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)
Screaming, he came at her with claws bared, all sense and reason gone. She thrust Firelight deep into his heart, then used her winds to shove him back until he was pinned to the nearest tree by her sword. This close, the scent of him clogged up her airways and made her gut want to eject itself through her mouth.
Red eyes locked with hers, hatred in their depths. But when he attempted to hit her with his power, nothing came out but the merest trickle. “Food,” he growled. “Food. Fuel.”
Zanaya thought of Lijuan’s mound of the dead, the bodies of her loyal fighters hollow and empty of all life. Silence where so many voices had rung. Hands stretched out in death, as if they pleaded with their beloved goddess for mercy.
Cruelty beyond cruelty.
“No archangel needs to prey on others to gain power,” she said to this creature that had once been a man of integrity and honor. “Even Lijuan only used others to bloat herself—she always had an innate level of archangelic power. You are no longer an archangel.”
He screamed . . . but the words he spit out in the aftermath were unexpected in the extreme. “Kill me.”
She hesitated, the tone of the demand so much of the Cadre that she questioned her conclusion that he was become reborn. “Antonicus? Do you exist?” Never would she end him without being dead certain. “If all you need is a much longer Sleep, then that may be the best choice.”
A single tear rolled down his face, the eyes that held hers no longer feral but so sad as to be despair in its purest form. “I will do as my mistress wishes.”
It was her blood through which rage burned now. “I am not your mistress,” she said. “You are an archangel!” Forcing herself to touch his putrefying body, she clenched her hand over his shoulder in the manner of comrades.
He was a shiver of bones beneath skin that felt as if it would fall off him at any moment. But his face was tranquil now, a faint smile on his lips. “What do you wish of me, mistress?”
Inside the faint screams within her head, however, she heard one that was loud and clear and of an archangel. End this! End me! I beg of you, Zanaya!
She staggered, her eyes burning. “Antonicus.” A whisper. “You are an Ancient.” To kill so much life, so much history when there might be hope of a recovery, it was an abomination.
But the scream inside her head was suddenly echoed by words forced out of a throat that didn’t want to cooperate. “I dream only of her,” Antonicus rasped, the strange half-smile yet on his face as the man who’d once been an archangel battled the evil in him that compelled him to submit. “My Sleep is nightmare. Now she has made me a slave.”
Rivulets of blood dripped down his face as his skin tore open from the force with which he was clenching his jaw. And that blood . . . it was green and dark, fetid and rotten.
In front of her, he struggled to find his voice again, while inside her mind, his screams became guttural. He was losing the last pieces of himself, she realized. Soon, he’d be nothing but a mindless beast beholden to her will.
“No,” she said, and locked gazes with him for the final time. “I will not allow her to do this to you, Antonicus, Archangel of Elysium.” Wrenching Firelight from his body, she took a step back, rage and pain locking her throat.
Zani! Alexander landed beside her, so hard that she felt an earth tremor. Xander is safe with Sharine. She flew this way to search with a squadron.
Sharine, the Hummingbird, was one of the very few people, she knew, with whom Alexander would trust his grandson. She should’ve known the general would find a way to look after both pieces of his heart.
“You’re hurt,” he said, his hands fisting as he stared at the bloody hole in her throat.
It’s all right, lover, she said mind-to-mind. I will heal. Today, we are charged with a task terrible and necessary.
Aloud she said, “Antonicus is ready to go,” as the archangel who’d died in front of their eyes only to be forced awake as a monster managed to hold his feet, though his chest was a bleeding maw, his face cracked rivulets of death.
Antonicus had been arrogant and oft an ass, but he’d done his duty as an archangel. He didn’t deserve to be humiliated at the end, his entire history reduced to this creature that was no longer Antonicus even if some part of his mind yet existed within. But she would give peace to that final flicker of the being who’d once been an archangel.
“Alexander, you and I must vow to never reveal this Antonicus to the others,” she said. “His history will end the day he flew into the black fog. With courage and heart. We will say we have no other knowledge of his whereabouts. Soon enough, he will become legend, the Sleeper lost.”