Angels' Flight(90)

Ice trickled down her spine, Keir’s words a painful echo of what Galen had said on the ledge outside his aerie. “You’re calling me a coward,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “You’re saying I’m hiding behind my wing.”





7


“I didn’t say that, but you heard it.” Reaching across the table, he closed his hand over her own, his skin smooth, so unlike another man’s far rougher touch. “Is that how you see yourself?”

Emotions choked her throat, tore up her chest, turned her voice raw. “I’m making the right decision; you must see that. If I allow him in and he rejects me, I couldn’t bear it.” Not when it was her infuriating, maddening, magnificent barbarian, a man who looked at her as if she was beautiful, awakening dreams she’d buried deep so she could survive and be content, not a resentful creature eaten up with envy.

Keir’s expression was tender. “Everyone learns to survive heartbreak.” Releasing her hand, he rose and came to lean over the back of her chair, his arms around her neck, his cheek rubbing against her hair. “Your disadvantage is that you did not have to face it early, when you were younger, more resilient. Now, sweet Jessamy, I think you are afraid.”

Swallowing the knot in her throat, she put her hand over the supple muscle of his arm. “Shouldn’t I be afraid? My life has not been akin to the lives of those who can touch the sky at whim.” Her years of learning to live with a desolation, a sense of aching loss no other angel could understand, had made her brittle on the inside. “Have I not earned my peace?”

Keir’s lips brushed her cheek, the scent of him a languid caress. “You never wanted peace, my darling. The only question is, are you strong enough to reach for what you do want, knowing the joy may be followed by terrible sorrow?”

The door opened on the lingering echo of his final words, to reveal not Jason, but Galen, eyes of sea green incandescent with fury. “You are now free to teach at the school,” he said. “Illium and Jason will be present to ensure the safety of you and your students both.” With that curt pronouncement, he was gone.

Her hand tightened on Keir’s arm. “He thinks we’re together.” It would be easy to allow him to believe her a liar, a woman who had betrayed her lover with a scorching kiss, a hundred hidden glances.

Her stomach twisted; her gut roiled. “Let me up, Keir.” When her friend released her, she rose, shook out the skirts of her gown. “The fear is like metal on my tongue—I’ve known him but a fragment of time, and yet I’m certain if I accept his suit, it will destroy a part of me when he leaves.”

Keir reached forward to tuck her hair behind her ear. “We’re all a little broken.” Quiet. Potent. “No one goes through life with a whole heart.” His eyes, full of wisdom too profound to belong to a man who was only three hundred years her senior, told her he saw her soul, tasted the salt of her loneliness.

But what even Keir’s eyes couldn’t see, she thought as she walked out of the library, Jason a silent shadow by her side, was that her heart wasn’t whole. It had broken long, long ago—the first time she’d looked up at the sky and realized it was forever out of her reach. The courage it was taking for her to reach out again was a tight rawness in her chest, serrated at the edges by the remnants of a thousand shattered dreams.


Galen put both vampires on the ground using a fury of kicks and hard whacks with the flat of his blade. “You made the same mistake twice,” he said, waiting only until their eyes focused after the stinging slap of the blade. “I gave you a warning.” Second warnings didn’t exist in his world.

Struggling to their feet, the two nodded. One wiped blood from the corner of his mouth. But neither demurred when he demanded they go through the exercise again. This time, they were so busy trying not to make the first mistake, they made a different one. Realizing both males were exhausted, he pulled his hits and called a halt. “Go,” he said. “Work on your own and against each other tomorrow. Day after, we’ll spar once more.”

The younger vampire hesitated. “We want to get better.” His partner nodded.

Impressed the two hadn’t made a run for it after the beating he’d given them, he forced himself to speak past the anger that was a violent storm in his body. “You will. I want you to go through the steps I showed you at the start again and again until the movements are second nature.” Galen had spent countless hours doing drills, knew their value. “Part of combat is being able to react without thought—you need to train your muscles to remember.”

The vampires left after asking several intelligent questions, determination writ large on their faces. Ignoring his audience as he had since she’d entered in an elegance of cool yellow, he picked up his broadsword and began to go through a complicated routine that would’ve left his opponents in tiny pieces in the blink of an eye. People often misjudged his speed because he looked big and heavy. In truth, the only one of Raphael’s people who might be faster, he thought, was Illium.

“I’ll have a class of disappointed babes if you force me to wait any longer.” Her voice was quiet, but it tore through the air of the salle, nails on his skin.

“Say what you have to and leave.” He forced himself to slow his movements so he could hear her past the whipping cut of the blade.