Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(62)

Zanaya was winning, of course she was winning . . . when Lijuan appeared right behind her, a nightmare out of mist.

Zani!

Even as he shouted out the mental warning and began to fly toward her, Lijuan gripped Zanaya’s upper arms with fingers as thin as claws and struck with the speed of a cobra to sink her teeth into Zanaya’s neck.

And Alexander’s world ended.





Desolation





30


Lovers fall and lovers rise. The river stops flowing. This time will be the end.

Alexander jerked awake out of a terrible sleep, certain he’d heard an old, old voice in his head. Older than that of an Ancient. A voice he knew . . . but no, it was gone now, whatever nightmare it was that haunted him.

Twisting to sit on the edge of his bed, his feet on the floor and his head in his hands, he tried to reset his mind. For once, he was clean, his naked body devoid of streaks of dirt and other, more viscous substances. Hair that had been damp when he went into sleep was now dry, and his wings no longer carried the stench of the reborn.

He’d been fighting day after bitter day to cleanse his territory of the last traces of Lijuan’s evil, and finally—months after that bitch’s death—it was done. No more child reborn roamed the landscape, though he had sentries on constant surveillance and all the leaders of the towns and cities and villages knew to contact the fortress at once should there be any sign of reborn.

So it was that he’d finally lain down to rest for longer than an hour or two.

He was tired.

To the bone and beyond.

Even archangels could get tired when they didn’t rest and barely ate. It was only Xander thrusting food into his hands that had made him remember to fuel his body. His grandson, who had already lost his parents and had been born long after his grandmother and grandfather went into Sleep, was the sole reason Alexander forced himself to continue on as more than an automaton tasked with cleaning up Lijuan’s mess.

Some would say that he could now lie down into a final and eternal Sleep, slip into that silent unthinking deep where he didn’t have to experience heartbreak every time he opened his eyes and remembered that his Zani was gone.

The only reason he didn’t was Xander.

An angel of a bare two hundred with skin of dark gold and hair of a brown so dark it was moments away from black. Alexander knew that, though his wings appeared black when folded, the black faded into brown with hints of gold. The biggest surprise, however, was the underside of pure silver.

A silver identical to the shade of Alexander’s wings.

Family. They were family. And his grandson was dealing with a grief not many angels his age ever had to experience, both his parents lost in a single act of violence. The youth was doing it with grace, but he remained fragile within. Oh, the child wouldn’t put it that way—he was a warrior after all—but Alexander had mentored many a youth, and he’d raised a son.

He knew the boy was hurting yet. As he knew Xander would break forever if he lost his grandfather, too. The child had bowed in respect to Alexander when they first met, not knowing that Alexander wanted no such formality—he’d wanted only to hold this boy who was the last surviving piece of Rohan. The child of Alexander’s child had been bewildered and grief-stricken then, and he didn’t know Alexander.

But things had changed. Alexander no longer saw his grandson as a memory of Rohan. Xander was far too much his own man for that—and what an astonishing young man he was; gifted in battle but also with a way about him that said he understood the pain and suffering of others.

Xander, too, knew him now not as a powerful Ancient but as the grandfather who’d race him across the plain, and who’d laugh with him when the boy made one of his rare—but always amusing—jokes.

No, Alexander couldn’t go into Sleep. Not until Xander had healed and grown to the point he no longer needed the old man who was his only living family in the entire world. Because Alexander felt old for the first time in his existence.

Weighed down by grief and a missing that wouldn’t end.

Always before, he’d known she’d wake. He’d been able to bear it because there existed a future in which she’d wake. Now . . .

“You miss her,” his grandson had said a month after the war. “Lady Zanaya.”

“Ah, Xander.” He’d gripped the side of the boy’s neck, tried to dig up a smile. “You’re too young to be interested in the love stories of us Ancients.”

But stubborn Xander, blood of Alexander’s blood, had stood firm. “I wish I’d met her.”

“I do, too. More than anything.” However, his grandson’s squadron had been on the farthest border from the fortress at the time of Zanaya’s waking, and Alexander had thought he’d have plenty of time to introduce this bright young piece of his heart to the woman who owned that heart. “She would’ve liked you.”

“I looked her up in the histories,” Xander had added. “They’re old, those histories, and most of the chapters are written from the accounts of the Ancients who were around at the time, but one thing remains a constant throughout: many of the fragments say Alexander and Zanaya or Zanaya and Alexander, as if to see one was to see the other.”

He’d smiled then, a smile formed of pain and grief and echoes of joy. “She’d be very angry at such an interpretation. Never say so to Zanaya.”