Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 118699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 475(@250wpm)___ 396(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 475(@250wpm)___ 396(@300wpm)
Not that it mattered.
While Alexander liked Raphael—upstart pup or not—he’d done what he had for Callie, the friend who’d stood by him through eternity. The friend who’d allowed him to scream out his rage and his loss when his Zani went into Sleep.
Small sounds, Raphael said now. Movement.
Yes, but not of an adult angel. These movements were smaller, almost . . . secretive. It’s likely an animal.
You’re probably right.
No more words, the two of them moving silently down to the wider section of the stairs . . . and then they walked into a large laboratory lit by multiple flickering lanterns. The oil was about to run out, Alexander thought as Raphael scanned the right half of the room, Alexander the left.
They both saw Osiris at the same time.
25
Alexander’s brother lay flat on his back on the floor, his arms and legs splayed . . . and his face a clawed-out mask of blood. Flickering shadows danced over the nightmare of him. His throat was gone, torn to pieces until it was near to a decapitation. But that wasn’t the most horrifying thing.
A small, small mortal boy, naked but for the blood that coated the warm dark of his skin, crouched on Osiris’s left wing, over the torn-open cavity of his chest. His shaggy hair was a shock of silver, striking in its purity of color. The boy held something dark and wet in his tiny hands, was taking quick ravenous bites of it.
The child is eating my brother’s liver. The mental words came out cold with shock, with the impossibility of what he was seeing.
How could this tiny child have ended Osiris?
Then a gurgle sounded from the angel on the floor and Osiris began to rise, his fisted hand moving with brute intent, as if to punch the boy.
A bolt of power—Raphael’s power—slammed into Osiris, shoving him back down before he could make contact with the child. Alexander made no move to stop Raphael. All the other man had done was protect a child. Angels didn’t hit the young.
Why had Osiris, this big brother who had always shielded the child Alexander had been, even tried such an act?
Brother. Osiris’s mental voice, shaky and weak. Help me.
At the same time, the child whipped his head toward Raphael and Alexander. A growling sound emerged from deep in his chest. Even as Alexander stared, trying to make sense of this situation, a kind of . . . ripple shadowed the child’s skin. Stripes. Like a tiger’s. And for a moment, the boy was a tiger given human form, his eyes a silver as pure as Alexander’s own but far more feral.
Hissing when Raphael moved toward him, the boy scuttled back, leaving tiny footprints in blood on Osiris’s wing, and dropping his prize of Osiris’s liver on his brother’s blood-splattered feathers. Those silver eyes darted toward Raphael, then at the liver, back again. The child was trying to calculate if he could get to it before Raphael.
A starving creature ready to fight for his food even against a bigger predator.
Alexander’s brain finally processed how the boy’s bones pushed against his skin, how his cheeks were hollowed out. The child needed to eat. Before he could say anything about getting food from the kitchen, Raphael crouched down, picked up the piece of liver . . . and held it out to the child.
Alexander knew he should intervene, should kill Raphael for treating Osiris with such callous disregard, but he had the sick feeling that his brother owed this child his blood and his flesh. So he stood in silence as the child weighed up Raphael’s offer before racing forward with inhuman speed to grab the offering; he then scuttled to hide in the shadows under a large table to gobble it down.
Raphael looked over at Alexander as Alexander came down at his brother’s right side, his gut a wrench of agony. “I believe,” Raphael murmured, “the child has already taken bites of Osiris’s heart.” It was a low murmur, the kind a person used if they didn’t want to startle a wild animal. “He has near-archangelic speed.”
Silver eyes glinted at Alexander from under the table, the child’s face once more a striped ripple that wasn’t quite human. “Brother,” he said to Osiris, and took his hand, “what have you done?”
Osiris replied mind-to-mind. I succeeded, Alexander! I have fulfilled the promise of my melding gift! I have made a chimera! Such excitement in eyes that were surrounded by dried blood and crusted viscera. The orbs had been clawed out, Alexander realized, then regenerated. But there was nothing of pain in Osiris’s tone, only joy, such joy. My name will be known throughout angelkind! Will be written forever in our history.
Alexander glanced once more at the tiny starved child who behaved more like an animal, and felt his heart tear in two. How did you do it? What was the cost?