Archangel’s Enigma (Guild Hunter #8)(30)
Author: Nalini Singh

Girding her stomach, she took care that no part of her touched the shadows . . . at least until they grew so thick not even a child could’ve avoided them. Cold whispered over her feathers and her skin where the shadows found purchase, and it was a cold that made her think not of winter, but of the grave and of dead, decaying things.

She tried to tell herself it was just her imagination, but the mute courtiers she passed in the corridors, their faces pinched and skittering fear in their eyes as they walked rapidly in the opposite direction, argued otherwise.

“We are here, honored guest.” Her escort stopped in front of a set of large doors that had been opened outward. Two vampires stood guard, both dressed in dark gray combat uniforms embellished with a single stripe of red down the left side.

The same colors as those in Xi’s wings.

As Lijuan had used these colors since her ascension, it made Andromeda wonder if the archangel had paid a young Xi particular attention because of his patriotic coloring. Had Xi’s future been written the instant his wings settled into their final coloration?

If she survived this meeting, perhaps she’d ask Xi.

In front of her, the guards didn’t so much as appear to breathe. One was a square-jawed and blue-eyed blond, the other dark-eyed and black-haired, his features angular, but they’d clearly been tempered in the same merciless crucible, their eyes without pity.

Walking past the two and leaving her guide outside, Andromeda found herself in a cavernous space that contained only a single piece of furniture. It was a throne carved of jade, the shades within spanning the spectrum from creamy white to a green so dark it was near black. Set atop a dais reached by five wide steps, it was spotlighted by the gentle golden light of the standing lamps set behind it. The soft lighting brought up the warmth in the jade, made the carvings glow.

Drawn to what was surely a treasure beyond price, she glanced around but saw no one else. She couldn’t resist. Going up the steps, she didn’t touch but bent to closely examine the carvings. Eerie, haunting, and disturbing in equal measures, they made her fingers itch once again for a pencil and a paper so she could record what she was seeing.

“Astonishing, is it not?”

The spectral voice was filled with a thousand echoes, with endless screams. As if behind that voice stood countless trapped souls. Spine threatening to lock as her skin iced over, Andromeda shifted on her heel to look around, but the metal disk on the opposite wall reflected only her own image back at her.

That meant nothing. Not when it came to the Archangel of China.

Abdominal muscles clenched tight, she walked down the steps and, making the decision to face the throne, clasped her hands in front of her. “Yes, my Lady,” she said. “I apologize if I overstepped.”

“It is to a scholar’s credit to be curious.” A frigid rush of air and then Zhou Lijuan appeared on the throne in a whisper of light and shadow that Andromeda’s mind struggled to comprehend.

Lijuan’s wings had always been a glorious dove gray, beautiful and elegant. The color had suited her age and her power. Those wings spread out behind her, as elegant and as flawless as always, and for an instant, Andromeda thought Lijuan was back to who she’d been before the battle with Raphael.

Then she saw eyes swimming in blood . . . and she saw absence.

There was no evidence of legs under the gown of red silk that flowed from Lijuan’s painfully thin shoulders. No indication of bones pushing against the skirt, nothing but emptiness. Her left sleeve hung equally hollow at her side.

Andromeda’s stomach twisted.

If Lijuan’s legs and arm—and possibly other parts of her that Andromeda couldn’t see—hadn’t yet grown back, then Raphael had done a kind of damage no one could’ve predicted when it came to a confrontation between an archangel who hadn’t yet reached his second millennium, and a near-Ancient. It also meant Lijuan was far more dangerous than even Andromeda had anticipated.

A woman who believed herself a goddess would not appreciate the daily, and excruciatingly painful, reminder of weakness.

At least, but for her eyes and her thinness, the archangel’s face seemed as it had always been. The same blade-sharp cheekbones, the same pearlescent eyes, the same ice-white hair. Her skin appeared fragile but that—

Andromeda choked back a scream.

Lijuan’s face had turned into a skull, her eye sockets black hollows crawling with maggots that screamed. It lasted a split second before her face was normal again, but Andromeda would never forget the horror. Raphael’s right temple now bore a vibrant and ancient mark in a wild blue lit with white fire, while the newest reports from Titus’s territory said he was developing a stunning tattoo-like marking in deep gold across the mahogany of his broad chest, but none of the archangels had developed anything so macabre.