"My mother says there is a garden nearby," he replied, noting Gian's subtle insolence and disguised condescension while deliberately downplaying his ability to navigate Lumia. He had incredible power, but strategy and intelligence still counted in a battle.
Especially against a foe on home ground.
The other man's smile appeared genuine, but Gian had been alive a long time, had headed a secretive sect for hundreds of years. A sect that was meant to change leaders every five decades. Nothing in Gian's face could be trusted.
"Yes," Gian said, smile holding, "it's just down this way." The Luminata began to lead them there, all helpfulness. "Did you enjoy your flight to the town?" he asked Elena.
"Pretty place."
Gian nodded, expression serene. "Yes, I hear that is so."
As if he's never been there. Total BS if he was involved with Majda. Elena's blade of a voice in his mind. He lies while breathing. I can't believe I almost fell for it.
Touching his hand to her lower back, Raphael stroked gently. He has had a long time to perfect his public persona, hbeebti.
I wonder if he fooled my grandmother, too. No doubt in her now, that the woman in the miniature was her blood.
Having seen the similarity, Raphael had to agree with her conclusion.
Maybe, Elena continued, Majda ended up in Paris because she realized what he was too late. But who fathered my mom? Where's the vampire in the family tree? It could be several generations back.
She was a hunter who'd caught the scent. And she was magnificent.
Even as his consort thought of the hunt, the hallway opened out into a courtyard that held a manicured garden, the hedges so neatly cut it was mathematical. It's unlikely, Raphael said in response to her supposition about her vampiric ancestor. He'd have had to be under two hundred to have sired a child, but while he was clearly strong, I know of no vampire of that age who would have power enough for the kiss of his blood to last beyond a second generation.
"Many of the brothers find it calming to work in this garden," Gian told them at the same time. "It's a little too sedate for me"--a smile that was grace embodied--"but we all find different paths to luminescence."
Spotting Caliane's snow-white wings on the other side of the garden, Tasha's copper ones beside her, Raphael said, "It seems my mother has beaten us here."
"Thanks for being our guide."
Gian's eyes glowed at Elena's words. "I hope you both enjoy your walk," he said, but he was looking only at Elena. "The garden is beautiful at sunset."
Raphael ran his hand down his consort's stiff spine after Gian disappeared down the hallway, ice coating his words when he spoke. "He looks at you with covetous eyes in front of me." The only reason Gian wasn't dead right now was because he had answers to Elena's questions.
She closed her own hand over the edge of his wing, stroked down in a firm caress. "Don't let him get to you. Even if we have to come back after the world settles down, we'll expose all his secrets."
It was a promise.
"Mother." Having reached Caliane, Raphael greeted her with a kiss to the cheek.
His mother, her hair a fall of midnight down her back and her body clad in a flowing gown of white with the barest tinge of green on the edges, smiled and slipped her arm through his, but not before she turned to Elena and said, "May I steal my son for a few minutes, Consort? I have missed him."
"Of course." Elena's tone was gentle in a way Raphael knew his mother didn't realize--and neither, he was certain, did his hunter. Elena had a soft spot for his mother now that it had become clear how much Caliane regretted what she'd done to Raphael.
It wasn't only that, of course.
His consort would do anything to see her own mother again, couldn't find it in her heart to hold on to anger against Caliane.
Knhebek, hbeebti.
Elena's response was a kiss against his mind before she fell back with Tasha.
30
"Did you ever visit Lumia before this?" he asked Caliane.
Nodding, she said, "Yes, several times. I had a friend who was Luminata long ago, before you were so much as a speck in the universe's eye." A remote smile, her gaze filled with eons of memory. "He was as thin as a reed and the funny thing was that his name was Reed. We teased him so, but he always had such a smile about it. Such inner peace."
"After he became Luminata?"
A shake of Caliane's head. "He was born that way, I think. Like some children are born with a placid, happy nature." Glancing up at Raphael, she laughed, no longer a distant Ancient but the mother who'd once kissed his hurts. "You were not like that. You had very firm and loud opinions for a babe."
"I had two archangels for parents."
Laughing again, she said, "Reed was born of two scholars and he was scholarly himself. I wasn't surprised when he told me he was drawn to Lumia." She went silent for a while, as the older angels were apt to do, their memories tangled skeins they had to unravel. "He was the kind of person who should be here. It seemed as if he had an ability to see beyond the veil."
"I've met people like that in my life." Ibrahim was one--young but with a purity to him that sang. "It doesn't seem as if most of the current Luminata are as your friend."
"I should've known you'd sense it, too. So intelligent and perceptive even as a babe." Memories in her voice again, her smile a haunting echo of the woman she'd been before unspeakable tragedy and madness. "Talking of Reed, I find I miss him. He had such a quiet, warm sense of humor."
"Does he Sleep?"
"I do not know." Sorrow colored her features. "He disappeared two millennia before your birth, and no one knows where he went. At the time, most hoped that he'd chosen to slip quietly into Sleep, but I hoped he'd found luminescence, was inhabiting a plane of existence unknown to the rest of us."
A soft smile, so many memories shadowing her expresssion when she lifted her head to meet his eyes that his soul ached. "Now I'm more selfish--I wish him to be Sleeping, so that he might wake one day and I will see my friend again."
Raphael thought of what it would be like if he lived a hundred thousand years, two hundred thousand, and began to lose friends to Sleep, or to retreats from society. Even vampires did the latter. They didn't have the ability to Sleep, but the old ones had been known to shut themselves away for eons.
Immortals called them the Withdrawn.
The Withdrawn relied on trusted retainers for their blood intake, with some families remaining with the same vampire for generation after generation, the only ones who ever had contact with the recluse or recluses. Raphael had known one such retainer a hundred years earlier; the man had told him that his master was tired but "his god does not permit self-annihilation." So he had chosen a life of total seclusion, blood supplied to him through a hole in the door to his suite.
"It must be a hard thing," he said to his mother, "to be awake in a world where so many of your friends Sleep." He knew he would never be alone that way--he and Elena would always wake and Sleep together. Not only could he not imagine life without his hunter, he'd seen the terrible harm it could do when one half of a pair went into Sleep unilaterally; he'd never hurt Elena that way.
"At least Alex is awake now." Caliane's sigh was heartfelt. "A troublemaker still. He always wants to take control--even as a boy, he was determined to lead."
"Have you tracked down any others of your compatriots?" He knew she'd asked Jessamy to do a search for her.
"Not from so long ago, but others I met through the ages, yes." Midnight strands of her unbound hair brushed over his arm as they walked. Many who only saw her outside Amanat thought she always dressed this way--in flowing gowns with her hair down, but Raphael knew that was only one of his mother's skins. She was as comfortable in weathered leathers, with her hair in a braid.
"Tell me," she said. "What is it that brings your consort to talk to Tasha?"
*
Elena and Tasha walked in silence for several minutes, and oddly, that silence wasn't awkward. I
t felt like walking with another hunter, both of them keeping an eye out for threats without making it appear they were doing so.
"Raphael told me you speak Moroccan Arabic," Elena said as, up ahead, Caliane and Raphael walked side by side, their wings overlapping.
Elena and Tasha, on the other hand, had made every effort to ensure their wings didn't so much as brush against each other.
"Yes," Tasha replied. "I learned it when I lived here for a time during my youth." A smile in her voice, she added, "Raphael traveled through here as well, you know."
"Knock it off, Tasha. You won't rattle me with stuff like that."
A shrug. "I'm simply speaking of an old friend."
Deciding to let that battle go when it was obvious Tasha was in a mood where she wanted to dig at Elena, Elena said, "Raphael also told me I can trust you to do a translation."
A frown from the other woman, her hackles so far up Elena could almost see them. "Of course you can trust me in this. We may both be the lovers of the same man, but I have honor."
The prickly response seemed honest. "I apologize," Elena said. "I wasn't questioning that . . . hell, yes, I was. This fucking place."
Tasha's stiff tension turned into a caution directed outward, her eyes going dark before she scanned the area once more. "Yes, I feel it, too. There are ghosts here."
Fighting off a shiver at the memory of the ghost that had twice chilled her skin, Elena said, "If you can, please translate this for me." Reaching into her mind, she spoke the words exactly as the woman in the marketplace had spoken them.
"Wait." Tasha frowned. "Repeat that more slowly."
She asked the same two more times before saying, "I have it. The repetition was because it appears the original speaker used a particular dialect. I had to match up the words I know with the words you spoke--you realize this means I must guess some meanings from context?"
"Got it."
After taking another minute to order her thoughts, Tasha began to speak. "'My grandmother told me the story of Majda, a woman with moonlight hair, born to a small merchant family. The family is no more, for she was the only daughter and the parents are now dead and she disappeared long ago.'"
Tasha gave a hard shake of her head. "Wait, that's not right. It wasn't the word for 'disappeared.' It was 'taken.'"
A woman who was taken.
Elena's heart thudded. "Was that all?"
"No. There was also this: 'All traces of this family and of the woman with the moonlight hair have been erased from the town, and those who know are elderly, their memories fading and their bodies too fragile to rebel against the silence that hangs over the story. If others know, they stay silent, for to speak of her is to draw the attention of the angels.'"
A quick breath before Tasha continued, "'My grandmother told me Majda's story in secret. I think you will not betray me and you, too, have skin like her and moonlight hair'"--Tasha's gaze grew sharp--"'so I tell you this.'"
Blood roaring through her veins, Elena reached for Raphael's mind, shared what Tasha had told her. Aloud, she said, "Thank you," to Tasha.
"You seek your ancestors?"
"My mother was orphaned as a small child," she told the other woman, since that was no secret if anyone cared to look into Marguerite Deveraux's history. "Her mother came from Morocco, that's all I know."
"A woman with moonlight hair," Tasha murmured, her gaze flicking to Elena's hair once more. "Personally, I think you look as if you were fried in a lightning storm, but to each their own."
Elena found herself laughing. "That's pretty good for an on-the-spot comment."
"It's possible I've been working on it for a while." Tasha's lips tugged up in a clearly reluctant smile. "Will you not insult me in turn?"
"I called you Tasha McHotpants once," Elena said, and as Tasha burst out laughing despite herself, Elena thought once again that she and the other woman could've been friends if not for Tasha's unhidden desire to turn back the clock.
The angel simply didn't understand that some things were set in stone, were forever.
Elena-mine, are you ready to fly?
Her lips curved at the sweet, wild caress of the sea over her senses. Yes.
My mother has expressed a desire to accompany us. I think she wishes to escape this place, too.
I've got no problem with that, but warn her of the reception she'll be getting. Turning to Tasha on the heels of her discussion with Raphael, Elena found the other woman's jaw clenched tight, her eyes grim. "Caliane let you know the plan?"
Tasha nodded. "I don't want her to be hurt. She's used to living in Amanat, where her people adore her."
"If you need backup getting her out of there, let us know."
"She's stubborn," was Tasha's response. "Not often, but when it matters to her, she will do exactly as she will do."
Ahead of them, Caliane spread her wings.
Tasha took off after Caliane, but Elena walked into Raphael's arms and let him lift off for both of them. She'd already proven her skill at vertical takeoffs; there was no need to be stupid and waste energy when she had a much better option. And while she was at it, she decided to take advantage of her position and kiss her archangel's gorgeous, sexy mouth.
Life was for living.
You are distracting me, hbeebti. Despite the stern words, Raphael kissed her back with a passion that curled her toes, all power and heat and love. So much love. It nearly hurt, to know she was that deeply loved.
"I could kiss you forever," she said against his lips . . . and he dropped her.
Sweeping around with a laughing "Whoop!" of sound, she flew to line up wingtip to wingtip with him. "You know how to court a girl!"
A dangerous smile. "I aspire never to bore my consort."
They kept to a steady pace, arriving at the township as the sky glowed a dark orange streaked with pink, sunset a long process in this land. More people were out in the cooler weather--though "cooler" was a relative term.
Their landing had a predictable effect: people froze, then they began to pull away as unobtrusively as possible, ducking inside shops or hunching their shoulders to make themselves smaller targets. The four of them had come down near the edge of the canopy of the sitting tree, and within seconds, everyone on the bench that circled the trunk had somewhere else to be.
Glancing at Caliane, Elena saw Raphael's mother take in the fearful--and deeply if quietly angry--response with no visible reaction. As she watched, Caliane went to sit on the bench that circled the tree trunk, her wings draped gracefully on either side; her ebony hair, jeweled eyes, and gown of white brushed with green turned her into a goddess at rest.
"I will stay here," she said to them with an enigmatic smile. "I miss my people when I am far from them. Listening to this town's heartbeat settles the ache." Her eyes met Tasha's. "Explore, my dear."
Shaking her head, Tasha remained standing by her side. "I am with you, my lady."
"There's not much anyone can do to me, child."
"I'm sure Father will be very understanding when I explain why I left you alone in an unfamiliar marketplace."
Caliane's laughter was pure music, her voice holding a piercing beauty even when she was doing nothing to amplify it. "Ah, Avi, he taught his daughter well." A nod. "Then stay, listen, and perhaps we will come to understand why this town is haunted by a malignant fear."
Extending a hand to Raphael, she said, "You and your hunter will do much the same?"
Raphael closed his fingers gently around Caliane's. "Yes. Tell me if you sense anything we should know."
The two were focused on each other so they missed what Elena saw: the way people's eyes lingered on their handclasp, and on how Caliane smiled at Raphael. Though she was an ageless beauty, that smile was a mother's. No one could mistake that. As no one could mistake that they were mother and son.
Leaving Caliane and Tasha seconds later, Elena and Raphael stepped out into the amber and red of day transitioning to night. Had the streets been full, they mi
ght've had trouble navigating through them with their wings, but with people so wary, there were no obstructions.
At first, all they did was walk through the market, looking at various things.
When Elena spotted a short, skinny man cooking some type of filled bun, she wandered over to the cart he'd parked in front of a closed shopfront. Hot and with a touch of spice, the scent had her stomach rumbling, her mouth watering. "Two," she said to the cook, who'd gone as motionless as a deer who'd spotted a wolf.
Nodding jerkily, he prepared two buns with expert hands, then half wrapped them in greaseproof paper, providing an easy way to hold the hot items as they ate. Elena dug into her pocket and placed enough local currency on the counter to cover the cost--the night before her and Raphael's dawn departure from New York, she'd rung Sara and asked if the Guild could convert some dollars for her; she knew it held a small amount of all types of currencies.
Izzy had picked up the money for her and dropped it off at the Enclave. Because while plastic might be fantastic, a hunter always carried actual cash for moments like this.
The cook's eyes went huge at seeing the money.
Shaking his head, he began to push it back with a trembling hand. Elena just took the food and gave one bun to Raphael. "Try it," she said after taking a long sniff of the aroma. "If you don't think it's delicious, I'll swallow my favorite blade."
The cook made a small, choked sound.
Ignoring the overwrought man, Raphael took a bite and gave a decisive nod. "There is no need to swallow your blade, hbeebti."
Smiling, Elena took a bite of her own bun before they walked on, leaving the stunned cook to collapse into a chair behind his setup, a tea towel held up to his sweat-drenched brow. From the corner of her eye, Elena saw a nearby shopkeeper run over and pat his shoulder before collecting the money and putting it in the little tin in which it should go. Her eyes, too, were wide as she handled the money.
These people don't expect us to pay for what we take. Raphael's mental tone was frigid, though his expression remained unchanged.
31
Yeah, looks like the Luminata don't believe in a fair transaction. Elena's own anger was a cold pulse inside her--immortals had so much, had centuries upon centuries to gather wealth. These people weren't dirt poor, but they weren't rich, either. Not by any calculation. They were just ordinary citizens trying to eke out a life.