Archangel’s Enigma (Guild Hunter #8)(110)
Author: Nalini Singh

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.”