Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(109)

So now it was that Zanaya had a most amusing and clever houseguest—who also possessed a delightful tendency to blush despite his best efforts to squelch the trait. A junior squadron commander of two hundred, he wasn’t a boy except to her and Alexander. And as a commander, he was well loved by his wing and wider comrades.

So many young angels had requested permission to visit the fortress that Aureline had assigned a separate aide to the task. “I’d forgotten the impatience of youth,” her second had said at the time. “An hour after the request and they contact us to ask why the delay in our response.” Laughter. “I had to put on an exceedingly severe ‘dusty old Ancient’ tone to get the entire lot of them to calm down and leave my aide in peace.”

Today, however, Zanaya found Xander on his own. With sleep-tumbled hair as dark as the cocoa bean, and skin of deepest gold, Alexander’s grandson sat upright in bed; his lithely muscled upper body was bare but for the salve that coated his healing wounds, his forehead furrowed as he focused on a “laptop.”

The word made no sense to Zanaya. Yes, it sat on his lap. But it was hardly a spinning top, was it?

He looked up at her entrance, sniffed the air . . . and put his laptop aside, his healthy wing rustling against the bedding with the movement. Not to say the wing was undamaged; he had taken wounds there, but they’d proven minor in the grand scheme of things and would heal without any major intervention. Xander, however, had wanted the wing excised, to balance out his body while it healed—a common choice among warriors. But to his dismay, the healers had vetoed that option: with Xander’s other injuries being what they were, they didn’t wish for his body to waste energy regrowing a wing that bore no significant damage.

“I am not in the habit of amputating perfectly healthy wings, young man,” the most senior healer on the entire continent had huffed. “Warriors.”

Unlike the irritable healer, Zanaya felt for Xander. She’d lost a wing in her time, and had gotten rid of the other as a matter of course. Else she’d have been useless as a ground fighter, her balance shot and muscle strains a certainty—angelic wings weren’t exactly small or weightless, after all.

But her houseguest wasn’t one to sulk; he’d groaned at the decision, then got on with learning how to be as stable as possible with one wing. Today, he whispered, “Tell me my nose doesn’t lie, Lady Zanaya, and that you’ve brought me angel-mead.”

“Drink fast,” she said, putting the amber brew in his eager hand. “We must get rid of all evidence before Healer Apanaia catches us.”

A playful glint in eyes of palest brown shot through with shards of gray, he said, “I never knew archangels were scared of healers before.”

“All smart angels are scared of healers,” she drawled, and took a seat in the comfortable armchair beside his bed. It was one of two. Alexander had returned to his territory for a short period to handle a most unexpected matter, but elsewise, they often visited Xander together.

Who, after taking a healthy drink, leaned toward her. “Will you tell me?” Though his butchered wing had barely begun to heal, the area against his spine where it had been so viciously hacked away was covered in salves and the like, and his other injuries made it appear as if a giant insect had taken bites out of him, there was no dimming the light in his gaze.

The healers had been concerned about lingering trauma, but he was more a general’s grandson than even Alexander had realized, pragmatic and hardheaded. Xander saw his attack by the pack of reborn as nothing more than an unpleasant encounter with an enemy they’d been fighting for years.

And while he hadn’t recognized Antonicus at the time, he’d vowed to honor the promise Zanaya and Alexander had made to the Archangel of Elysium. “Never will I speak of him as I saw him,” he’d said. “As far as the world is concerned, I will say I was assaulted by aggressive reborn after I landed to eat a meal. With my wing gone, there’s no evidence of the crossbow bolt, no question to answer.”

Yes, this child of Rohan’s was a young man Zanaya was proud to call family.

“Tell you what?” she said, amused an inordinate amount by her secret knowledge.

“Why Grandfather got a stunned look on his face while he was sitting right there next to you, and flew off the balcony all but two minutes later,” was the dry response. “As if he hasn’t been watching me like a hawk over its chick.”

“Not a hawk,” Zanaya murmured. “A raven. Like the one sitting on the balcony railing right now, keeping an eye on you in your grandfather’s absence.”

A pause, a slight tilt of his head as he glanced out through the wide-open doors. The bird spread its wings and croaked a greeting before settling back down to its unblinking watch.

Xander looked slowly back at her. “I thought I’d imagined the raven that watched me from the branches as I fought the reborn.”

Zanaya gave him an enigmatic smile; let the child discover the mysteries of his grandfather in his own time. “If I share what enticed Alexander to leave your side, you must keep it to yourself until the knowledge becomes widespread.”

“I promise,” Xander said at once.

Still amused, she said, “First General Avelina has just woken up.”

Xander’s mouth dropped open. “You mean Archangel Titus’s mother?”