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)
“No damage,” he told her. “No sign of a quake at all. It appears to have been localized to the Refuge.”
Shit. “That can’t be good.”
Raphael’s expression mirrored her worry. Because the last time the world had started blowing up, they’d ended up in a devastating Cascade. One from which they had only now recovered.
The world was too fragile to take another pounding. They needed this to be a natural event, not one linked to the power that ran through the veins of the archangels—a power so brutal that it could shatter the earth into a million pieces.
4
Interlude
Fall of an Archangel
Laric was going to be in trouble.
Again.
It wasn’t as if he tried to be late. It just happened. Like today, he’d been distracted by the honey cakes his mother had made and now he was going to be late to his lessons at the Medica. But oh, those honey cakes had been pure decadence on the tongue.
Smiling, he angled left and caught a glint in the sky.
He assumed it was another angel, probably one of the warriors wearing gauntlets or other armor . . . until he got closer. The glint had been no armor, but a bolt of angelic power.
Laric rolled his eyes. “Typical.”
Every time one of the recent crop of newly strong angels got into a temper, they started to throw around bolts. It was aggravating; if he wasn’t a trainee healer who’d taken certain oaths, he’d be tempted to drop a little “calm-balm” into their mead. Put the whole annoying lot of muscle-bound bumbles to sleep.
Another bolt, this one thunderous enough that his bones vibrated even though he was still some distance out from them.
His flesh chilled.
Squinting, he looked more carefully. And gulped. Those weren’t two angels acting tough. No, what he was looking at was a serious battle between two archangels.
He couldn’t see their faces from this distance.
White wings, long black hair, a woman.
Wings of pale gold, dark hair, a man.
Caliane and Nadiel.
Battling with a lethal ferocity that was no lovers’ quarrel.
Panic stabbing into him, he dropped. He didn’t care how late it made him—he did not want to be in the sky while two archangels fought.
He was so intent on getting to the ground that he didn’t see the fatal strike, just felt the flames sear his feathers, melt his skin as the sky turned molten—a cataclysmic burn born of the inferno of an archangel’s violent death.
Laric screamed and fell.
5
The Cadre met in the empty square at dawn the next morning, after they’d done all they could to assist the injured and stabilize damaged areas. Aside from the Cadre, the only other people in the square were Elena, Hannah, and Lady Sharine.
Consorts didn’t usually attend meetings of the Cadre, but with all three of them in the Refuge, it had seemed the natural choice. That Lady Sharine wasn’t officially Titus’s consort wasn’t something anyone cared about, either; she’d earned her voice at this meeting on her own.
Unexpectedly, however, the quake wasn’t the top item on the agenda.
“Where is Qin?” Caliane hadn’t bothered to change out of the sophisticated white leathers she’d chosen to wear for the ball, and they were now blood-smeared and dusty, the knees black from where she’d knelt in the dirt to lift literal houses off people. The crisp white of her feathers hadn’t fared any better.
“I noticed he wasn’t here yesterday morning.” Zanaya scowled, the violet-tinged silver of her hair pulled severely off her face and her body clad in a simple linen tunic that ended midthigh.
White plaster dust coated her thighs and streaked her shoulders, dulling the vibrant ebony of her skin. “I wasn’t surprised in the least. We all know how much our Qin loves parties.”
Elena had come to appreciate the dry humor of the Queen of the Nile, but snark aside, Zanaya wasn’t wrong. Elena had spotted Qin’s absence, even joked about it with Raphael. “Ten bucks says he arrives at exactly eleven a.m. on the dot tomorrow.” The Ancient might’ve stuck around after being forced awake by the Cascade, but a man who less wanted to be present in the world, Elena couldn’t imagine.
“He insults us!” Aegaeon thumped a fisted mallet of a hand on the dark brown leather of his pants, his upper half bare but for a top of metallic mesh that overlay the silver swirl on his chest.
The latter was no temporary tattoo or artwork but as much a part of him as Raphael’s Legion mark was his.
“This is a declaration of war!”
“Calm down, Aggie,” Zanaya muttered, adding fuel to the fire as only she could.
Elena battled the urge to snort out a laugh; she knew the Queen of the Nile wasn’t helping matters, but she loved how much Zanaya couldn’t stand Illium’s asswipe of a sperm donor and how she made zero effort to hide it.