Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(34)

Alexander didn’t rage, just threw himself into his work as an archangel. And, after a century of silence between them, he took the odd lover. No one who’d ever be to him what Zanaya had been, but safe choices, women who asked nothing of him but what he was willing to give, women who would never make him question a single decision, much less threaten to push him into the abyss. He knew Zanaya must’ve moved on, too, but as he’d once listened for news of her, he now blocked all knowledge of First General Zanaya.

He also began to accept that they were too combustible together, hurt each other too much. Love that deep wounded and bruised and destroyed. The loss of her had brought him to his knees, turned him hollow for decades.

Far better to stick with the safe choices.

Then one night, the entire world turned dark in a roar of silken silence as opulent as a panther’s fur and he knew. “Zanaya has ascended,” he said to Avelina while staring up at that luminous sky, while a melody beyond the ability of any musician to mimic filled the air . . . along with scents as lush as Zanaya’s night. “My love has ascended.”

Because no matter what, that would never not be true: she was his love and would always be his love. That had never been the problem between them. And now, she was his equal in power.

Hope he’d believed long dead unfurled its wings inside him, the youth he’d once been alive in the scarred heart of the archangel.



* * *



*

On the other side of the world, Zanaya’s back snapped out of the vicious arch into which it had been bent in the air, her wings back under her control. The power that had poured out of her mouth and eyes to drench the sky in midnight shut off, but the windstorm that held her aloft did not.

It cradled her, brutal power and speed that exhilarated.

Laughing at the primal beauty of it, she danced in the tempests before sucking them into herself. It was pain that sent her spiraling to land hard on the ground—and it was ecstasy that had her hair streaming back as scents sensual and wild wove over her skin, through her veins.

Her outward form may not have changed, but she was far bigger than she’d ever been, could touch every point in the universe.

And she knew what she was now, what she’d become.

An archangel. One of the Cadre of Ten.

A being unkillable by anyone but a fellow archangel.





18


Alexander planned to go to Zanaya, court her until she was his, this time forever, but she came to him mere days after her ascension, just flew into his arms. Their kiss was a joyous homecoming, tears streaking both their faces. So overwhelmed was he that it took him a moment to notice the flickers of silvery light in her irises that must’ve come with ascension.

Earthbound stars. As if she truly was a piece of the night sky.

“Zani, my Zani.” He pressed his forehead to her own. “Archangel Zanaya.”

No one had predicted this, for while Zanaya was a power, so were multiple other angels of her age. Yet it made perfect sense to him that it would be her. Zanaya had always burned as bright as a star, magnetic and impossible to ignore. Now, that star controlled a territory, and they were equals on every level—including raw power.

They were also archangels who couldn’t be in the same space for long periods of time without stirring violence in one another, but they made it work. It got ragged at times, and they did fight, but they were a unit for a hundred of the best years of his life . . . until war broke out among the Cadre and they found themselves on opposite sides of the issue, neither willing to back down.

Alexander was convinced of his choice.

Zanaya was convinced of her choice.

He saw in her refusal to even consider his point of view the impulsive stubbornness of a young archangel. She saw in his rejection of her stance an infuriating condescension.

There was no middle ground.

But Alexander refused to strike against her and she wouldn’t strike against him. Neither, however, did they support each other. The aftermath was as bitter as the fruit on Osiris’s island that even the animals wouldn’t eat, both of them angry at the other for their choice and unable to forgive.

“It’s damaging to what the mortals call the soul,” Caliane said to him after war’s end. “What you and Zanaya do to each other. Perhaps my friend, this love story is not meant to have a happy ending.”

Her words inflicted a wound, for Alexander had begun to realize the same awful truth. Zanaya was to him what no one else had ever been or ever would be—a literal piece of his heart—but they were akin to two opposing elements that, together, could create great beauty . . . or great carnage.



* * *



*

Despite his acceptance that he and Zanaya just weren’t meant to be, two people whose love wasn’t enough to bridge the differences between them, Alexander fell back into her orbit more than once in the eons that followed—as she fell into his. In time, they grew past covetousness and jealousy, in no doubt that their hearts belonged to each other alone. It was a truth evident and unassailable that no one could ever truly come between them.

Their trust in one another was profound, their loyalty to each other unquestioned by even their worst enemies. All knew that Alexander would never make war against Zanaya, as she’d never make war against him. There was no point attempting to even foment such a thing, for that line Alexander and his Zani would never cross, not even in the darkest maw of anger. But the rest . . . the struggles of power, of two immovable opposing forces with their own scars . . . that, they could not navigate.