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 warriors 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.