Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(101)

When Alexander flew over to land beside her, she exhaled. “No,” she said. “I feel no compulsion to serve anyone.” It was a relief to say that aloud. “But—” She cut herself off because she didn’t want to say it, but Alexander had to know. “I felt them, those creatures. Like a hum inside me. And . . . I heard a screaming faint but pitiful.”

Trembling not with shock but blackest rage, she looked at Alexander. “How could she live with those screams? They would’ve been so loud for her, the trapped begging her for release.”

“Because she was evil.” Flat words, the silver of his gaze as hard as a sheet of metal.

“I might not be reborn,” Zanaya said, “and my eyes might have settled into their ordinary shade—”

“They changed to gray when the reborn were coming toward you, are only fading back into dark brown now.”

Uttering a small scream, Zanaya kicked at the dirt, hard enough to send a clump flying. “Bitch. Vicious, murderous bitch!”

Whatever Alexander said in response to her tirade was drowned out by Aureline’s voice in her head: Zan! We’ve received an alert on a modern device that bears Raphael’s sigil and that of Elijah. I can’t access it. It’s sealed for archangelic eyes only.

Blood cold, Zanaya shared what Auri had told her with Alexander.

They took off in grim silence.

That the Cadre had buried Antonicus in the ice was a secret between archangels and their consorts—no one else could ever know that their most powerful could get sick, could become infected with disease. It was too catastrophic a piece of knowledge, would shatter the belief in the invincibility of the Cadre that kept the world relatively stable.

An archangel being killed in battle against another of their kind was one thing, but to be maimed in the way Antonicus had been? No, that information couldn’t be permitted to spread. Theirs was a world of vampires prone to bloodlust and mortals so vulnerable to angelic power that they simply couldn’t fight back.

No weapon created by a mortal mind would ever kill an archangel.

Zanaya had caught up on a large chunk of more recent history in the past months, and so she knew that a mortal had once built a thing called a bomb and used it to blow up an angelic home. The saboteur had managed to kill the angel’s entire household, vampires included, and he’d blown the angel to pieces.

But not enough pieces.

The angel’s head had been found still attached to his spinal cord. His skull was cracked up, his brain badly damaged—but not obliterated. That was all it’d taken. Because that angel had been one of the old ones full to the brim with power.

Five years and he was whole again.

By then, the archangel who was his liege had destroyed every hint of the mortal and his bloodline, no matter how far-flung. Mortal after mortal and even a number of kindhearted angels had pleaded that the members of his family were innocents—with many so distantly related to him that they didn’t even know the bomber.

The archangel had refused to show mercy to even the smallest babe.

Zanaya’s stomach had churned as she listened to that history. She didn’t believe in a scorched-earth policy of punishment, but she understood how the other archangel’s mind had worked: to show even a drop of mercy might be to encourage others to act out.

The annihilation of the bomber’s bloodline followed by the resurrection of the angel who’d been blown apart—an angel, not even an archangel—had made the futility of such attacks crystalline.

Bombs still existed.

As did flamethrowers and missiles.

Those weapons and more had been used in angelic wars and battles. But every human on the planet knew that to attempt to use them against angelkind as a whole would end only in a carpet of red across the world. Because even if they blew up every single archangel in the world, those archangels would come back.

Over and over and over again.

For only an archangel could kill another archangel.

Even the black fog that had devastated Antonicus had been spawned by an archangel.

There was no way for mortals to win against the Cadre, destruction of humanity the only end result . . . except of course, angelkind would never kill all the humans. Their need for humanity was her kind’s greatest secret, one that had been kept with ruthless ferocity across time. Without humans into whom to eject the toxin that built up in their bodies, angelkind would be a madness of wings and blood.

“Rather make the creatures cattle—breed them and use them.” She’d heard it said in her time, and she was sure there were those who yet believed the same.

Angels could be cruel and heartless and without pity.

Zanaya had no illusions about her people. But any further thoughts on the subject would have to wait. They’d arrived at her fortress, and she soon spotted a familiar form spotlit by the moon. There’s Auri on the roof.

They landed as one in front of her second.

The other woman handed over a sleek black device. Larger than the machine called a “phone,” it had many of the same functions. Zanaya thought of it as a knowledge bank, for it held all the information of the world.

Attached to it was another small, square object.

“It’s set to open to a scan of your iris,” Alexander said before Zanaya could ask for the procedure to access the message.

She remembered now, how the Cadre had requested that she put her eye to a machine so that the image of her eye could be recorded and used as a key, along with her voice. She’d been newly awake then, hadn’t processed much of what that meant.