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)
“And while our Rafe”—a smile shared with Nisia—“bears the Legion mark, the Legion have always stated they serve only aeclari.” He picked up the vial. “We have had many a discussion, have we not, on what that means. But what if it’s this at the core—a true bonded pair, each holding a part of the other?”
Raphael’s Legion mark blazed, glowing brighter than it had since the war…and as it did so, the mortal cells in the sample became wildfire bright in a reaction that had nothing to do with the chemical agent the healers had introduced.
Keir and Nisia both sucked in a breath, but Raphael was laughing and kissing his consort, his happiness a glow in his very blood. You made me a little bit mortal, Elena-mine.
Elena’s eyes shone wet. She understood.
For how could Raphael ever go mad if he had Elena’s mortal cells inside him fighting the insidious damage of immortality? They both knew those rare few cells would battle to the death to save him from himself should it ever come to that.
Elena threw her arms around his neck as he lifted her off her feet and squeezed her tight, both their wings flaring so wide that Nisia ducked as Keir jumped back with his precious vial of glowing blood.
That just made them both laugh again, their giddiness an artifact of love.
* * *
* * *
They danced the most intimate dance of all that night, high in the skies above the Catskills. Skin to skin in the protective privacy of glamour, her breasts crushed against the hard plane of his chest and her bare thighs locked around his waist as she held the rigid need of him inside her.
When they fell, it was in a conflagration of tangled limbs and interlocked lips, Elena trusting her archangel to keep them aloft as they rose and fell, as they lost their breaths and their pulses went ragged.
Each kiss was another invitation.
Each shiver a surrender.
Each whispered word infinite tenderness.
All of it wrapped around the primal pleasure they found in one another. Sweat-slick skin and musk, the ocean crashing in her mind, his arm a steel band around her that said no matter what, he’d never let her fall.
She made sure to caress the arch of his wings with the firm touch he liked.
He kissed her throat just the way that made her moan.
She rode him with a ruthless precision that had his jaw going taut as he fought against the edge.
First, you. A rough kiss in her mind before he reached from behind to touch her just so between her thighs.
Elena moaned as she clenched on him, around him, pleasure scorching her veins. And in her pleasure, he found his own, thrusting deep inside her as they fell one last time, their wings aflame with wildfire.
* * *
* * *
They were back home and in bed—after first having tiptoed into Nix’s room to look in on their son and his best friend, the children having asked for side-by-side bunk beds—when Elena was struck by a thought.
“Marduk and Tiamat,” she sleepily muttered, “neither of them was ever mortal.”
“Keir only said a true bonded pair.” Her archangel’s voice rumbled against her cheek as she lay on his shoulder, atop his wing. “They’re also not like angels of this time—we don’t know how they bonded, how they could bond. All we know is that they were aeclari.”
Aeclari.
Elena fell asleep to the murmur of the Legion in the back of her mind…and the pulse of her archangel’s little-bit-mortal heart under her palm.
75
In conclusion, it is apparent that mortals are the innovators of our world, with the limited angelic outliers only making that more evident. If angelkind is to continue to move forward through time, we must work with mortals on innovation—and provide funding to those inventors who lack such but have groundbreaking ideas that could be of use to us all.
—From: An Essay on Mortality, Immortality, and Innovation by Phoenix Zakriel
Several decades on from the night that had erased the specter of madness that had hung over Raphael since he was far too young, Elena avoided a kick aimed at her head by her tall and very strong “teenage” son. She then kicked out her own leg to sweep his from under him.
He went to the ground on his back with a grunt, immediately scowled. “Ugh! I should’ve seen that coming.”
She held out her hand. “I would’ve been insulted if you had.”
Grinning that huge grin that was pure young Raphael, Nix took her hand and vaulted up to his feet with the ease of the athletic youth he was—a youth who was about to edge her out in the height department, even though he was only just nudging seventy.
Once, that would’ve seemed an impossibly old age to her, but now that she’d spent those years watching her child grow, she felt like it was nothing, the blink of an eye.