Archangel's War (Guild Hunter #12) - Nalini Singh Page 0,137
teeth bared, the whites of his eyes showing. “Junior librarian in a minor court. No combat skills.” He pointed to another angel, went motionless. “She’s combat trained but belongs to Titus.”
All of them went silent for long moments.
“It appears we may find ourselves fighting friends,” Raphael said at last. “Warn your squadrons—and remember, it is unlikely they are acting of their free will.” Titus’s people were notoriously devoted to their archangel. “Do to them what we would expect them to do for us were our positions reversed and we were the ones being controlled.”
“I’m not sure they’re even actually alive,” Vivek ventured, his face pale under his brown skin. “I know they look it, but . . . Here.” He threw up another image.
It showed an angel with wings of speckled light brown sinking his teeth into Andreja’s arm—who was in the process of smashing the spiked ball of her morning star club into his head. A flail swung from her other hand, that spiked ball on its way to crushing the biter’s ribs.
“Talk about psycho eyes.” Arms folded across her chest and booted feet set apart, Elena stared at the biter’s visage. “There’s nothing there.”
She was right. The fighter looked dead, the lack of expression eerie.
“His eyes are black.” Illium came to stand beside Elena, their wings overlapping slightly—but no energy jumped from Elena’s wings to Bluebell’s. “Hardly anyone in the world, mortal or immortal, has eyes of pure black, but I came up against a number of other fighters with the same eyes. You can’t distinguish pupil from iris.”
Raphael recalled his own sense of unease about two of the enemy angels. It had been the eyes, he realized—too black, too flat.
Vivek threw up image after image of blank-eyed warriors, their gazes black. Jason identified half of them as belonging to archangels other than Lijuan. It was a small mercy they hadn’t yet come face-to-face with one of their own.
“Vivek,” Elena murmured, “can you find more images of the junior librarian Jason pointed out? I want to see him in battle.”
“Should be doable. This facial rec software is great, but it needs . . .” His words mumbled off as he worked.
Jason stirred again, his wings rustling as he stepped closer to the screen. “I don’t understand how she is even here.” He pointed to a female angel whose full breasts bulged from the sides of her improperly fitted armor. “She gave birth to a child two months early—and that was a mere week before China went dark. She was meant to rest and recover, then fly to the Refuge with the babe in the company of a healer.”
Sara Haziz spoke for the first time, her tone shards of flint. “Her breasts are engorged with milk.”
“A premature angelic infant needs near-constant contact with their mother to have any chance of survival.” Raphael had stood watch in the nursery as a youth, watched worried mothers cradle their early-born babes to their bare skin hour after hour.
“Got it.” Vivek replaced the photographs on the screen with a recording.
The librarian angel with no combat training sliced and cut through his opponents without pause. His movements were fluid, his reaction time that of a well-trained warrior. His expression, however, never changed. Whether he struck a blow or took one, the dead blankness of his eyes was a constant.
Raphael stared at the images, then he thought of the angels he’d seen in the infirmary and what his consort had said in the aftermath. “I think the reborn are already among us.”
“That’s impossible.” Illium shook his head. “She made reborn with mortals. These are angels.”
“Charisemnon was able to impact immortals,” Dmitri argued. “It’s possible.”
“Except for the meeting in India,” Jason murmured, “Charisemnon has stayed closeted in his palace for months. My spies glimpsed him now and then, but he never appeared outside, even within his own grounds.”
Raphael remembered that report, but as Michaela had so cleverly used to her advantage, immortals oftentimes decided to withdraw from the world. Charisemnon had been available to the Cadre and in being so, had fulfilled his obligations. His sociability or lack of it had been no concern of his fellow archangels.
“They did it together.” It was a certainty in Raphael’s blood. “Whatever created this abomination of death and life, it involves both Charisemnon and Lijuan.”
The Archangel of Disease and the Archangel of Death.
“His ‘gift’ turned on him last time,” Elena said. “You think he’d have risked it?”
“He recovered. If it happens again, he no doubt believes he’ll recover.”