Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(3)

Today, none of the Sleepers had a pulse, showed any signs of life.

She didn’t know if they dreamt, but she did know that they had no awareness of the world. That was a mercy given their injuries. Yet she could feel their minds, huge and powerful, and those minds were . . . not at rest.

Had one of her brethren asked her how she knew these facts, she couldn’t have answered them. All she had were guesses. Perhaps it was because the wounded archangels Slept in the embrace of her fire, their minds linked to her by threads tenuous that allowed her to monitor their lives. For, despite all outward appearances, they lived, the spark within flickering but not extinguished.

Yet.

She couldn’t see any of their future timelines, not even the merest glimmer. Each led to a tangled knot so tight that it was pure darkness.

Yet she caught other things in the slipstreams that impinged on her shallow rest. Her owls fluttered around her, their feathers soft and white as she jerked and twitched in her Sleep. Sensing what awaited, she tried not to look at the slipstream. She was so very tired, her mind a stained-glass window so fractured with cracks that it could never be whole again.

The colors of her were the colors of him.

Qin, her Qin.

Tears rolled down her cheeks as she fought the compulsion to look, but she’d never won that fight in the eons since her “gift” was first bestowed on her. At times, when she was sane, she wondered if part of her anger was because of how she always lost the battle. Was she so very vain and arrogant that she was enraged by her constant inability to win?

Laughter, a touch mad.

Oh, that was her.

No, she wasn’t angry. She’d long ago moved past anger, through terror and rage, into a sorrow so heavy that it was her very breath. Sometimes, she thought she must be born of tears, nothing to her but saltwater.

Her mind kaleidoscoped, shattered again, more fractures on the stained glass.

And the slipstream opened out in front of her, showing her countless threads, millions of lives, millions of possibilities. One choice could lead to this, another to that. But some choices . . . some choices led always to a single thing. Roads funneled into a single choke point. Those were the futures set in stone.

As was the future that pulsed red in front of her in the shape of scarlet wings that glowed.

Red as blood.

But beautiful.

Even as the thought passed through her mind, the wings began to darken. To a rich ruby that was lovely. Then edged with blue. Still lovely. On a sigh that made her flinch, the blue and the red started to mingle but rather than the violet hue that should have resulted, the wings turned a sickly green.

Droplets of blood crawled down the feathers, each droplet a viscous black that splattered on the slipstream and coated the highways of it in a quickly spreading plague that decimated all future timelines. Feathers fell off the wings, further spreading the plague.

She jolted, her heart echoing the twisted tapestry of the rotting pair of wings.

“No.” A whisper. “No. They have paid the price. They have survived.” This should be a time of rebuilding and hope.

But the wings continued to contaminate the slipstreams with their poison.

One.

By.

One.

Over.

And.

Over.

Until the wings were nothing but bone rotted through with infection and the entirety of the future a noxious stranglehold with no way out. Screaming, she lifted her hands to claw out her eyes . . . but her owls stepped on her fingers, reminding her that she could Sleep, could fall deep, deep below the surface and allow herself to drown in nothingness.

But she couldn’t hear her beloved owls today. Couldn’t see them. All she could see were the rotting bones of the wings, breaking, falling, spreading more poison. Digging her nails into her eyes, she clawed them out. Blood coated her fingers, slick and iron bright. But it didn’t matter how much damage she did to herself. She still saw. She still knew.

Her owls, distressed, fluttered their wings in an effort to calm her, but still she screamed.

Until . . .

A single thread of the slipstream that glittered with black diamonds. It split off from a thicker line. The main line was coated in the poison and went into the knot that was the end of eternity, the end of everything. The diamond-dark one flowed into a future beyond which lay more endless possibilities, stars blinking to life one after the other.

Cassandra wanted to cup her bloody hands around that single thread of hope, but that wasn’t how her gift worked, how it had ever worked, was why she was always a little mad. “A single crossroads.” Her murmur reached no one, caught in the fires she’d set up to stop her thoughts leaking into the minds of others.

Elena, that mortal child turned angel, she deserved a little peace from the whispers of a mad Ancient.

So it was only her owls that heard her screams, her words.

For the archangels she held in her arms couldn’t hear, couldn’t listen, were in a place far beyond pain, beyond this world, perhaps beyond healing.

Closing eyes that were already regenerating, Cassandra fell back into a fitful Sleep. She would continue to listen for her charges and for the other. Perhaps one would wake. Perhaps she would glimpse a joyous surprise in the slipstream. It had happened before. Some forces were greater than fate itself.

For she had seen Elena alive in only a single fragile timeline.

The mortal had fallen in the arms of her archangel, broken and dying, in every timeline. But in every other one, she’d died. Vanished, and with her, all the timelines that rippled off her, the world a wholly different place.