Archangel's Heart by Nalini Singh

plane, she switched to mental speech.
Can we wait a little longer?
    Eyes of heartbreaking blue landed on the angel who shone like a star under the sunlight.
I’m afraid not.
Her archangel’s voice was the cool mountain wind against her senses. “There is no more time.”
    They headed up the steps of the plane on the heels of his words.
    Aodhan was the last one to board, and he kept his eyes turned toward the window as the plane began to roll down the runway. He didn’t look away even after they were in the clouds . . . not until they’d gone too far for even Illium to catch up to them.

9
    T his part of Morocco was an arid brown and gold landscape broken up only by hardy mountain wildflowers, waving grasses, and occasional groves of deep-rooted trees that provided an unexpected kiss of green to the landscape, but it was spectacular in its starkness.
    Elena had been looking forward to the feast to the senses that was Marrakech, noisy and crowded and her kind of place, but they landed even deeper inland, at a private airstrip a considerable distance from the city with which she was most familiar. From there, they flew on the wing over and into the Atlas Mountains and to a sloping peak on which sat a stronghold that was all graceful curves and arches.
    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.
    â€œIt’s like the Taj Mahal,” she said to Raphael when he flew close enough. “This huge thing that somehow has an air ofbeautiful fragility.” The Taj, too, appeared to float against the sky.
    â€œLumia 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.”
    â€œThey have a lot of land if we can’t see the walls.”
    â€œNot 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?”
    *   *   *
    R aphael hadn’t flown wingtip to wingtip with anyone for a long time before Elena. Smiling deep within at