Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(87)

“He survived?”

“More than that. He thrived. Osiris would’ve been exultant.” Head dropping, Alexander shoved a hand through his hair. “But Naasir wouldn’t be who he is had he grown up under my brother’s dark care. The Naasir we know today was raised with love and in freedom, not tortured and starved in a cage; he’s a cherished part of Raphael’s court, and Raphael’s second may as well be his father.”

Hating the old grief in his eyes, and hating his brother for causing it, Zanaya didn’t ask any more on the subject. “I should be able to visit soon. The twins can hold the fort in my absence. And . . . I ache for you.”

His jaw worked. “I dream of you. Every time I close my eyes.”

Her eyes burned, her throat raw.

The two of them closed the connection without saying good-bye. They’d never again say good-bye. For the first time in their existence, they’d decided to put their stubbornness to work in pursuit of their love.

Stepping away from the screen with the urge to hold him close a tightness inside her, she thought of what he’d said. Because the thing was, she did know her second’s and third’s place of Sleep. She’d helped them create it.

“Will you help us find a place no one can disturb even should the earth tremble and split open?” Auri’s eyes—that familiar and beloved translucent brown—dull and bruised by the loss of her babe, a loss made all the more agonizing for how late into the pregnancy it had come. Auri had felt her babe move in her womb before her child went forever silent.

Zanaya had been there when Auri gave birth, for her babe was too big to be released in any other way. She’d held that small, so-small body in her arms, tears rolling down her face as she pressed a kiss to his forehead, the child’s skin blue yet warm from being inside his mother. And she’d held both Auri and Meher as they cried until they could cry no more.

Auri’s desire to Sleep had come as no surprise. And Meher would always go where Auri went; she was the sun around which he revolved.

Zanaya had found the couple a safe location. Their babe didn’t lie near them. They’d chosen to scatter his ashes in a forest inside Zanaya’s territory, so that he’d become a part of the trees, grow as he’d never had a chance to grow in life.

Zanaya had watched over that forest for her entire lifetime prior to her first Sleep, and to her great joy, it had survived all the archangels who’d come after her, its trees tall and strong. Auri would be happy to see that, too. Zanaya had also promised her best friend that she wouldn’t disturb her rest unless there was no other choice—and the world was a place Aureline would like to see.

She looked at the screen in front of her, considered the machines that flew in the sky and rolled on the roads, the buildings that speared the clouds, and thought Auri would be fascinated indeed. And Zanaya needed her on the deepest level.

Titus had done much to heal this land, but it remained wounded from the battles against not only the reborn, but Charisemnon’s reign of misuse. The population had been decimated, and crops had failed in turn. All these years later, and the populace was yet fighting to get back to where they’d once been.

“They’re a strong people,” Titus had said to her when they met at the border two days earlier, to discuss what appeared to be a new incursion of reborn at the far end of Titus’s territory. “But you can’t squeeze blood from a stone, and they were drained to the bone by the time their ass of an archangel got his just deserts.”

He’d glared, as if he’d like to kill Charisemnon all over again. “The wounds linger—and, I fear, fester. The current news won’t help; I was confident we’d cleared the territory of Lijuan’s poison.”

“You’re certain about it being the reborn?”

“All signs point to it—but it appears to be a single stealthy creature. My people should be able to hunt it down soon enough.”

Zanaya hoped that was true, and that no reborn lurked in her own territory. Her people had suffered enough. “Auri suffered, too,” she murmured to herself. “Do I have the right to ask her to wake?”

Sleep healed the physical. Perhaps it also healed the heart. And . . . Auri would never begrudge her for asking, not when it had been an eternity since she and Meher left the world.





46


Titus crouched down to examine the body at his feet. It bore all the hallmarks of a reborn—the rotten green tinge to the flesh, the reddened whites of the eyes, even the nails turned into claws that showed up in many but not all of them.

“Only problem,” his second Tzadiq said, “is that it’s dead. Without being decapitated or burned up.” He shrugged. “Not a bad problem.”

“But troubling because it raises questions.” Titus used the hilt of a blade to prod the poor creature onto its back so he could examine it. He used no extra force—this person had been someone’s daughter or wife or mother before she fell victim to the scourge and bore no fault for what had happened to her. “Only mark on her is the single bite to her neck.” Clean, neat, a perfect impression of teeth.

“Shows a little too much control for my liking.” The sun beat down on the pale skin of Tzadiq’s skull. “Reborn tend to gnaw at their prey like feral dogs.”

Titus nodded; he was of the same mind. Predators who could controlled their impulses and regulated their kills were far more dangerous than mindless beasts driven by nothing but the craving to feed.