“It’s begun to ice over,” he told the deadly, lovely archangel who’d preferred to be called the Queen of the Nile over any other title. “We are in a Cascade. You are the only Ancient I know who has woken with such suddenness, but there are signs Aegaeon is also stirring. Caliane woke before I did.”
No smile as she rose, regal and so beautiful that he had never comprehended why the world considered Michaela the epitome of beauty. “I will Sleep,” she said, because infuriating and half insane she might be, but Zanaya was also an archangel who’d been beloved by her people—and once, by Alexander.
“I do not think the Cascade will let you Sleep.” He folded his arms with rigid tightness to stop himself from stroking his fingers over her shoulders, down her arms, as he’d done a thousand times in another age. “I will call a Cadre meeting about you, but first, I have to rescue a village buried under ice and snow.”
“Why so bad-tempered, lover?”
“I am an Ancient. Treat me as such or . . .”
“Or what?” A wink, long lashes coming down like a fan. “So, tell me what you’ve been doing since I decided I’d caused enough mayhem for ten immortal lifetimes.”
As if they had not been apart for a hundred thousand years. She had gone into Sleep ten years after their last fight, while he was still half furious and half in love with her. Not because of him. Zanaya had never been tied to the decisions of others and it was part of why she’d so bewitched him.
“I have work to do.” He rose into the air.
She followed with a laugh, her wings rippling black with flecks of silvery white.
That was when the world turned black in a way that was nothing akin to Zanaya’s luxuriant darkness. The silence that descended was oppressive . . . until it was broken by screams that drilled into the ears and shrieked.
“What is this cacophony!” Zanaya yelled. “No archangel I know wakes with such darkness!”
“You do not know her. Her name is Lijuan.”
39
Neha watched Lijuan’s return from a border fort in her own territory, Nivriti by her side. She and her twin had declared a strange, unsteady truce in the face of the chaos fostered by the Cascade and when Nivriti stood with her this way, the peacock hues of Nivriti’s wings nearly touching the white and indigo of hers, Neha remembered all that she’d lost and wondered if it was her time to Sleep.
Everything hurt. Her heart. Her soul.
She was so tired.
But none of them could Sleep now, with Lijuan rising once more. The screaming blackness that had announced her waking had finally withdrawn its suffocating presence from Neha’s lands, but it stayed solid over and around China. “Do you think the people within see any light?”
“I think that one likes to keep her people in the darkness.”
The wind brought scents across the border, all the way to the top of the fort. Tiny hairs rising on her nape, Neha sent out a mental order to her generals to mount a permanent guard across the entire border. She would not be taken by surprise, would not be a prize for Lijuan to claim.
Yet even as she thought that, she knew that Lijuan had come back different from the Cadre. The Archangel of China had already been able to go noncorporeal prior to her disappearance, and now she was back after no real Sleep at all—with the power to opaque her entire territory from the rest of the world.
The black fog hovered over China, only to curve down to meet the earth at the border. As Neha watched, a bird disoriented by the sudden changes in the sky flew into the wall of fog. Its small body tumbled to the earth a heartbeat later. Jumping off the roof of the fort, strands of hair that had escaped her braid sticking to the sides of her face, Neha flared out her wings so she could make a soft landing on the dirt below.
Nivriti was already down. She’d always done that. Tried to be faster, better, stronger. Not that it mattered any longer. Sliding her sword from the sheath at her hip, Neha nudged the bird’s small body out of the danger zone. “Do not touch it,” she said when Nivriti hunkered down, the emerald and cobalt and black of her wings spread out behind her.
“I am not a fool, sister.” Rote bitten-out words, Nivriti’s attention on the dead bird. “It is hard to say if the marks of violence on the body are as a result of the wall, or of the bird’s fall.”
Neha hunkered down beside her sister, their wings overlapping. “See those, Nivi.” She pointed to the wing area.
A hiss. “Cuts. Yet there are no stones on the ground that could’ve done such damage.”
“Lady!” One of Neha’s senior vampires ran toward her, was breathless by the time he arrived. “A dog ran into the dark fog and it fell where it stood. When we dragged it out by the visible hindquarters, it was cut all over and bleeding.”
“Dead?” She had to know if survival was possible.
“All but,” the vampire said. “We gave it mercy.”
“Mercy was the right choice.” She rose to her feet. “Spread the word that no one is to approach the border. I will warn Lady Caliane’s people. If anyone does fall in, haul them out as fast as possible.”
“Yes, my queen.”
Nivriti got to her feet as the vampire ran to action Neha’s orders. “No archangel in history has been able to so surround their territory.”
“Caliane can do it,” Neha murmured. “But Amanat is the size of a large village. To encompass China . . .”
She stared at the dark fog and told herself it was her imagination, that she couldn’t see the trapped and screaming faces of the lost villagers staring back at her.
All those souls imprisoned forever, their teeth and nails Lijuan’s weapons.
40
Talk about hell on earth.” Elena’s mutter had Antonicus shooting her another riveted look. She tried to ignore him. He’d been staring at her since she returned to the Tower.
He should’ve been staring at the screen in front of them—on it was a live broadcast from Neha’s territory, of the border with China. Neha’s second had sent it out to all of the Cadre before Raphael could initiate a meeting about Antonicus.
“Hell is a mortal concept. This is very much an immortal nightmare.”
Elena couldn’t disagree, but that wasn’t why the back of her neck was prickling. Why does Antonicus keep looking at me as if I’m an interesting new bug?
He has no idea what you are and that is a strange thing for an immortal. He ran his fingers through the stormfire of her wings.
Shivering inwardly, Elena said, Stop that. I have to look hard-ass so your new friend doesn’t try to chop me open and examine me.