Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(66)

Because Zani was the fulcrum on which his existence turned.

So many years they’d spent apart, and yet when she’d woken, it was as if they’d kissed but a day ago. He knew her in his bones, loved her with every cell in his body.

. . . it isn’t the last ending.

Words Cassandra had spoken when he handed Zanaya over to her care. Words he’d clung to for ten long, lonely years. Even more so than he’d clung to the echo of that ghostly prophecy he’d heard as he slept. That might well have been a dream, while the others were words Cassandra had spoken to his face.

Had he his way, he would’ve kept his Zani close, watched over her himself. But he’d known that his proud lover would hate that with every fiber of her being. Theirs had always been a relationship of equals. Midnight and silver, two streams that had crossed time and time again . . . but never blended.

Some might call that a broken love, but Alexander knew the truth: it had to be that way for their love to work. He and his Zani, neither one of them was built to bend. They were however, built to be loyal and to hold on to those they cherished.

“You are as arrogant as I,” he’d said to her one memorable day, after she’d knocked him to the ground in combat training and was holding a sharp stiletto blade to his throat. She’d been dressed in one of those short shifts she liked to wear to fight, her arms lithely muscled, her hair pulled back in a braid, and her skin glorious in the sunlight.

His comment had been the continuation of a discussion they’d been having over breakfast, and that day, she’d thrown back her head and laughed before jumping up to her feet and reaching down to offer him her hand so he could haul himself upright. He hadn’t needed the assist but he’d taken her hand nonetheless.

“Well, perhaps you’re right, Xander.” A wicked spark in her eye. “At least I’m not old and arrogant.” Then she’d taken off into the sky with an unrepentant grin.

Growling, he’d taken off after her.

Zanaya was the only one who’d teased him long after they’d both settled into the Cadre, the only one who’d played with him. He and Caliane, their relationship had never been like that. Callie had always been calm, centered, a touch old before her time. Only with Nadiel had he seen her become a young woman, carefree and laughing.

As only with Zanaya had Alexander become a playful young man.

Alexander? Are you planning to moodily skulk on the mountain for much longer? Or will you join us for a meal?

Alexander scowled, reminded that he did now have one other person in his life who treated him with irreverence. Your mother would be appalled by your manners, pup.

Good thing she’s still Sleeping. I have enough to deal with, given the refusal of my sisters to revere me as an archangel. Plague me they do.

Well aware that Titus adored his siblings, and often visited them to be so harangued and plagued, to be called “Tito” and treated as their beloved youngest sib, Alexander was hit by a wave of piercing melancholy. Oh how he missed his brother as Osiris had been before he became a monster. He missed laughing with him as Titus laughed with his sibs, missed their conversations and their swims.

It was as if his grief over Zanaya had breathed new life into that older pain.

His heart was as heavy as stone most days, but he tried never to reveal that side of himself to Xander. To his grandson, he was his grandfather, strong and well recovered and back to himself. Xander could believe it because he’d never met Zanaya; had he met her, had he seen her with Alexander, he’d have known that no man could ever get over a woman like Alexander’s Zani.

To give himself strength to keep up the act, Alexander oft made it a point to think of the light in his life.

He had good friends in Titus—and now, Lady Sharine. She’d always been Caliane’s closest friend and was apt to remain so for eternity, but Alexander had come to know her better over the years through her relationship with Titus. He’d come to understand why Caliane so cherished her bond with an angel Alexander had always thought of as an artist lost in her own world.

Then there was the youngest and most precious spark in his entire universe: Xander.

You jest? You are a grandfather?

Throat thick at the memory of Zanaya’s joyous astonishment, he rose into the sunset sky. As was his wont every time he took to the sky, he looked toward the horizon in the direction of where Cassandra had vanished with Zanaya in her arms.

The seer’s fire had been in Raphael’s territory at the time, but Alexander wasn’t credulous enough to think it remained there. An Ancient would never be so open about her place of rest—especially when she also watched over multiple other badly wounded archangels.

And Cassandra was beyond ancient; no one had any idea of the depth of her power or of what she was capable. Qin knew her best, and he certainly wasn’t giving them any clues. The archangel who’d stepped in to watch over Astaad’s territory rarely even spoke.

That was when it happened.

Sunset began to turn to midnight in a racing wave. Not the dark gray of encroaching night. The pure and soft obsidian of the Queen of the Nile. Heart thundering, he listened . . . and he heard her. The sweet and haunting music that was the wind in melody. Zanaya’s song.

Alexander! This happened before the war. Titus’s voice in his mind.

It’s Zanaya. Alexander barely kept his mental voice from shaking when he caught a wave of scents lovely and unknowable. She wakes. And this time, she did so on her own terms, with her song and her scents.