Archangel's Heart (Guild Hunter 9)

Reminded of Izzy and Illium both, Elena dropped to his altitude. “What’s so interesting?” she called out when she was close enough.

“There are animals below!” he yelled back. “Goats perched on such narrow ledges that I can’t believe they aren’t falling off!”

Elena joined him in goat-spotting. Not an activity she’d ever before considered. This was definitely not New York. But it kept them both amused—and Xander was right: some of those goats had to have glue on the bottoms of their hooves or something. The landscape below wasn’t particularly hilly, but the hills that did exist were steep and devoid of heavy foliage.

“Magnus!”

The lion-maned rider below them looked up at Xander’s cry and waved a hand before going down low over the neck of his black stallion again, a man clearly at home with that means of transport though he lived in an area where it wasn’t exactly common. But angels and vampires, as she’d learned, had long histories.

Magnus could well have been born in a landscape filled with horses.

When she, Xander, and the others eventually passed over Lumia’s walled border, the aerial guard dipped its wings but didn’t get in their way.

The first thing she noticed was the lack of any guards without wings—vampires need not apply to Lumia in any capacity apparently, not even as guards. The second thing was the sheer size of the defensive squadron—and what she was seeing was only the part of the force assigned to this section of the border.

Raphael, do you know Lumia has an army of its own? She didn’t have the strength to “send” that far, but Raphael could hear her from great distances.

The crisp bite of the wind sliced through her mind an instant later. How big?

This is only an estimate, Elena said, then gave him the numbers.

Interesting. Raphael’s tone was cool—not Archangel cool but thoughtful cool. Lumia has always had a guard complement fed by volunteers from all of the archangelic territories. Unless one of the others in the Cadre has seconded large numbers of people here, the Luminata must have recruited beyond the volunteers.

Elena twisted her lips. I can’t see any of the archangels weakening their defenses to supply a heavy guard to men who are meant to be a bunch of monks.

It could be that these monks are no longer neutral and are providing a service to an archangel, Raphael pointed out. I’ve asked Aodhan to keep a sharp lookout on your return, see if he can identify any of the angels in the squadron.

See what you can discover in the town, he added. If the angels and vampires who live there are aggressive, it may be an overreaction or posturing on Lumia’s part. I, meanwhile, will attempt to keep from killing Charisemnon.

That last didn’t sound like a joke. What’s happened?

Nothing. But I look at him and I see Stavre.

The youngest angel to have died in the Falling, his funeral bier covered with flowers placed there by his warrior brethren. We’ll kill the evil bastard one day, she said. Better yet, I like to imagine his disease-causing power turning back on him again, but this time in a slow, tortuous, but eventually fatal fashion. Don’t give him your energy.

Wise advice from my consort. I shall attempt to follow it.

Blowing him a mental kiss, Elena winged to a slightly higher altitude as the first buildings came into view on the horizon, a hive of life in the midst of an otherwise arid landscape. Interestingly, nothing appeared much over two stories high—angels tended to go up when they built, though low dwellings weren’t unheard of depending on the weather and topology of an area. Lumia itself was gracefully low to the earth—though it did sit on a rise—so maybe that had influenced the architecture of the town.

Elena wanted to get an overview of the place before she landed, see how big an area it covered, guesstimate how many people she’d be dealing with in her hunt to unearth the identity of the woman in the miniature. For all she knew, that miniature had been painted centuries ago and no one would have the faintest clue, but she had to try.

The homes on the edge of town were very small and colored in earth tones, blending into the landscape. Then came the fruit trees—fig and orange maybe—followed by the shocking green of fields planted with vegetables and irrigated against the harsh sun and dry environment. Cows looked up placidly at the shadow of wings passing overhead and children pelted to their homes.

Elena frowned.

Kids ran under angelic shadows in New York, too, especially in Central Park, but they always tried to follow the wings, not divert away from them. Could be Raphael was right and the angels who lived in the town were aggressive and violent. Not that she could see any of them; the only wings in the sky were of her group.

Trees and houses broke up the patches of lush green. The farms were small, each field easily traversable on foot. The deeper they flew into the town, the more the houses began to cluster together, the greenery coming in smaller patches that were probably private gardens. Earth tones permeated throughout.

No mansions. No railingless balconies that she could spot. Nothing beyond the two stories she’d already noted. A few flat roofs that could be used as landing spots, but the people she spotted on them had no wings.

More and more of the town’s denizens began to come into view, some seated under the shadows of trees, others going about their business with their faces covered by colorful scarves. Those scarves were necessary under the merciless heat of the sun. Elena had thrust one into a side pocket when she and Aodhan swung by the suite earlier; it was a bright purple thing with silvery threads in it that she’d picked up on her last trip to Morocco.