Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 118699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 475(@250wpm)___ 396(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 475(@250wpm)___ 396(@300wpm)
Because while Antonicus could fly, his wings were not . . . right. His tendons and fine wing bones had healed enough to keep him aloft, but a greenish film so transparent that she could see the entire understructure was all that connected the myriad pieces.
He had no feathers.
The only thing to which she could compare his current state were the wings of a newborn angelic babe. Yet even that wasn’t right. An infant’s wings might be frail and transparent, beyond easy to tear and break, but they were also hauntingly lovely in their delicate translucence.
A skeletal smile from a face out of nightmare, Antonicus’s eyes wet orbs in a shrunken face. Those orbs flicked to the archangel at her side. “Would you like to see my prize, Alexander? Your son, I would guess.”
The tiny hairs on Zanaya’s arms quivered. Antonicus’s voice was . . . broken. There was no other way she could describe it. Perhaps she might say he had shattered rocks clogging up his throat.
“Where is he?” Alexander’s question was quiet—and all the more deadly for it.
Smirk on his face, Antonicus dropped through the mists above the trees without warning.
Zanaya followed, Alexander beside her. Yes, Antonicus was drawing them into a trap, but they were two against one. Xander is your priority, Alexander. Antonicus is mine. I can feel him. Like slime in her head, a putrid malevolence that whispered things just beyond her ability to hear.
Zani, he’s no ordinary archangel, said her consort, who would die inside should his grandson perish.
Zanaya was not about to allow that to happen. I’m an archangel and a general, lover. Your grandson is but a youth. Our duty is clear.
A wrenching moment of eye contact before they landed.
Antonicus stood a number of meters from them, his wings folded back to reveal the barest arches over his shoulders. What arches he had were mismatched and mutilated. To her, it looked as if his bones remained unbelievably soft and malleable, Antonicus a melted doll.
“You’re yet in the process of healing,” she said, not able to believe how he’d even reached the sky when his frame was so emaciated, patches of green rot on his face, his neck, his arms . . .
“Thank you for not mentioning the smell.” At that moment, he sounded like a cultured Ancient.
“It is of no moment. You have but risen.” But no Sleeper ever came out of Sleep so damaged. On the other hand, Antonicus had been a rotted corpse when he was buried, so perhaps it was to be expected. “Where is the angel you brought down?” She had to be the one to speak, because Alexander was vibrating with the need to kill—and it was clear Antonicus was baiting him.
Antonicus bared his teeth, the loose skin of his face quivering in a way that made it seem as if he had things crawling beneath. “I gave him to my creatures.” A small, mean laugh. “They will fill their bellies with him while we converse.”
She snapped out a hand to press it against Alexander’s chest when he would’ve stalked forward. He wants you close. A cold realization. He wants to make us like him. It was there in the greed of his gaze, in the breathless quiver of him.
I must find Xander.
Antonicus hissed. “Why is he beside you . . . mistress?” The last word seemed torn out of him, his face twisting through a hundred emotions before it settled into one of utmost devotion.
Queasy unease in every part of her. Archangels served no one, were laws unto themselves. But she wasn’t about to walk away from this opportunity. “Antonicus, where is the angel you took down?”
A sly smile. “I left him by the river with my reborn.” His features twisted, his next words gritted out through clenched teeth. “By the river, mistress. You can hear the waterfall.”
Alexander, go! Save the boy!
* * *
* * *
Alexander lifted off, Zanaya’s hair blowing back in the wind of his passage. Did he possess that intangible thing the mortals called a soul, it was now torn into two ragged pieces that fluttered in the cold morning gray of the rainforest.
In the power games of archangels, Xander was the innocent, had to come first.
Zanaya knew that, too. She would have asked him to make the same choice had she been faced not with one reborn archangel but an entire Cadre of them. I’ll return as fast as possible, he promised her. Keep him talking.
I can’t get anything beyond the river out of him. Can you spot the ribbon of it from above?
No. The entire forest was concealed by heavy morning fog as soft and welcoming as Lijuan’s had been an ugliness of black death. But its ethereal beauty made it no less an impediment to his need.
His grandson hadn’t yet developed mind speech, was too young for it, so Alexander couldn’t contact him that way.