Guild Hunter 02 - Angels' Flight

midnight sins, “you do belong to him.” A wicked smile. “Just as well. I don’t fancy getting my bones broken into tiny pieces.”
     
    Catching a feather that floated down from above, she saw it was white streaked with gold.
Raphael.
The archangel had returned late last night, spent candlelit hours with Galen and Dmitri in his study. It was clear to her that Galen was becoming an ever more integral part of Raphael’s Tower. There was a chance he would not want to return to the Refuge.
     
    If he didn’t…
     
    Jessamy felt nothing but joy at the freedom that had allowed her to see the world, to fly the skies, but the Refuge was her home. Her books were there, the histories she was charged with keeping. And oh, how she missed the children. There were no children in the Tower.
     
    A wave of wind, feathers of white-gold on the edge of her vision as Raphael folded away his wings. “What will you write in your histories about my territory?”
     
    “That it’s a place as wild, and with as much promise, as you.” He was an archangel, but he’d also been her charge once, and sometimes, she found she forgot and spoke to him thus.
     
    Raphael’s lips curved, but there was a growing hardness to his eyes—so
blue
, sotraordinary—that hurt. It was changing him. The politics. The power. “Alexander’s land?”
     
    “Stable for now.”
     
    “And you?” Her eyes lingered on a profile that was becoming ever more savagely beautiful, until, she knew, one day soon, no one would remember the boy he’d been.
     
    “I have a territory to consolidate.” He stepped closer, took her hands. “You are always welcome in that territory, Jessamy—the rooms you occupy are yours.”
     
    He saw too much, she thought, but then, that was why he was an archangel. “The Refuge is where I belong.”
     
    “Are you certain?” He angled his head toward the squadron of angels now diving and cutting in the thin air of the clouds.
     
    Following his gaze, she watched not the squadron, but their commander. Her soul ached with inexorable need, but she knew it wasn’t yet time. “The heart,” she whispered, “can be a fragile thing.” And this love that grew between her and Galen, even in their silence, was even more so.
     

13
     
    G alen watched as Trace left the Tower, dressed in the smudged green and brown clothing of a scout. The vampire was good—Galen could glean no trace of him once he’d blended into the forest. But Trace wasn’t the only one who had noticed Jessamy now that she’d flown down from her isolated perch in the Refuge.
    Galen watched, didn’t interfere… and beat Dmitri into the earth on a regular basis.
     
    Wiping off blood from a split lip after their latest round, the vampire shook his head. “I must be a glutton for punishment, to keep coming back for this.”
     
    “No, you’re just determined to be better.” The truth was, the vampire was real competition. Galen left with cuts and bruises more often than not, and Dmitri had even managed to injure his wings a time or two. They were learning from each other, developing into deadlier fighters.
     
    Pouring water over his head using a pitcher set beside a pail of the cool, clear liquid, Galen pushed back his wet hair and said, “I need to get away for a day, perhaps two.” He trusted Dmitri now, knew the vampire, along with Raphael himself, would watch over Jessamy, make certain no man dared harm her.
     
    “Another angel wants to fly her”—Dmitri’s expression was watchful—“except he’s afraid you’ll kill him.”
     
    The pitcher shattered under the force of his grip. Ignoring the blood, he spread out his wings in preparation for flight. “I would never cage her.”
     
    Rising into the sky, he stopped for nothing, flying hard andfast into the coming edge of dusk. Several squadrons passed him, but none attempted to intercept, as if able to sense the black mood that had all but swallowed him whole. Flying as if he was fighting for his life, he raced the air currents until the sky was a bleak emptiness on every side, the land dark and forested below him.
     
    Alone.
     
    er growing up as he had, he’d believed himself immured to such pain, invulnerable to the invisible cuts that could eviscerate. But the love-hungry boy he’d been, he still existed inside the man, and both parts of him bled without surcease at sensing Jessamy leaving him in a thousand tiny steps. Diving down to the ground and the edge of a small stream,