Archangel's Enigma

11

After first discovering his sudden irresistibility to women, Naasir had taken advantage. Then, thinking about all the lessons he’d had from Jessamy, and what he’d learned of honor from watching Dmitri, he’d gone to Dmitri and confessed that it was possible he’d inadvertently been compelling women to him. He was unique—even he didn’t know his own capabilities.

Dmitri had treated his worries seriously. Restricting him to bottled blood, Dmitri had gone out and spoken to over fifty women, all of whom had fed Naasir since he started finding his own food. At the end of his investigation, he’d come to Naasir with a lethally amused smile on his face.

“You aren’t compelling anyone, Naasir. The women are all of sound mind and body and recall their encounter with you with pleasure.” A raised eyebrow. “If they weren’t so terrified of me, I think I’d have been bombarded with invitations for you to return any time you feel hungry.”

Dmitri’s laugh had held a vein of sensual cruelty that drew countless women to the man who was Naasir’s father in all the ways it counted. “It appears you have the same effect as a jungle cat on certain women—they find you beautiful and want to pet you, tame you. Having a wild creature at their throats excites them.”

Since Naasir couldn’t be tamed, he wasn’t angered by the women’s thoughts. Their response to him was occasionally annoying though—it made the hunt too easy. Not only that, it was clear that they reacted to him on a purely physical level, without ever knowing anything about who he was as a person.

Andromeda hadn’t liked him or melted for him. She’d fought with him.

He grinned.

He’d make her like him after he got her out of Lijuan’s citadel. And when he fed from her, he’d feed her in turn, so she’d know she wasn’t just food to him. He wondered what she liked to eat. He’d have to find out so he could court her properly and confirm she was his mate. He’d never courted anyone before, but he’d watched other people do it. He knew he was supposed to bring her gifts, do things that made her smile.

To accomplish that, he’d have to discover Andromeda’s smaller secrets. Having watched others win and lose at courting, he knew the best gifts matched the person. Maybe he’d find her a knife. Elena liked the knife Raphael had given her, and Andromeda was a warrior, too. But he’d have to find the right knife. Or perhaps he’d get her something else.

Dmitri had given Honor jewels he’d held safe for centuries, as if part of him had known he was waiting for his mate to claim them. Honor’s eyes went soft every time she touched her fingers to those jewels. Naasir hadn’t seen Andromeda wearing jewels but he hadn’t known her long. Maybe she liked sparkly things. Naasir liked them sometimes. He had a large cache he’d collected over the years. He hadn’t even stolen most of them—he’d stopped stealing things even from people he didn’t like four hundred years ago, after he grew up.

It had taken him longer than other immortals because he was different.

A growl sounded not far from him. He growled back and had a running companion for over an hour before the other runner rumbled a snarling good-bye and turned back into his territory. Continuing to run at the same relentless pace, Naasir looked up at the sky and tried to find Jason. He couldn’t. The spymaster was too good.

When he saw a small truck parked up ahead on the far edge of a field—as if the owner had walked into the village in the distance—he got into it. Hot-wiring the ignition, he drove the truck until he’d exhausted the fuel, ran again until he found another ride. He was moving as fast as he could without causing his body to shut down, but Lijuan’s territory was vast. It would take him at least another full day to reach Andromeda. Another twenty-four to thirty-six hours when she was alone with Zhou Lijuan.

Snarling, he reminded himself that the woman who smelled like his mate wasn’t prey. She was smart. She had secrets. She would survive.

Andromeda’s gasp was still hanging in the air when Lijuan smiled. “Ah, have you seen my faces?” She carried on speaking without waiting for an answer. “I am continuing to evolve. Soon, I will be more powerful than even the legends rumored to Sleep beneath the Refuge.”

Andromeda had no doubts Lijuan was changing, but she wasn’t sure she’d call it evolution. “Lady,” she said instead, her tone respectful. “According to reports filed after the battle, you perished in the fighting.” She needed to keep Lijuan talking. It would give her precious more time to think of a way out of this situation.

“I am not so easy to kill.” Lijuan’s voice echoed with screams again on the last two words, as if the souls she’d swallowed were fighting to get out. “I decided on a strategic retreat, decided to permit Raphael to live.”

Andromeda allowed Lijuan’s rewriting of history to stand. Discretion wasn’t only the better part of valor at this instant, it might be her only chance at survival. “Will you rejoin the Cadre?”

“The Cadre is a weak construct.” Lijuan flicked her hand as if brushing aside the idea. “It is time for a new world order.” Leaning back in the throne, she smiled, her face continuing to fade in and out of its different forms. It was eerie and oddly compelling at the same time. “I will create a better world.”

For the next hour, Andromeda listened to Lijuan speak of the world she planned to build. The archangel’s words were rambling and disjointed, and at times, they faded off completely, Lijuan’s body phasing in and out at the same time. However, Andromeda knew it would be a fatal mistake to underestimate her. Zhou Lijuan had at least nine thousand years of life and experience behind her, likely more.

“You listen well, scholar.”

Andromeda inclined her head. “It is my task to listen and to record.”

Lijuan smiled right as her face changed into the skull avatar. It turned the smile into a grotesque grimace filled with agonized howls that made Andromeda want to clap her palms over her ears. Controlling her breathing with grim effort, she gripped her hand tighter in front of her.

“Then hear this,” the archangel said in her sepulchral voice. “I have need to speak to Alexander.”

“The Ancient Sleeps.” Andromeda’s response would be expected, shouldn’t engender torture or violence. It remained a calculated risk nonetheless. “No one is meant to disturb an angel’s Sleep.” It was a taboo on par with that which forbade the abuse of children.

“I understand your qualms, but the world is changing and you must change with it.” Lijuan’s bloody eyes held her own. “Xi tells me you know where Alexander Sleeps.”

“No, Lady. I do not,” Andromeda said even as the crushing depth of Lijuan’s power threatened to suffocate her. “Alexander was too good a general for it to be otherwise. I know only of a possible location where he might have gone to ground.”

“Lying to me would not be a good idea.” A strange chill infiltrated the air at Lijuan’s words.

“I would not.” Andromeda’s breath felt like shards of ice in her lungs, stabbing and painful. “Alexander was an Ancient when he went to Sleep. He must have had the power to hide himself in the same way as Caliane.” Raphael’s mother had taken an entire city with her into Sleep, and when it rose after more than a thousand years, it was in a location far from its origins. “We cannot know whether he buried himself in the earth or under the seabed.”

Lijuan nodded at last, the inhuman chill receding. “You speak the truth. I must not forget that Alexander was always a great tactician. The tales his peers told of him as a young fighter . . .” A shake of her head, her tone almost affectionate as she added, “He would neither confirm nor deny most of them when I asked.”

Aware Lijuan’s mood could turn in a heartbeat, Andromeda used grim focus to keep her voice steady, though fear was a cold intruder in her gut. “May this scholar importune you for such stories as have been lost in time?”

Lijuan laughed and for an instant Andromeda could see the archangel as she’d once been. The one who was old and arrogant, but also wise and a cool head on the Cadre. The one who had found amusement in a wild boy who’d pretended to eat her cat.

“So young and curious.” Lijuan shook her head. “Yes, I will tell you stories, scholar, but first, you will give the possible location of Alexander’s place of Sleep to Xi.” It was an order. “He will mount the search.”

Spine stiff from the relentless discipline it took to stand firm against Lijuan’s power, Andromeda didn’t crumple. “Lady, as a fledgling historian, I took certain inviolable oaths. I cannot reveal Alexander’s possible location without compromising those oaths.”

“Your qualms do you credit, but as I have said, the world has changed.”

Though her flesh was icy from the renewed chill and her bones ached, Andromeda fought for courage, found it in the sudden memory of a sword dance with a silver-eyed vampire who wasn’t a vampire. Naasir thought she had a secret skin. Today, she’d wear the skin of a troubled young scholar and it would be her mask and her shield.

“May I have a night to consider my decision?” she asked. “It is a difficult one, for while my oaths are sacrosanct to me, I know Alexander’s strength is needed in this world.”

Lijuan’s face faded to almost nothing without warning, as did her body. “You are of the blood of an ally, so I will give you this chance.” An echoing, screaming, horrifying voice. “Go. Consider.” A wave of her hand as her body took form again.

Andromeda left before the archangel changed her mind. Her vampire escort was no longer outside the great doors, but Xi was on his way in. “General,” she said calmly, fighting the pounding urge to run until she had no more breath and the sinuous, screaming shadows of Lijuan’s throne room were far in the distance. “Am I forbidden from exploring the citadel? I’m curious to see Suyin’s creation.”

“Go where you will,” Xi told her. “If you need help to find your way, ask any of the people you meet.” A curt nod. “I must attend my archangel.”

Andromeda forced herself to walk away at a tempered pace, her heart beating so rapidly it was all she could hear. Xi’s acquiescence confirmed Andromeda’s suspicions that Lijuan didn’t intend for her to leave. Ever.

Even as the harsh truth settled in Andromeda’s stomach, she didn’t panic. That would get her nowhere. Once out of the central part of the citadel, she noted the number of guards, tried to pinpoint possible exits she could use, but had to admit the complex was too big and sprawling for her to believe she’d seen even a tenth of it in her explorations.

She tried to imagine what Naasir, renowned for his stealth, would do. He was impossibly beautiful when he moved, an apex predator who feared nothing and no one, and who had a dark, deadly grace.

You have secrets. You wear another skin, too.

Hand fisting against her abdomen, Andromeda fought back a sudden surge of raw emotion. It was silly, foolish. She’d known him for a flicker of time. It shouldn’t matter that she might never again see him, never again play games with him that threatened to unravel her hard-fought shell of civilized discipline.

But it did. It mattered.

Hours after that stabbing instant of loss, terror was a quiet tattoo in her head. Because this citadel was a fortress. She’d tired her feet to throbbing pain without discovering a single avenue of escape. Swallowing past the sour taste of fear and refusing to give up, she was padding down a quiet hallway when she heard it: a low, lyrical humming that caught at her heart, it was so evocative.

She followed the exquisite sound to a set of open doors at the far end of the hallway, knocked softly. “Hello?”

The humming trailed off. “Yes?” A gentle voice.

Entering, Andromeda found herself in a light-filled room decorated with white fabrics and colorful cushions. The angel who looked up at Andromeda from the sofa on which she sat, a sketchpad on her lap and her legs folded under her, had Lijuan’s sharp cheekbones and ice-white hair against cool white skin, though her eyes were a rich obsidian. A tiny beauty spot dotted the delicate skin just below the far edge of her left eye.

You have spots on your face.

The mental echo of Naasir’s growly, fascinated voice snapped her out of her stunned shock. Because this angel’s distinctive features, when added to the arching snow-white wings with bronze primaries that Andromeda could see behind her, made her identity impossible to mistake. “Suyin.”

Lijuan’s niece and one of the greatest architects the world had ever known.

The angel smiled, and it was startling to see such open, kind welcome on a face that could’ve been a duplicate of Lijuan’s but for the color of Suyin’s eyes and the beauty spot. “And who are you, youngling?”

Andromeda supposed she was young in comparison to an angel many thousands of years old. “Andromeda,” she said. “A scholar.”

“Ah.” Returning her eyes to her sketchpad, Suyin motioned her head toward the opposite sofa. “Sit, Andromeda,” she said in the same aged dialect she’d used earlier. “Tell me what you do here.”

Andromeda saw no reason to lie.

Pencil motionless on her sketchpad, Suyin looked at her with sad eyes once she was done. “My aunt will not allow you to leave.”

“I know.” It was no longer Lijuan she saw when she looked at Suyin. The other woman’s own spirit was too bright and too gentle both. “Have you been imprisoned here all this time?” It must’ve felt like living death to an angel who, according to the histories Andromeda had read, had loved to fly the world.

“I was given the choice to Sleep or to die. And in this, I was . . . lucky, for others who helped build this citadel and thus knew its secrets, were all executed.” Sorrow in every part of her as she flipped a page and began to sketch again. “I chose to Sleep, but I wake every few hundred years to see if this prison I built has fallen and I can fly to freedom.” The quiet horror of her pain made Andromeda’s eyes sting. “Yet each time I wake, my aunt is more powerful, more a nightmare.”

Andromeda wanted to trust this woman who appeared to be a fellow captive, but she couldn’t. Not so quickly. Yet she risked asking, “Did you ever try to escape?”

Setting aside her sketchpad, Suyin rose to her feet and turned. Andromeda cried out, one trembling hand rising to her mouth. Suyin was missing most of the lower half of one wing, the exposed muscle and tendon of the bottom edge hot and red.

“I tried to escape the first time I woke,” Suyin said after sitting back down, the faint breathlessness in her voice the only indication of what must be agonizing pain.

She nodded to the crossed swords mounted on the wall behind Andromeda. “The blades used to clip my wings each time I wake.”

Andromeda couldn’t imagine the endless horror. “How are you sane?” she whispered.

“I do not know myself.” Suyin’s fine-boned hand moved over the paper in confident strokes. “Perhaps because I was old enough before my imprisonment that I understand time passes like an inexorable river, bringing change with it.”

Wise, sad eyes met Andromeda’s once more and for an instant, her skin prickled with a dizzying sense of déjà vu. As if she was facing Lijuan again, only this Lijuan was who the archangel should have become.

“I have heard whispers of a change called the Cascade,” Suyin said. “Is this true?”

There was no reason to hide the knowledge. “It’s said to be a time when the archangels grow so viciously in power that the consequences could shatter the foundations of the world.”

And the archangels were not who they should be, and bodies rotted in the streets and blood rained from the skies as empires burned.

Nothing could ever soften the grim impact of those words, the first specific mention of a previous Cascade that Jessamy had discovered in the Archives. “A small number of ordinary angels have also been affected.”

Illium was the most dramatic example. All the older immortals had begun to notice the violent acceleration of the blue-winged angel’s development. There were rumors that he might break away from Raphael’s Seven and seek to rule a territory, but those who believed that had forgotten Dmitri. The vampire was one of the most powerful in the world and he chose to be Raphael’s second.

“If the world is on the brink of catastrophic change,” Suyin said softly, “then, perhaps the next time I wake I will be free . . . and the world will be a ruin. One nightmare to another.”

Naasir ran under the moon after his latest truck ran out of fuel, his skin covered by a fine layer of sweat and his muscles straining, but he was still too far from Lijuan’s citadel. Be smart, he thought to Andromeda. Be sneaky. I’m coming.