Angels Dance

her. No matter what happened once they reached Raphael’s territory, she was his for this journey and he wasn’t too proud to pretend that she did care for him the way he needed her to. “Tell me about Alexander. I have studied him, but never seen him.”
    “Alexander,” she said thoughtfully, “is the oldest of the archangels. Caliane alone was older than him, and she disappeared when Raphael was a youth.”
    Jessamy would never forget the haunting sound of Caliane’s song as she rocked her cherished baby boy. The archangel had had the purest of voices . . . so beautiful that she’d sung the adult populations of two thriving cities into the sea in a successful attempt to avert war. Except that it had meant the death of every one of those people, and later, of most of their children.
    It was as if the shock and grief had hollowed the little ones out, turning them into mute shells who breathed—until one day, they began to curl up and die. Jessamy would never forget the dark history she’d been forced to write that year, the sketches she’d been sent to place within the pages as a silent testament to the terrible price paid by the innocent . . . sketches of a hundred, a thousand, babes wrapped with tender care for burial.
    Dead of hearts broken
,
Keir had said when he returned to the Refuge, his eyes haunted. Dead of such sorrow as immortals will never know.
    “Alexander,” she continued, her throat thick with the echo of memories as painful as when they had been formed, “is also a handsome man.” Golden haired, silver-eyed, and with a chiseled profile, his body honed in war, there was a sense of physical perfection to Alexander even before you got to the stark beauty of his wings—of a pure, metallic silver. “He is, in fact, so striking I believe Michaela hopes to bear his child.”
    Galen chuckled. “She aspires to birth a son or daughter in the image of the two most beautiful angels in the world?”
    “Yes, but I don’t think she will succeed—quite apart from the fact he already has a son, Alexander is not like her other conquests.” He was too intelligent, saw beyond the exquisite lines of Michaela’s face to the coldly ambitious heart within. “He once told me it would be akin to coupling with the black spider that eats its mate.”
    Jessamy had always respected Alexander for his perspicacity, though she didn’t agree with his stance toward Raphael. “Why,” she said, “didn’t you attempt a position in Alexander’s court?” Titus and Alexander had dissimilar styles of rule, but they were both men of war.
    “His age and power threaten to blind him to the reality of the changing world,” Galen answered. “If Alexander were to succeed in his goals, we would remain forever locked in time, fireflies in amber.”
    Jessamy couldn’t disagree. Alexander had said something analogous to her on his last visit.
    “I am too old for this world.”
    His words had been a startling contrast to the ageless perfection of his looks. But that wasn’t all he’d said. Frowning in thought, she followed the fragment of conversation to its roots in a dialogue that had taken place near to two years ago.
    “I’m tired, Jessamy.” Silver eyes so bright, they would never belong to a mortal. “Tired of war, tired of bloodshed, tired of politics.”
    “You can choose peace.” She didn’t touch him as she might have Raphael—Alexander was far, far older than her, for all that he sometimes sought her counsel. “There is no need to raise an army against Raphael as I know you’re considering.”
    A faint smile that held no humor. “Peace is a mirage . . . but yes, perhaps you are right in your counsel. Perhaps it is Raphael’s time.”
    Sucking in a breath as she realized the import of the memory, she shared it with Galen. “No one suspects or expects Alexander to lay down his weapons.” Even she had taken his words for an idle musing, forgotten as soon as the lust for battle blazed once more.
    The opulent red of his hair whipping off his face, Galen angled himself so she was in no danger of being buffeted by the wind. “Yet his armies amass even now.”
    Jessamy examined each facet of the memory, each subtle shift of Alexander’s expression, but the fact was, it was one memory among thousands, hundreds of thousands, could mean nothing. “He’s an archangel,” she said. “They can be unpredictable.”
    Galen began to drop from the sky in a slow glide. “We’ve reached the