"What does it taste like?" Hannah asked.
Raphael shook his head. Ambrosia . . . that moment - it was indescribable . . . and utterly private.
After a second, Hannah bent her own head in silent acquiescence. "I'm happy for you, Raphael."
He met her gaze, waited.
"I've always thought of you as a friend," she said quietly. "I know that if the others decided to come after Elijah behind his back, you wouldn't join in."
"Where does your faith come from?"
"From the heart, of course."
Elijah walked out at that moment, his hair damp. "Raphael. You didn't bring your Elena?"
My Elena.
He wondered what his hunter would think of the way immortals spoke of her. "Not this time." Perhaps one day, Elijah was the one archangel he might trust. But that day wasn't today.
"Come," Hannah said, "let us sit." As he watched, she turned to Elijah, and Raphael knew some silent communication passed between them, for Hannah's lips curved before she took her seat.
"So," Elijah said as his mate poured him wine with a poise that held an elegant maturity,
"I hear Michaela graces us with her presence."
"It seems she finds the Refuge to her taste these days."
A small smile from the other archangel. "Has Hannah told you about her newest painting? It's extraordinary."
"I've scarcely begun," Hannah demurred. "But, it's almost painting itself."
The next half hour passed in such easy conversation, and though Raphael had guessed the shape the meeting would take, he found himself impatient. It wasn't a feeling he was familiar with - after having lived so long, he'd learned the art of patience. But then he'd met a hunter, and everything had changed.
Finally, he stood with Elijah on the balcony, Hannah having discreetly excused herself.
"Do you tell her everything?" Raphael asked.
"Such a personal question. Not what I'm used to from you."
"Elena asked me about angelic relationships. I find I know very little."
Elijah looked down at the river that rushed so far below, twisting in and out of crevices that had grown ever deeper with the passing centuries. "Hannah knows what I know," he said at last.
"Then why does she not stand with us?"
"She knows because she is my mate. She has no desire to be caught up in the workings of the Cadre." A pause. "You don't understand because your hunter has always been entangled with the Cadre."
"How can someone of Hannah's power" - and she'd strengthened a great deal since he'd last seen her - "be content to remain in the wings?"
"Hannah has no taste for politics." Elijah turned to glance at Raphael, his jaw granite.
"Such as that which has another angel daring to use my name."
"It displays an arrogance that'll lead to a mistake," Raphael answered, echoing something Elena had said to him after those taut moments when she'd held him so tight - as if she'd physically keep him from falling into the abyss. "He seeks glory. For that, he must be known."
"I understand your anger, Raphael" - Elijah's own fury was a violent heat - "but we can't allow this to distract us from the true problem."
"You've heard something." It was there in the other archangel's eyes, his voice.
Elijah nodded. "There are rumors Lijuan plans to openly show off her reborn at the ball."
Raphael had guessed as much. Jason's last report, delivered after Lijuan's reborn managed to corner him long enough to claw off part of his face, had spoken of an ever-strengthening army of the reawakened dead. "We must prepare for the consequences should the extent of Lijuan's evolution become known."
"The world will shudder," Elijah said, his voice soft in the dusk. "And they'll learn to fear us a little bit more."
"That isn't always a disadvantage." Fear stopped mortals from taking foolish chances, from forgetting that an immortal would always win any battle.
Elijah's face was an aristocratic silhouette against the orange red glow of the setting sun, his golden hair aflame. "Do you think that applies in this case?"
"Mortals are unpredictable - they may brand Lijuan a monster, or they may call her a goddess."
Elijah glanced behind him as Hannah stepped out to ask if they'd like more wine.
"Raphael?"
Raphael shook his head. "I thank you, Hannah."
"It's my pleasure."
"What Lijuan is becoming," Elijah said after his mate left, "part of me fears that that's what awaits us all in the end."
"You know as well as I do that our abilities are tied to who we are." Raphael still couldn't understand his own unexpected new talent - where had it grown from, what seed, what act? "And you've never taken the firstborn child of every family in a village just to show your power."
Elijah was visibly shocked. "I've never heard that of Lijuan."
"She was ancient when I was born, when you were born." And Elijah was over three thousand years older than Raphael.
"She's done many things which have been hidden in the mists of time."
"Then how do you know?"
Raphael simply looked at the other angel.
After a while, Elijah nodded. "It says little about our intelligence that we do not. What did she do with the children she took?"
"Some, she apparently raised as her mortal pets - kept alive so long as they amused her.
Others, she gave to her vampires as a source of food."
"That," Elijah said, "I cannot believe." His face was a mask of revulsion. "Children are not to be touched. It is our most sacred law."
Angelic births were rare, so rare. Each child was considered a gift, but - "Some among us believe it's only angelic children who matter."
Elijah's bones pushed up white against his skin. "Do you?"
"No." A pause, brutal honesty. "I've threatened mortal children to leash their parents."
But no matter the parents' transgressions, not once had he touched their young.
"I did the same in the first half of my existence," Elijah said. "Until I understood that the threat is only a step distant from the act."
"Yes." A year ago, while in the grip of the Quiet - a cold, inhumanly emotionless state caused by a specific use of his power - the darkness in Raphael had weighed up the life of a mortal child like so much grain. It was a stain on his soul, a crime for which he'd never seek forgiveness - because it was unforgiveable. But never again would he hold a child's life as ransom. "The one who discovered the atrocity committed by Lijuan," he said, wondering once more what he'd have become without Elena, "witnessed things that make a mockery of any doubt."