CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
Uriel’s mind rebelled; his heart cleaved itself in
two. No.
“No,
Ellie—”
When he reached out
to attempt for the third time to pull her into his arms with the
painfully numbing desperation he felt, it was to find that not only
was she formless and ethereal—so was he.
His fingers trailed
through her essence, leaving streams of their own molecular
signature as they did so. He was dissolving, it seemed, breaking
into fragments of what he was and dissipating into the glowing soup
of shimmering substance that was once Ellie Granger.
He glanced up to
capture her blue glowing gaze. Her look of relief was gone and had
been replaced with one of confusion.
“What’s happening?”
she asked, glancing down at his quickly evaporating body. He could
sense her distress. She had just saved him, and now he was
disappearing before her eyes.
It was unsettling to
him as well but not as much as, perhaps, it should have been.
Because something inside his head seemed to . . . remember. It clicked into place.
As their world melted
around them and the rest of the universe began to seem more and
more unreal, Uriel realized that he wasn’t afraid of this change.
It was supposed to happen.
He’d been waiting for
it for two thousand years.
“Uriel?” It was that
echoing whisper again. Hollow and resonant.
“Close your eyes,
Eleanore,” he told her softly.
She frowned at him.
But he smiled a reassuring smile and nodded. “Trust me,” he said.
“Close your eyes.”
She did so. Her
ethereal lids barely muted the blue-white glow of her otherworldly
eyes.
Then he closed his as
well and waited. And waited . .
.
“Now open them,
Ellie.”
In the muted
gray-white darkness that enveloped her, Eleanore realized that the
world around them had gone silent. It was the kind of silence that
pervaded on a snowy morning, muffled and absolute. She knew she was
no longer on a battlefield in Texas amid fallen giants and
petrified angels. There was no storm. No nothing.
If she hadn’t just
heard Uriel’s voice, she would have thought herself well and truly
alone. But he told her to open her eyes and she opened them to
stare across at the man she loved.
He was solid once
more and at his back was a pair of wings unlike any she’d ever
imagined. They were black, but tinted green, the way a raven’s
feathers were tinted blue. They were enormous. Beautiful.
Stunning.
As was his
smile.
“Uriel?” she said,
more to test her voice and the sound it made than anything
else.
He laughed softly.
“Are you okay?” he asked, at last cupping her cheek with his hand.
His now solid touch was warm. It filled her with instant peace and
reassurance.
“I’m fine.” She
smiled. “Nice wings.”
“Yours aren’t so bad
either,” he said, his emerald eyes sparkling. They matched his
wings, she noticed. Perfectly. “Where are we?”
“Nowhere,” he said.
Then he glanced to either side of him, at the wall of foggy white
that encompassed them. “Not yet anyway.” He looked back at her. “I
think we’re being given a choice.”
“What kind of
choice?”
“To leave Earth—or to
stay.”
Eleanore considered
that for a moment. “You mean, we can”—she hesitated, as if saying
it out loud was somehow different from experiencing it—“we can
die and go wherever it is people go
when they die . . . or we can go back to the way we were
before?”
Uriel nodded,
brushing his thumb against her cheekbone. The gesture was so
tender, she closed her eyes again just to enjoy it.
“What about our
wings?” she asked, her eyes still shut. She wasn’t sure why she’d
asked such a thing. There was no filter between her brain and her
tongue just then, and she liked the
wings. They felt natural.
He laughed again, a
soft, easy sound. “I honestly have no idea. I kind of like them
too.”
She opened her eyes
when she felt his fingers brush along the tops of her blue-black
feathers. If someone had asked her to explain what it felt like to
have a person touch her wings, she wouldn’t be able to. It was like
asking a mermaid to describe her legs.
But it felt good. She
shivered.
“Yours match your
eyes,” he added.
She peered up at him
and watched his pupils expand, eating the green of his irises.
There was that telltale hunger again, that desire that never seemed
to be far from his gaze when it came to her.
She swallowed,
sensing his need and feeling it build within her own body as
well.
“I have a family,”
she said. “I can’t leave my parents. And knowing what we know now,
we can help your brothers and their archesses if we
stay—”
She broke off when he
leaned in, his wings expanding, enveloping her in his tall, broad
darkness. His lips slanted over hers with blatant yearning,
pressing and opening and demanding. He stole her breath and, with
it, every thought she had thought she possessed.
He pulled away,
quickly and but for a moment. Long enough to mutter a few
ground-out words between clenched teeth.
“We’ll stay,” he
said.
As Ellie began to nod
her assent, he kissed her again, and she felt the world change
around them once more. It dissolved, shifted, and resolidified, and
somewhere in between his subjugation and her surrender, sound crept
in at the edges and a wet, muddy chill settled in beneath her
knees.
At long last, Uriel
broke the kiss.
“I thought for sure
you weren’t coming back,” came a familiar voice.
Uriel hesitantly
pulled his gaze from his archess and turned to see Michael and his
brothers standing a few feet away. Behind them rested a tangled
metal mass of fallen turbines and steel and concrete debris. The
storm around them was lifting and drifting away.
The battle was over,
apparently. And his brothers were still standing.
“We won?” he
asked.
Max stepped up on the
other side. “For now,” he said. But then he smiled and his gaze
drifted from Uriel to Eleanore.
“Nice wings,” he
said.
“I’ll say,” Gabriel
added. “How’re you plannin’ on hi-din’ those?”
But no one had a
chance to answer him before Azrael spoke up. “Welcome back, Ellie,”
he said softly. The corners of his mouth were turned up in a
welcoming and warm smile. Are you sure this is
the choice you wish to make?
Eleanore smiled back
at him. Yes, she thought. It is.
Then it’s good to have you with us. There was both
relief and admiration in his mental tone.
She knew that it
wasn’t going to be easy, this life she had chosen. She was still an
archess and she possessed the ability to heal. The Adarians would
always be looking for her. And for the other archesses, she
imagined.
And then there would
be Samael to contend with.
But at least she knew
what she had here. She had the archangels and Max. She had the
mansion. And she had her parents. Together, they would be strong.
They would figure things out.
With Uriel, she thought with a smile.
She turned away from
Azrael and was once more caught up in her lover’s covetous
gaze.
Oh yeah, she thought. We’ll
figure it out.