Hunter.”
“Harumph.” Despite the dubious-sounding response, Elena kissed him back, her passion and love entwined with an affection so deep and true that it warmed him to his bones. “Go talk to that angel straight out of some people’s nightmares—and other people’s fantasies.”
Raphael raised an eyebrow.
“I’ll tell you later,” she said. “But let’s just say there are folks out there who really like scales.”
“I may wish to remain uneducated.”
Elena’s laughter followed him out the door.
He carried that laughter with him as he walked up to the roof. When he exited, it was onto a rooftop lit only by small uplights at the corners that acted as landing beacons. Around him glittered the lights of his city, the sky clear of even the smallest cloud. The wind, soft and cool, tugged at the loose white shirt he’d thrown on over black pants.
“The lights are like stars on the earth,” Marduk said to him in a voice that had become less grating and deep in the time since his waking—but not by much. No one would ever mistake his voice for anyone else’s.
“I have that same thought at times.” He walked to stand next to this being who was his ancestor—there was no way to avoid that, not with the mark on his temple and the echo in his blood anytime they were within a certain proximity to each other.
“The Legion always said they came to me because Elena and I are aeclari.”
Marduk glanced at him in that slow, deliberate way he had. “Yes, they will only ever go to aeclari. Not just to those of my blood.”
“Coincidence, then?”
A shrug of those massive shoulders. “I was part of the first aeclari.”
Raphael felt punched in the gut. “Where is your consort? Why is she not with you?” Aeclari were pairs. Always.
“She Sleeps. I’m not going to disturb her simply because Cassandra cannot keep her nose out of the Sleep of her elders.”
It made Raphael’s head hurt to hear Cassandra referred to as young and feckless. Not when she was the oldest being with whom he’d ever communicated—until now.
Marduk continued. “Perhaps it is coincidence, and perhaps it was time.” A glance at Raphael out of eyes gone slitted. “You are of my line. Yet I sense no others of my direct line in this time.”
That answered one question. “It must have been my father who was of your line,” he said, his thoughts filled with memories of a laughing man with eyes of a vivid green that held a hint of aquamarine. Nadiel had been the best father in all the world—until madness ate him up from the inside out.
“My mother is awake in this time,” he told Marduk. “She is Caliane, Archangel of Amanat. She saw your colors in the waters of her territory.”
“Because she is your mother, the tie through you.” Marduk turned away again, staring out at the glitter of Manhattan, the flow of traffic on the streets its lifeblood.
Raphael tried to see through his eyes. “Do you find this city strange?”
A long pause before Marduk said, “It is vibrant. That is good. Civilizations come and go, but cities must be alive to thrive.”
“How many civilizations have you seen come and go?”
“Too many.” Marduk’s voice held tiredness for the first time. “I should not be awake, young one. There is a reason I Sleep, a reason the Ancestors Sleep. We chose to give this world over to the young and we have all kept our promise through eons uncounted.”
Raphael wondered what his mother would say to being called young. “I think you’re awake because you need to be awake.” When Marduk turned to him with those penetrating eyes, Raphael decided it was time to tell him about the failing Mantle and how it appeared to have triggered the fall of the world itself—but Marduk glanced sharply left without warning, toward the entrance to the roof.
“I was wrong. There is another of my line here. Weaker . . . younger, so I cannot feel them from afar, but present.”