Archangel's Enigma (Guild Hunter)(2)

The Scribe’s voice was crystalline as he said, “I have traced the origins of the prophecy to the Archangel Cassandra.”

Lijuan’s hand curled over the armrest of the jade throne, the carvings cutting into her flesh as the tiny hairs on her nape rose in a primeval response. “You are certain?” Cassandra had gone to Sleep so long ago that she was more myth than memory, an Ancient among Ancients. But one thing about her legend had never changed: that on her ascension, she had gained the great and terrible gift of seeing the future.

Legend stated that she’d chosen to Sleep soon after she clawed out her own eyes in a vain effort to stop the visions. Her eyes had grown back within the day, and in the hour afterward, her dress still bloody, she’d disappeared. Most of her prophecies had been lost in time and the ones that remained were often disregarded as the scribblings of some unknown fantasist.

“Raphael is the one kissed by mortality.” Lijuan didn’t understand how such a weakened archangel had almost been able to bring her down, but she would not make the mistake of underestimating him again.

“I have no answers for the last-mentioned, for the broken dreams with eyes of fire,” the Scribe responded. “But the silver-winged Sleeper can be only one.”

Lijuan’s grip on the armrest grew vicious as her back spasmed. Her wings had grown back after her brain and spinal column, as per the angelic hierarchy of what was important, but they were weak and prone to causing her torso to spasm, further exacerbating her remaining injuries.

Breathing through the vicious sensations, she stared into the metal disk that acted as her mirror, and spoke the name of the Sleeper who needed to die. “Alexander.”





1


Seven months Naasir had been hunting. Seven months since he’d told Ashwini he was ready to find a mate. Seven months and still his mate hadn’t made herself known to him. Didn’t she know he was looking for her?

Crouched on the railing-less edge of a high Tower balcony, he growled.

A Legion fighter who’d just flown past turned to give him an appraising look. Naasir snapped his teeth at the bat-winged male and was pleased when the fighter changed direction to head to the Legion’s new home. Naasir liked that home, even if it had walls. It was a high-rise that had been turned into a giant greenhouse, windows taken out to form balconies, walls replaced with massive sheets of glass where possible, and a flight tunnel created in the central core, a tunnel big enough to accommodate wings.

With fall now a blaze of red and orange and yellow across Central Park, the engineers had also added clever transparent “curtains” of what Illium had told Naasir was a high-tech material that allowed the Legion to fly in and out at will, but that maintained a warm, growing temperature within. Each time a fighter went through, the curtains fell automatically back in place, trapping the heat inside.

Naasir had snuck into the high-rise soon after he first returned to New York two weeks earlier. The inside was structured so that the remaining parts of the internal floors and ceilings jutted out at unusual angles; the distance between one and the next was often deep. Enjoying the lush greenery within, the vines climbing up the sides already starting to take strong hold and small trees digging in their roots as flowers bloomed, Naasir had made his way to the top regardless—without alerting the Legion he was in their territory.

He didn’t think the Primary had been pleased when Naasir appeared on the glass of the roof, but the leader of the Legion was loyal to Raphael, and Naasir was one of Raphael’s Seven, so they existed in a wary truce. Just thinking about the Legion made Naasir’s skin prickle and muscles tense.

They were so old and so other that he often had to fight the compulsion to bite them.

Despite that, or perhaps because of it, he sometimes felt that the strange fighters who flew on wings devoid of feathers, were more like him than anyone else in the entire world. Naasir might not have wings, but he was as other. Except, where there were seven hundred and seventy-seven in the Legion, he was only one.

You are angry with us because we are many, but you know deep within that you are one of us. A child of the earth. Bitterly young in comparison to our eons-long existence, but with a connection to life that is primal.

The leader of the Legion had said that to Naasir with a straight face. The other man—though man didn’t feel like the right description—truly believed his words. He didn’t understand that Naasir wasn’t anything natural. He hadn’t been born of the earth; he’d been created by a monster.

A monster whose liver and heart Naasir had clawed out and eaten.

Teeth bared, he looked down at the balcony to his left and two floors below, noting that it was one of the rare ones with a railing. Dmitri had said he couldn’t jump to the city streets because he’d end up flattened like a pancake, but this jump wasn’t far and the wind, while brisk, wouldn’t push him right to the edge. Muscles bunching a split second after his eye fell on the other balcony, he jumped.

Cold air rushed past his face, pasting his T-shirt to his body and stinging his eyes, and then his bare feet hit the hard surface of the balcony. Absorbing the impact through his entire body, having purposefully ended up in a feline crouch, he found the wind had pushed him farther than he’d expected—another couple of inches and he’d have hit the top of the railing, would’ve had to scrabble for purchase to keep from tumbling out into open air.