Archangel's Heart (Guild Hunter 9)

Lumia was formed of thousands of small sand-colored bricks that blended into the landscape, and rather than being one big block, it was a sprawling stronghold with myriad pathways and sections that flowed into one another, giving the place a delicate and almost ethereal air. She also glimpsed two domes far apart, one of which looked like glass, the other opaque.

“It’s like the Taj Mahal,” she said to Raphael when he flew close enough. “This huge thing that somehow has an air of beautiful fragility.” The Taj, too, appeared to float against the sky.

“Lumia was designed on the principles of perfect serenity, as understood by the Luminata. Each brick, each pathway in the garden, all of it.”

While the courtyard gardens she could see from the air appeared to be manicured and green with precise placement of foliage, mountain flowers covered the hillsides that swept down to gorgeous golden meadows on which it appeared no development had ever taken place.

But for the Luminata complex, there were no other buildings or roads within sight. No vehicles. Not even people on less modern means of transport. She couldn’t even glimpse the walled border that Raphael had told her protected Lumia on three sides. There had been no wall on the side over which they’d flown, the mountains providing a natural bulwark. “When you said the Luminata like their privacy, you meant it. Are the borders patrolled?”

Raphael maintained his position at her side with a minute change in his wing balance. “The sect has a small complement of guards who ensure no one breaches Lumia’s peace, but for the most part, the people here—mortal and immortal—know that these lands are forbidden to all except by invitation.”

“They have a lot of land if we can’t see the walls.”

“Not so much in the scheme of things. Perhaps an hour’s flight from the mountains to the far border at most.” Eyes of unfathomable blue met her own. “Is it all you imagined?”

Elena took another look at the compound getting closer with every wingbeat. “I’m not sure. I think I was expecting something more like the Refuge Library.” Stately and with a heavy sense of age about it. “Or maybe an austere monastery. This is more grand in a way. Peaceful and quietly lovely, but with an awareness of its own beauty.”

She deliberately “nudged” at him with a wing, their primaries barely brushing. “What about you? Is it as you remember?”

* * *

Raphael hadn’t flown wingtip to wingtip with anyone for a long time before Elena. Smiling deep within at the playful contact, the youth he’d once been rising to the fore, he nudged her carefully back. He was far stronger than Elena, and while she had incredible grace in the air, she’d only been in flight for a mere flicker of time.

Laughing as his nudge spun her to the left, she said, “Whoop!” and flipped over onto her back for a moment that had his heart crashing against his ribs as he prepared to catch her fragile not-yet-fully-immortal body.

If she hit the earth from this altitude, she’d break. She’d die.

But she angled her head down in a gentle curve, her body following, and was right-side-up again in a matter of seconds.

“I am going to kill your Bluebell,” he said, dropping two feet so they were wingtip to wingtip again.

A grin. “How did you know he taught me that?”

Raphael just raised an eyebrow.

Laughing again, his unrepentant consort blew him a kiss. “Don’t kill Bluebell. He’s teaching me to do a downward spiral roll right now.”

“Clearly, Aodhan is not the only one suffering pangs of boredom.” Raphael felt his lips kick up, the stab of fear retreating under a wave of memory featuring an intrepid little boy with wings of extraordinary blue. “Did he tell you who taught him the spiral roll?”

Elena’s mouth fell open. “It was you!” she guessed.

“The Hummingbird wouldn’t speak to me for a month afterward,” Raphael admitted with a grin of his own. “As for Lumia, the stronghold doesn’t appear to have changed in the time since I overflew it—and the splendor of the landscape, yes, that fits what I know of the Luminata way.” He’d never truly thought much about the sect, but when he had, it had been to see them as removed from life but not ascetic in the way of the monks Elena had referenced.

“As a very young man,” he told Elena, one long-ago memory sparking another, “I once met a mortal mystic, as you did the holy man. He was thin—only tendon and muscle over bone, no fat. Just enough flesh to sustain his mortal body.” Raphael remembered wondering how anyone could survive in such a state. “He had a long gray beard, and his skin was cured by the sun from all the hours he’d walked the landscape, but his soul, it emanated perfect contentment.”

Raphael been a young and arrogant angel at the time—akin to a mortal youth who’d left home for the first time—but in that instant, he’d felt humbled. “I felt he knew far more than I could ever imagine, though his lifespan could not have been more than six decades to my two hundred at the time.”

He’d ended up walking with that mystic for miles, curious and respectful and aware for the first time in his existence that immortals weren’t necessarily the pinnacle of existence. “Unfortunately, the lessons I learned in my days of walking by his side didn’t hold in the millennium that followed. I had forgotten him until this instant.”

“Don’t knock yourself, Archangel.” His consort’s voice held both her warrior spirit and her fierce love for him. “I learned things as a teenager and young hunter that I forgot in the years that followed. Life isn’t static, and sometimes, we don’t realize the value of knowledge or even of people, until farther down the track, when we’re mature enough to truly understand.”