Archangel's War (Guild Hunter #12) - Nalini Singh Page 0,92

it was a hue he’d seen on no other, skin of night, eyes huge dark orbs that he knew flickered with silvery light and lips so plush a man could look at them and think himself lost.

Until she cut out your heart and fried it to eat with her most prized wine.

Shorter than him by several inches, Zanaya wore her sword across her back because of course Zanaya would go into Sleep with a sword. It was her most beloved lover.

Her body was clad in a short wrap that hugged every curve and valley. A glittering starlight creation that covered her breasts and thighs and yet left her more alluring than if she’d been unclothed. Though, as Alexander was personally aware, Zanaya was beyond alluring when bare to the skin.

He landed in front of her with a feeling of inevitability in his gut.

“Xander.” A purr of sound, the language one he hadn’t heard for millennia even before his Sleep. “We meet again.”

“That is my grandson’s name now.”

The sparks of moonlight in her pupils grew brighter. “You jest? You are a grandfather?” A slow seduction of a smile. “I have Slept long.”

“That is a matter of opinion,” he muttered under his breath.

Throwing back her head, she laughed and the sound wrapped around him as it always had, luscious and drugging and Zanaya. “Oh, Alexander, do not say you are not happy to see me. I am crushed.”

She stretched her arms to the sky, back arched and toes digging into the snow, and it was like watching a lioness wake to the sun that even now chased Zanaya’s sudden night from the sky. “It did not snow in this desert when I went to Sleep.” She crouched down, lifted a handful of glittering ice crystals. “Does my Nile yet flow, or is it ice?”

“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