Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(90)

It wasn’t the same love as she felt for Alexander, for no other love would ever be that, but it was love nonetheless. And it made her greater. “I can’t describe how happy I am to see you.”

“Even me?” A lopsided grin from Meher.

“Even you.” She couldn’t help but smile in return. “Well, Auri,” she said, looking to her best friend, “will you be my second again?”

“I just woke up from a rather long nap, Zan,” Aureline said in the old angelic tongue. “Give me a moment.” But her eyes sparkled, a sight Zanaya had thought never to see again. “Though I suppose if you’re recovering from being a mummy, I shouldn’t tease you so.”

“I must know the mummy story,” Meher put in, his red hair already tumbled. “Who was able to turn an archangel into a mummy?”

So it was that Zanaya told her friends the story of the Cascade, the Archangel of Death, and the war that had almost devastated the world. Dawn was spreading its golden fingers across the savanna and they were halfway home by the time her friends got over their slack-jawed shock.

Wanting them to know the beauty as well as the darkness of the present world, she landed on a mountain plateau. Her lands fell away in a sprawl of wild beauty below them, while a small city of shining metal and glass rose in the distance. Charisemnon had stifled his people, so that his territory had no cities as glittering as some of Titus’s, but Zanaya had already put plans in motion to undo some of that damage.

It wasn’t about cities, however, but about stewardship. She was putting equal effort into rehabilitating wild landscapes that had suffered considerable damage from uncontrolled hunting by Charisemnon’s angelic friends. Soon, those abused regions, too, would flourish with life and energy.

“Home,” she murmured. “We’re home.”

A pulse inside her, faint and distant. Not her own.

Aureline sucked in a breath at the same instant. “Zan, your eyes have altered color.”

Curses upon Lijuan!

“I’ll explain later,” she said, then turned in a slow circle . . . but she always ended up looking directly toward Titus’s lands.

Whatever it was she was sensing, it continued to move up Africa.





48


Titus didn’t like the cold. He said as much to Sharine.

She, lover of snow after her long residence in the Refuge, leaned up to press a kiss to his cheek. The caress melted him from the inside out. “We’ll be back home soon enough.” Her wings were a glory of indigo and shimmering gold against the interminable span of white.

“Yes, I can’t wait to be away from here.” With that goal in mind, he began to knock the snow off the cairn that marked Antonicus’s place of Sleep . . . and perhaps death.

Sharine joined in, neither one of them wishing to use their abilities and inadvertently cause damage. Thanks to Sharine’s forethought, they both wore gloves at least. Still, it took time enough that he grumbled his toes were going numb.

His lover, his heart, said, “I’ll run you a bath after we get home.” A wicked smile that the world would never believe came from the revered Hummingbird.

Titus knew better. “To think I once believed you sedate and beyond carnal matters. I am shocked to my frozen toes,” he muttered in faux outrage—for he adored her wickedness as much as he adored every other part of her. And he knew she’d made that comment because she could sense his very real disquiet: this place felt bad.

Holding the warmth of her care close, he got back to the task of cleaning up the cairn, grateful at least that no flakes of icy white fell from the sky. What was already here was plenty enough.

“I see no sign of a disturbance,” Sharine said after they were done, her eyes sharp and clear. “What see you, my love?”

“Nothing obvious.” Frowning, Titus did a full circle of the cairn, as Sharine did the same. “No damage to our sigils, no sign that anyone broke out.”

“Archangels aren’t known for subtlety when they wake.”

“Hmm.” Not sure why the scene disturbed him when all was exactly as it always was when he did his routine flights to the cairn, he said, “Let’s check the entire island.”

But when Sharine would’ve separated from him, he took her slender hand in his. “Together, Shari. There’s something not right here.”

She exhaled, the air a puff of white. “I admit it does make the hairs on the back of my neck rise.”

But though they searched every inch of the island, they found no debris at all, no sign of an archangel shattering his cairn and rising triumphant.

“Look here, Titus.”

When he followed the line of her pointing hand, he saw the small patch of greenish-black liquid that had frozen in place. His gut churned. “Reborn colors. As if one of the creatures threw up.”

“From the size, it could as easily be seabird scat,” Sharine pointed out. “We could attempt to take a sample for a test, but reborn samples tend to come back as decaying matter, with no other specificity. Illium has explained the concept of DNA, and he says that the reborn process appears to irreparably alter the fabric of what makes us who we are.”

“I’ve also heard this. We should take a sample regardless, just in case—Antonicus was an archangel, after all. He might not react the same way to Lijuan’s evil.”