“Thanks for being our guide.”

Gian’s eyes glowed at Elena’s words. “I hope you both enjoy your walk,” he said, but he was looking only at Elena. “The garden is beautiful at sunset.”

Raphael ran his hand down his consort’s stiff spine after Gian disappeared down the hallway, ice coating his words when he spoke. “He looks at you with covetous eyes in front of me.” The only reason Gian wasn’t dead right now was because he had answers to Elena’s questions.

She closed her own hand over the edge of his wing, stroked down in a firm caress. “Don’t let him get to you. Even if we have to come back after the world settles down, we’ll expose all his secrets.”

It was a promise.

“Mother.” Having reached Caliane, Raphael greeted her with a kiss to the cheek.

His mother, her hair a fall of midnight down her back and her body clad in a flowing gown of white with the barest tinge of green on the edges, smiled and slipped her arm through his, but not before she turned to Elena and said, “May I steal my son for a few minutes, Consort? I have missed him.”

“Of course.” Elena’s tone was gentle in a way Raphael knew his mother didn’t realize—and neither, he was certain, did his hunter. Elena had a soft spot for his mother now that it had become clear how much Caliane regretted what she’d done to Raphael.

It wasn’t only that, of course.

His consort would do anything to see her own mother again, couldn’t find it in her heart to hold on to anger against Caliane.

Knhebek, hbeebti.

Elena’s response was a kiss against his mind before she fell back with Tasha.

30

“Did you ever visit Lumia before this?” he asked Caliane.

Nodding, she said, “Yes, several times. I had a friend who was Luminata long ago, before you were so much as a speck in the universe’s eye.” A remote smile, her gaze filled with eons of memory. “He was as thin as a reed and the funny thing was that his name was Reed. We teased him so, but he always had such a smile about it. Such inner peace.”

“After he became Luminata?”

A shake of Caliane’s head. “He was born that way, I think. Like some children are born with a placid, happy nature.” Glancing up at Raphael, she laughed, no longer a distant Ancient but the mother who’d once kissed his hurts. “You were not like that. You had very firm and loud opinions for a babe.”

“I had two archangels for parents.”

Laughing again, she said, “Reed was born of two scholars and he was scholarly himself. I wasn’t surprised when he told me he was drawn to Lumia.” She went silent for a while, as the older angels were apt to do, their memories tangled skeins they had to unravel. “He was the kind of person who should be here. It seemed as if he had an ability to see beyond the veil.”

“I’ve met people like that in my life.” Ibrahim was one—young but with a purity to him that sang. “It doesn’t seem as if most of the current Luminata are as your friend.”

“I should’ve known you’d sense it, too. So intelligent and perceptive even as a babe.” Memories in her voice again, her smile a haunting echo of the woman she’d been before unspeakable tragedy and madness. “Talking of Reed, I find I miss him. He had such a quiet, warm sense of humor.”

“Does he Sleep?”

“I do not know.” Sorrow colored her features. “He disappeared two millennia before your birth, and no one knows where he went. At the time, most hoped that he’d chosen to slip quietly into Sleep, but I hoped he’d found luminescence, was inhabiting a plane of existence unknown to the rest of us.”

A soft smile, so many memories shadowing her expresssion when she lifted her head to meet his eyes that his soul ached. “Now I’m more selfish—I wish him to be Sleeping, so that he might wake one day and I will see my friend again.”

Raphael thought of what it would be like if he lived a hundred thousand years, two hundred thousand, and began to lose friends to Sleep, or to retreats from society. Even vampires did the latter. They didn’t have the ability to Sleep, but the old ones had been known to shut themselves away for eons.

Immortals called them the Withdrawn.

The Withdrawn relied on trusted retainers for their blood intake, with some families remaining with the same vampire for generation after generation, the only ones who ever had contact with the recluse or recluses. Raphael had known one such retainer a hundred years earlier; the man had told him that his master was tired but “his god does not permit self-annihilation.” So he had chosen a life of total seclusion, blood supplied to him through a hole in the door to his suite.

“It must be a hard thing,” he said to his mother, “to be awake in a world where so many of your friends Sleep.” He knew he would never be alone that way—he and Elena would always wake and Sleep together. Not only could he not imagine life without his hunter, he’d seen the terrible harm it could do when one half of a pair went into Sleep unilaterally; he’d never hurt Elena that way.

“At least Alex is awake now.” Caliane’s sigh was heartfelt. “A troublemaker still. He always wants to take control—even as a boy, he was determined to lead.”

“Have you tracked down any others of your compatriots?” He knew she’d asked Jessamy to do a search for her.

“Not from so long ago, but others I met through the ages, yes.” Midnight strands of her unbound hair brushed over his arm as they walked. Many who only saw her outside Amanat thought she always dressed this way—in flowing gowns with her hair down, but Raphael knew that was only one of his mother’s skins. She was as comfortable in weathered leathers, with her hair in a braid.