Celestial (Angels of Elysium, #2)

by Olivia Wildenstein

“Naya means dawn in Angelic.”

Eve’s feet were on the ground. I’d be eternally grateful to her for this. Eternally . . .

“All of Elysium is here, Daniel.” “No. But all of Elysium is coming.” The channel began to toil and haze, blustering an endless stream of glitter and smoke through which materialized angel after angel. “You’ve forgotten the ophanim,” Daniel said, “but the ophanim, for all your talk of negligence, have not forgotten our brother.”

“It was the least I could do after I damned her.” I squeezed his arm, hating that he still blamed himself. “She damned herself, Seraph,” Raphael said. Sofia glanced up at her husband. “Existing without him would’ve damned her soul, whether she’d kept her wings or not.”

“Celeste, you take good care of this man for me, all right? See that he doesn’t break too many more laws. We’ll always have his back, but I wouldn’t mind a little respite first.” I laughed. Oh, how nice it felt to laugh. “No more law breaking for him, only law amending.” A smile brightened Tobias’s haggard face. “What a fearsome political duo you two will make.” “Elysium will quake,”

“I hear most human love stories end with the phrase happily ever after.” His wings began to curl around us. “Aren’t we lucky to be angels, then?” His fingers wound through my hair, tipped my head back. “And why is that, neshahadzaleh?” “Because our love story”—I touched my lips to his—“gets to begin this way.”

Naya’s wing bone ceremony was two days ago, and already our brilliant thirteen-year-old was off to earn her first feathers. Yes, ours. Mine and Asher’s. There were no formal adoption papers because there was no need for those in our world, but everyone knew Naya as Asher and Celeste’s daughter. It had felt strange at the beginning, but then the strangeness had faded and I could not imagine being anything else to Naya. Especially after she called me by the Angelic name for Mom: Ama. The first time she’d said it, on my second trip back down to the guild, I’d cried so hard that she’d worried her lip and apologized.

Naya spun around, wing bones poking out from her black tank top. My gaze ran along the curved bones, hunting for colorful down. It took me two lengthy sweeps to catch the small tufts growing at the top of each bone. Naya peered over her shoulder. “So? What color are they?” My eyes met Asher’s and then Mira’s before finally settling back on Naya’s. Her smile wavered. “What is it?” She gathered her wild hair and pushed it off her shoulder. When her eyes finally alighted on the new downy growths, she sucked in an audible breath, and her gaze jerked to her father. In shock. In question. In distress. We’d never told Naya about her origin, and mind-bogglingly enough, the ophanim had all kept silent, but how much longer could we keep it a secret now that it had stained her feathers? I supposed that until Adam’s appendages appeared, my theory was pure speculation, but if his feathers too were black . . .

“They’re not black, motasheh. They’re the color of starlight.”

“You tell them, Starlight, that your wings are black because your father made you this way.”

I had yet to meet the girl and yet knew everything about her: from the color of her wings—black, like mine, because we were both byproducts of extra-conjugal affairs, but sparkly, unlike mine—to how precocious she was—she’d already earned over nine-hundred feathers. I’d even heard her mother prattle on about how Naya’s voice rivaled the guild’s sparrows. Whoop-de-effing-doo.

The blonde glanced over her shoulder as she shrugged out of a jacket with silver angel wings, but not at me. At Emmy. I frowned. After almost a minute, her gaze slid back to me, and a small groove formed between her brows. What in Abaddon was wrong with me? Why was I staring? She wasn’t particularly pretty or anything. I mean, her hair . . . Did she not own a brush? Color crawled up her throat and spread into her cheeks from my enduring scrutiny. Then suddenly, she said, “Emmy Rogers?” Damn, that voice . . . pure, effing velvet. Emmy tapped one of her white sneakers impatiently. “Yeah?” “I thought I recognized you. We chatted about a flat you were renting out.” The blonde slid past me and extended her hand to shake Emmy’s. “I’m Naya.”

“What’s your last name, Naya?” Her hands slid to her hips. Perched there. “Moreau. What’s yours, Adam?” My heart calmed. Angels didn’t have last names, so this couldn’t be Elysium’s faultless princess. I checked the pavement for a fallen feather in case she’d lied.

Her gaze followed its collapse, while mine traced the wings curled around her, wings that looked like someone had sheared off a piece of starry night sky and fit it to her spine. When her eyes settled back on mine, glittery black as her feathers, I murmured, “And so, we finally meet.”