Archangel's War (Guild Hunter #12) - Nalini Singh Page 0,63
it.
Their boots hit the earth moments later. Dust swirled up around them as Raphael folded back his wings. Elena retracted hers, and the two of them began to walk through the village accompanied by the sound of nothing. No life. Not even a squawking chicken or irritated cricket.
Spotting an open door, Elena knocked. “Hello? I don’t mean you any harm,” she called out in the very basic Mandarin Chinese she’d learned in the weeks before their departure. Mostly greetings and phrases like this one that she’d thought might be needed.
But her nose told her that attempting communication was a vain effort: abandonment had a dull, musty odor it was impossible to mistake. The taste of it coated the back of her throat as thickly as the dust that caked everything in sight.
She walked all the way inside.
Charred pot on the stove. Looks like it was left on until the element burned out.
The table is set in this home, Raphael replied from another part of the street. The food on the plates has petrified under mold.
The two of them checked multiple buildings, even a barn, and a garage where a car sat up on blocks with its bonnet raised, but aside from the unnerving lack of people and animals, there was nothing unusual to see. No mummified bodies, no indications of burials. It was as if the entire village had simply vanished in a single heartbeat.
Taking off in pensive quiet, their boot prints immortalized in the dust until the next wind, they turned to the right. Their flight path would take them over new territory before they met up with the jet. Below them passed more green fields and rural villages. The light was fading but hadn’t yet affected visibility. Which was why unusual motion below caught Elena’s eye.
There’s something odd about those villagers. She couldn’t quite make out the details from their current altitude, so she dropped lower. They’re all moving like old people. No village this big was occupied only by the elderly.
She descended farther . . . and horror curdled her stomach. Shrunken and emaciated faces. Bodies of bone in a skin bag. Shuffling movements, limbs being dragged.
We land. Raphael went down first, Elena right after him.
The shuffling villagers didn’t react at all.
Everyone who wasn’t an archangel reacted to Raphael.
Elena caught the gaze of a nearby woman. Her eyeballs gleamed wet in a hollow bone frame. Pity and a need to render aid overwhelmed the cold bite of fear. “We’re here to help.”
No response.
“Raphael, do you speak the dialect in this region?”
Yes. I lived in China for two decades long ago. But the woman just stared blankly at him before shambling past. She was pushing a small cart, the type of thing on which you might carry vegetables or other goods you were taking to market.
Not far from them, a man banged a hammer up and down on a piece of wood, as if building something. Except he’d been banging at the same piece of wood since they’d landed. It was splintering, the nail long since embedded.
“It is as the courtier reported to my mother—they are going through motions so well learned that they are instinct.” An arctic gaze, the blue a cold chrome. “Nothing but the most primordial part of their minds remain.”
Elena struggled with the ethics of what she was about to say, finally made the choice. “Check, make sure.” She’d asked him to never again invade a mortal mind, but what if these people were trapped and screaming within? The only person who might be able to hear them was an archangel.
“There is nothing there,” Raphael said in a matter of seconds, his expression flat. “Broken sparks of memories that are already fading. No sense of personhood. No awareness of the outside world or of others as living creatures. Even a badly damaged mortal mind has a sense of personality; here, there is only a blank slate. I will see if any others are different.”
They weren’t. Vampire or human, all were empty.
Nausea twisted Elena’s intestines. “If the Cascade had won, I’d be like this, an empty shell with no soul.”
“Such an abomination would’ve never walked the world. I would’ve kept my promise.”
Yes, he would have. Even though it would’ve destroyed him. Elena went to brush her hand over his wing in a silent apology when it struck her. “Archangel.” Cold sweat along her spine, her leg muscles suddenly rigid. “Where are the children?”
Every single one of the shambling skeletons around them was an adult.