Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(107)

A flicker of mud-green power as her winds smashed Antonicus hard enough into a tree that it disrupted his glamour. Dropping her tempests, she targeted him with angelfire, but he was invisible to her gaze once more, and in that moment, she saw Lijuan, felt Lijuan. How the Archangel of Death had gained the ability to go noncorporeal, until even the archangels with glamour could no longer see her. How she’d appeared behind Zanaya.

This time however, Zanaya was ready.

She’d reactivated her tempests as fast as he’d vanished, and she hoped to hell her winds were shredding the gelatinous webbing of his wings.

Then it came. A crossbow bolt shot hard and with power enough that it ripped through her left wing—with another bolt hitting her in the neck seconds later. Gurgling at the blood that threatened to drown her, she gripped the bolt in her throat and tore it out as she spiraled to the ground.

Even her winds couldn’t keep her aloft with her wing so badly damaged.

She landed, but didn’t crumple. Her throat was already healing, but she remained at a disadvantage with her lack of glamour. But she had other assets, including her mind. “Fight like an archangel, not a sneak thief!” she challenged when she felt claws swipe by so close they almost sank into her.

A hiss of anger and then there he was, his face a rictus so tight it was animalistic, his eyes no longer holding much sentient thought. Teeth gritted, he said, “Kill you. End you. No mistress! I am Antonicus!”

Too wounded to move fast enough to avoid his power, she took a blow directly in the gut. But though it burned and seared and made her grimace at the pain of it, it didn’t dig into her bones like angelfire . . . and she knew. “You’re not Antonicus,” she whispered, drawing Firelight. “Antonicus is dead.”

Screaming, he came at her with claws bared, all sense and reason gone. She thrust Firelight deep into his heart, then used her winds to shove him back until he was pinned to the nearest tree by her sword. This close, the scent of him clogged up her airways and made her gut want to eject itself through her mouth.

Red eyes locked with hers, hatred in their depths. But when he attempted to hit her with his power, nothing came out but the merest trickle. “Food,” he growled. “Food. Fuel.”

Zanaya thought of Lijuan’s mound of the dead, the bodies of her loyal fighters hollow and empty of all life. Silence where so many voices had rung. Hands stretched out in death, as if they pleaded with their beloved goddess for mercy.

Cruelty beyond cruelty.

“No archangel needs to prey on others to gain power,” she said to this creature that had once been a man of integrity and honor. “Even Lijuan only used others to bloat herself—she always had an innate level of archangelic power. You are no longer an archangel.”

He screamed . . . but the words he spit out in the aftermath were unexpected in the extreme. “Kill me.”

She hesitated, the tone of the demand so much of the Cadre that she questioned her conclusion that he was become reborn. “Antonicus? Do you exist?” Never would she end him without being dead certain. “If all you need is a much longer Sleep, then that may be the best choice.”

A single tear rolled down his face, the eyes that held hers no longer feral but so sad as to be despair in its purest form. “I will do as my mistress wishes.”

It was her blood through which rage burned now. “I am not your mistress,” she said. “You are an archangel!” Forcing herself to touch his putrefying body, she clenched her hand over his shoulder in the manner of comrades.

He was a shiver of bones beneath skin that felt as if it would fall off him at any moment. But his face was tranquil now, a faint smile on his lips. “What do you wish of me, mistress?”

Inside the faint screams within her head, however, she heard one that was loud and clear and of an archangel. End this! End me! I beg of you, Zanaya!

She staggered, her eyes burning. “Antonicus.” A whisper. “You are an Ancient.” To kill so much life, so much history when there might be hope of a recovery, it was an abomination.

But the scream inside her head was suddenly echoed by words forced out of a throat that didn’t want to cooperate. “I dream only of her,” Antonicus rasped, the strange half-smile yet on his face as the man who’d once been an archangel battled the evil in him that compelled him to submit. “My Sleep is nightmare. Now she has made me a slave.”

Rivulets of blood dripped down his face as his skin tore open from the force with which he was clenching his jaw. And that blood . . . it was green and dark, fetid and rotten.

In front of her, he struggled to find his voice again, while inside her mind, his screams became guttural. He was losing the last pieces of himself, she realized. Soon, he’d be nothing but a mindless beast beholden to her will.

“No,” she said, and locked gazes with him for the final time. “I will not allow her to do this to you, Antonicus, Archangel of Elysium.” Wrenching Firelight from his body, she took a step back, rage and pain locking her throat.

Zani! Alexander landed beside her, so hard that she felt an earth tremor. Xander is safe with Sharine. She flew this way to search with a squadron.

Sharine, the Hummingbird, was one of the very few people, she knew, with whom Alexander would trust his grandson. She should’ve known the general would find a way to look after both pieces of his heart.

“You’re hurt,” he said, his hands fisting as he stared at the bloody hole in her throat.