Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(40)

She took off in a hard burst. And she didn’t look back even though she wanted to do so with every fiber of her being. He blamed her for leaving him and going into Sleep, but he’d left her just as much when he’d chosen a ceaseless reign over her desire to heal their aging minds and leave the world to the young.

I will never again be that powerless boy, Zani. I will never allow anyone to crush me and mine under their boot.

Words he’d spoken to her untold mortal lifetimes ago, when he’d told her of what it had been like to grow up an unimportant part of Rumaia’s poisonous court. She understood that the angry and wounded boy he’d once been was a permanent part of Alexander’s psyche; he’d settle for nothing less than a position as an apex predator. But she also understood another immutable truth that he’d chosen to forget: archangels weren’t meant to rule forever.

Look at Antonicus. He shouldn’t be awake; he was so clearly not of this time and not suited to it in any fashion. It wasn’t simply a matter of being outpaced by new knowledge, like that which had faciliated the meeting of the Cadre. She’d seen great and wondrous inventions during her reign that—from what she’d experienced of the present world thus far—appeared lost to time.

Such was the way, even in a world of immortals. People forgot and discoveries were made over and over. The world was in constant flux. It could be that millennia from now, they might live once again in a time of chaos and brute power. That might be the right time for an angel like Antonicus—he could do good in such a world.

Civilizations rose and fell, even angelic civilizations.

The great civilization Zanaya had built, perhaps it remained in the echoes of history, in the memories of some old ones, but it would’ve fallen into the desert in its time, as was the right way. As the Nile flowed in new routes every eon, life changed, turned, became.

I grew while you Slept.

She hissed out a breath, the wound pulsing anew. And she wondered at all she’d missed of Alexander’s life while she wasn’t in this world. She’d missed a child, for one.

Thinking on that, she considered if she was jealous.

No.

Children were a gift, to be treasured. And they both knew the truth. No other lover either one of them had taken over their long, long lifetimes could end the tempestuous vortex that swirled between them. Sometimes, it got too much, demanded too much, and they looked to quieter, less demanding arms. Never accepting that they’d inevitably find themselves back in the vortex.

“I’d die if Meher lay with another,” Auri had said to Zanaya once, during a time when Zanaya and Alexander were no longer a couple. “How can you bear it?”

“Because when we break, we break, Auri.” Her heart had ached at the memory of each awful break. “We shatter into splinters. There’s no us, only a memory of us—and a memory of anguish and hurt.”

A solemn look from her closest friend. “That doesn’t sound like love, Zan. That sounds like pitched battle.”

Zanaya had laughed then, her amusement an ironic thing. “You speak truth. It seems I’m not built for a gentle and kind love. I’m built for war. So is he.” And that was why they were forever doomed.

That knowledge heavy on her mind, she swept over the mountains and stopped to offer assistance where needed. The vast majority of the squadron commanders and ground crews had no idea who she was, but accepted her presence because it was obvious that Alexander had to know she was in the heart of his territory—the general had never run anything but a tight ship.

She saw some of them talking into small rectangular devices and narrowed her eyes, thinking of the “screens” through which she’d spoken to the others in the Cadre. It seemed to her that these were miniature versions of those screens, so likely they could be used for communication. No doubt they were requesting confirmation from the fortress that she was no threat to their people.

Well, she’d have time to learn about these new inventions after the war was done. For now, it felt good to use her abilities for acts simple but necessary: to clear floodwaters, lift people or animals out of danger, or explode the eerie spikes of stone that had erupted out of the earth without warning, this Cascade truly a thing beyond.

Waves of tiredness rippled over her more than once. She shrugged them off, knowing they weren’t related to physical exhaustion, had nothing to do with a need for rest. No, this was another kind of tiredness.

Of this constant pitched battle between her and Alexander.

Why do we do it?

She had no answer to her question by the time she had to turn back in readiness to fly to Archangel Neha’s territory. They were to meet on her border with this Zhou Lijuan who thought herself above them all, in readiness to witness Antonicus’s heroics—or idiocy, the interpretation dependent on the individual.

“Despite the fact I believe him to be putting his life at risk for no rational reason,” Zanaya said to Alexander as they flew, “I want him to succeed. For in so doing, he’d show us a path out of the horrors she has spawned.”

Alexander responded to her archangel-to-archangel conversational overture in kind. They’d both been polite since her return, well aware that what was coming allowed no room for extraneous emotion.

“I feel the same,” Alexander said. “Antonicus isn’t an archangel to whom I feel any affinity, but I wish him well in this. We need him to succeed.”