Archangel's Light (Guild Hunter #14)(3)

“When are we going to fetch him home?” she demanded. “New York doesn’t feel the same without him.”

Raphael shook his head, no more humor to him, his face an unearthly creation of stark lines and cold power. “I don’t think the time is right for him to make such a momentous move, nor that Suyin is the right archangel for him, but he must make the choice, Elena-mine. Freedom is the one thing I will never take from Aodhan.”

Seeing the echoes of old rage in his eyes, hearing it in his tone—so frigid, the anger an old, old one—Elena stroked his nape, his hair heavy black silk against her fingertips. “Part of me wants to tell him to take the promotion and not look back.” He was magnificent, their Aodhan, more than worthy of the position he’d been offered. “The rest of me wants to drag him home.” A kiss pressed to Raphael’s lips. “I’ll keep it under control, though. I won’t be anything but supportive.”

“As will I,” Raphael said. “But I also plan to fight dirty.” A dangerous spark in the blue. “I have told Suyin I am sending her more help. I am a kind fellow archangel.”

Elena whooped, her grin huge. “You’re sending Illium.”

“Of course I’m sending, Illium, hbeebti. Now, we watch, and we wait.”





Life changes us. To wish otherwise is pointless.

    —Nimra, Angel of New Orleans





3



Today

Aodhan was tired.

Not the tired of the body. He was a powerful angel, and tonight, he flew patrol over Suyin’s interim stronghold without any real drain on his resources. Young in the grand scheme of things at just over five centuries of age, but with veins bursting with an energy that made him suitable to be second to an archangel.

It was why Raphael had accepted his offer to assist Suyin as her temporary second.

It was why, three weeks earlier, Suyin had extended him a formal offer to make the position permanent.

Aodhan’s first call had been to Raphael. His sire had told Aodhan that he wouldn’t stand in his way should Aodhan wish to take up the position. “You are the only one who can make that call,” Raphael had said. “Whatever you decide, know that you will forever be part of my Seven.”

Aodhan’s immediate instinct had been to turn down the position. “It is Raphael I call sire—and I do so of my own free will,” he’d said to Suyin at the time. “It is a bond I will not break.”

“You will never be second to Raphael,” Suyin had said in her gentle way, her night-dark eyes vivid against the white foil of her skin and hair. “Dmitri has been too long in that position and is too good at what he does.”

“I do not aspire to be his second.” Aodhan already had another, equally critical position—to be one of Raphael’s Seven was to be part of a group unlike any in all of angelkind.

Suyin had smiled, the sadness that lingered always in her easing for a fraction of a second. “You have honored me with your fidelity and courage, given me counsel wise and patient, and so I ask you to take more time, consider my offer in more than the moment.”

And because Suyin was an archangel he respected, he was giving her offer the solemn thought that it deserved. To be the second of an archangel at just over half a millennium of age? It was unheard of; Aodhan would be the youngest second in the Cadre by far.

But, despite Raphael’s promise, he would never again be one of the Seven. They would become the Six until and unless they accepted another into their ranks. Because no matter how friendly the relationship between two archangels, there existed a distance nothing could bridge. A thing of power and age, for two alpha predators could never successfully occupy the same space.

Even Caliane and Nadiel, beloved of one another, hadn’t been able to always be in the same physical space. Aodhan hadn’t been born when they were together, but their tragic love story was legend. Prior to Nadiel’s madness and subsequent execution at Caliane’s hand, however, they’d simply been two archangels in love. But never had they been able to spend all their time together.

Power was a gift that demanded sacrifice.

Should Aodhan accept Suyin’s offer, Dmitri, Venom, Galen, Jason, Naasir . . . and Illium would be lost to him in a way that stabbed a stiletto blade straight into his heart, the cold steel severing their unseen bond even as it made him bleed. But was his vehement negative reaction not a bad sign? Could he say he was growing as a man, as an angel, if he clung to them with such fierceness? Or was he simply playing at freedom while keeping himself inside the cage that had altered the course of his life?

Then there was his tiredness. It was of the heart. He missed New York. He missed working by the side of his sire and the others of the Seven. He missed watching horror movies with Elena, both of them with their bare feet up on an ottoman and a bowl of popcorn in between.

He missed the new friends he’d begun to make in the Tower and in the Hunters Guild, those bonds one of the few good things to come out of Lijuan’s obsession with New York. He even missed the noisy chaos of the city’s streets, its drivers often yelling at each other as if for sport.

Wild blue flashed on the insides of his eyes.

Aodhan set his jaw and dived to do a wide sweep. He would not think about the person he missed most of all—because that person seemed to have forgotten him. Illium had sent him regular packages of items from New York alongside art supplies—only to come to a sudden screeching halt three months earlier.