Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(18)

The deadly glow didn’t dim, but something of Alexander’s passion seemed to get through to Esphares and he stared at the stone table. “Why did I not see?” It was a question almost to himself.

But Alexander answered. “Because you are tired, sire, and a tired fighter always falls on the battlefield. It’s a law you taught me yourself, when I was a fledgling in your army.”

“Archangels don’t get tired, child,” Esphares said, and the way he addressed Alexander was a deliberate insult.

Alexander ignored it. “How many memories do you carry, sire? How much of the weight of history do you bear? How powerful is the crushing force of it all?”

Esphares spun around, his wings opening and snapping closed in a violent motion that created a powerful gust of wind and knocked over all the pieces on the battle table. “I am an archangel! I have the capacity to be endless!”

“Yes,” Alexander said. “But there’s a reason the Cadre is only ten or less. Never more. Else our world would burn ever more, as archangels lived atop archangels. There’s a reason we Sleep. We can be infinite, it’s true, but my mother used to say that being infinite is also our hidden curse. We see no end, and so we live without urgency. We begin to dim in ways small and terrible without ever seeing it.”

Esphares stared at him, death in his eyes. “Do you say I dim, Alexander?”

Alexander went down on one knee, his wings flared behind him. “I will never again serve anyone of your strategic skill, sire. I will never again know a man with such a wealth of battle knowledge in his mind.” He looked up, held that gaze that might yet be the final thing he saw. And he stuck true to his convictions. “But I would rather die today than live to see your light fade mistake by small mistake.”

A blink, a sudden absence of motion.

Then Esphares exhaled. “Is it so bad then, Alexander?”

Aware the danger had passed, Alexander yet stayed on bent knee, for Esphares would always have his respect. “It’s getting there, sire. Another year and you won’t listen to me. You’ll strike me dead and end up surrounded by those who fear you and will say whatever it is you wish them to say.”

Esphares, the scar on one side of his face an element of his history that he’d never explained and that no one else knew the answer to—for it defied the healing abilities of angelkind, came to Alexander and held out a hand. Taking it, Alexander allowed his archangel to haul him to his feet.

“You were never my second in the official records,” Esphares said, “but you have acted with the fidelity and courage of a second, and I won’t forget it. Go now, Alexander. I must think.”

“Sire.” Alexander bowed out of the room, near certain that this would be the last time he’d see the archangel with the wings of a gray falcon for eons to come.

He was right.

Esphares vanished into a place of Sleep secret and unknown and the storm clouds of war whispered away, the Cadre now nine. Alexander had the task of storing Esphares’s most precious belongings and he handled the task with all respect. Only after it was done to his satisfaction would he turn his mind to seeking his next position.

He’d long left behind all thoughts of ascension. So it was that it came without warning, a spike of impossible power that sent him soaring to the sky, alongside a raven caught in the inferno of his updraft. Then they both went down, the raven burning up as Alexander was struck by a lightning bolt that spread metal through his bones and fused him to the stone of the isolated mountaintop on which he’d landed.

The raven’s feathers were caught in the fusion, black filaments against the metal.

Alexander screamed and from his mouth spilled silver lightning that turned into liquid gold that burned. Across the world, metal melted, spiraled its way across landscapes, became frozen in strange and beautiful shapes. The sky flashed silver then violent gold with a flickering sheen to it.

There was no night.

Only a dazzling metallic day.

When it ended, he’d broken out of the stone and sat crouched on the mountaintop, his blood feeling like liquid metal and his power so vast it reached into forever. And he understood why Esphares hadn’t wanted to go into Sleep. He understood what it was to be greedy with and for power. He understood that he was now one of the ten most powerful beings on the planet.





11


When the sky turned to gleaming metal above Zanaya, deadly as a blade, it was a spear through her heart. She knew what had happened even before news spread across angelkind that First General Alexander had ascended. If he’d been beyond her reach before, he was now impossibly past it.

Zanaya wanted to scream at the sky, then at herself.

“I will not be my mother, obsessing over a man until that obsession is all I am!” she yelled to Auri as they sparred, her best friend the only person who knew of Zanaya’s reluctant fascination with the unattainable Alexander. “I will not!”

Blocking her move with one arm, Auri swept Zanaya’s feet out from under her, but Zanaya rolled back up with quicksilver swiftness.

“You’re hardly your mother,” her friend said, her breathing rough as the two of them circled each other. “It’s not like you’ve put yourself into near-seclusion and refuse to even look at another man. If I recall, you tumbled a rather delicious bite at the last border meeting.”