Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 118699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 475(@250wpm)___ 396(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 475(@250wpm)___ 396(@300wpm)
It was Zanaya who spoke first. “You were right on one thing during our previous debates on the topic of war—such violence will always occur in a race as powerful as our own.” Whispers of melancholy. “It’s as inevitable as the rains of a monsoon or the chaos of a Cascade, a law of nature that we can’t alter.”
Alexander had seen too many archangelic alliances falter over the centuries to argue with her on the point. He took her hand, their fingers weaving together in a familiar pattern. “At times, I’ve wondered if we are prey to more subtle Cascades. Ones we never notice, but that light a flame of slow rage under the cauldron of archangelic power.”
Not answering in words, Zanaya shifted so that her wing brushed his own. And they walked through the tall grasses while the moon shone overhead and other nightjars joined the solo flyer. Small insects and creatures become comfortable with their presence soon added their noises, busy and active, to the rustle of the grass.
“I’ve had many names through time,” Zanaya murmured at one point, the fingers of her free hand trailing over the long grass. “Perhaps one day, I’ll be Queen of the Savanna. I would like that, I think.”
Alexander would love her under any name, in any of her guises. Walking with her, neither one of them in any hurry, this night was restful in a way he hadn’t experienced in a long, long time . . . until Zanaya came to a sudden halt.
“I feel it again,” she said, rubbing a fisted hand over her chest. “A strange mirrored heartbeat. As if I’m hearing my pulse and another’s at the same time.”
Alexander’s hand clenched on hers. “Which direction?”
Halting, Zanaya moved—her consort moving with her—until they looked in the direction of the frozen wasteland where they’d buried an archangel . . . but that direction also included Titus’s entire territory. “Any sense of distance?” he asked her. “Is the heartbeat close?”
Zanaya “listened” harder, but the beat was difficult to pin down, the “sound” of it oddly fuzzy. “I can’t tell,” she said at last. “It’s so strange, but it’s almost as if the pulse I hear is an echo of a pulse, a beat made in an empty sp—”
A stirring in the grass that wasn’t a harmless creature going about its business.
It was too . . . cold. Cold as the grave.
And she could feel it.
Hairs rising on her nape, she released Alexander’s hand to draw Firelight from its sheath. Alexander shifted into warrior readiness beside her, a subtle change but one that was as obvious to her as if he’d yelled out a battle cry. They’d always been in sync when it came to the physical, whether that was a thing of pleasure—or of war.
But what came at them wasn’t an enemy or a threat. Neither was it one of the wild beasts that prowled this landscape and that Zanaya cherished with all her heart. The wild should be left to be wild; she’d kill no animal if all it was doing was protecting its young or its territory.
“Alexander.” Her voice came out a ragged whisper, horror a saw rubbing on her every nerve ending to produce a jangling and manic melody. “Do you see this?”
“Lift off,” he said, his voice clipped. “Rise above so they can’t touch you.”
Zanaya wasn’t one to take orders, but this one she’d needed. Her shock and refusal to countenance that this could be had threatened to freeze her in place.
Snapping out her wings, she made a rapid vertical takeoff.
Alexander, his own sword in hand, waited until she was aloft before rising himself.
Now that she was in the air, she could see the full horror of it. A gleaming white skull on which clung dusty tufts of hair, arms and legs that had all but skeletonized, the skin gone a strange inhuman shade of greenish dark from decay or another process she didn’t understand.
Dirt covered the whiteness of bone where the moonlight glinted on it.
The creature had stopped crawling when she lifted off, now twitched its head up to stare at her through a blank eye socket . . . and that was just the one who’d been the closest to her. Others crawled through the grasslands, all of them in a similar—or worse—shape. Some were missing limbs, as if the bones had fallen away, but each and every one had a head that was yet attached to their neck.
Mouth dry and stomach a churn of nausea, Zanaya said, “Reborn? They look nothing akin to the ones I’ve seen previously, not even the most recent reborn in Titus’s lands.”
“I’ve never seen the like,” Alexander said, the silver of his eyes unearthly in the moonlight and his wings a blaze of metallic light that was the moon’s reflection. “But I think they are reborn. They were either missed in Titus’s sweep of this territory, or . . .”