Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(104)

Zani, I survived losing Rohan only because Xander existed. The words were torn out of him. I can’t—He shoved the thought aside, unable to even countenance it.

I’ve been thinking of why Antonicus—if it was Antonicus—would target Xander. Coolly strategic, the voice of the commander she’d once been. He’s not your enemy.

Finding his footing in the familiar chessboard of war and politics, Alexander’s brain kicked out of fear mode and into gear. No. How would he know Xander was mine, in any case?

The underside of his wings, Zanaya suddenly said. Did you not say they are identical to your own? And that’s what a person on the ground would see when they looked up.

That he’d missed the obvious was a testament to his current state of mind—and it was a cold slap across the face. He couldn’t help his grandson if he wasn’t thinking clearly. Wiping away all emotion using the brutal control he’d learned over millennia of disciplined rule, he considered Zanaya’s words. Is it possible he thought he was taking me?

Perhaps. Or he took the chance that it might draw you to him. He may well hold the Cadre responsible for his predicament and want to take vengeance against each of us in turn.

Alexander fisted his hand as the raven beside him—tireless, seen only at the periphery of his vision—shouted its croak, then dived. He went with the bird, the wind rushing past his face at vicious speed and his wings sleeked until he was a falling arrow.

He landed in a hard crouch on the ground, one hand pressed to the earth. The metals far beneath sang to his touch, but his attention was on the single feather beside which stood the raven: the filaments a pure silver that glittered in the glow thrown off by Alexander’s wings, it was splotched with a substance he didn’t want to see, didn’t want to touch.

Zanaya landed opposite, immediately saw what held his gaze. “It’s my turn to protect you, Alexander,” she said and picked up the feather. “Silver on one side, earth tones on the other.”

Then she ran her finger over the splotch, lifted that finger to her nose. “Blood.” A single word that made veins of rare metals ooze from the earth in a metallic spiderweb as Alexander fought to control his rage and panic. “But there’s not enough of it here, not even enough feathers.”

Zanaya’s own wings glowed, too, her eyes pearl gray shot with light as she scanned the area. “Xander was wounded, but he didn’t die here.”

Zanaya was right, he realized—he could see more than one feather, but the number was far smaller than it should be for a major injury to an angel of Xander’s age and size.

He went to look to his raven . . . but the bird was gone, though Alexander hadn’t seen it take off. When he searched in the trees and in the sky, there were no more birds with hooked beaks riding the winds or perched in the branches.

“I believe my ravens have said all they wish or need to say.” Alexander was never sure quite which; the birds had their own minds and ways. “He must be close by.” Looking into his consort’s eyes, he said, “Gray.”

From the harsh curse that escaped her parted lips, she knew exactly what he meant. “No mirror pulse, but I feel . . . an absence. So strange that I should feel what is missing, but that’s all I can describe it as. A numbness where a pulse should be.” Her head jerked to the left. “That way.”

Alexander never went into battle without being fully informed, but he’d follow Zani anywhere—and he knew the child of his heart was now of her heart, too. Because Xander mattered to Alexander.

They took off into the cold chill of a grayness that told him dawn was approaching. He and Zanaya and his ravens had flown through the night. He looked below, scanning in every direction.

But when the answer came, it hovered in the sky directly ahead of them.

“Antonicus.”





57


Zanaya snapped into a hover while using every skill in her arsenal to keep her face expressionless. She couldn’t, however, do anything about the shock and revulsion that curled creeping tendrils throughout her blood.

Because while Antonicus could fly, his wings were not . . . right. His tendons and fine wing bones had healed enough to keep him aloft, but a greenish film so transparent that she could see the entire understructure was all that connected the myriad pieces.

He had no feathers.

The only thing to which she could compare his current state were the wings of a newborn angelic babe. Yet even that wasn’t right. An infant’s wings might be frail and transparent, beyond easy to tear and break, but they were also hauntingly lovely in their delicate translucence.

A skeletal smile from a face out of nightmare, Antonicus’s eyes wet orbs in a shrunken face. Those orbs flicked to the archangel at her side. “Would you like to see my prize, Alexander? Your son, I would guess.”

The tiny hairs on Zanaya’s arms quivered. Antonicus’s voice was . . . broken. There was no other way she could describe it. Perhaps she might say he had shattered rocks clogging up his throat.

“Where is he?” Alexander’s question was quiet—and all the more deadly for it.

Smirk on his face, Antonicus dropped through the mists above the trees without warning.

Zanaya followed, Alexander beside her. Yes, Antonicus was drawing them into a trap, but they were two against one. Xander is your priority, Alexander. Antonicus is mine. I can feel him. Like slime in her head, a putrid malevolence that whispered things just beyond her ability to hear.