Spreading her wings, Elena took off in a low sweep over the Hudson before using the air currents to rise up. Raphael didn’t need to do the same, but he did so they could fly wing to wing toward the city. Titus helped train me when I was a stripling, he said after they were both in position, but once I ascended, he accepted that I was an archangel and his equal on the Cadre.
Alexander, on the other hand, has always had trouble with the fact that I became an archangel at only a thousand years of age. It made Raphael the youngest angel to have ever become an archangel. As a result, I can never allow him to treat me as a youth. He could laugh with Titus and call him “old man” while the other archangel called him “pup,” but such games would never happen with Alexander.
Right. Elena’s braid slipped over her shoulder as she swept left with the wind, her joy in flight apparent. He’s like a father who can’t accept that his child has grown up.
A good analogy. Almost to Manhattan, he said, Look.
Elena’s response was free of the worry that had twisted through it in the days immediately after Illium’s fall. Bluebell and Sparkle are having a competition again.
Not far from the Tower, the two angels were racing in a straight vertical line into the clouds. As Raphael watched, Aodhan eked out a lead, Illium overtook him, only to be overtaken himself . . . and then everything went to hell.
Illium slammed into the stratosphere as the world suddenly shattered into a blue-gold rain. Hitting Elena beside him, it glimmered and stuck, streaking her skin and hair.
Raphael, what’s happening?
He’s ascending. Raphael’s heart thundered. Land. Now. With that curt instruction he knew his intelligent consort wouldn’t fight, not with the air currents already turbulent around them; he rose into the sky after Illium.
It wasn’t done to interfere with an angel’s ascension, but the boy was too young, hundreds of years too young. Right then, Raphael couldn’t help but think of Illium as the boy he’d first met, the one who had followed him all over the Refuge telling him stories of his adventures. The small blue-winged boy who, with his quieter friend, Aodhan, had pulled more tricks than most other children combined.
At not much past five hundred, Illium’s body simply wasn’t physically strong enough to handle the power that lived in an archangel’s veins every moment of every day. A thousand had been a stretch—Raphael had barely survived the transition, been able to feel his skin about to break when he landed following his ascension. It had taken every ounce of his will to hold himself together instead of flying apart.
Today, using that same violent power to cut through the unstable air currents that had sent other angels dropping onto the closest landing surfaces, he arrowed directly toward Illium. The younger male was glowing golden, so much power pouring out of him that it threatened to ignite and annihilate him. His body was bent backward, his wings hanging down limply though his hands were fisted, his jaw gritted.
Raphael didn’t hesitate.
Punching through the golden blaze of power, he grabbed Illium with a grip on his upper arms. “Illium!”
The blue-winged angel’s eyes met his, pure terror in golden depths full of a hot red fire. As if his blood was boiling inside him. “Sire.” The sound was strained. “I can’t—”
His head snapped back, light pouring out of his eyes, his mouth, his skin.
Refusing to see the jagged cracks appearing in Illium’s flesh as raw power forced its way out of a body not built to hold it, Raphael “caught” that power with his own. He was running on blind instinct, had no reason to believe it would work. Though there were rumors and suspicions that Lijuan had gained the ability to siphon power from other archangels, from what Raphael had seen in the battle above New York, all she might be able to do was to feed on the Cadre much the same as she did with anyone else.
No archangel could capture another archangel’s true power.
Only . . .