Archangel's Enigma (Guild Hunter)

by Nalini Singh

  Dropping down toward Alexander while Naasir and the other defenders fired up at the squadron that had turned to follow Lijuan, he landed beside Alexander’s fallen body. The Ancient, his clothing not so different from that of his fighters, had come down hard on the rough stone that covered the caves, some distance from the snipers Raphael had spotted.

  Leave this place, he ordered those snipers. Go assist your brethren.

  Alexander’s left wing was crumpled under him, his right leg shattered so badly that had he been mortal, it would’ve been impossible to put him back together. Blood dripped from his mouth, but his eyes were open and they were pure obsidian.

  Remembering his own blindness under Lijuan’s attack, Raphael took the Ancient’s hand. “Alexander, it is Raphael.” He reached out with his mind, the interference that had stopped him from contacting Naasir—likely caused by Alexander’s waking presence—no longer a problem. It had cut out as Alexander fell.

  I’m sending something into your body to counter Lijuan’s poison. Don’t fight it. With that warning he hoped the stubborn warrior would heed, he released a tiny ball of white gold fire swirled with luminous blue, directly onto Alexander’s wing.

  The Ancient’s body went rigid as the wildfire entered his system, tendons and muscles stretched and his hand crushing Raphael’s, but Alexander made not a sound. He was a general, would suffer pain in silence. As Raphael watched, the black slowly receded from that part of his wing.

  Breathing heavily, Alexander stared blindly toward Raphael. Your cure is as bad as the disease.

  Raphael hadn’t heard that deep voice with its touch of Ancient arrogance, in four hundred years. And though Alexander had been threatening to go to war against him at the time, he felt an unexpected welcome inside him for this man he’d always respected. I must be careful. The wildfire may kill you if I use too much. Any more than needed to counter the poison and it became a weapon in itself.

  Alexander suffered excruciating pain throughout the operation. He bore it with the grace of a warrior and when his eyes cleared at last, he looked at Raphael and said, “Well, young Rafe. It’s as well that I didn’t kill you, isn’t it?”

  Raphael felt his lips curve at the name no one had ever called him—no one but an Alexander who refused to see the archangel he’d become. “Try to remember that, Xander.”

  Alexander’s smile at the familiar address he permitted only intimates, was fleeting. “She took my son from this world.” Rage boiled in every word. “I will not stop until I hunt her down and cut out her venomous heart.”

  That, Raphael thought, was what many people had forgotten about Alexander: he was wise and strong and a great peacemaker, but he’d begun life as a warrior and it was the bloodthirsty heart of a warrior that beat in his chest.

  “I will be at your side.” Raphael moved down Alexander’s body to see if he could speed up the Ancient’s healing. This much damage on the heels of an early waking could leave Alexander broken for days.

  “What has become of Lijuan?” Confusion beneath the blood fury. “She was many times arrogant after her ascension, but she showed signs of greatness.”

  “That was true enough even a hundred years earlier.” Raphael had found Lijuan disturbing at times, eerie more than once, but the old ones of their race were often a touch removed from the world. He’d asked her advice on countless matters over the centuries, received genuine responses.

  After spending an eternity wondering if his parents’ madness would one day claim him, Raphael saw Lijuan’s devolution and couldn’t help but consider if age alone was the killer of souls. Was it possible Lijuan had no choice in her evil, that eternity itself had betrayed her?

  We are not your parents and you sure as hell aren’t anything like Her Evilness. She killed her mortal lover, remember? You made your lover your consort. She had a choice. Elena’s voice was as sharp and as annoyed as if she stood beside him. He knew it was exactly what she’d say should he articulate his thoughts.

  The incipient cold inside him burned off by her fire, he spoke to Alexander. “I don’t know what precipitated the change, but Lijuan has become a scourge upon the world. She believes herself a goddess—the rest of us are hindrances to her desire for omnipotent rule.”

  Alexander turned his head toward the destroyed village in the distance. “My people come. I do not want them here.”

  Raphael understood; it was why he’d told the snipers to go. Touching Naasir’s mind, he said, Naasir, tell the ones with you to prepare a place suitable to receive Alexander. He will come down in his own time. They are not to come to him. No archangel would want to greet his people looking weak and broken.

  I’ll make them obey, Naasir said with the brutal honesty that was part of his nature.

  “It is done,” Raphael told Alexander.

  “You are no longer the stripling I left behind.”

  Raphael had been more than a thousand years old when Alexander chose to Sleep. No stripling. Though, in the eyes of an Ancient who had lived countless eons, perhaps it was correct enough. “I am Cadre, Alexander, and I’ve held my own in battle against Lijuan. You would do well not to forget that.” Raphael respected Alexander but he also knew the other man had a warrior’s instincts—weakness was despised, strength admired.

  “The feral creature who came to warn me,” Alexander said as his bones began to knit together as a result of a combination of his own archangelic healing ability and Raphael’s powers, “he was the wild thing you rescued from Osiris and adopted into your court.”

  “Naasir has become a warrior unlike any other.” Fierce and loyal and with an unquenchable hunger for life.

  “He has little respect for anyone.”

  Raphael raised an eyebrow. “He is one of mine.”

  Alexander laughed, the sound rusty. “Yes, you never did have enough respect for your elders either.” Laughter fading, he stared out at the horizon. “My son is gone from this world, Raphael. The babe I held in my arms, the boy I taught to wield a sword, the man with whom I fought in battle, he is gone forever.” Open grief in his voice, raw and endless.

  Raphael said nothing, giving the other archangel time to mourn the son he would never again see. Rohan had made mistakes, most specifically when he’d attempted to hold Alexander’s entire sprawling territory himself after his father chose to Sleep, but in the end, he’d proven himself.

  “Your son was a man respected far and wide,” he said a long time later, after Alexander’s leg was nearly healed and the clouds above had begun to dissipate. “He held this section of territory for the archangel who came after you . . . and he sired a son of his own.”

  Alexander’s eyes locked with Raphael’s, happiness blazing out of the grief. “I have a grandchild?”

  “Yes. He wasn’t at the stronghold—Rohan fostered him with Titus so that he could learn from Titus’s warriors. He is a stripling of two hundred. His name is Xander, after his grandfather.”

  Fierce joy in Alexander’s expression. “Did Rohan take a mate?”

  “Yes. He and Xander’s mother were a pair, but she is likely gone. She lived in the palace with Rohan, would’ve fought beside him to the end.” As Elena would with Raphael. “She loved him and together, they loved their son.”

  “The boy will have a home with me,” Alexander said, his voice a passionate roughness of grief, joy, and rage. “And one day, he will have vengeance.”

  43

  Andromeda and Naasir helped the wing brothers hurriedly pick up and set aside the broken pieces of their homes. Part of the village was just gone, crumbled into dust. What remained was nothing whole.

  “We will have to greet the sire under the open sky,” Tarek said, and though his expression and tone were controlled, the same couldn’t be said for all his men and women. Their distress at being unable to show due honor to their archangel was clear.

  Andromeda thought of everything she’d heard of Alexander. “The stories say that your sire preferred to drink mead with his warri
ors around a fire, rather than to sleep comfortably in a sumptuous tent.”

  The wing brothers visibly relaxed.

  “Yes.” Tarek nodded. “He’s one of us.”

  Decision made, they cleared out the communal space near the lake, then one of the fleet-of-foot scouts was dispatched to fetch their vulnerable. To Andromeda’s surprise, he went not in the direction of the caves, but toward the damaged trees. Secrets, more secrets.

  Deliberately turning her back on the trees so she wouldn’t see this one and thus be able to betray it in Charisemnon’s court—a stabbing pain in her gut—she continued to help pick up and stack shattered pieces of wood and glass and roofing material. When she started finding personal items, she made a neat pile of them inside a former home that had no roof but had three walls that had survived to about three feet off the ground.

  It would work well enough as a storage space for now.

  The noncombatants flowed into the village a half hour later, bubbling with excitement. Their dismay at seeing the broken state of the village was quickly overcome by half-terrified joy at playing host to not only their own archangel, but to a second one. Most people never came within close proximity to even one archangel their entire lives.

  Nerves or not, the cooks were able to get a fire going and create a stew out of food items scavenged from the devastated homes, as well as flatbread. When a fridge was dug out of the debris, everyone clapped at the find of undamaged fruit within. Someone else discovered that their tins of dried fruits were dented but whole, and soon a newly washed and barely chipped plate was bearing a bounty of dried figs and other sweetmeats. A teenage boy placed it on the large wooden table that three of the wing brothers had put together with the materials at hand.

  When Naasir dug out a bottle of mead that had been buried under the fallen beams of a house, a raucous cheer went up. Grinning, he passed it to Andromeda and went hunting for more supplies, his senses having made him a favorite of the cooks. Anytime they needed something, they’d tell him, and more often than not, he’d find it in amongst the debris.

  The village was as neat as it could be by the time the sun streaked the sky the dark pink and rich orange of sunset. Not only were the villagers ready for Alexander, they’d created shelters for the young and the weak, and cleaned themselves up as much as possible. Aware Alexander had been injured, everyone was on tenterhooks.

  As the sunset grew ever more dazzling before beginning to darken until the clouds glowed like rubies, the village went quieter and quieter.

  “Papa! Angels!”

  Following a small child’s pointed finger, Andromeda looked to the color-splashed sky above the caves to see wings of glittering silver side by side with wings of an astonishing white gold that seemed aflame.

  Overwhelming power and magnificent beauty, the sight made her heart stop. “They aren’t like us,” she whispered to Naasir, feeling that understanding in her bones. “They are nothing like us.” As different from her as she was from a mortal.

  Arms wrapping around her shoulders from behind, Naasir nuzzled her temple. “They love as fiercely, Andi. And they fight as wildly.”

  His words made the difference in their growing-up years so clear. To him, Raphael wasn’t a distant archangel who was a deadly member of the Cadre. Naasir saw Raphael as his sire and a warrior first, everything else second. She would’ve liked to have seen Raphael through his eyes over the years, gotten to know the blindingly powerful being who landed not far from them in a strong sweep of wings.

  The power that burned off the two archangels made her eyes hurt.

  As Alexander’s people, young and old, knelt down in front of him in a silent and devoted fealty, Raphael walked to join Naasir and Andromeda. Having moved around to stand beside her, Naasir clasped the archangel’s forearm in greeting when Raphael held it out, his own hand closing around Naasir’s forearm.

  “You did well, Naasir,” the archangel said, his voice as pure as the searing blue of his eyes. “Alexander is of the opinion that you have no respect for anyone.”

  Naasir grinned. “Especially not for stubborn Ancients who refuse to listen to reason.”

  A slow smile before Raphael turned to Andromeda and held out his forearm. Her mouth dried up, her heart thundering. “I have a warrior as a consort, scholar,” Raphael said at her frozen response. “I recognize one when I see her, even if she chooses to wield the pen more often than the sword.”

  Awed and astonished, she gripped his forearm, the power that lived in his body an almost painful ache in her bones. And yet his consort had been mortal before her transformation, was yet an angel newborn. Andromeda wanted desperately to meet Elena Deveraux at that moment, to know the woman who had the strength to hold her own against an archangel.

  “Because of your and Naasir’s courage and will,” Raphael said after they broke contact, “Alexander lives today. He will not forget it.”

  Andromeda found her voice at last, and though it came out raspy, it did at least come out. “I’m glad an Ancient has not been lost from the world.”

  Raphael nodded and turned to watch as Alexander greeted his loyal sentinels one by one, having asked all his people to stand. “My mother will be happy to have a compatriot with whom to speak.”

  That was the moment Andromeda realized a staggering truth. “There are now eleven living archangels in the world, two of them Ancients.”

  The Cadre had, at rare times, been less than ten, but never more. Never.

  “It appears the Cascade has changed the natural equilibrium of the world more deeply than anyone comprehends.” Raphael looked up at the painted sky, but she knew he saw the battle that had broken its peace not long ago. “Ten has been enough to maintain balance throughout time. That apparently no longer holds. More Ancients may yet rise before this is over.”

  Because the Cascade was just beginning.

  44

  Raphael escorted Naasir and Andromeda safely out of Favashi’s territory before he went to speak to the Archangel of Persia herself. Midnight had long fallen by then, and he found her standing in that starry darkness in the ruins of Rohan’s palace. Her brown eyes were brittle, her bones stark against the golden cream of her skin.

  Sweeping wings the shade of aged ivory touched the broken shards all around her.

  “It’s true then,” she said, looking at him when he walked toward her through the ruins peopled by no others, as if Favashi had told them to leave her alone. “Alexander has woken and you battled Lijuan to protect him.”

  “Yes.” He could understand her disbelief—there was so much impossibility in those events.

  One: an Ancient had been Sleeping in the heart of her territory.

  Two: that Ancient was now breathing aboveground.

  Three: Lijuan had sought to kill a Sleeping archangel.

  “Rohan was always loyal to his father,” Favashi said to him, her voice elegant and cultured but the steel core of her exposed for once. “I knew that should Alexander ever rise, I would lose him, but until then, he was loyal to me.” Midnight winds sifted through the luxuriant dark brown of her hair, creating a tangle she didn’t bother to ease away. “I always knew I could trust him to watch my interests.”

  “He safeguarded the people in this area well.”

  When Favashi looked at him, he was surprised to see tears in her eyes. The Archangel of Persia might appear softly female, but she was as ruthless as any other member of the Cadre, the archetypal iron hand in a velvet glove. “He was my lover once, before my ascension.” A sudden harsh rasp to her voice. “Strong and loyal. I should’ve taken him as mine, but I wanted someone with more power.”

  Someone like Dmitri, Raphael thought, aware Favashi had offered his second the position of consort. “I am sorry for that, Favashi.” Had he not seen her tears, he wouldn’t have believed her heart involved. But those tears were real, as was the twist of her face as she tried to fight them.

  The other archangel drew in a shaky breath. “He used to make me la
ugh,” she whispered. “Even after we went our separate ways and he found a mate, he remained my friend who could make me laugh. I never realized how much I needed that until this instant.” She looked around, her eyes lost. “I should’ve made him mine,” she repeated. “Now he is no more and no one will ever again make me laugh as he did.”

  A pregnant silence.

  Then, hands fisted, Favashi took a deep breath, and when she turned to face Raphael again, the lost, heartbroken woman was gone. In her place stood a furious archangel with vengeance on her mind. “If Lijuan believes I will forgive her this crime, she is a fool.”

  Raphael wondered if Lijuan realized her arrogance may just have cost her an archangel who might’ve otherwise remained neutral in any future battle. “Lijuan’s arrogance is dangerous, but worse are her growing powers.”

  Raphael hadn’t missed the fact that the Archangel of China had gone noncorporeal as she fled. Paired with her vicious black rain, her capacity to rejuvenate herself from the lifeforce of others, as well as her ability to create infectious reborn, it made her the most dangerous being on the planet.

  “She isn’t the only one whose powers are growing,” Favashi said, and suddenly, the winds were a tornado around them.

  Those winds fell flat just as quickly, but the display confirmed rumors of Favashi’s Cascade-born ability.

  Considering the offensive uses of such a power, Raphael said, “Alexander and you cannot exist in the same territory for long.”

  There was a reason archangelic territories were separated by considerable distances. Two archangels could stay in close proximity only for a limited time. The exact period depended on the archangels involved. Sooner or later, their powers began to shove against each other, creating tension that could erupt easily into bloodshed. Even Raphael’s parents hadn’t always been able to be together, though their deep love for one another had significantly ameliorated the effect.