“We heard your voice in our Sleep.” It was a flat, toneless statement. “We hear only the voice of the Sire or his consort.” His eyes locked with Elena’s.
“Elena,” she said through a dry throat, forcing herself to remember this deadly creature was a friend, not foe. “You can call me Elena.”
He looked at her as though she were speaking a foreign language. “You are the consort.”
Okay, Archangel, I think this is more your speed than mine.
I’m uncertain these gray ones are anyone’s speed. “What do you call yourselves?”
“We”—an absolute hush, the wind frozen—“are the Legion.”
Elena felt her stomach drop, as if she’d learned something terrible.
• • •
The Legion.
Raphael had heard those words before, a long, long time ago. They are, he said to Elena, the threat used to scare badly behaving angelic children.
Have a nap or the Legion will come get you? Like the bogeyman?
Precisely. Except it appears our bogeyman is real. “You have been gone from the world an eon.”
“Yes.”
Raphael, look at his eyes. They’re starting to gain color. And his hair . . .
Doing as Elena bid, Raphael saw the gray one was indeed no longer so gray. His hair was darkening into black and his irises now boasted a fine rim of blue—the same blue as Raphael’s eyes. “You are now my Legion.” Not a question, the mark on his face a quiet thrum that told him the truth, told him, too, that the Legion waited for his command. “Your first task is to assist my troops in securing the city and fixing the damage to the Tower.”
A quiet nod, his wings folded with military tightness. “Sire.”
“You are their leader. I need a name for you.”
A pause. “I am not the first primary,” he said at last, “but that is what I am. The Primary.”
“All right,” Raphael said, accepting what appeared to be a rank rather than a name. It was becoming clear the Legion was not in any way an ordinary angelic—if they were even angels—squadron. “Tell the Legion they are to obey the orders of Dmitri and Illium as if they were mine or my consort’s.” He pointed out the two men. “I will make the others of my Seven known to you when they return from their tasks.”
“The Legion has heard and understands.”
“I estimate five hundred in your squadron. Is that correct?”
“Five hundred woke to the Sire’s call in urgency. Two hundred and seventy-seven need more time. They will arrive when their hearts begin to beat fast enough for flight.”
Seven hundred and seventy-seven fighters who functioned as a single cohesive and apparently tireless unit, their skills lethal and their healing abilities unparalleled. He’d seen a Legion fighter beheaded, only to rise again within minutes, his head growing a new body while the old disintegrated into dust.
It was an army no other archangel would easily wish to face.
“We’ll need quarters for the Legion,” Raphael said to Dmitri.
“Sire.” It was a quiet interruption from the Primary, and when Raphael nodded at him to speak, the male said, “We do not sleep except when it is time for us to leave the world.”
“Do you eat?” Dmitri asked. “Need water?”
Another pause, akin to those of older angels who sought to mine their memories for a lost answer. “Yes”—a faint sense of surprise in his tone—“when we are awake, we do need fuel, but we can fight for many days without sustenance or rest.”
I’ll work out the logistics, Dmitri said mind to mind. “Though you may not need a place to sleep,” he said aloud, his words directed at the Primary, “you should have a place where you can be with your men and women—” A frown. “I see no women.”
“We are the Legion,” came the incomprehensible answer.
Eyebrow raised, Dmitri continued. “You’ll need a place where your men can gather at least.”
“Yes,” the Primary said after another pause, his mind seemingly not yet having shaken off the shackles of his long Sleep. “We do not . . . do well if cut off from the group so soon after waking.”
“There are two warehouses next to each other not too far from the Tower,” Dmitri said. “We normally use them for storage, but they can be cleared for temporary accommodation if”—a glance at the Primary—“that wouldn’t be too basic an environment? They’re nothing but large spaces with four walls and a roof.”
“No, such will do well.”
Raphael knew the warehouses could only be a short-term solution. Even with the members of the Legion rotating in and out, the combined space wasn’t designed for over seven hundred winged beings. “Now that you’re awake,” he said to the Primary, “how long do you plan to stay this way?”
“Until it is time to Sleep again.”
Okay, he takes the win for most cryptic statements.
Biting back a smile at Elena’s dry assertion, Raphael said, “We’ll build you a living space suited to your requirements after the repairs to the city and the Tower.” Raphael owned a massive chunk of Manhattan, far more than most people realized, and it made sense to have this force around the Tower. “In the interim, you are welcome at the Tower. You are my people now.”
Epilogue
Sadness had been the pulse of the city for five days follow-ing the war, as they watched flower-covered bier after bier leave for the Refuge and buried hunters and vampires who’d fallen. Elena hated funerals—not hard to figure out why—but she’d attended every single one, as had every other fighter who’d survived and wasn’t confined to a sickbed. It had hurt.
The finest honor we can do the fallen is to bring our city back to life, until children play in the parks and lovers walk in the streets while angels soar among the skyscrapers and the blood kin share the kiss of life without fear. We must not forget what they died to protect.
Words a still badly hurt Aodhan had spoken, at the funeral of a vampire commander he’d considered a friend, and words they’d all taken to heart. In the past forty-eight hours, the rebuild of the city had kicked into high gear, and that was going a long way toward healing the wounds, though Elena knew it would take time for the emotional—and physical—injuries to heal.
She’d been lucky, so damn lucky that all her close friends had made it out alive, here and in the Refuge—the fighting there having ended the instant word filtered back of Lijuan’s defeat. Of the injured, Ransom and Ashwini were the worst off, but they’d both be okay. Ransom had taken a crossbow bolt in the leg in the final battle, his femur snapping, while Ashwini had been slashed pretty badly with a sword across her chest. The other woman now held the Guild record for most stitches in a single sitting and was trying to avoid answering the one question to which every hunter wanted to know the answer.