Archangel's Enigma

40

Lijuan arrived at Rohan’s stronghold long after she should have. It infuriated her that the unmistakable sign of Alexander’s awakening had forced her to ground herself for long periods; instinct had whispered that those silver lightning strikes could do serious damage to her yet healing body.

It appeared Favashi, too, had been delayed, for Rohan had no archangelic backup.

Good. Also good was the fact the swiftness of the storm indicated Alexander was forcing himself to wake at rapid speed; he’d be weak, while she could feel her strength returning to her with each hour that passed. Even her wings now felt strong enough for short flights. And, unlike Raphael, Alexander wouldn’t have developed any defenses against her black rain—if she could hit his heart, she could kill him.

The best option, however, remained to execute him before he rose.

Lijuan wasn’t about to discount Alexander until he was dead.

She spoke to Xi from her chair inside his battle tent. “You need to break this siege.” Lijuan could use her abilities to turn the tide, but that would mean dipping into her power reserves. “Rohan is not his father and you’re a seasoned general. Why is this taking so long?” The lightning was dangerous but it was no longer constant.

“Rohan is better prepared and has a larger number of troops garrisoned here than reported by our advance scouts—I believe he had warning.” Despite the fact he’d been fighting for hours, Xi’s expression was as cool and intelligent as always. “He’s also improved the palace with new technologies that are hindering our troops. The passion with which he fights appears to confirm that Alexander lies within.”

“Yes. The boy was always devoted to his father.” Lijuan considered her options, decided the expenditure of energy was justifiable; the earlier and faster she got to Alexander, the easier it would be to kill him.

Waiting only until her strength was at full capacity—though that capacity was paltry in comparison to what it would be once she healed totally—she rose into the air during a break in the lightning, and blasted the palace with her black rain. The attack vaporized part of the buildings, creating a large gap in Rohan’s defenses. Leaving Xi to take advantage of that, Lijuan invaded the palace in her noncorporeal form.

She escaped a lightning strike by mere millimeters.

It was a waste of precious energy to maintain her noncorporeal form when the palace was a ghost town, everyone at the defenses, but she had no legs and using her wings would attract too much attention.

She saw no signs of Alexander’s presence. Even when she sank below the earth, she sensed nothing of the silver-winged Ancient. Rising to the surface just before her noncorporeal form solidified humiliatingly into flesh and blood on the tiled floor of the palace, she knew there was only one option.

Because Zhou Lijuan did not crawl.

Before she could order Xi to bring her a sacrifice, her eye fell on an old retainer shuffling along a back passageway. Snapping out her wings to sweep through the wide corridors designed for angels, she grabbed him in silence and, cutting his throat with his own ceremonial knife, lapped at the blood that bubbled up. It was a poor substitute to directly sucking up his lifeforce, and blood tasted vile to Lijuan, but it transferred enough of his life energy to her that she was temporarily rejuvenated. If she felt weak again, she’d take another life. There were always warm bodies available to a goddess.

Ready for this to end so she could concentrate on her healing, she waited for the lightning to stutter, then rose above the palace and blanketed it with her black rain. Xi, find Rohan. I want him alive.

In took another forty minutes and two more inefficient feedings before Xi succeeded in overwhelming the defenders, and captured Alexander’s son. The palace lay half in ruins by then, Rohan’s fighters mostly dead, along with a large number of noncombatants who’d been hiding in a room that had fallen under Lijuan’s archangelic power.

Lijuan hadn’t done the latter on purpose—a goddess didn’t worry about weaponless ants—but neither did she feel any guilt. Rohan should’ve surrendered the instant he saw he was up against an archangel. He had to have known there was no way he could win.

Yet, even now, when he stood in the charred ruins of what must’ve been his great room, his hands bound behind him and his wings half cut off and cauterized by fire, while she sat on a chair in front of him, Alexander’s son was defiant.

“I do not know where my father Sleeps,” he said with an insolent laugh. “Do you truly think he would be so foolish as to leave the information with his son? It would make me a target. Neither would he remain in this territory, which is the first place a stupid enemy would look.”

“Do not forget you speak to an archangel,” Lijuan warned him. “And swallow your lies, for we both know your father loved his people and would not leave them.”

Lijuan had long thought that love a foolishness on his part. Raphael shared the same failing, as did Elijah, Titus, and Astaad. Even Neha, for all her ruthlessness, would shed her own blood to protect her people. Lijuan wasn’t so sure about Favashi, and Michaela put herself first, as had Uram. Charisemnon alone, of them all, thought like Lijuan.

To be an archangel was to be a god. Lijuan cared for her people by making sure they were safe and that they had enough to eat, but she did not love them. She would use them in her wars as necessary. They were disposable. More would spawn and fill the world.

Alexander hadn’t thought in such a way. He’d created orphanages in his land that still provided shelter and education for urchin children to this day. He’d been so proud of those homes and of the schools he’d founded. “Every child in my land,” he’d said to her once, his hands on the railings of the top balcony of this very palace, “will have the chance to become better than a lost piece of flotsam on the street.”

She’d laughed and shaken her head. “You are a fool, Alexander.” The amused, affectionate words of a friend. “Mortals are born and die in a mere glimmer of time. What use is it to waste your resources and your emotions on them?”

Alexander, his golden hair afire in the sunlight, had smiled. “Did you not admire the tapestry in the hall? It was designed and created by a mortal. The work of a lifetime and more beautiful than any such work I’ve seen completed by immortal hands.”

Laughing again at how neatly he’d trapped her, Lijuan had conceded the point that very occasionally a particular mortal had his or her value. Most, however, were nothing. Insects to step on.

She hadn’t put it that way then. Only a thousand years into being an archangel and she’d been . . . soft. And for all their disagreements, she’d still admired Alexander, hadn’t wanted to disappoint him. But that time was long gone. She now saw him for the weak creature he’d been, driven by emotion and heart rather than the cold pragmatism of a god. That would be his downfall.

“You know something,” she said to the son Alexander had shown her when Rohan was a mere day old.

Lijuan had congratulated him, but in that tiny, squirming bundle she’d seen only a chink in his armor, a living vulnerability. Lijuan had long ago killed the mortal who had made her heart stir, and who could’ve become her own living vulnerability had she not taken preemptive action. Chaoxiang had been as dark as Alexander was fair, and he’d laughed as much as Raphael’s blue-winged commander did now.

“Beloved” he’d called her, eyes dancing.

Those eyes had held hers as she stabbed a dagger into his heart. There had been no recrimination in their black depths, only piercing love and forgiveness. His last word had been a whisper. “Lijuan.”

That day marked her true ascension, when she became invulnerable.

Unlike Alexander.

“If you do not speak,” she said to Rohan, “I will annihilate what remains of this palace and of your squadrons, as well as the surrounding villages and towns. I will kill tens of thousands.”

Rohan’s eyes, a deep ebony rather than Alexander’s silver, glittered. “You are a monster.” The words were spat out, his pale brown skin hot with rage.

“I am evolution.” Gripping his neck while she hovered using her wings, she lifted him off his feet. She’d fed again in the inefficient fashion that nonetheless gave her a power boost, and now she burned with it.

Bound as he was, Rohan couldn’t fight her, but his eyes remained unyielding. “My people stand with me and my father,” he said. “All know that if you come to power, the world will drown in death.”

“The world will be purified.” All weakness burned away. “Speak, or die.”

“You would go to war with Favashi for this?”

“Favashi is young.” Now that she could feed again even in a limited fashion, Lijuan knew she could kill the much younger archangel should Favashi be so foolish as to get in her way. “Where is your father, Rohan?”

Alexander’s son, the babe she had once held, looked at her without flinching. “I am Rohan, proud son of the greatest archangel ever to live, and you are an abomination who will never break my will.”

“Insolent fool!” Crushing his neck until his head lolled forward, she dropped him to the floor. He’d live—he was a strong angel of enough age to heal those injuries.

“My men have sacked the palace but there is no sign of Alexander,” Xi told her. “If he is like Caliane and able to hide deep in the earth, we may not find him in time.”

Alexander loved his people. He loved his only son even more.

Lijuan’s eyes went to Rohan’s already healing form. Her lips curved. “Then we make Alexander come to us,” she whispered, and waited the minutes it took for Rohan to heal enough to open his eyes. “Your father will wake at reckless speed to avenge you.”

Her words made Rohan’s jaw go tight, but Alexander’s son didn’t beg, didn’t scream as her black knives plunged into him. He went to his death with the stoic and defiant pride of a true warrior.

Part of Lijuan could admire that, and had it been possible, she’d have ordered that Rohan be given a warrior’s burial. But it wasn’t possible—her black death had caused his body to disintegrate into ash of the same shade.

Rohan was gone.

The world screamed, lurching under Xi’s feet.