Angels' Flight

Jessamy giggled and held the book and Galen’s letter close to her heart. Those letters kept winging their way across the world as the seasons changed. She wrote pages and pages full of stories about life in the Refuge— including about the three small angels who were waiting for Galen right along with Jessamy.

They assure me their flight technique has improved considerably—they’ve been very diligent about the training exercises you set them, have even become instructors themselves to their schoolmates.

Illium, Jason, Aodhan, they all took her missives and flew back with Galen’s.

“Do you know I came to see you before my mother?” a tired Illium said one late summer’s day, handing her a letter. “Galen threatened to pull off my feathers one at a time if I didn’t.”

Loving him, this blue-winged angel who ever made her heart lift, she kissed him affectionately on the cheek. “Fly to the Hummingbird,” she said, speaking of the gifted artist who was his mother. “I know she has been watching the skies for you.”

He was a sight against the orange and gold of dusk, but she was already turning away, her fingers trembling as she broke the seal. As always, it was short, without embellishment. No words of love. Just Galen.

Tell my trainees I intend to test them rigorously on my return. Never too early to start training a squadron.

“Oh, wonderful man,” she whispered, because such words would mean everything to the little ones who hero-worshipped him.

There was no daisy this time. Only an unspoken request.

The feather I stole when I left is losing your scent.

She sent him a feather from the inner edge of her wings, where the blush was so deep it was magenta, and wrote to him of the summer blooms in the mountains, and of the political game playing she saw taking place as Michaela rode the razor’s edge between angel and archangel, wrote, too, of her worry about Illium.

The young angel had fallen in love with a mortal before he left the Refuge, and with each day since his return, that love grew ever deeper. Most shrugged it off as infatuation on his part, mistaking the wild beauty of his spirit for fecklessness, but she knew the power of Illium’s loyal heart.

I cannot imagine Illium without his smile, she wrote, as the blue-winged angel played with her students outside, while she sat at her desk in the schoolroom. Her death will haunt him through eternity.

Galen’s response was simple. He’s strong. He’ll survive. Then he added something that broke her heart. I’m not that strong.

Tears rolling down her face at the words he gave her, this warrior who was her own, she wrote to him of her adoration, because never again would she raise any self-protective barriers when it came to Galen. He would always, always know of her love. “Galen, mine.”

Autumn had fallen by the time a response arrived with Dmitri, who’d come via a swift seagoing vessel before hitching a ride with a wing of angels, so Illium could spend time at the Tower. Jessamy met the vampire’s gaze. “It’s no coincidence he’s been recalled so soon, is it?”

The sensual curve of Dmitri’s mouth was a thin line as he shook his head. “Raphael is worried about his relationship with the mortal girl. He may cross lines that cannot be crossed, speak secrets no mortal must know.”

Knowing the punishment that would fall upon the angel if he did divulge angelic secrets, Jessamy watched him go with a pained heart. “There’s no choosing safety in love, is there, Dmitri?”

“No.” A single word that held a thousand unsaid things.

Again, she wondered what lay in the vampire’s past, but those were not her questions to ask. “Raphael’s troops?”

“They profess to hate Galen on a daily basis, but would follow him to their deaths if he ordered it.” Curiosity overtook his expression. “I was wrong about the result of his courtship, and I still can’t determine why.”

Laughing, she touched Galen’s missive, hidden in a secret pocket of her gown.

It was in her next letter that she wrote of the one thing she hadn’t raised thus far—not out of fear, but because he made her forget that she was imperfect. I will never have a child, Galen. Keir cannot promise me I will not pass on my disability. And while she had found her happiness, it had been a road paved with broken dreams and haunting loneliness. It would destroy her to see such sorrow in the eyes of her child.

Galen’s response came in the hands of a beautiful warrior with the wings of a butterfly.

I would fly our child wherever she needed to go.

The words blurred. Wiping off the moisture on her cheeks, she continued to read.

The flitterbies might have air in their heads, but Titus has done a great thing in raising them. Bonds can be formed not only by blood. And Jess? I have no need to build empires and dynasties. I want only to build a home with you.

Her barbarian did know poetry after all, she thought, watching the ink smudge under a rain of tears that held no pain, only the ache of a love so true, it had forever changed her.

16

Illium told Galen of the things Jessamy didn’t write in her letters—that several other men, angels and vampires both, had made repeated attempts to court her. The only reason Galen didn’t beat the blue-winged angel bloody for being the messenger was that Illium conveyed the news with a scowl, adding, “Jessamy’s too polite to tell them to cease plaguing her, but each male knows if he pushes too hard and makes her uncomfortable, he’ll be dealing with Dmitri.”

Galen had the sudden understanding that until Illium left the Refuge, he was the one who’d been Jessamy’s champion. “Thank you.”

A glare, bared teeth. “Do you know how many people are calling me Bluebell now?”

Galen laughed, realized this pretty angel who looked like an ornament and fought like a gleaming, elegant blade had grown into a friend when he hadn’t been looking. “Come, then. I’ll let you attempt to knock me to the ground in recompense.”

As he continued to work with Raphael’s people through the crisp bite of autumn, the earth covered in a hundred shades of red, brown, and ochre, he thought of his precious store of letters, and of delicate feathers of blush and cream. Such beautiful words Jessamy wrote to him. Still, he was too honest to lie to himself—one fact nothing could change: that he’d been the first man to take the woman she’d become into the skies. By the time he returned, others would have… and so his historian would have a choice.

It might crush him to imagine her flying in the arms of another man, but he wanted her to have that choice, wanted her to never regret being with him. Because rough edges and all, every part of him bore Jessamy’s name. He needed her to be his in the same way.

Watching autumn glide into a brittle, harsh winter, Jessamy opened her histories and wrote of all that had passed in the previous season. The peace had held, with the archangels too busy with keeping an eye on the spectacle of Michaela’s ascension to the Cadre to play politics. Jessamy had to admit, the new archangel had come to power with awe-inspiring splendor.

In the far north, she wrote, the skies dance with color in winter, but when Michaela rose to her full strength, the skies danced across the world, whether in the tropics or in the Refuge, whether it was night or noon. Rich indigo, vivid ruby, iridescent green, colors that turned the world into a dream.

There had been other developments, of course, smaller in comparison but not unimportant. She noted them with a historian’s distance, even as her soul cried silent tears at some of what she had to write. But theirs was a long-lived race, loss and sadness as much a part of their history as joy.

Her own aching need continued to grow. She watched the skies for Galen’s distinctive striated wings each and every day, even knowing that he’d taken Raphael’s men and women on a winter march, so that they would be