Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(59)

No word. Alexander’s mental voice was grim. Lijuan did well to seed so much chaos across so many different territories. She has broken us into pieces.

Zanaya felt her own face tighten. Were she not evil, she could’ve been a great leader.

She did hold somewhat of that position in the Cadre prior to this descent into madness. That was before any Ancients were awake.

Zanaya shrugged. As we discussed before the world turned to pain and death and sorrow, living a long time doesn’t make us wise. It just makes us old and worn-out and—at worst—a threat to the world.

A long pause from the man she’d loved for all eternity—but not enough to stay forever awake. As he hadn’t loved her enough to go into Sleep for a millennium or two.

When he did speak, it was to say, We’ll talk about this after the battle. For now, she is the threat.

Agreed. They weren’t young angels on the cusp of their first love; they were Ancients and archangels, their priorities shaped by the needs of the people they ruled.

They flew on.

Until at last they hit the border of the city called Manhattan where the battle was taking place. Zanaya knew they must’ve been spotted by sentries long before so it was no surprise to find Raphael waiting for her and Alexander in the sky. But fascinated as she was by this child of Caliane’s, she was even more compelled by the angel who hovered at his side.

Elena Deveraux. That was her name.

Zanaya had made it a point to find out that piece of information after she’d learned of this most unusual being. She’d thought to come face-to-face with a callow youth, or perhaps a scared mortal thrust into the world of archangels. But this woman with her hair the hue of white flame and her skin of dark gold, her wings formed of wild fire, was a warrior.

Forget about the fact that Raphael’s consort bristled with weapons, like would always recognize like. But Elena Deveraux was something else, too. “A mortal turned angel,” Zanaya said, giving voice to her wonderment. “How extraordinary. And such wings.”

The newborn angel held Zanaya’s gaze without flinching, and Zanaya found herself impressed again. Yes, she could see why this young one was consort to an archangel. She had within her a spark rare and precious.

Elena parted her lips as if to reply, but shifted her gaze toward the water in the distance a heartbeat later. “The sea aurora’s back.”

Zanaya looked at the ripple of multihued light on darkest blue turned translucent, haunting and lovely, and gave a small smile. “Qin’s legend, that is what we called it in child tales. An old one.” Older than Alexander or Caliane. “Will he rise, do you think?”

“He does or he doesn’t.” Alexander’s tone came across as harsh but she knew that was because of his worry for the people he’d left behind, for the soldiers fighting a war that was knives into their hearts. “We must prepare for battle.”

Giving a curt nod, Raphael and Elena led them to the silver spear of Raphael’s sky-piercing Tower, and into what Raphael told them was the war room. The archangel had also done them the courtesy of informing them that the rest of the Cadre was already present. Barring, of course, the enemy, Lijuan, and that accursed traitor Charisemnon—Zanaya’s hopes had come true on that point and the latter was no longer among the living. Titus had dispatched him before coming to New York.

Armed with foreknowledge of the Cadre’s presence, Zanaya walked into the war room prepared for the thrum of power in the air, the subtle—and not so subtle—posturing.

Rolling her eyes internally because some archangels would never learn, she kept her silence as she was wont to do when gathering intelligence. Alexander, in contrast, got right into the thick of it.

“I left my territory overrun by reborn to come here.” His hand was a fist against the table around which they were gathered, the field of battle laid out on it in intricate detail. “We must end this here and quickly.”

The discussion shifted to tactics and numbers and the best approaches. Zanaya was paying attention—she’d long been a general, would die as one—but she couldn’t keep from glancing at Raphael and his consort. It intrigued her that Elena Deveraux made no attempt to push her way into the Cadre discussion, not seeking to treat Raphael’s power as her own.

Some would see in that a diffidence that betrayed her mortal roots. They’d be fools. This was the confidence of a woman at home in her own skin and her own power. She had no need to rely on that of her lover. I think I will like you, Elena Deveraux, Zanaya thought to herself.

“Before we go any further,” Raphael said at one point, while that idiot Aegaeon was blustering on like a peacock with its hideous screech, “you should all watch this.”

The moving images that played against a screen that had dropped down from the ceiling told the story of the battles that had already taken place on this land . . . and the black evil that Raphael’s people had witnessed. Zanaya’s gut iced over—because what she was seeing was the impossible: an archangel feeding off her wounded, the very people who trusted and looked to her for protection. Instead, Lijuan had left them desiccated husks in her wake.

Feathers turned dusty and colorless, skin become parchment, faces frozen in twisted agony, only hollows where their eyes should’ve been. A few yet reached out even in death, as if pleading with their archangel to the final breath.

Silence overhung the war room.