Archangel's Heart by Nalini Singh Page A

the playful contact, the youth he’d once been rising to the fore, he nudgedher 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.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œClearly, 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.
    â€œThe 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.
    â€œAs 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.”
    â€œDon’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.”
    At times, Raphael’s hunter consort surprised him with her perceptiveness about mortals and immortals both. “The Luminata,” he replied, “they’re not and have never been like my mystic or your holy man. Their members join after at least one thousand years of existence—no one younger is permitted to become an initiate. And by that stage, they are used to a certain way of life.”
    â€œI get it.” Elena swept down on a wind current, her joy in flight an incandescent light he could