Elena was Raphael’s consort, and Raphael was Jason’s liege. Perhaps that was why he felt an unexpected kind of ease with her. Or it might be that she was a stranger in the land of immortals, searching for a path that would take her into the centuries to come, as he once had. Or perhaps it was that, unbeknownst to Elena, they were linked by a far bleaker tie, a tie that spoke of mothers and blood.
Iron rich liquid matting his hair, soaking into his tunic, sticky on his arms.
Elena looked up, shook her head, the startling near-white of her hair pinned back in an elegant twist, her body clothed in a simple ankle-length gown of a blue the shade of a pristine high-mountain lake. Her only ornamentation came in the form of the small amber hoops she always wore as an outward sign of her commitment to Raphael. “Don’t you see, Jason?” she said as the bridal couple broke a kiss that had more than one sigh rippling through the crisp morning air. “He is only this Dmitri for Honor.” She joined in the clapping and cheering when Honor and Dmitri turned to the assembled guests, well-wishers moving forward to congratulate them.
Having spoken to Dmitri before the ceremony, Jason waited for the crowd to thin. Elena, too, held her place, giving others a chance to speak to the newly wedded couple. As he’d been with Dmitri before the ceremony—alongside Raphael, Illium, and Venom—Elena had been with Honor, the archangel and his consort having turned over a suite in their home to the bride’s party. That party was composed of hunters, all certainly with a weapon or two hidden beneath the sleek, elegant clothes they wore for the wedding.
Blue flickered at the edges of his vision, and he turned to see Illium spread his wings for a hunter who had made the request. Clad in the same formal black worn by the groom as well as Raphael and the others of the Seven here today, he had a flirtatious smile on his face. The smile was real as far as it went, but then, it did not go far. Jason had seen Illium love until his heart broke, and he had seen the angel mourn until there was no light in those eyes of molten gold.
“I understand,” he said to Elena when she glanced back at him, reminded once again of the capacity others had for endless nuances of emotion. Jason had watched mortals and immortals alike for centuries, was able to glean even the most subtle changes in their emotional equilibrium, for no man could be a spymaster without that capability. Yet, through all that time, he had never been able to feel as they did. It was as if life skimmed across the surface of him, leaving his heart and his soul untouched.
“You are the perfect spymaster. An intelligent, gifted phantom unaffected by anything he sees.”
It was Lijuan who had said those words to him, four hundred years ago. The oldest of the archangels had also made him an offer—riches and women trained in the sensual arts, men if that was what he desired—if he would change his allegiance, put himself in her service. Except Jason had already earned and created enough wealth for a hundred immortal lifetimes. As for the other—when Jason wanted a woman, he had a woman. He had no need for anyone to act his procurer.
Elena’s wing shimmered lightly over his as she stretched a little, and he didn’t shift away to break the fleeting contact. In many ways, he was the opposite of Aodhan, the angel so broken, he couldn’t bear the slightest touch. Jason, by contrast, sometimes only felt real and not the phantom Lijuan had named him if he had the pressure of another’s skin, another’s wing against his own. It was as if all those years, decades, when he hadn’t felt the touch of another sentient being had created a thirst in him that could never be assuaged.
A sybarite drunk on sensation, that was what he might have become, but for the fact that those years of excruciating, endless aloneness had left him with other scars—scars that led him to embrace the very shadows he’d hated as a child, scars that meant he meted out trust with a careful hand. Regardless of his need, Jason allowed very few people to touch him outside of the bedroom; for the touch of a friend, it was a far different thing than the caress of a lover taken in the dark of night and left behind when morning broke.
“It was a beautiful wedding, wasn’t it?” Elena said, her eyes soft in the way women’s often were at such things.
“Do you wish for one?” Marriage was thought of as a mortal thing, but as today showed, some immortals continued to embrace it—Dmitri had been most insistent on the ceremony.
Startled laughter from Elena. “Raphael and I married above the wreckage of New York, when he fell with me in his arms.”
Raphael, too, Jason thought, was a different man with his consort, this mortal woman become an angel. Such a weak angel in terms of power, her immortality a flickering flame, and yet she had a strength that spoke to the survivor in him. So he’d taught her how to remain unseen in the sky, watched her push her body to merciless extremes in an effort to achieve a vertical takeoff so soon after her becoming, and listened for threats to her life.
For Elena was Raphael’s biggest weakness.
A tiny giggle, a mischief-eyed little girl running to Elena on wobbling legs, curls of bronze-threaded black captured at the sides of her head with ribbons of summer orange. Smiling in unhidden delight, Elena bent to pick up the child in her arms. “Hello, Zoe, Warrior Goddess in Training.” A kiss on one plump cheek, Zoe’s flower girl dress a confection of lace over Elena’s arm. “Did you give your mom the slip?”
Jason met the child’s direct gaze as she nodded, saw that she held a silver-edged feather of distinctive blue in a careful fist. The daughter of the Guild Director stared at his wings for a moment before whispering something in Elena’s ear. Jason heard what she said, understood none of it, her language that of very small children.