Guild Hunter 02 - Angels' Flight

attire, but it was practical for the long flight.
    He and Raphael carried nothing beyond the weapons they’d strapped on. Like every archangel, Raphael had “journey’s rest” stations spread across the world, stocked with everything from food, to clothing, to replacement weaponry. It was an unspoken rule that no such location was ever to be compromised or utilized as a place of ambush, as every angel was welcome to use the stations. However, Raphael had madrtain of the safety of his by posting guards at the remote outposts. Each pair served a season before rotating in to the Refuge, ensuring no team was ever too long isolated.
     
    Jessamy shifted a fraction, her wing muscles moving against his arm. He hadn’t kissed her this morning, seen frustration dig grooves in her forehead. She couldn’t know what the restraint cost him, but the one thing he would never accept from Jessamy was her gratitude. It would be a slow death.
     
    “Stubborn,” Jessamy said, her breath an airy kiss against his neck, “has a terrible temper, arrogant, with a tendency to sulk. Your flaws are growing.”
     
    Squeezing her, he dipped his wings, making her cry out, tighten her hold around his neck. “Stop that.” It was a laughingcensure, the softness of her mouth pressed to his skin sweet agony.
     
    In front of them, Raphael swept down and out of sight along a young, green valley, scouting ahead. The archangel’s wings glittered in the rising sun, his flight so smooth as to create not a single ripple in the air. Then he was gone, leaving Galen and Jessamy with the sky to themselves, the clouds soft white puffs he deliberately flew into.
     
    Jessamy ran her fingers through the insubstantial filaments. “Oh Galen. I’m touching clouds.” The wonder in her made everything worth it, even the pain that might yet come… as Jessamy found her heart’s wings, and flew away from him.
     
    He should have thought ahead, should have comprehended the consequences of her first taste of true freedom. Of course she’d be thankful to the man who’d taken her into the skies, but even had he known that from the beginning, he would’ve still done everything in his power, fought an archangel, to allow Jessamy to touch the clouds. His selfishness was only a small one—he wanted her to need him, want him, for himself. No one in his life had ever cared for him just because he was Galen.
     
    “Are you planning to ignore me the entire way, you stubborn beast?” Jessamy murmured as they came out into the unbroken blue of the sky once more, the landscape below a verdant green interspersed with the snaking sparkle of water.
     
    Realizing he had no will to resist her when she teased him with such unexpected affection, he said, “It is a long flight,” attempting a small tease of his own, when he’d never done such a thing. “If we use up our conversation now, the final leg will be deathly silent.”
     
    Her laugh tangled around him, wrapping him in silken chains that might yet make him bleed. “I will never run out of words, Galen.”
     
    “Then tell me things,” he murmured, stealing this time with 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