Elena met his gaze, her frustration at the dead ends clear. "Can I do anything?"
"The stronger you get, the more difficult it becomes to hurt you."
Her expression grew intent, as if she'd heard something he hadn't been aware of saying.
"It's personal for you, just like it is for Illium and the others."
"I won't allow my people to be treated as disposable pawns." And he'd cold-bloodedly end the life of anyone who dared come after Elena.
"That's how hunters work. Attack one, attack us all." A quick nod. "I have a feeling you suspect someone."
"Nazarach is over seven centuries old and as with many of the old ones, pain has become his pleasure." Nazarach was also bound to Raphael. If he'd turned traitor, his punishment would send a scream through the world.
Elena played her fingers along the hilt of a knife he hadn't seen her draw. "That's when you know you've stepped over the line." She looked up, her eyes haunted. "When it starts to feel good."
"You'll never cross that line," he said, moving to pull her to a standing position. He might not be certain of himself, but he had no doubts when it came to Elena.
"How do you know?" Her face was a mask hiding a thousand nightmares. "I was glad when Uram died. I was so damnhappy the bastard was dead."
"Did you delight in his pain?" he murmured in her ear. "Did you smile when he bled, when his flesh burned? Did you laugh when I ended his life?"
He felt her rejection of the idea even before she shook her head, wrapping her arms tight around him. "Do you ever worry?"
"Yes. Cruelty seems to be a symptom of age and power." He thought of Lijuan, raising the dead, playing with them as a child would with toys. "I look into my heart and see the abyss looking back at me."
"I won't let you fall." A fierce promise.
He held her close, his immortal with a mortal heart.
An hour later, and still able to feel Raphael's arms around her, Elena walked into a classroom. Ten pairs of shiny eyes stared at her in mute fascination as she took a seat in the semicircle. Elena was doing some staring of her own. This was the closest she'd ever been to the youngest of immortals - they appeared significantly frailer than she would've guessed, their wings so delicate she could've torn apart each with her bare hands.
Finally, one little girl, her tawny hair in pigtails, wings of autumn and sunset at her back, dared to speak. "Are you a kid?"
Elena bit the inside of her lip and shifted on the big, firm cushion - to her eternal gratitude there'd been one in her size in the corner - that seemed to function as a chair.
"No," she answered, feeling her spirits lighten in a way she'd never have expected after her conversation with Raphael. "But I haven't been an angel very long." Of course, when Dmitri had told her she'd be attending lessons to bring her up to speed on angelic culture - to save her from her own ignorance - she hadn't quite expected this.
Whispers behind raised hands, passed angel to angel. Until one almond-eyed girl said,
"You were mortal."
"Yep." She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees.
"You're not supposed to do that," a boy with loose black curls whispered urgently from her left. "If Jessamy sees you, you'll be in trouble."
"Thanks." Elena sat back up as the boy - who looked about four - nodded in approval.
"Why am I not allowed to do that?"
"Because it's bad for your posture."
"Excellent, Sam," an adult voice said from behind Elena. An instant later, a tall, painfully thin angel dressed in a long blue gown swept around Elena's right, heading to the top of the semicircle. This, Elena though, must be the dreaded Jessamy.
"I see you've all met our newest student," the teacher said.
Sam raised his hand.
"Yes, Sam?"
"I can show her around."
"That's very kind of you." A twinkle in those stern brown eyes, hidden within a blink.
But Elena had seen it, and it made her like this woman.
"Now," Jessamy said, "because it's Elena's first day, I'd like to review some of the material we've already covered, particularly that which relates to our physiology."
Elena glanced at Sam. "You're not four, are you?"
"I'mnot a baby," was the indignant response, before they were both hushed by their neighbors.
Then, as Elena listened and learned, the other students taught her the names and functions of every muscle, every bone, and every feather, from the ones that controlled direction to the ones that reduced drag and increased thrust.
By the time class was over, Elena had a head full of information and a keen awareness of just how much more she still needed to learn.
"You may go," Jessamy said to the class as she rose. "Elena, I'd like a word with you."
Sam's disappointment was all huge brown eyes. "Shall I wait for you?"
"Yes," Elena said. "I haven't been to this part of the Refuge before." It lay in the dead center of the sprawling city - neutral territory according to Illium.
A sunny smile, so innocent it made her suddenly afraid for him. "I'll wait in the play area." Inclining his head toward the teacher, he made his way out the door, his black-tipped brown wings trailing on the floor.
"Sameon," Jessamy said gently.
"Oops." Another smile. "Sorry." The wings lifted up.
"They'll be back down the instant he's out of sight," Jessamy waved to two adult-sized cushions beside a desk piled with books. "Who told you to join the class?"
Suspicion licked up Elena's spine as they took their seats. "Dmitri."
"Ah." The teacher's eyes sparkled. "You weren't supposed to be with the little ones. I'm meant to tutor you separately."
"I'd threaten to skin him," Elena muttered, "but I enjoyed the lesson. Do you mind if I sit in on more? They teach me by simply being."
"You're welcome at any time." Jessamy's thin face grew solemn. "But you must learn far faster than they if you're to survive Zhou Lijuan."
Elena hesitated.
"I know about the reborn," Jessamy said in a voice thick with horror. "I'm the depository of angelic knowledge. It's my duty to keep the histories - but this history, I wish I didn't have to write."
Nodding in silent agreement, Elena put her hand on the books piled on the desk. "Are these for me to read?"
"Yes. They contain a concise glimpse into our recent past." She stood. "Read as much as you can, come to me with any questions, no matter how small or impolitic. Knowledge is very much power when it comes to dancing with the oldest among us."
Elena rose to her feet, her eyes going to Jessamy's wings as the angel turned to retrieve something from behind her. The left one was twisted in a way that made Elena's stomach clench.
"I can't fly," the angel said without rancor though Elena hadn't spoken. "I was born this way."
"I - " Elena shook her head. "That's why you are who you are."
"I don't understand."
"You're kind," Elena said. "I think you're the kindest angel I've ever met." There was no sense of malice in this thin angel with her eyes of burnt sienna and hair that shone a rich chestnut. "You understand pain."
"So do you, Guild Hunter." A perceptive glance as they exited into the sunshine, one that was replaced almost immediately by a quiet but intense happiness. "Galen."
Following Jessamy's gaze led Elena to an angel who'd just landed on the raised platform in front of the school. There was something familiar about the muscular, red-haired male, though she could've sworn she'd never seen him before. Then those eyes of palest green met hers and the cold warning in them opened the floodgates of memory.
Raphael bleeding on the floor. Two angels flying in with a stretcher. This one looking at her as if he'd like to pitch her into the blackness beyond the shattered remains of her plate-glass window . . . and watch as her body fell to hit the ground at terminal velocity, her spine breaking through her skin, her skull nothing but a crushed eggshell leaking gray matter.
Clearly, he hadn't changed his mind.
"Galen." It held censure this time.
The male angel finally looked away from Elena, but didn't speak. Taking the hint, she said good-bye to Jessamy and walked down the steps, her nape prickling in primitive awareness.
"Here I am!"
Startled, she looked up to find Sam flying over to her on wings that looked far too big for his small body. "You can fly already?"
"Can't you?" He hovered beside her.
"No."
"Oh." A wobbly left turn and he was landing at her side.
"Then I'll walk, too."
She had to fight a smile as she saw his wings drag along the scrupulously clean pathway.
"Is it easier for you to stay airborne?"
"Sometimes, if there's a good wind." He tugged at her hand, pointing to someone on the other side of the courtyard. Looking up, she saw a wide-shouldered angel with wings patterned like an eagle's coming to land. "That's Dahariel. He's one of the old ones."
Dahariel's eyes locked with hers.
Age. Violence. The whiplash of strength.
It was all in that single glance before he gave a curt nod and walked away in the direction of what she'd learned was the archangel Astaad's territory. She shivered in spite of the sunlight. That one, she thought as Dahariel disappeared from sight, might just be capable of beating a man with such heartless precision that nothing whole remained.
Sam pulled at her hand again. "Come on."
As her tiny tour guide took her through the small campus, the sky agonizingly clear overhead, Elena allowed her mind to go quiet. These children were immortal-born, many of them likely older than she was, in spite of their appearance. But age was a relative thing. In their faces, she saw the same innocence she'd seen in the face of Sara's baby, Zoe. They hadn't yet tasted the bitter tears the world had to offer them.
It seemed the older, more powerful angels, for all their cruelty, made an effort to keep this part of the Refuge free of the stain of violence. It was an oasis of peace in a city that whispered with a thousand dark secrets.
Air over her head, the wash of an adult angel's wings.
Glancing up, she saw a flash of wild blue and then Illium was landing. Shrieks and giggles abounded as the children, Sam included, swarmed him like so many little butterflies. "Save me, Elena," Illium said as he took off into the air . . . but not so high, not so far that the little ones couldn't follow.
Smiling, she sat down on a piece of playground equipment and watched them swoop and dive. Belle would've loved this, she found herself thinking. Her brash older sister had had a secret - she'd loved butterflies. Elena had given her a coin purse in the shape of a monarch once, a pretty thing she'd found at a yard sale for a dime. She'd used her own pocket money to buy it. And Belle had had it in her jeans the day Slater Patalis broke her legs into so many pieces, she'd looked like a child's forgotten doll.
Elena could still see the bright orange sequins glittering in the sea of blood, Belle's lifeless fingers dipped in red.
