Archangel's Enigma (Guild Hunter)(9)

He went straight to Jessamy and Galen’s house on the cliff.

“Naasir!” A vampire, his poison-green eyes slitted like those of a viper and his dark, dark brown hair having grown to touch the collar of his T-shirt, caught him in an embrace on the paved yard outside the house.

Slapping Venom on the back, Naasir dropped his duffel to the paving stones, the small yard edged with pots bursting with flowers. “I see Galen hasn’t broken you yet.” He took in the younger man’s jeans and simple black T-shirt. “No more suits?” Venom was well known for his dangerously elegant appearance, his grace as liquid as it was lethal.

“Who cares about suits when I’m getting my ass handed to me in the training ring every day.” Venom winced and pointed to a blue-black bruise on his jaw, the color vivid against the warm brown of his skin. “Sometimes I’m not sure if Galen’s teaching me or trying to kill me.”

Naasir bared his teeth. “If Galen was trying to kill you, you’d know.” The weapons-master didn’t fight like Naasir or Venom, his style heavier and more steady, but he was a brutal and deadly force. “He’ll toughen you up.” Venom was a dangerous cub who had the gift of deadly poison in his blood, but at just over three hundred and fifty, he was the youngest of the Seven.

He needed a little more tempering.

“There you are!” Jessamy ran out of the cottage, the misty yellow of her airy ankle-length gown frothing around her legs and the chestnut waves of her hair woven into a loose braid. Her lush brown eyes glowed with welcome against the cream of her skin, her smile luminous.

Grabbing her tall and delicately slender form up in his arms, his skin brushing the insides of her wings, Naasir spun her around and around until she protested. “Oh, I have missed you,” she said with water shining in her eyes, before cupping his face and kissing him on both cheeks. “Come inside. I have a drink waiting for you.”

His stomach rumbled right on cue, but he hadn’t forgotten his mission. “The scholar, she’s safe?”

“Yes, she’s working in the Library. I thought you could rest and have a snack before I introduced you two—I’m planning on inviting her to dinner with us.”

Walking with Jessamy and Venom into the cottage just as Galen landed behind them, Naasir released a quiet breath. It was good to be with family again.


*



Andromeda tried to focus on the illuminated manuscript she’d placed on a stand at the back of the Library, but all she could see were the words of the letter that had come for her an hour earlier.

In twenty-two days, you turn four hundred. You have had many years of indulgence. We have allowed you all of it—even when you chose to forsake your bloodline.



It is now time to return home and undertake your obligation to your family and to your archangel. We shall expect you for the start of the ceremonial celebrations six days prior to your day of birth, following which, you will go to your grandfather’s court to take up your position by his side.



He has little use for scholars, but you are his sole grandchild, and as such, he is willing to overlook your failings as long as you conduct yourself as a princess of the court during your time of service. Do not disappoint him, Andromeda. Your grandfather’s mercy is not endless.





She gripped the sides of the stand, the wooden edges digging into her palms. “Indulgence” her mother called Andromeda’s centuries of learning, learning that had seen her offer help to countless immortals who came to the Library for assistance. She was a keeper of angelic histories and a teacher of their young. Yet after a bare three hundred and twenty-five years, give or take, she was a mere apprentice. There was so much more she had to learn.

And the journeys she’d taken . . . the world was ever changing and she wanted to continue to drink in every single part of it. But time had run out. She’d always known it would, always known that one day, no matter any other choice she’d made, she’d be four hundred years old and expected to return to the court of the Archangel Charisemnon—to fulfill the terms of a familial blood vow her parents had made on her behalf when she was a babe newborn.

Jessamy had asked her if she was bound by any such vows when Andromeda first came to the Refuge. Scared she wouldn’t be accepted into an apprenticeship should she tell the truth, admit she’d have to stop her studies at four hundred, Andromeda had lied and said Charisemnon had forgiven her vow since she was so clearly unsuited to court life. As the years passed, the lie had become more and more difficult to put right.

None of it mattered now. Allowing one day for the journey, she had fifteen more of freedom before she had to return to the stunning, heartbreaking land she’d left as a girl not yet an adult. Any other action would be considered high treason, death the penalty.

No one, enemy or friend, would offer her safe harbor. “Stealing” children from another archangel’s blood family was considered an act of quiet violence that could ripple out into war. She’d considered asking Raphael or Titus for sanctuary, since they were already at war with her grandfather, but she knew that even if they paid attention to the petition of a lowly apprentice, the two archangels could not give her what she wanted.

To do so would be to shock and disturb the more traditional archangels who were Raphael’s and Titus’s allies against the death and disease her grandfather and his own nightmare ally had spread across the world. And regardless, she’d be hunted to the end of her existence should she run. Far better to serve the five hundred years required of her and hope her soul was intact at the end of it.