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)
To ask him to leave Hannah and Aanisa even for short bursts would’ve been a cruelty.
But Dmitri’s arrival two days past had been a welcome surprise for far more than that pragmatic reason. Raphael’s best friend had been a father as a mortal, gone through this process twice with Ingrede. He’d also known Raphael for an eon. The two of them had spent the night of Dmitri’s arrival drinking mead and talking—the kind of conversation a man could only have with a friend who’d known him since they were both young men.
Now, confident in the knowledge that Dmitri had things in hand with Galen and Jean-Baptiste for backup while Naasir and Trace had joined the team in New York in turn, he focused only on Elena. He wiped her brow of the sweat that accumulated there, rubbed her back when the pain was too much, and spoke into her mind when she bore down on his hand—because she’d asked him to.
“You’re storm winds and the crashing ocean in my mind,” she’d said on a gulped breath. “I know I’m home, that I’m safe, when I feel that.”
A knock on the door before Majda came in. She’d gone for a walk to give them time alone, but Raphael was glad to see her return. “She’s in pain,” he said to Elena’s grandmother.
“I know, son.” Her gentle affection might’ve annoyed the youth he’d been—but that had been a long time ago.
Today, he was only grateful for her maternal presence.
“Keir says immortal births can be painful and there aren’t any drugs that’ll work on Elena’s system. He also doesn’t want to risk using his healing abilities too much and stifling her natural processes.”
Raphael knew all that—the healer had explained it to him and Elena. But hearing Majda say that in her calm voice helped. As did having her in the room with them as Elena continued to walk.
The older woman talked Elena into bracing herself against a wall at one point, so she could massage Elena’s back in a specific technique that she taught Raphael then and there, so he could take over.
Later, she lovingly bullied Elena into eating a bowl of soup when morning fell into dusk.
Still his consort labored.
Until it was the twilight hour, a time when it felt like the entire world slept. Raphael had a quiet moment with Elena while Majda spoke with the healers as they prepared things in another corner.
Because his hunter was almost ready.
“You’re the strongest woman I’ve ever known,” he said, cradling her in his arms from behind as she stood upright, having decided against giving birth lying down. “Seeing this? It’s only made that clearer to me, warrior-mine.”
She leaned her tired body into him, her voice husky. “Let’s do this, Archangel.”
The next contraction hit her so hard that he felt her body ripple—and then the healers were swarming, Keir chief among them. But it was Raphael who got Elena to the standing birthing rail.
He braced her while she wrapped her hands in the straps that hung from the overhead rail. Angelic birthing could be done in multiple ways, all of it up to the comfort of the mother.
Elena had decided on this one about an hour ago.
“It suits my body,” she’d said. “It also means you can hold me throughout.”
He did exactly that while she labored to bring their child into the world, Keir in constant healer contact with her, while Majda cooled her heated skin and comforted her in a way that Raphael knew Elena would only ever accept from a maternal source. She even sang gentle songs in Moroccan Arabic to her when Elena asked for a distraction, bringing a piece of Elena’s mother into the room with them.
“You’re doing it, baby girl,” she said toward the end, tears in her eyes. “Just one more push, Ellie.”
Pulling down on the straps, Elena screamed—and pushed!
When Keir said “Raphael” in a sharp tone, he shifted around to in front of Elena to catch their child in his hands.
Tears streaming down his face as the healers did what needed to be done, he looked up at his trembling consort and threw his power around her so she wouldn’t fall. Never would he let his Elena fall.
Holding their child in his arms, he said, “Hbeebti, we made a little boy.” A perfect little boy with ten fingers and ten toes and translucent wings, his skin as golden as his mother’s, and his hair as black as his father’s.
Elena cried, too, and he was up and there to catch her with one arm when she released the straps to sag into him, take their baby into her arms—with Raphael’s underneath for support because she was shaky from the strain of the birth.
“He’s gorgeous.” She sobbed. “Our own wrinkled little old man of a super-parasite.”
Laughing, he just held his small family and was grateful to whatever powers controlled the energies of the world that he’d been given this gift beyond price. He wasn’t even mad at the ethereal white owls he’d spotted sitting on the shoulders of the Legion, all of them facing outward as Cassandra gave them privacy while letting them know she shared in their happiness.