Angels Dance

breaking the touch. “I was young—it took years to grow back. The same could happen again in battle. Would you repudiate me?”
    The stiffness of her didn’t abate. “It’s not the same, Galen.” A raw kind of pain in her words. “Eternity is a long time to live broken and malformed.”
    He didn’t do her the insult of disregarding the suffering that had forged her. “Many would have chosen Sleep.” Decades, centuries, even millennia could pass while an angel Slept. “Yet you chose to live.”
    “I’m not brave,” she whispered. “I just didn’t want to give those who pitied me the satisfaction of seeing me give up on life.” Turning in his arms, she wrapped her own around his waist, pressing her cheek to his chest. “I didn’t want to be seen as weak.”
    One hand on her nape, beneath the warm fall of her hair, the other on her lower back, he bent his head to speak with his lips brushing her ear. “Many a young warrior has gone into battle with the same motivation. There is no shame in fear that drives.” He widened his stance to tuck her even closer, and he thought that, perhaps, she had shown him a secret part of herself. “I was,” he said, revealing the same within him, “one of those young warriors.”
    Tanae had always been so unflinching in her courage, and Galen had never wanted to shame her. “My mother looked at me with disgust when the blood and gore and horror of my first battle had me emptying my stomach, and I didn’t know how to tell her that I had never tasted true fear until that moment. Instead, I learned to be harder, better, stronger.”
    “Your mother . . . she sounds a harsh taskmaster.” It was a hesitant statement.
    “She is a warrior.” Galen had no other words, because the words he’d already spoken described Tanae’s soul.
    It was Jessamy’s hand that stroked him now, her touch tender and careful over his wing, and he was startled at the realization that she was attempting to comfort him. It was a strange sensation. No one had ever coddled him after he’d snarled at the flitterbies, determined to become tough.
    Jessamy would probably not handle snarling well, so he’d bear the gentle petting. “Jessamy?”
    “Hmm?”
    Fisting his hand in her hair, he tilted back her head. “I’m going to kiss you now.”
    As the stars flickered overhead, icy gemstones lit with cold fire, he took her mouth the way he’d wanted to from the first. He demanded entrance and she opened for him, the softness of her his to ravage. Mystery, that was what Jessamy tasted like. Sweet and dark and with depths it’d take a man an immortal lifetime to explore. Gripping her chin with his free hand, he angled her just as he liked and then he devoured her.
    A tiny push, a hint of teeth.
    Listening, he gave her a bare instant to breathe before he plundered her mouth again, her sensuality a deliciously slow-burning ember that had her nails digging into his nape, her tongue stroking against his with carnal curiosity.
    He groaned and angled his body, the spread of his wings blocking the view of the Refuge as he cupped the gentle curve of her bottom and lifted her up to cradle the hard ridge of his need.
    “Galen.” Breathless.
    He was moving too fast. But when she rubbed her lips over his, licking out her tongue to taste him, it would’ve taken a stronger man than Galen to resist her.
    * * *
    G alen was unsurprised to find Raphael in the practice salle the next morning, stripped down to wide-legged black pants held up by a thick fabric belt tied at the side. It reminded Galen of the gear worn by Lijuan’s men when they occasionally came to train with Titus’s, the two archangels maintaining a relatively cordial relationship this century.
    He’d worn pants of a durable brown material today, along with his favorite worn-in boots, his sword in its usual position along his spine. Now he removed boots and sword. “Are you going to execute me if I pin you to the floor?”
    Raphael’s lips curved at the practical question. “I’m not Uram, Galen. I suppose I’m more like Titus in this—I want men who aren’t too afraid of me to tell me the truth.”
    Galen had thought as much. It was why he was here. “Hand to hand, no weapons.”
    “Agreed.”
    A whisper of blue flickered on the periphery of Galen’s vision as Illium entered, spreading his wings to fly up and perch on a beam. Dmitri was no longer in the Refuge—he’d gone, Galen had realized, to hold Raphael’s