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)
My fellow members of the Cadre, if you are reading this, then I have made the decision I have struggled with since the moment I woke into this world wondrous and new and made of steel and glass. I have gone into Sleep.
I know you will rail against me, and you have that right. I make no excuses save one: I am only half a being without my Cassandra. I do not exist in truth in this world when she does not. My mind is an organ split in two, while my heart lies beneath the earth.
The vampires who I am tasked with controlling have begun to sense that. They know my will is not in this existence. I have done my duty. I have kept them in check. But I fear for the years to come, as I become less and less without her. I foresee a time when I will not care to keep a hand on them at all . . . and a time where I, too, will become a mad being.
This is a piece of my history that you do not know, for you are all too young. I tried to live without her once before. I made it two centuries, but by then I was so mad that the only reason I survived is because my two closest archangelic friends cut me up into tiny, tiny pieces and buried me in a cavern deep in the ocean.
They knew even an archangel would take time to recover from such an annihilation.
Time enough to regain my sanity perhaps.
They were right.
I did not rise after I was whole.
I chose to Sleep as my beloved Sleeps.
I do so again, in the knowledge that the madness whispers to me every step I take alone in this new world she finds so alluring and full of wonder.
I leave with you a treasure from the deep where I once lay. I carved it over millennia, in the heartbeats when I woke. I would the world never forget her. I would they remember her as I remember her: as the joyous wild beauty who was ever my closest friend and only lover.
I ask that this carving be placed in Lumia, in lieu of a portrait that does not exist.
I beg no forgiveness or grace, only that you treat Astaad’s people with gentleness, for they are yet his people. He was their true archangel, I only a caretaker for a pulse in time.
—Qin, once Archangel of the Midnight Sky
11
Interlude
Graves
Raphael fell to his knees in the dirt, sobs shaking his body and his wings crumpled. His hand clenched on the wood of the implement he was using to dig a grave so small it should’ve never been needed.
“Rafe.” Keir put his hand on Raphael’s shoulder, but even the healer’s warmth couldn’t penetrate the cold at Raphael’s core. “You don’t have to continue doing this. You’ve more than done your part, son.”
But Raphael shook his head and, after using the back of one hand to roughly wipe off his tears, rose to his feet. He towered over the diminutive healer, but that said nothing of Keir’s power.
It blazed kindness and compassion.
“No, Keir,” Raphael said, “my blood is responsible for this. I must be here.”
“You had nothing to do with your mother’s madness,” the healer argued, the silky black of his hair wind-tangled against his dusky skin. “Listen to me, Rafe. You’re a young man who should’ve never been put in this position.” An uptilted brown, his eyes held compassion endless.
But Raphael couldn’t listen, his eyes taking in the field that went on forever. Grave after small grave. Mortal children who’d curled up and died of grief after his mother turned her voice into a weapon and sang their parents into the ocean.
He had watched over the children, had tried to make them want to live.
He had failed.
Shoulders set, he turned away from Keir’s empathy and heart. The healer was a better man than Raphael, had told Raphael that his mother was sick, her decision made in the tangle of insanity.
Raphael didn’t care.
She’d seen what madness did to his father, to her lover . . . and still she’d stayed awake as the phantoms began to howl. He wanted to shake her, scream at her, beg her to make this right.
But she couldn’t.
Mortals didn’t rise once broken.
Even as Keir tried to speak to him, he bent, began to dig again.
12
Elena’s muscles locked in a reflexive act at her first glimpse of Jeffrey.
Only now did she realize that she’d been scared he’d appear diminished, appear small. She wasn’t sure she’d have been able to bear seeing the man who had always been a force of nature, who’d once been her beloved and loving Papa, turned fragile and weak.
But somehow, though he lay in a hospital bed hooked up to multiple machines, Jeffrey Deveraux remained himself down to the tension in his face.