Angels Dance Read Free Page B

causing those around her discomfort? As for her charges—and those like Illium who had once been her charges—they had only ever known her as Jessamy, who had a twisted wing and whom they had to behave with, because she couldn’t chase them into the sky. All she had to do was step outside the schoolroom and raise her arm, and even the naughtiest child came back down to earth at once.
    This one, however, she thought, glancing askance at the large male she couldn’t imagine as a lonely boy making his way in a court filled with the clang of blades and the cries of combat, would have done exactly as he pleased.
    “Were you born this way?” he asked, blunt as the edge of a dull axe.
    Jessamy decided he wasn’t being rude, at least not in a purposeful way. “Subtle,” as Illium had said, didn’t seem to be in Galen’s vocabulary. “Yes.”
    “They say Keir is a talented healer.”
    “He is . . . He did his best.” And he had blamed himself when he failed. She didn’t blame Keir. Neither did she blame her mother—who found it difficult to look at the child she’d borne, though not because of a lack of love.
    “Her guilt is too huge.” Keir’s young-old eyes, his voice layered with potent emotion. “She will not listen when I tell her there is no need for it. Nothing she did or did not do caused your wing to form as it did.”
    Jessamy’s mother wouldn’t listen to her daughter either, not for the longest time. Even now, there was a haunted kind of pain on Rhoswen’s fine-boned face on the rare occasions Jessamy caught her looking at her child’s malformed wing. Rare . . . and getting ever rarer, as the wrenching silence between them, created of all the things they did not say, grew into an impenetrable black wall.
    The heavy wooden doors to the library appeared out of the mist at that instant, as impenetrable in their bulk, the gold that inlaid the exquisite carvings waiting for the sun’s kiss to shine. Reaching out, Galen pulled open one of the doors, the ropes of muscle on his arm flexing and bunching in a way that had her mouth going dry, her heart slamming hard against her ribs.
    Shaken by the depth and swiftness of her response—unmistakably physical and carnal—she averted her gaze and held out her hand for the book.
    “Do you not eat?” he asked, sliding it into her hold, a jaundiced look in his eyes as he ran his gaze over her body.
    The dark pulse of attraction morphed into sharp irritation. As a young woman, she’d attempted to do everything in her power to put more flesh on her bones, to no avail. This was simply how she was meant to be. “No,” she said, ice in her tone, “I prefer to starve,” and stalked into the library, certain the infuriating male had been raised by wolves.
    * * *
    I t was not long afterward, the sun’s blaze having burned away the mist to reveal the bright flecks of precious metals embedded in the marble buildings of the Refuge, that Galen saw Illium’s distinctive wings sweep out and over the gorge. The younger angel headed into the clouds and across mountains where no one and nothing lived.
    “A woman,” Dmitri said from beside him, the wind lifting his black hair off his face to reveal “a dangerous male beauty”—or so Galen had heard it said by more than one woman, angel and vampire both. What Galen saw was a ruthless kind of strength, strength that demanded respect.
    “Mortal,” the vampire added.
    Galen might not know how to talk to women outside of other warriors, but no one had ever accused him of being stupid. “You worry for him.”
    Dmitri’s gaze lingered on the clouds where the angel had disappeared. “Mortals die, Galen.”
    Galen shrugged. “So do we.” The mortals called them immortal, but angels and vampires could die—it just took a great deal of effort. “Does she make him happy?”
    “Yes. Too much.”
    Galen didn’t ask him to elaborate. He’d known immortals who had fallen for mortals, seen how they mourned when