Archangel's War (Guild Hunter #12) - Nalini Singh Page 0,126
Honor separated—but Dmitri kept Honor’s hand in his as he brought up another set of images. “This is the current feed.”
Yellow and orange licked across the screen.
Neha’s angelic squadrons were setting the border aflame. Several of the toughened warriors were crying. To execute a child even when that child had been made monstrous was no easy thing. Neha, too, was in the thick of battle, her face smudged with streaks of soot and sweat plastering her hair to her temples as she used her Cascade-born ability to create fire to speed up their efforts.
No tear tracks marked her face, but the Archangel of India was attempting to drive the children back into Lijuan’s territory rather than ending their existence. Even the knowledge that those tiny bodies were rotting flesh held together by infection wasn’t enough to stifle the primal rejection of killing a child.
A buzz, Dmitri glancing at his phone. “Rhys just confirmed Lady Caliane is assisting Neha.”
Raphael’s gut clenched. My mother’s revulsion against harming a child ever again is so strong she’ll let them eat her alive before raising a hand to help herself.
She understands the stakes. Elena shifted so that the side of her body brushed his. We have to trust her not to surrender to her nightmares.
Not certain his mother’s mental state was strong enough, Raphael said, “Lijuan’s eliminated both Neha and my mother from the fight.” Neither could leave India lest it be overrun by the infected. Lijuan surely had more reborn hiding close by. The stronger adults would be the second wave, after the children traumatized and weakened the border guard.
“She’s taken out Alexander and Michaela, too,” said another familiar voice.
Raphael glanced over to the sharp-featured man with a muscular upper body who’d come up beside Dmitri in a manual wheelchair. Vivek Kapur passed across a sheet of paper, the dark brown of his skin shining with health. “Dispatch from the border with Persia. Reborn children pouring out there, too. Lijuan doesn’t seem to have targeted the border with Michaela, but she’s gone to assist Alexander.”
“With their territories connected by land, she has no other choice.” Should they fail to stop the scourge in Alexander’s land, the infected would crawl unchecked across a vast geographic area. “Elijah?”
“No adverse reports at this point,” Dmitri said. “No reports at all from the rest of the Cadre, but it hasn’t been long since I fired off my message.”
A whisper of black on the edge of Raphael’s vision. “Jason,” he said. “What have you heard?”
Breath a little jagged—highly unusual for Jason—his spymaster said, “I’ve just received a report from one of my people in Charisemnon’s territory. Nests of reborn are breaking out all over his lands, killing and infecting and rampaging.”
Honor spoke for the first time, her forehead wrinkled. “I thought the entire Cadre took precautions?”
“Lijuan’s a smart operator.” Dmitri stared unseeing at a blank screen. “I bet those reborn were smuggled in during her “Sleep” and someone’s been feeding the fuckers in the interim.”
“Those things feed on blood and living flesh.” Elena’s hand was bone white on the handle of her blade, her thigh pressed up against his and the stormfire of her wing tangled with his feathers. “And they can’t make other reborn from nothing.”
Raphael considered her point. “The keeper or keepers must’ve hunted locals with stealth over a long period, so the disappearances wouldn’t be noticed.”
Vivek Kapur had been bent over a tablet in his lap, now shook his head. “Article in not one but three different local papers report a rash of disappearances in their areas in the past month.”
His fingers flew across the screen with nimble speed. “Looks like each set of disappearances was blamed on a different thing—a bloodlust-ridden vampire, a flash flood, a man-eating pride of lions. Can’t find any articles that cross-link the three incidents.”
A muscle ticked in Dmitri’s jaw. “Someone hasn’t been doing their job.”
Because Dmitri would’ve noticed those disappearances and Raphael would’ve been informed of them. “So Charisemnon is out.” The archangel would have to contain the reborn threat to the African continent before he could render any assistance. “And so is Titus.” The two archangels were in no way allies, but this wasn’t about their differences. It was about a world that would end them all.
Vampires couldn’t feed on reborn. They needed mortals.
And the greatest secret of angelkind was that they needed mortals, too.
“She knows the danger, knows the reborn are a plague that could spread across the entire world,” Elena said, blades in both her hands now,