Archangel's Eternity

1

. . . I have no plans to kill you. Not today.

-Archangel Raphael to Guild Hunter Elena Deveraux
(Once, on a Tower roof)

A thousand years old.

Elena's brain struggled to comprehend the enormity of that truth, a truth writ large in the city that sprawled in front of her. Her vantage point on the railingless balcony outside her and Raphael's Tower suite gave her a bird's-eye view of a Manhattan that had altered dramatically since the day she'd first walked into a meeting with an archangel . . . and into her destiny.

The waters of the Atlantic had surged quietly into the landscape in the three centuries since Illium's ascension, nibbling away the coastal border until part of the city was now waterborne, buildings and parks floating gently on oceanic waves.

Unlike the airborne habitats, which anchored to the earth only in emergencies, the water habitats were permanently anchored and connected to solid ground, bridge after bridge arcing over blue-green water and into Manhattan proper.

That had always felt right to Elena-her home had, from the beginning, been a land of bridges and water, though the Hudson and the East River slumbered sleepily these days after having settled into their new pathways four hundred years earlier. Their waters ran clearer than they had in her mortal years, and today, the sun turned the Hudson into a sheet of sparks that almost hurt the eye.

The metal and glass and soaring skyscrapers so iconic of New York during her mortal lifespan still existed, but where roads had once cut the city into neat grids, there were now thick corridors of living green that served that function now.

That green heart hadn't impacted only the roads-the biotech born partially of the Legion's enduring legacy had speared outward until New York's skyscrapers rose half-organic from the earth. Even the Tower was part organic, its external walls a gleam of midnight blue-black.

Anytime she placed a palm on that living "metal," the area around her hand turned a searing blue so distinctive, it needed no name to identify it. Hbeebti, it seemed to say. Hunter-mine.

The Tower reacted that way to no one else . . . but then, it was Raphael's blood that had provided the blueprint for the Tower's organic skin. In battle, the Tower was now an extension of its archangel, a repository of violent power that sang with his name.

Glimpses of yellow through the canopies of the massive trees that lined Manhattan's streets and avenues.

Elena smiled, the ache in her heart a fraction less painful. Because the yellow cabs had soldiered on through war and change and multiple transformations of the world and of technology.

Like all vehicles in New York these days, they didn't need roads except as designated pathways along which to quietly purr. Their passage was so gentle that they did no damage to the greenery over which they hummed-but the drivers continued to honk and shake their fists at others they thought were dawdling.

Because the drivers had also come through time and change and the failure of pure self-driving tech. The latter had never totally recovered from the incidents where vehicles had stopped for frothing-at-the-mouth vampire "pedestrians"-thus serving up their passengers as a gruesome smorgasbord.

To the left of the last cab, a private vehicle pulled to a stop on the "third deck" of the street, the final level assigned for air-parking. Elena's eyesight had become increasingly sharper with each new century of immortality, edging ever closer to the vision of a raptor, so she had no trouble seeing details even from this distance.

The black-clad woman who stepped out of the car and onto a small gravity float that carried her to the ground before the float retreated to the vehicle had hair a familiar sheet of glossy ebony-in which fluttered a colorful array of the tiny mechanical birds that were in style this decade.

Holly, off to look in on the design studio she'd founded three centuries earlier-the same studio that had set the trend for mechanical hair accessories. Each piece was designed according to the aesthetics of the early twentieth century in a seamless melding of the past and present. Holly had not only come up with the initial concept, she'd also taken it into immortal clubs and ballrooms.

A wash of wind behind Elena, followed by the susurration of wings as intimately familiar to her as the air of this city. Folding her own wings tighter against her back, Elena leaned into Raphael as he came to stand behind her, sliding his arms over her shoulders and around to hold her against the muscled heat of him.

His biceps were bare, his leathers sleeveless.

"Hbeebti." A kiss nuzzled to the side of her hair, which she'd allowed to grow until it reached her butt, but which she wore in a braid today. "You are in a contemplative mood."

Raising her right hand, she closed it over his forearm. Her bracelet slid down her wrist as she did so, each slender metal link bearing a name beloved to her.

Her mother. Sisters. Nieces. Nephew. Father. Sara.

Heart twisting, she said, "I'm having trouble accepting that, as of tomorrow, I'll have lived an entire millennium." Most immortals past a certain age either didn't bother to-or couldn't-remember their date of birth, but Elena had held on tight to that piece of herself that was wholly human.

She kept a diary in which she maintained assiduous track of the passing of time; she was determined never to become jaded or to lose herself in the slipstream of an endless existence. "It seems impossible, even when I remind myself of everything that's come in between." Not only the losses that would forever mark her, but war, a hard-won peace, constant growth, and the transformation of her beloved New York at its very foundations.

"A thousand years of sunrises and sunsets. A thousand years of taking flight. A thousand years, Raphael." Her archangel's scent in her blood, her eyes closing as she sank into him.

"What astonishes me is how you've managed to stay so defiantly my Elena through it all." Raphael's voice rumbled against her, holding power even more deadly than the day they'd first met-the day he'd made her close her hand over her blade, and she'd decided that death was better than submission.

She opened her eyes. "What a journey we've been on, Archangel." He'd gone from being a terrifying threat, to being integral to her existence; nothing would ever feel right again if she lost him. Even the thought of it made her stomach drop, cold begin to cut through her veins.

He spread out his wings, the magnificent span of them visible in her peripheral vision. "All of it because of your wild spirit and beautifully stubborn mortal heart."

The irony of it was that Elena's heart wasn't physically mortal, wasn't even like that of ordinary angels. Her body, her heart, carried archangelic cells. But the physical had never mattered, not in this. "If I lose that, Archangel, we'll have to go into Sleep."

Never did she doubt that if she went, so would he.

"I have no fear of that happening anytime soon." One arm still around her neck and shoulders, Raphael moved his other hand to her hip as he leaned in to kiss the curve of her neck.

She shivered. "This is ridiculous. We should act our age."

A chuckle, his aroused body hard against her lower back. "Per Marduk, we are but youths. Didn't he call us 'children' when last we met?"

Laughter bubbled inside her even as she turned to take Raphael's hand, let him tug her toward the doors into their suite. "I think he just likes messing with us." Raphael's ancestor-in the truest sense of the word-had a sly sense of humor that she would miss when he left this time. But her feeling of loss would be even keener when it came to his mate, she who had risen in one hell of an irritated mood a century into Marduk's own waking.

Storms had raged across the world for three full days, the skies roiling black and the rains ceaseless, but when the tempests calmed and the sun pierced the clouds once more, the world had gained another being so old that she was beyond Ancient.

Of all the immortals Elena had met, Tiamat-Neith, Huntress of the Ages-Tiamat to her friends, and Tia to Marduk-was the most like Elena. She'd winced and told herself she was being arrogant for even thinking that of a being so old, had never articulated it to anyone but Raphael.

Then Tiamat-striking and dangerous-had stared at her one day out of eyes that altered shade much as a black opal did, and said, "So it seems Marduk managed to embed a very particular taste in women in our male descendants." A grin that had nothing of civilization in it. "I think we will be intimates, Elena."

They'd become exactly that over the centuries, their friendship an odd and unbalanced thing when it came to age and power, but balanced where it counted. In their humor, in their conversations, in the way Tiamat was covetous of Elena's collection of blades after the Huntress of the Ages first woke.

"I should not collect any," she'd murmured even as she admired a precisely balanced blade that Elena had gifted her. "Marduk and I will not be long awake."

In the end, however, the couple had remained far longer than either had initially anticipated. By staying on after Illium's ascension, Marduk had taken the Cadre to its full complement of ten, becoming the piece that ensured the world's stability by his simple presence. Because nine was a stretch, eight painful to the point of leaving the archangels threadbare.

Ten, however . . . ten was calm and ease. Ten left time for empires to rise, innovation to thrive, dreams to take flight-and friendships to take root.

And so Tiamat-Neith now had a collection of blades to rival Elena's.

Raphael tumbled into bed, pulling her with him. As she fell over her archangel, her wings spreading to shadow them in a midnight-and-dawn sky, her mind crashed with a surge of love as wild as the ocean waves that crashed against the city.

Salt and steel and power, that was her Raphael.

"Knhebek," she said against the perfect shape of his lips, before he wound her braid around his fist and they sank into a kiss that was as familiar as their own breaths-and as extraordinary as the endless stars scattered across the universe.

I discover you anew each day, Guild Hunter. Raphael's voice in her head, the mental scent of him intoxicating to her hunter senses.

Then there were no more words, just a tangle of limbs and wings and love.

Strong hands sliding over her skin, her lips tasting the heat of him, her fingers spread over his inner feathers in an intimacy that was hers alone to claim. As the way he caressed the arch of her own wings, making her toes curl and her thighs clench, was only ever for him.

She surrendered, because all these years later, it wasn't about submission or control.

It was about trust.

Boundless, infinite, cherished.

Their love had grown in weight and depth with each passing season . . . without ever asking Elena to give up herself. They weren't one being; no, they were Elena and Raphael, and they were a unit forged of loyalty furious and forever.

"Love me, Archangel. Time haunts me today." A heaviness of melancholy twined around old sorrow until it was a vine choking her heart.

Tenderness in his kiss, his hands cupping her face as he drew her down and into him, into pleasure.


Later, when her eyes grew heavy, he wrapped her up in arms that understood her confusion at a time when her entire past was a boulder on her chest.

A thousand years. Ten centuries. So many mortal lifetimes.

"Sleep, hunter-mine." His wing coming over her. "I have you."

Safe, at home, she rested.

And dreamed of unearthly white owls with huge golden orbs for eyes that flew around her while she strained to hear a distant whisper.

2

Such glory you are, prophecy of mine. I will wake again when you next change the world . . .

-Archangel Cassandra
(War's End in the time of the Death Cascade)

Elena woke to a dawn that was a sweeping wash of orange-kissed pink beyond the balcony doors, but it was the piercing blue of her archangel's eyes that held her attention.

His hair was tumbled over his forehead, his skin aglow in the morning light, and his wings a shimmer of white gold.

The Archangel of New York remained the most beautiful being she had ever met.

"Happy Birthday." Leaning on his elbow, he held out his palm-on which sat a small box of verdant green tied with a gauzy ribbon that was a rich hue caught between purple and blue.

Her voice was husky with sleep when she answered. "I already have everything a woman could want." They'd long ago stopped giving each other physical gifts on specific days-instead, it tended to happen when they spotted an item they thought the other would enjoy.

Despite her words, however, she was smiling as she took the box off his palm. Tilting her head to the side, she shook it gently by her ear. "Hmm, jewelry?" She wasn't a woman who wore much of it-mostly his amber and sentimental items like the bracelet that Beth had gifted her.

"I know you'll miss us after we're gone," her baby sister had said, her face seamed by a life joyously lived, and her spirit at peace in a way that had made her far older than Elena in that moment in time. "If I've forgotten anyone, you have space to add more links."

Beth's gift never got old. No link ever broke. Because Raphael had it quietly repaired each time it began to show signs of damage.

The blades and gauntlets that Sara and Deacon had given her, Elena had preserved in a memory box when time and use began to make her fear for them. Not so they'd be hidden away, but so she could still take them out every decade or so and the touch leather and metal that had been given to her in love by her best friend in all the world-and by the man whom Sara had loved.

Five hundred years ago, Zoe had seen the memory box, realized how precious the contents were to Elena . . . and turned up a year later with exact copies of both the gauntlets and the blades. "I know it's not the same," Sara and Deacon's adored only child had said, "but I thought you might like having them to use . . . and it makes me happy to remember Mom and Dad through this."