Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(53)

In the distance, Raphael did the same, the boy as well as the diaries in his arms.

Then, with Osiris’s ashes held in one hand, Alexander used his power to collapse the ground under the stronghold in such a way that it formed a uniform crater that cradled the house. And though no ravens could ever fly in this cold place, a raven’s feather fluttered to land atop the roof.

He made sure the stronghold remained undamaged as he dug the crater deeper and deeper. Until at last, the stronghold sat so deep that no one would ever accidentally find it. To further make sure of that, Alexander turned the rock shelf below which it had sheltered into dust.

He erased all other rocky structures in the vicinity, too.

There were no longer any landmarks here for anyone to track, to find. Go, get the boy warm, he said to Raphael. I’ll cover the stronghold with the excavated dirt, then watch the snow fall until the landscape is pristine. And his brother’s crimes had been buried. Such was not Alexander’s way—he believed in public condemnation, but this secret, if known, could spawn more evil.

So this was how it had to be. The child could be passed off as a disastrously failed Making by an unknown angel, his feral nature a byproduct of growing up in squalid conditions—and his distinctive eyes a result of Alexander using his archangelic power to try to ameliorate the damage done to him.

No one would disbelieve it. What reason would they have to? Chimeras, after all, were creatures of myth, nothing but a flight of the imagination. Alexander could safely predict that not a single person would so much as think of that as an option. And if an abused child might be saved, ninety-nine percent of angels would attempt it; in this situation, angelkind wouldn’t find it odd in the least that an archangel had expended his power on a mere mortal.

Still—Do you agree with my decision, young Rafe? He couldn’t guarantee that his love for his brother wasn’t clouding his judgment.

The blue fire in Raphael’s eyes was apparent even from this distance. Yes. This knowledge can’t be permitted to spread. It’d find a foothold in the ugliest corners of our society and it would lead to more killing, more evil.

Alexander wasn’t one to ask for anyone’s advice, but today he nodded. The child is under my protection. Make it known. He had a feeling that wouldn’t be necessary for long—the chimera had bonded to Raphael and everyone knew the young pup would be ascending sooner rather than later.

The young angel’s power might be termed catastrophic for someone of his age except that Raphael had a dark maturity to him. Watching his mother execute his father, then having that same mother crash him to the earth, smashing him to pieces . . . yes, it had all marked Callie’s boy.

Raphael hesitated. I’m sorry, Alexander. I never had a brother, but I know what it’s like to lose family to madness.

The boy was being kind in ascribing Osiris’s decent into horror to madness. The truth, as Alexander had seen in his brother’s mind, a truth of which he was certain Raphael was also cognizant, was that his brother had been very aware of the evil of what he was doing—he just hadn’t cared. Osiris had thought his twisted version of “scientific progress” more important.

But Alexander just nodded to Raphael, waiting only until the other angel had flown away with the living symbol of Osiris’s descent into the abyss before he began to use his power to bury the stronghold. His heart was a block of ice by the time he finished, but he landed and stood in the falling snow to watch the last part of it, the blanket of white that was to be the shroud of this burial ground.

And then, though he didn’t understand why, he sent his power up into the sky in a shower of sparks. For all the children as bright and beautiful who’d never had a chance to bloom.

Rising into the air in the aftermath, he left the place where the dead could now rest, and he flew and flew and flew, until he was as far from the burial site as he could go. Then he dropped his brother’s ashes into the heart of a volcano. The final ending. Because rather than being known throughout the world, Alexander would ensure that no one spoke his brother’s name. As Osiris had erased the names and futures of all those lost children.

Eternity was a long time; Osiris would be forgotten soon enough.

A fitting punishment to a crime so malevolent and cold.

He flew home with another crack in his heart, another scar that took away a piece of the youth he’d once been. He’d become harder over the years—growth was inevitable, and his growth had included eons of being an archangel and holding vast power and with it, the responsibility for countless lives.

But this hardness . . . Would his Zani even know him when she woke from her Sleep? Or would she look at him and see a stranger grim and scarred to the point that he no longer had in him the man she’d loved?

Will you know her?

A whisper from the most pragmatic core of his nature, a question that almost stopped him mid-flight.

Zanaya had Slept for thousands of years while he was changing, growing. It wasn’t only possible but likely that they’d be very different people when they met again in some distant future.

His heart cracked in half this time, and the scar that formed over it was rigid, his hardness a thing of unbreakable granite.





26


Zanaya could’ve never predicted the horror of the story Alexander was about to tell. “Oh, my love,” she murmured when he fell silent, her throat thick. “You had no choice.”