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)
Please be alive, Xander, she said inside her own head. He has a warrior’s fierce heart but it will break beyond repair if he loses you.
Aloud, she said, “Tell me about your reborn.”
A twisting wrench of his head, his face distorting in ways that should’ve been impossible.
Molten bones.
Melted bones.
She almost took a step back on the rich green of the dew-laden grass, stopped herself just in time. Around them, the forest was as silent as the grave from which Antonicus had come . . . but a white owl with eyes golden sat motionless on a branch of the young kapok tree behind Antonicus.
“I must rise,” he grated out. “I must . . . serve.” Hate in his eyes, but he answered her question as if compelled. “I must be your instrument.”
A cold tendril of understanding wormed its way through Zanaya’s brain. This was why the dead had risen from their graves to come to her. Lijuan, that blackhearted bitch, had made Zanaya just a little like her.
But even Lijuan hadn’t been able to control living archangels.
Her chest heaved, her breath slicing razors in her lungs as she remembered the pulse that was an absence, an echo of what once was . . . and no longer existed. And the smell that clung to him, so noxious and unalive.
Yet surely Antonicus was too rational to be dead, to be reborn. “Are they like you?” she asked. “Your reborn?”
He snorted, his face a ripple of distortion. “In a minor way. Basic speech. Basic thought. They are vectors to spread the glory of you.”
Alexander’s voice blasted into her mind at the same instant, with the joyful news that Xander lived. But along with her happiness came a creeping fear. Burn out every scratch and cut he has on him. I don’t know if Antonicus’s creatures carry the same poison as him, but we can’t risk it. Deeply excising the wounds may stop it from reaching Xander’s bloodstream.
Antonicus leapt at her without warning, his claws bared and eyes red.
Blasting out with angelfire, she blinked as he moved with reptilian speed to avoid the blow. That hadn’t been normal, hadn’t been natural, not for their kind. Now, he crouched opposite her and screamed, “I serve no one! I am an archangel! I am Antonicus!” Curling bolts of power of putrescent green at the tips of his clawed fingers before he shot them her way with a speed that was vicious.
Then Antonicus smiled . . . and vanished.
Shit! Fuck!
The bastard knew Zanaya had no glamour. And those without glamour also couldn’t see through it. Her consort’s voice in her head, a warning about Antonicus’s plans. I know! Take Xander to safety! Get him out of here now! Antonicus would go after Alexander if Zanaya fell, with Xander collateral damage.
A whisper of cold at her nape.
Falling back on the instincts Mivoniel had drilled into her, she dropped, rolled, and came up on her feet some distance away. Then she went airborne at brutal speed, at the same time calling her tempests to pummel the earth and the air.
A flicker of mud-green power as her winds smashed Antonicus hard enough into a tree that it disrupted his glamour. Dropping her tempests, she targeted him with angelfire, but he was invisible to her gaze once more, and in that moment, she saw Lijuan, felt Lijuan. How the Archangel of Death had gained the ability to go noncorporeal, until even the archangels with glamour could no longer see her. How she’d appeared behind Zanaya.
This time however, Zanaya was ready.
She’d reactivated her tempests as fast as he’d vanished, and she hoped to hell her winds were shredding the gelatinous webbing of his wings.
Then it came. A crossbow bolt shot hard and with power enough that it ripped through her left wing—with another bolt hitting her in the neck seconds later. Gurgling at the blood that threatened to drown her, she gripped the bolt in her throat and tore it out as she spiraled to the ground.
Even her winds couldn’t keep her aloft with her wing so badly damaged.
She landed, but didn’t crumple. Her throat was already healing, but she remained at a disadvantage with her lack of glamour. But she had other assets, including her mind. “Fight like an archangel, not a sneak thief!” she challenged when she felt claws swipe by so close they almost sank into her.
A hiss of anger and then there he was, his face a rictus so tight it was animalistic, his eyes no longer holding much sentient thought. Teeth gritted, he said, “Kill you. End you. No mistress! I am Antonicus!”
Too wounded to move fast enough to avoid his power, she took a blow directly in the gut. But though it burned and seared and made her grimace at the pain of it, it didn’t dig into her bones like angelfire . . . and she knew. “You’re not Antonicus,” she whispered, drawing Firelight. “Antonicus is dead.”