Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(21)

Right now, her focus was on the tunic she was tearing into long panels.

As Meher completed his task and threw aside the piece of the spear he’d cut, Zanaya slid her hand under Aureline’s neck with extreme care and placed her fingers around the other end of the spear. Perspiration chilled her skin. “Tip’s buried too deep in the ground. We can’t pull it out without hurting her.” She thought fast. “We extricate Auri by sliding her neck up over the top end of the spear.” It was short now, the exercise doable.

Meher helped her stabilize Aureline’s head as they gently, gently, gently got her free. Then they worked at rapid speed to wrap her wound with the bandages formed of their squadron mate’s tunic. It didn’t matter if they made it tight; angels could survive without air for long periods. It wouldn’t be comfortable, but it was better than Aureline’s head detaching from her body.

Because there was no coming back from that for anyone but an archangel.

“Is she still alive?” Meher asked as they finished wrapping the final bandage.

“Yes,” Zanaya said, though she wasn’t sure. “Hold the line.” With that, she gathered Aureline up in her arms. Her friend was taller than her, but Zanaya had built up considerable strength over the years—in all honesty, she was far stronger than she should be, given her size and outward appearance. A little gift from her father no doubt, because it certainly hadn’t come from Rzia’s willowy and ethereal line.

Just grateful for the strength that meant she had no trouble doing a vertical takeoff with Auri’s body cradled in her arms, she tucked her friend close and, hoping against hope that Aureline could fight just a little longer, she flew her friend home.





12


Alexander saw Zanaya again a bare season after his ascension, while he was in the process of trying to put together his court. She came into his world as a squadron leader in charge of escorting a renowned scholar whom Archangel Inj’ra had kindly permitted to guest in Alexander’s court for a period, the scholar’s task to assist Alexander in certain matters.

If Zanaya had been a punch to the solar plexus before, she was now a grip around his throat. But if she’d been forbidden then, she was now verboten.

An archangel and such a young angel?

It would be an abomination.

Yet she stood under the banner that bore his sigil—a raven in flight—and held his eyes with impudent arrogance, challenging him to see her, know her, have her. But there was something different about her this time, a tension that hinted at pain. And that Alexander couldn’t stand, so he closed the distance between them.

“What’s happened?” he asked, as if they’d been having this conversation throughout the years between their first meeting and this. “Why do you hurt?”

She would’ve been well within her rights to tell him it was none of his business, but he’d startled her out of her martial calm by striding over to stand so close to her. So she told him the truth. “My best friend is gravely injured. She might die.”

Alexander wanted to hold her. To face the specter of death so young . . . “She isn’t dead yet,” he said. “And Inj’ra has a corps of healers that outshine any other.”

“Yes.” Hope in her tone now, her face younger and more innocent than it had been a bare moment ago. “Thank you, Alexander.” She should’ve called him Archangel Alexander but of course she wouldn’t, not this warrior woman who refused to treat him with diffidence. “Will you walk with me today?”

Gut clenched against the desire to hold her, comfort her further, he said, “I do not consort with babes.” It was a cruel thing to say, but he had to be cruel. Or he’d doom them both.

Her expression grew hard as granite, all softness erased. “You’ll regret your words one day, Archangel Alexander.”

He should’ve been furious with her for speaking to him in that tone, but Zanaya made her own rules when it came to Alexander. The only rule he wouldn’t permit her to break was the one that would lead to her touching him. At least not until she was a thousand years of age or more.

He could not—would not—take her to his bed while she remained dewy with youth. He’d seen such things happen between angels and it never ended well. Either the youth outgrew their elder, or the elder crushed the youth’s growth. All of it due to the fact that angels grew slowly, including in their maturity.



* * *



*

Needing to speak of Zanaya even if he wouldn’t permit himself to have her, he found himself telling his second—and friend—all of it. “It may be condescending to say that, squadron leader or not,” he said at last, “Zanaya doesn’t know herself yet—”

“—but that makes it no less true,” Avelina completed for him.

Tall and taut with the muscle of a honed warrior beneath her well-worn leathers, she had eyes of a brown so pale it was amber, and skin the shade of purest onyx. Though it made Alexander’s chief of “soft” operations, Zakariah, groan at the “cruel waste of beauty,” Avelina usually wore her mass of tight black curls in fine braids threaded through with strings of shimmering bronze.

“I’m a warrior, Zak,” he’d heard her say dryly. “I’ll leave the fashion to you. I’m more interested in hair that leaves my field of view clear and is easy to maintain. There are, sadly, no hair maids on the battlefield.”