Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Lira nodded slowly. “Politics do not fall in my arena, but if you do this, you’ll have to leave your territory in the hands of others in the hope that they care for it.”
“I suppose we will soon discover how well that choice worked. But even if the Cadre decides I must give up my territory each time, start anew when I wake, I will do this.” She wasn’t hungry to rule a large territory, had taken over India prior to this Sleep only because there’d been no other option, the lands desolate and devoid of their archangel.
As Lira went to speak, Caliane felt Raphael’s mental touch. We return to you, Mother. A ten-minute flight at most.
I will be waiting for you. Her heart squeezed. “Come, Lira,” she said. “My son is on his way back with his consort.”
Lira scowled. “That’s another thing we have to get going—scouts in the air.” Not an unexpected thought from Caliane’s steward, for while she wasn’t a warrior, she worked with them on a daily basis. “The wings should be fully functional by now.” Though she fell into step with Caliane on the way out of Caliane’s home, she peeled away once they were at street level, off to do her duties.
Caliane smiled and spoke with her loving, generous people as she walked through her city, but her goal was the “gate” in the shield that she could open or close at will. Now, she opened it, so it would be welcoming to Raphael and Elena when they landed.
Several of her people joined her on the walk there, chattering about gossip they’d left behind a decade earlier, and asking each other what their predictions were for the current Cadre lineup. Still others were eager to catch up with mortal and immortal friends who either lived outside Amanat or had left the city when it went into Sleep.
There was no discontent that Caliane could hear, but when one of her most senior maidens fell into step beside her, a basket of flowers in one arm, Caliane said, “Are you happy, Heliae? Do you and the others understand that Amanat is never to be a prison, always a home?”
A startled smile from the maiden. “Of course, my lady.” She tilted her head to the side, her hair a sheath of golden silk. “But you are wrong on one part.”
This was why Caliane had always liked Heliae—she was clever and sharp of wit, and after so very long, she was also a friend to Caliane in a way many of the powerful in the world wouldn’t understand, for Heliae was a vampire of minor innate power. But her spirit? Her spirit was incandescent.
“Tell me, so I may fix it,” Caliane said.
“You are our home, my lady.” A smile as bright as her spirit. “We travel with you into Sleep for you are the sun around which we spin—the sun around which we choose to spin.”
Caliane’s heart filled, but she worried that she hadn’t given her people enough chances for independence. She would make that her secondary goal this waking.
Her first was to be a good mother.
Amanat’s energy shield shimmered in recognition of her presence as she walked, and she knew that should she touch that energy with her fingers, it would ripple along her skin. Not playful, for she wasn’t playful…hadn’t been for a long time. But joyous all the same, for she had learned joy again after an eon in the darkness.
That joy overflowed as she saw Raphael coming in to land on the other side of the open gate. Elena swept in alongside him. But what—
Her heart thudding as her people cried out around her, she ran most unceremoniously to her grinning son, to come to a stunned halt in front of him…and the little boy he carried in his arms, who had skin as golden as his mother’s and eyes as wild a blue as Raphael’s.
61
“Imagine, my love, that we may one day hold our son’s babe in our arms.”
“Already, you dream so far, my Cali. And such a glorious dream.”
—Caliane and Nadiel (On the Birth of a boy named Rafi)
“Mother, meet your grandson, Phoenix Zakriel,” Raphael said, while Elena grinned as widely beside him. “Nixie, this is your grandmother.”
The boy’s eyes met Caliane’s, vivid and innocent and a memory of yesterdays. “Hello, little one,” she said, her voice trembling. “You look just like your father when he was your age.” It was there in the tumbled dark hair, and the eyes that met hers so directly.
But his unconventional, once-mortal mother was there, too, and not just in his skin. In the smile he gave her just then, in the way his eyes had a silvery shimmer when he twisted in his father’s arms to hold out his own toward her. “Grandma!”
Caliane accepted the precious charge with care, but it felt natural to settle him on her hip, his wings draping over her arm, as if she’d only yesterday carried her own son just so. “Why are you awake so late, hmm?” she found herself asking the smiling child, who was fascinated by the piping on her formal leathers, the subtle decoration her tailor’s signature.