Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(78)

Her chest ached from the coldness of the air, but she dove down after Alexander, then raced with him to the sky. And for a moment, they were youths again, playing with each other, rather than two sensible and mature Ancients who should surely know better.

But the laughter and the delight faded in the next half hour, as they hit the halfway point in the no-fly zone, then moved beyond it. Until at last, they hovered over the cairn they’d built to mark the resting place of Antonicus, Archangel of the lost city of Elysium.

Buried in snow and ice, it had become a small and unremarkable hill in the midst of an ice-coated ocean. Her breath frost in the air, Zanaya landed in an area she remembered as being rocky. Her boots sunk in at once, the snow coming up to her thighs. “Ugh!”

Alexander did a terrible job of hiding his chuckle. Hovering above the snow, he said, “Not been in snow for a while, Zani?”

“I will deal with you later, General Alexander,” she muttered, and used archangelic power to melt away the snow so that she stood in a dry hollow.

When Alexander landed beside her, he didn’t bother. But he wasn’t playing anymore and neither was she, both of their gazes on the snowy hill that held an archangel caught between life and death.

She saw no signs of any disturbance, but still her tendons remained tense, her stomach clenched. Light flecks of snow began to fall, the scene peaceful and lovely, it was so silent and white.

“Do you still feel it?” Alexander asked. “The thread that pulls you here?”

Zanaya breathed in air that was sharp knives in her lungs. “Yes. It almost hurts now. I’m in the right place.” Taking a long breath of the frigid air, she held it for a full ten seconds before exhaling. “I need to know for sure.”

A short nod before Alexander lifted a hand and began to melt the snow off the cairn with delicate precision. She didn’t attempt to assist. He’d always been better than her when it came to such subtle use of power. In the same way that she could generate balls of angelfire at double his considerable speed.

Their differing strengths and weaknesses were one thing about which they’d never fought. Rather they’d seen it as a gift that meant they made a far stronger team. “Why aren’t we like this with everything?” she found herself saying in this cold and desolate place that was the grave of an archangel.

He didn’t glance away from his exacting work. “What are you talking about?”

“Cooperative, willing to be supple. Why do we always break?” Alexander had been her last thought before she went into her Sleep, and her final thought when she believed she was dying.

He was so important to her—so why couldn’t she make it work with him?

Why had they never achieved the grace that Raphael and his consort had already managed after but a blip of time? She’d felt that comfort between them, that acceptance that they were each other’s forever and that nothing could come between them.

Zanaya and Alexander had never come close to such a bond.

“Raphael’s consort might believe I looked at her like an interesting bug,” Zanaya added, “and perhaps I was rude at first, I can admit it.” As the entire Cadre had turned out in person to ensure she wasn’t a reanimated mummy, it wasn’t every day that an Ancient archangel woke up and saw a mortal who’d been turned into an angel and was now consort to an archangel.

“But,” she said, “the reason I watched her and Raphael so intently after my first shock was because they . . . fit. Like two pieces of a wooden puzzle played with and loved so long that its edges are smooth with love and time. They flow and bend and stay.”

As the snow fell, she felt her heart break. “Why could we never stay, Xander?” Again, her pet name for him slipped out.

“Zani, they’re infants,” was the answer of the general who was Alexander. “Barely together for a heartbeat. We were together for millennia.” Impatient, annoyed with what he thought was foolishness.

“Never that way, lover,” she said, too old not to be blunt in return. “We were never that close and faultless a fit. Too many jagged edges in both of us.”

Alexander shot her a look, this one full of aggravation, but kept on with his task. And when he spoke, it wasn’t about their splintered history, but the reason they’d flown to this bleak place on the edge of nowhere. “I see a sigil.”

The symbol glowed at that instant, recognizing the power that touched it.

“Yours,” she said. “Mine was on the other side.” It seemed a fitting metaphor for their entire relationship: never quite together, always separated—not by continents or distance, but pride, willfulness, the inability to be vulnerable.

“And there’s Raphael’s.” Even here, Caliane’s son wore his love openly, having altered his original sigil to include his consort.

His name in the angelic tongue—twined around the dagger of her.

Archangel and Guild Hunter.

Cadre and Consort.

Raphael and Elena.

Zani and her Xander had never become so entwined, a unit against the world.

“I can see Caliane’s,” Alexander muttered, his forehead furrowed as he fought to contain his power to a fine beam.

Not disturbing him any further, Zanaya just waited, though the “push” inside her strained at the seams, telling her to go and—