Archangel's War

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 The screaming blackness that had announced her waking had finally withdrawn its suffocating presence from Neha’s lands, but it stayed solid over and around China. “Do you think the people within see any light?”

“I think that one likes to keep her people in the darkness.”

The wind brought scents across the border, all the way to the top of the fort. Tiny hairs rising on her nape, Neha sent out a mental order to her generals to mount a permanent guard across the entire border. She would not be taken by surprise, would not be a prize for Lijuan to claim.

Yet even as she thought that, she knew that Lijuan had come back different from the Cadre. The Archangel of China had already been able to go noncorporeal prior to her disappearance, and now she was back after no real Sleep at all—with the power to opaque her entire territory from the rest of the world.

The black fog hovered over China, only to curve down to meet the earth at the border. As Neha watched, a bird disoriented by the sudden changes in the sky flew into the wall of fog. Its small body tumbled to the earth a heartbeat later. Jumping off the roof of the fort, strands of hair that had escaped her braid sticking to the sides of her face, Neha flared out her wings so she could make a soft landing on the dirt below.

Nivriti was already down. She’d always done that. Tried to be faster, better, stronger. Not that it mattered any longer. Sliding her sword from the sheath at her hip, Neha nudged the bird’s small body out of the danger zone. “Do not touch it,” she said when Nivriti hunkered down, the emerald and cobalt and black of her wings spread out behind her.

“I am not a fool, sister.” Rote bitten-out words, Nivriti’s attention on the dead bird. “It is hard to say if the marks of violence on the body are as a result of the wall, or of the bird’s fall.”

Neha hunkered down beside her sister, their wings overlapping. “See those, Nivi.” She pointed to the wing area.

A hiss. “Cuts. Yet there are no stones on the ground that could’ve done such damage.”

“Lady!” One of Neha’s senior vampires ran toward her, was breathless by the time he arrived. “A dog ran into the dark fog and it fell where it stood. When we dragged it out by the visible hindquarters, it was cut all over and bleeding.”

“Dead?” She had to know if survival was possible.

“All but,” the vampire said. “We gave it mercy.”

“Mercy was the right choice.” She rose to her feet. “Spread the word that no one is to approach the border. I will warn Lady Caliane’s people. If anyone does fall in, haul them out as fast as possible.”

“Yes, my queen.”

Nivriti got to her feet as the vampire ran to action Neha’s orders. “No archangel in history has been able to so surround their territory.”

“Caliane can do it,” Neha murmured. “But Amanat is the size of a large village. To encompass China . . .”

She stared at the dark fog and told herself it was her imagination, that she couldn’t see the trapped and screaming faces of the lost villagers staring back at her.

All those souls imprisoned forever, their teeth and nails Lijuan’s weapons.