Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(99)

Ofttimes mortals didn’t realize how long it could take a young immortal to recover from the worst injuries. Yes, an angel could grow back an arm or a leg, but it wasn’t a thing done without pain and suffering. Yet he could see it from the mortal side, too—after all, the mortal fighters who’d lost limbs in the war would never regrow them, would live their lives in a body forever altered.

“War is never good for anyone.” Potent emotion in each and every one of Zanaya’s words. “All it leaves behind is carnage of the body and fractures of the mind.”

“Yes,” he said, awash in memories of the rows of immortal and mortal dead, of the angels who’d fallen to Lijuan’s black fog, of the vampires who’d lost their lives on the cusp of freedom after their mandated century of service, of the children Lijuan had turned into a piteous plague . . . and of the piercing cries of the survivors.

Parents. Lovers. Children. Friends. Comrades.

War spared no one.

“I don’t believe it.” Zanaya came to a hover in the air, above a tree under whose wide canopy slept a family of cheetahs, their bodies curled and tails flicking as they dreamed. “The general is agreeing with me when it comes to war?”

Halting across from her, hands on his hips, he dipped his head a fraction. “I’ve witnessed too much suffering to see battle as a thing glorious anymore.” Always before, he’d focused on strategy, on the mechanics of war. This time around . . . “This war wasn’t ‘clean’ in any sense. Lijuan crossed lines that should never be crossed, and she made us all her accomplices.”

So long as he lived, he’d never forget having to cut down child after reborn child. Their blood had stained him, would forever haunt him. “And so long as war exists, there will be those who fight in a way that is without honor. Better then, to have a world without war.”

Softness in her expression, she said, “If only it could be so, lover,” before they both swept down and over lands bathed in the light of a fertile moon, round and heavy.

His consort, his Zani, led him eventually to a landing spot on a grassland that appeared to go on for miles, interrupted only by the majestic form of a single baobab tree in the distance. Its smooth trunk was a heavy weight of thickness, the thin branches high above crowned with leaves.

When he folded back his wings and turned, however, he saw another stand of trees in the shadows of the opposite direction. More akin to a small wood or nascent forest. He guessed it had grown up around a source of water.

It was toward those trees that Zanaya walked. He strolled with her, content to be in this time and place with her while a nocturnal bird rode the drafts above. Not an owl from the form and size. Likely a nightjar.

It was Zanaya who spoke first. “You were right on one thing during our previous debates on the topic of war—such violence will always occur in a race as powerful as our own.” Whispers of melancholy. “It’s as inevitable as the rains of a monsoon or the chaos of a Cascade, a law of nature that we can’t alter.”

Alexander had seen too many archangelic alliances falter over the centuries to argue with her on the point. He took her hand, their fingers weaving together in a familiar pattern. “At times, I’ve wondered if we are prey to more subtle Cascades. Ones we never notice, but that light a flame of slow rage under the cauldron of archangelic power.”

Not answering in words, Zanaya shifted so that her wing brushed his own. And they walked through the tall grasses while the moon shone overhead and other nightjars joined the solo flyer. Small insects and creatures become comfortable with their presence soon added their noises, busy and active, to the rustle of the grass.

“I’ve had many names through time,” Zanaya murmured at one point, the fingers of her free hand trailing over the long grass. “Perhaps one day, I’ll be Queen of the Savanna. I would like that, I think.”

Alexander would love her under any name, in any of her guises. Walking with her, neither one of them in any hurry, this night was restful in a way he hadn’t experienced in a long, long time . . . until Zanaya came to a sudden halt.

“I feel it again,” she said, rubbing a fisted hand over her chest. “A strange mirrored heartbeat. As if I’m hearing my pulse and another’s at the same time.”

Alexander’s hand clenched on hers. “Which direction?”

Halting, Zanaya moved—her consort moving with her—until they looked in the direction of the frozen wasteland where they’d buried an archangel . . . but that direction also included Titus’s entire territory. “Any sense of distance?” he asked her. “Is the heartbeat close?”

Zanaya “listened” harder, but the beat was difficult to pin down, the “sound” of it oddly fuzzy. “I can’t tell,” she said at last. “It’s so strange, but it’s almost as if the pulse I hear is an echo of a pulse, a beat made in an empty sp—”

A stirring in the grass that wasn’t a harmless creature going about its business.

It was too . . . cold. Cold as the grave.

And she could feel it.

Hairs rising on her nape, she released Alexander’s hand to draw Firelight from its sheath. Alexander shifted into warrior readiness beside her, a subtle change but one that was as obvious to her as if he’d yelled out a battle cry. They’d always been in sync when it came to the physical, whether that was a thing of pleasure—or of war.