Nalini Singh - Angels' Flight

“I love you, Galen. So much it hurts.”

He held her words to his heart, polished them until they were faceted jewels, told himself no woman would say such sweet, passionate words to a man if she did not adore him. He hadn’t chained her with his request—she had chosen him. And still he worried that she would not look at him the same when he returned, her love eroded by the limits on her freedom his promise demanded.

The first letter was carried by a returning messenger, Jessamy’s flawless hand writing to him of her life, of the children she taught and the people she met, the histories she kept, connecting them though he stood half a world away.

My dearest Galen…

He ran his finger over the words so many times the ink smudged, his eyes burning until he had to put the letter away to read late in the night, when no one would disturb him and he could read it as slowly as he liked.

He sent his response—far shorter, for he had no way with words like Jessamy—with Raphael, when the archangel returned to the Refuge with a small wing of angels who would now be based there. Jason was currently taking care of his interests at the angelic stronghold, with Illium and Aodhan’s help, but the two angels were yet young.

Raphael carried Jessamy’s letter back to him.

Jessamy touched the letter for the thousandth time, tracingthe hard, angular lines of Galen’s pen. She could almost feel his energy, his raw power in the terse words another woman might have taken as disinterest. Smiling because she understood that a warrior had no time or inclination to learn poetry and gentle wooing skills, she kissed the letter and put it on top of the book she was carrying as she headed home for the day.

“Daughter.”

Jessamy turned at the sound of that familiar voice, sliding Galen’s letter between the pages of the book as she did so—but her mother had already seen. “From your barbarian.” It was said with a smile, affectionate rather than judgmental.

Jessamy laughed. “Yes.” She didn’t tell her mother that Galen wasn’t as much the barbarian as he appeared—not only because the fact people constantly underestimated his intelligence gave him an advantage, but because he needed no such defense. She adored every part of him, the rough and the secret sweetness. Such as that which had led him to send her a daisy pressed in the leaves of his letter.

I flew past the field today, and I remembered how you talked to the flowers , he’d written, almost driving her to tears, the big beast.

“You love him.” Her mother’s words were followed by a deeper, yet somehow more tentative smile. “I can see it in your eyes.”

Unable to bear that hesitancy, Jessamy walked into the arms her mother held out. The scent of her was intimately familiar, warm and loving, a sensory reminder of the childhood nights Jessamy had spent silent and stiff in Rhoswen’s lap—after truly understanding that her wings weren’t ever going to form like those of her friends, that she’d never be able to join them in their sky games.

“I do,” she whispered, squeezing her mother tight, because Rhoswen had rocked her night after night, a fierce protective love in her voice as she attempted to give solace to a child who hurt too much to accept it. “And he loves me, too,” she said, aware her mother needed to hear it. “I’m happy.”

Rhoswen drew back from the embrace, a sheen of wet over the lush brown of her eyes. “No, you’re not.”

“Mother—”

“Hush.” Laughing through the tears, her mother squeezed her hands. “You ache with missing that warrior of yours.”

Jessamy laughed and it was a little teary, too, because she hadn’t realized until this instant how very much she’d missed talking about Galen with her mother. It hadn’t been a conscious choice not to, simply an extension of the painful silence that had grown between them over the years. “Will you come home with me?” she asked, reaching for Rhoswen’s hand. “I’d like to talk.”

“I’d like that, too.” Fingers, slender and long, stroking her cheek. “I’m so happy to see the sadness gone from your heart.”

That was when Jessamy realized the distance between them had had as much to do with her as her mother. She’d thought she’d masked her sorrow as she grew older and became a respected figure in the Refuge, but what mother who loved her child would not be able to taste the salt of that child’s hidden tears?

Linking her arm with Rhoswen’s, their wings overlapping in a warm intimacy between mother and child, she made a decision—no matter what happened going forward, Rhoswen would never again taste such pain in her daughter. Galen had helped Jessamy find her wings, but the joy of spirit that bubbled within her was hers to nurture and she would fight to hold on to it.

“What does he write, the big brute who kissed you in front of the entire Refuge?” Rhoswen asked with a teasing smile. “Do let me see.”

“Only if you let me see the love notes I know Father still writes to you.”

Her mother’s cheeks turned as pink as the color that marked the tips of her primaries, the very shade on the inner edges of Jessamy’s own wings. “Terrible girl!”

Jessamy giggled and held the book and Galen’s letter close to her heart. Those letters kept winging their way across the world as the seasons changed. She wrote pages and pages full of stories about life in the Refuge—including about the three small angels who were waiting for Galen right along with Jessamy.

They assure me their flight technique has improved considerably—they’ve been very diligent about the training exercises you set them, have even become instructors themselves to their schoolmates.

Illium, Jason, Aodhan, they all took her missives and flew back with Galen’s.

“Do you know I came to see you before my mother?” a tired Illium said one late summer’s day, handing her a letter. “Galen threatened to pull off my feathers one at a time if I didn’t.”

Loving him, this blue-winged angel who ever made her heart lift, she kissed him affectionately on the cheek. “Fly to the Hummingbird,” she said, speaking of the gifted artist who was his mother. “I know she has been watching the skies for you.”

He was a sight against the orange and gold of dusk, but she was already turning away, her fingers trembling as she broke the seal. As always, it was short, without embellishment. No words of love. Just Galen.

Tell my trainees I intend to test them rigorously on my return. Never too early to start training a squadron.

“Oh, wonderful man,” she whispered, because such words would mean everything to the little ones who hero-worshipped him.

There was no daisy this time. Only an unspoken request.

The feather I stole when I left is losing your scent.

She sent him a feather from the inner edge of her wings, where the blush was so deep it was magenta, and wrote to him of the summer blooms in the mountains, and of the political game playing she saw taking place as Michaela rode the razor’s edge between angel and archangel, wrote, too, of her worry about Illium.

The young angel had fallen in love with a mortal before he left the Refuge, and with each day since his return, that love grew ever deeper. Most shrugged it off as infatuation on his part, mistaking the wild beauty of his spirit for fecklessness, but she knew the power of Illium’s loyal heart.

I cannot imagine Illium without his smile , she wrote, as the blue-winged angel played with her students outside, while she sat at her desk in the schoolroom. Her death will haunt him through eternity.

Galen’s response was simple. He’s strong. He’ll survive. Then he added something that broke her heart. I’m not that strong.