“Jessamy.” The single word brought her lips to his attention. Soft and just full enough to tempt, they would’ve dominated her face if not for those compelling eyes dark with unspoken mystery. “When did I teach you, Galen? I can’t seem to remember.”
Curling his fingers into his hand, he fought the urge to reach out, rub away the lines that had formed between her eyebrows. She was too fine a creature for him, his touch far too rough. And yet he didn’t walk away. “Why should you have taught me anything?”
Another blink, more lines. “I teach all our babes, have done so for millennia. You must have been one of my students—you are so very young.”
In his two hundred and seventy-five years on this earth, he had walked in battle and bathed in blood, felt the hot kiss of a whip on his back, the cold thrust of a knife into his gut, but never had he been called an infant until this moment. “I spent my childhood in Titus’s court.” It was an unusual thing for a child to grow up outside the Refuge, but no one would have dared harm the son of two warriors, a boy Titus himself had placed under his protection. “I had a tutor,” he added, because he did not like the idea of her thinking him an unlearned savage.
“I remember now.” Jessamy’s liquid silk voice pouring over him in an unintentional caress. “Your tutor was a former student I recommended for the post—he told me you were taught alone.”
“Yes.” Titus had not wanted the feminine softness of his daughters to affect Galen’s development.
“A lonely life.”
He shrugged, because he’d survived and he’d grown up strong—he’d been a capable fighter at an age when most angels were yet considered children. Perhaps he had not had the usual playmates, but it was all he knew, and a life that had formed him into the man he was today. That man wanted to bend, sniff the scent at the curve of Jessamy’s elegant neck. “I’ll escort you the rest of the way,” he said, rather than giving in to the primitive urge.
Jessamy fell into step beside the big—and rather physically overwhelming—angel, his wings raised up off the floor with such effortless ease, she knew it was no conscious choice, but the honed training of a warrior. No one would ever trip him up by using his wings, this male who had looked at the book he held as if at some foreign object. “Do you read?” she asked without thought.
The incredible, exquisite red of his hair shimmered with droplets of mist that had collected on the strands as he shook his head, and she wondered if the color would stain her skin a glorious sunset should she weave her fingers through the thickness of it.
“I can,” he added almost curtly, “but there’s not much use for it in my world.” An unexpected brush of heat across his cheekbones. “My reading skills are… rusty at best.”
Jessamy didn’t understand how anyone could live without words, without story… but then, she had been entombed in the Refuge for millennia. If she, too, had wings as magnificent as Galen’s, perhaps—though it seemed an altogether impossible thing—she would not have cared so much for words either. “I can’t fly,” she found herself saying, because she’d embarrassed him, and she hadn’t meant to. “It gives me much time to read.”
Galen didn’t turn, didn’t stare at the twisted wing that meant she’d never take flight. Keir, their greatest healer, had tried to heal her a thousand times over the years as his strength grew with age, but her left wing always formed into the same twisted shape, regardless of how many times it was broken and reset, or excised and allowed to grow back. Until she had said enough. No more.
“Your inability to fly,” Galen said even as she fought the painful echo of a decision that had broken her heart, “is obvious.”
Her mouth fell open. No one had ever been so unkind about her disability. Most people preferred to pretend it didn’t exist, and she didn’t push them to acknowledge it. What was the point in causing those around her discomfort? As for her charges—and those like Illium who had once been her charges—they had only ever known her as Jessamy, who had a twisted wing and whom they had to behave with, because she couldn’t chase them into the sky. All she had to do was step outside the schoolroom and raise her arm, and even the naughtiest child came back down to earth at once.
This one, however, she thought, glancing askance at the large male she couldn’t imagine as a lonely boy making his way in a court filled with the clang of blades and the cries of combat, would have done exactly as he pleased.
“Were you born this way?” he asked, blunt as the edge of a dull axe.
Jessamy decided he wasn’t being rude, at least not in a purposeful way. “Subtle,” as Illium had said, didn’t seem to be in Galen’s vocabulary. “Yes.”
“They say Keir is a talented healer.”
“He is… He did his best.” And he had blamed himself when he failed. She didn’t blame Keir. Neither did she blame her mother—who found it difficult to look at the child she’d borne, though not because of a lack of love.
Jessamy’s mother wouldn’t listen to her daughter either, not for the longest time. Even now, there was a haunted kind of pain on Rhoswen’s fine-boned face on the rare occasions Jessamy caught her looking at her child’s malformed wing. Rare… and getting ever rarer, as the wrenching silence between them, created of all the things they did not say, grew into an impenetrable black wall.
The heavy wooden doors to the library appeared out of the mist at that instant, as impenetrable in their bulk, the gold that inlaid the exquisite carvings waiting for the sun’s kiss to shine. Reaching out, Galen pulled open one of the doors, the ropes of muscle on his arm flexing and bunching in a way that had her mouth going dry, her heart slamming hard against her ribs.
Shaken by the depth and swiftness of her response—unmistakably physical and carnal—she averted her gaze and held out her hand for the book.
“Do you not eat?” he asked, sliding it into her hold, a jaundiced look in his eyes as he ran his gaze over her body.
The dark pulse of attraction morphed into sharp irritation. As a young woman, she’d attempted to do everything in her power to put more flesh on her bones, to no avail. This was simply how she was meant to be. “No,” she said, ice in her tone, “I prefer to starve,” and stalked into the library, certain the infuriating male had been raised by wolves.
It was not long afterward, the sun’s blaze having burned away the mist to reveal the bright flecks of precious metals embedded in the marble buildings of the Refuge, that Galen saw Illium’s distinctive wings sweep out and over the gorge. The younger angel headed into the clouds and across mountains where no one and nothing lived.
“A woman,” Dmitri said from beside him, the wind lifting his black hair off his face to reveal “a dangerous male beauty”—or so Galen had heard it said by more than one woman, angel and vampire both. What Galen saw was a ruthless kind of strength, strength that demanded respect.
“Mortal,” the vampire added.
Galen might not know how to talk to women outside of other warriors, but no one had ever accused him of being stupid. “You worry for him.”
Dmitri’s gaze lingered on the clouds where the angel had disappeared. “Mortals die, Galen.”
Galen shrugged. “So do we.” The mortals called them immortal, but angels and vampires could die—it just took a great deal of effort. “Does she make him happy?”
“Yes. Too much.”
Galen didn’t ask him to elaborate. He’d known immortals who had fallen for mortals, seen how they mourned when those bright firefly lives were extinguished. He’d never felt such depth of love, but he could comprehend grief. “Jessamy,” he said, his mind on a woman who wasn’t mortal, but whose slender form seemed far too vulnerable for his peace of mind, “does she have a lover?”
Dmitri’s sophisticated elegance broke to reveal utter astonishment. “What?”
“Jessamy,” he repeated patiently. “Does she have a lover?”
“She’s the
“She’s also a woman.” And if the men around her had been too stupid to notice, Galen wasn’t going to lose
