She fell into the wild blue of his eyes when he lifted his head from his unhidden visual exploration of her skin, her body. “Is that good news or bad?”
“It means she is almost awake.”
23
Elena took one look at the Hummingbird as the angel stepped into the living room on Illium’s arm and stopped breathing.
Michaela was beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful woman who had ever lived, but this woman was . . . radiant. It was the only word Elena could come up with to describe her. Eyes of sparkling champagne, hair of purest black tipped with gold, skin stroked by the sun . . . and wings of a wild, unexpected indigo, each feather bearing streaks of shimmering gold so pale as to be sunlight.
When she smiled, her lashes came down for a second and Elena saw that they were black tipped with gold. “Hello,” the angel said. “They call me the Hummingbird, but you may call me Sharine.”
Elena took the hands Sharine held out, unable to refuse. They were small, delicate, in perfect proportion to the Hummingbird’s bare five feet of height. “I’m Elena.”
“Oh, I know.” A laugh that was pure diamond sparkles glittering in the air. “My baby’s told me all about you.”
Looking up at Illium, she expected to see a playful scowl, but the blue-winged angel watched his mother with a mute sadness that made Elena’s own laughter fade. “Your baby,” she said at last, “is very beautiful.”
“Yes, I have to have a care—the girls will be after him once he grows up a little more.” Her gaze shifted to behind Elena. “Raphael.” Smiling with such love that it made Elena’s heart hurt, the Hummingbird walked into Raphael’s arms. “How’s my other boy? Never my baby, not you. But still my son.”
Elena watched in fascination as Raphael dipped his head and let Sharine straighten first his hair, then his shirt. She’d never seen him bow his head before any other being, male or female, but he treated the Hummingbird with the greatest respect ... and care. Such care that it spoke of handling something broken.
When Elena glanced at Illium again, she couldn’t stand what she saw on that face that was a dream of beauty. Closing the distance between them, she curled her hand around one muscled arm—as in the Refuge, his upper body was bare. Except tonight, his chest bore a painting of a huge bird in flight. “That’s stunning.” It didn’t take more than a cursory study to realize the bird was a stylized version of Illium.
“My mother,” he said, his voice more solemn than she’d ever heard it, “is the one who taught Aodhan to draw, to sculpt. To act as her canvas is considered a great honor among angelkind.”
As Elena watched, Sharine put her hand on Raphael’s chest, smoothing out a nonexistent wrinkle. “We have not met for many days,” she said. “Five or six at least.”
Elena frowned. She knew Raphael hadn’t had physical contact with the Hummingbird for over a year, and yet Sharine’s words held nothing of humor, nothing that said she was gently chiding him for the time that had passed. Suddenly her earlier words, calling Illium her “baby,” cast a far more somber shadow.
“Yes,” Raphael said with a slow smile. “I knew you would come see me before the seventh.”
Sharine laughed then, and it felt like warm raindrops against Elena’s skin.
“She’s . . .”
“I know.” Illium’s muscles tightened under her hold. “Ellie . . .”
“Hush.” She leaned into him, allowing her wing to brush over his. “She loves you, loves Raphael. That’s what matters.”
“Yes.” Smiling at his mother when the Hummingbird turned and held out a hand, he went to help her get seated.
The dinner was magical. Elena had heard Raphael use his voice in that way—until it felt like a tactile caress, but Sharine had honed it into an art form. Listening to her was like being surrounded by a thousand streamers of sensation, all of them sparkling with brilliance.
And the stories she told—of Raphael’s and Illium’s youth, such wonderful stories of bravery and folly, all told with a mother’s pride in her sons. Sharine had not borne Raphael, Elena thought as she stood on their private balcony later that night, watching the Hummingbird take flight with Illium by her side, but she had cared for him just the same. “She reminds me of some gorgeous hothouse flower.”
“One that’s been crumpled,” Raphael said, his hands on her shoulders as he pulled her back against his chest, one arm sliding around to hold her pressed to him. “For the rest, you must ask Illium.”
Placing her hand over his forearm, she shook her head. “I can’t. Not when I see how much it hurts him.” She’d believed she knew the greatest tragedy of the blue-winged angel’s life. He’d loved a mortal, lost her to angelic law and her human life span. But the pain she’d seen tonight, it was older, deeper ... raw and aged and angry. “How long is she staying in the city?”
“She will leave within the hour—she finds it difficult to linger far from home.”
As they stood there in silence, there was a spark of fire in the sky. Then another, and another.
The stars were falling.
There was no magic the next day. Even the spring sunshine promised by a stunning dawn was subsumed by bone-chilling horror as the calm broke in the most decisive of ways.
Flying down, then up toward the bottom of Manhattan Bridge, Elena hooked her fingers in the massive metal structure and stared at the five bodies that hung from its belly. They’d been spotted at daybreak by one of the craft that used this section of the East River—the witness was apparently still puking his guts out.