Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(19)

Zanaya spun out with a dangerous kick, but her friend was fast, grabbed her foot and flipped her, evading Zanaya’s wings as they snapped out to knock her over. Zanaya gloried in sparring with a warrior who so evenly matched her. There were very few moves she could pull that Aureline hadn’t seen a thousand times over. Which constantly pushed her to be better, faster, more innovative.

“I’m hardly going to allow my sex to dry up and blow away while he’s working his way through a harem,” she muttered during the next span of quiet as they restarted the bout after a tussle that had ended in a draw. It wasn’t that she was jealous of Alexander’s lovers. That would be madness indeed when the two of them had literally never touched, but she hated this hold he had on her that meant she was even aware of who he bedded.

As for Zanaya . . . she was just as bad, wasn’t she? She never promised her lovers anything, gave them only her body and her affection, and always cut matters off before passion could fuse with emotion. “My obsession is in the form of the mind,” she admitted to Auri, infuriated by herself for it. “As if now that I know Alexander exists, I can’t fully give myself to any other. Makes me exactly like Rzia.”

“You’ve said your mother has pined for your father until she’s made herself and her world a small and toxic place,” her best friend argued. “Zanaya, you might have a fascination with Alexander, but it has done nothing to stifle your growth.”

Zanaya grunted and blocked a blow from Aureline. “I’d rather not feel the fascination at all,” she gritted out. “It’s like a bee buzzing inside my skull. I want rid of it!”

Aureline straightened from her fighting stance, held up a hand to signal a pause. “You know, if it was anyone else, Zan, I’d tell them to seek a healer, get past the obsession.”

Zanaya flushed. “Yes?”

“Yes. Because the idea of reaching for an archangel? It would be a hopeless goal. But it’s not anyone else. It’s you.” Aureline’s lovely and intelligent eyes held her in place far more effectively than any sparring hold.

“Your drive is the first reason I don’t believe you to be delusional,” her friend said. “The second is that I was waiting for you in his court when you crossed paths with Alexander. I witnessed how he looked at you in turn. It’s not in your head—the reaction between you was . . . potent. Unsettling in its intensity, if I’m being truthful.”

Aureline bit down on her plush lower lip. “But it’s going to be a long journey, my friend. The man he is? When it comes to being with a fellow warrior, he won’t ever lie with anyone below a general. It’d be different if you weren’t a warrior. He’s attracted to you because of that, because of who you are. But he also won’t lie with you—to do so would be to change the course of your existence.”

“Donkey shit,” Zanaya muttered, thumping a fisted hand against the stone wall of the training ring. “I have full control over my life.”

Aureline gave her one of those curiously wise looks. “You may believe so, Zan, but the years that separate you, the power differential . . . can you not feel it around even our sire? It’s a pressure on the skin, a thing of such vastness that it’s elemental.

“And you’re no mortal,” Aureline continued, “to grow in the body and the mind at chaotic speed. You’re an angel, your growth constricted by the demands and gifts of immortality. You aren’t tough enough or old enough to take on an archangel and remain yourself. Your mind is too malleable yet.” Walking over to the table that held an array of weapons, she grabbed a fighting staff. “But we’ll get you there.”

“My ambitions are my own.” Zanaya caught the staff Aureline threw across. “I won’t alter them for any man.”

“Didn’t say you would.” They clashed in the middle of the ring, both of them holding the pressure on their staffs. “I’m saying Archangel Alexander sees that power in you and is waiting for you to grow into it and that perhaps we can accelerate the process.”

Zanaya hesitated, ended up with Auri’s staff at her throat. Ignoring it, she said, “Do you truly believe so?” It remained painfully hard for her to allow herself to be vulnerable, but if there was anyone of whom she could ask this question that cut through her external armor to reveal her soft insides, it was her closest friend.

Pulling back her staff, Aureline wiped the back of one forearm over her brow. “Yes. The two of you . . . that moment . . . Such a demanding bond, it’s not for me, Zan. It’s too much, too violent. But for you? Yes.”

Aureline searched her face. “But are you sure? I don’t think such an attraction will ever be comfortable. It’ll always demand everything, threaten to crush you in the passion of its grip.”

Zanaya thought of Auri’s parents and their sweet kindness to one another. After witnessing it, she’d decided she wanted that kind of love. A love warm and of the heart, and nothing akin to the dark obsession of Rzia’s desire for Camio. And yet she was her mother’s daughter—and the only man with whom she could imagine spending eternity was an archangel who probably wasn’t good for her.

Just like Rzia and Camio . . . but for one crucial factor.

“If I am ever with Alexander,” she said at last, “it’ll be as solid a thing as the stone of the mountains. He won’t play games of trust. The general who lives within him has too much honor for that. And fidelity, Auri, is more precious to me than any gemstone.”