Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(61)

She felt herself begin to bristle. “Lover, you can’t ask without giving orders.” But because arrogance or demands, she loved him all the same, she turned and pressed a kiss to his palm. “You’re too used to having the world bend to you. I never will.”

Holding those silver eyes that were now afire, she placed a hand over her heart. “But we will speak. It’s past time, don’t you think?” They had to work out what they were to each other now. Eons of love had left their mark, an imprint that could never be erased, but did that mean it was more than memory?

“Perhaps it’s seeing young Raphael and his consort together,” she said to him. “But I feel it, what we have missing between us. It’s been gone a long time, has it not?”

Alexander slipped his hand to her nape, squeezed. “What are you saying, Zani?” His heart thundered, his breath coming short and fast.

Lovely dark eyes holding his without fear, as she’d always done. “I don’t know,” was the soft answer. “I just know that we can’t continue this cycle endlessly.” Rising up on tiptoe, she touched her lips to his. “I have loved you more than I have ever loved anyone or anything my entire existence, Xander, my Xander. But you still love power more.”

“Zani.” His heart felt as if it was being wrenched out of him. “You’re wrong.”

A faint smile, that sparkle in her eye. “Am I then? Well, we shall see after this war is done.” Stepping back, she spread out her wings. “We’ll talk later, lover. It’s time for me to take position.”

He watched her sweep off the balcony, catch a rising wind current, before spreading his own wings. “After the war,” he promised the air, more than ready to have this out. Because if there was one thing he knew, it was that Zanaya was his yesterday and his today, and all the tomorrows to come.

His power stirred as he prepared himself for what was to come, his intent to melt all the metal around the enemy forces. Quite aside from the metal in the earth, many, many of the buildings in this city had rods of metal that acted as their spines. He’d felt it the instant he arrived, and he’d wondered if Raphael had forgotten what it was that the Archangel of Persia could do, the chaos he could cause . . . but then, Alexander had been gone from this world while this city—as it was now—was born.

As it stood, Raphael had no reason to be concerned. Alexander was no longer in the mood to pick fights with young archangels just going about their business. He hadn’t told Zanaya of that irrational part of his history, was ashamed of it now that he looked back. Jessamy had been right to call him on his idiotic posturing, right to remind him of the wisdom he’d once owned.

“You are the only one who calls me wise,” he’d told the slender angel with kindness woven into her very bones. “Everyone else believes I am a being of violence and war.”

“You are both, Alexander. You always have been.” A reminder that she was their Librarian now, the keeper of their histories, knew far more about him than he might imagine. “I think, if the test came again, you would stand on the side of right.”

“You are so young, Jessamy. Foolish, many would say.”

“Did they not call you the same when you stepped between two warring Ancients?”

He’d laughed then, delighted by her courage and her wit. Hers was the wisdom, he’d told himself, that had sent him into Sleep. What he’d refused to admit even to himself was that he was exhausted of living an existence devoid of his Zani. He’d been exhausted even before learning of Osiris’s crimes—and he’d stayed awake from then on only to watch over the wild chimera.

That chimera had been full-grown by the time Jessamy spoke to him. And the hole in his heart where Zani was meant to live had pulsed with agony each and every day. He could no longer bear being awake without her. To see her rising from the sands . . . beneath his anger had burst a joy incandescent.

His Zani was awake, was back in his arms.

And now they went into war.

But it wasn’t their first and wouldn’t be their last. They’d survived eons upon eons. They’d survive this too, and then they’d talk.

The world roared, Titus lifting up the earth beneath the enemy’s feet.

Landing hard on the asphalt of the abandoned road beyond which lay territory Lijuan’s people had won, he crouched down on one knee and placed his hand on the dirt that Titus had lifted to the surface for him by purposefully cracking this section of the road.

The song of the metals within hummed through him, pure and resonant.

Smiling, he unleashed his power and every piece of metal that was touching the earth began to melt. A few weapons, other tools. Nothing but collateral damage . . . because Alexander’s true target was the metal of the buildings that loomed over the enemy. “It’s time for your mistress to learn that she cannot dance with the entire Cadre and win.”

The air began to howl with violent winds the same instant that the buildings began to shiver and fall.

Smiling again and aware his eyes had gone a liquid and inhuman silver, he looked up.

To see his lover encased in a whirlwind as black as the heart of midnight as she trammeled the enemy, such a power as this world hadn’t seen for eons. Oh how he loved her. He’d tell her after the war, and they would work it all out.

He was so certain of that outcome that when things went wrong, he refused to believe it was happening. He’d just decimated an entire wing of Lijuan’s black-eyed army while Zanaya fought one of Lijuan’s generals a short distance away, the man’s eyes a hue that said he was fueled by his archangel, his power more than it should’ve been.