Archangel’s Legion (Guild Hunter #6)(102)
Author: Nalini Singh

Ten seconds later, the instant after he sliced off the head of an enemy general in a fountaining spray of red that sent the body into the water from where his people would no doubt retrieve him, for he was too old to die by beheading, he felt Jason’s mind touch his. Sire, they’re lifting the flag of surrender.

Rising immediately above the rest of his force, Raphael confirmed Jason’s sighting, then raised his sword above his head in a vertical line. The message took half a minute to get through the furious fighting, but one by one his people held their blows, allowing the enemy to retreat.

“We just let them go?” Elena asked, having come up beside him. “Seriously?”

Raphael didn’t blame her for her angry disbelief, his own fury colder but no less deadly. “It is part of the rules of engagement.”

“But they would’ve killed us.” It was almost a growl, her blood-streaked and battered body taut with the need to hunt down those who had hurt the people who were her own.

“If my forces had surrendered, the enemy fighters wouldn’t have touched them so long as they didn’t raise arms against Lijuan.” Whether Lijuan herself would then have used his people for her feeds was another question, but he wasn’t Lijuan, to make such an ugly breach of the rules of his people.

Contacting Dmitri and Naasir, he said, Herd her surviving vampire troops to the pier and find them a ship. Make sure they have enough blood to survive the journey out of my waters. After that, they became the responsibility of their own commanders, and while Raphael didn’t think Lijuan had much honor any longer, he thought perhaps her older commanders had enough not to abandon their own.

“I still think it sucks.” Elena pushed a strand of hair off her sweat-stained face, the brown color so wrong, Raphael knew he’d have her wash it out at the first opportunity. “I don’t think that sick thing calling herself an archangel would’ve obeyed the rules.”

“She is beyond honor and madness, a creature of true evil.”

A sigh, his furious consort nonetheless lowering her crossbow. “And you’re not.” Scowling, she continued to watch the enemy. “Fine, fine, we’ll be civilized and let them retreat, but damn it, I don’t like it. They’ll be back as soon as Lijuan has recovered, because it would be just too much good luck if the Queen of the Zombies was truly dead.”

Of that, Raphael had no doubt. “The rules of engagement were put in place long ago, after archangelic wars no one remembers,” he said to Elena, and it was also a reminder to himself of why such rules were needed. “Wars, after all, are between the archangels—yet it is the angels and vampires below us who die total deaths.”

As he’d expected, the general he’d beheaded had been retrieved, while countless vampires and ordinary angelic fighters floated on the water or lay broken and bloodied across the city, their lives ended. “In those wars, it’s said we decimated over eighty percent of our population. Only the archangels and the noncombatants survived and not one person ever forgot the blood that stained the hands of the Cadre at the time.”

“Okay,” Elena whispered, horror in her expression. “Okay, I get it now.”

“Jason’s squadron will escort them out of our territorial waters,” he said, brushing his wing over hers. “Now we must deal with this other strange force, find out their price for this day’s help.”

They turned as a unit to face the city.

45

Having landed on roofs as far as the eye could see, the gray ones sat crouched like living gargoyles, their wings arched, fundamentally changing the landscape. Birds sat on the shoulders and bodies of many of them, silent and watchful.

“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Elena asked Raphael, trying to make some sense of what she was seeing, and failing.

From what she’d witnessed in the battle as the gray angels fought around her, there was no color to them—gray eyes, pale smooth skin, hair of gray, gray wings. Yet they were humanoid, had faces with the clean lines and strong bones of the immortals. Their wings, however, had no feathers, instead formed of a leathery texture that reminded her of the wings of bats. The shape of those wings, too, was similar to the nocturnal creatures.

“No,” Raphael said after a long moment, as heavy clouds passed across the sky to drop a curtain of snow on the city, the sun blotted out to cloak the world in darkness.

It created the perfect muted background for the strange angels who crouched all over New York.

“These gray ones are an enigma.” Eyes of violent blue took in the eerie scene, everyone so silent it seemed impossible this was a city of countless souls. “Come.”

The gray angels didn’t stop them as they flew back through the snow to the Tower, Illium by their side. Coming to a stop on the Tower balcony, Elena took her place beside Raphael, their eyes on Manhattan. Dmitri flanked him in silence, while Illium acted as a winged sentry. Naasir, she realized, had to be handling the enemy vampires still in the city.

Take one step forward with me, Elena.

Guessing it to be some kind of angelic protocol, she did so without argument . . . and one of the gray ones flew toward them from a nearby building. Tall, with broad shoulders, his wings silent in the snow and his hair brushing his nape, Elena couldn’t have picked him out from any of the others. It was as if they’d been minted from the same press, one after the other.

Landing right in front of them, he placed his sword horizontally in front of his body and went down on one knee, head bent.

Elena bit down hard on her lower lip to stifle her gasp. The mark on his nape, she said, eyes on the primal black lines of it as the male’s dusty gray hair slipped to either side, it’s a mirror image of yours.

“Sire,” the unknown fighter said at the same instant, “we come as called.”

Raphael’s answer was accompanied by a freezing wind that swept through the deathly silent city. “None who fought so bravely should kneel.”

The gray angel rose to his feet on Raphael’s words. This close, Elena saw his irises weren’t truly gray; they were so pale as to be barely distinguishable from the whites, but for the black pinpricks of his pupils. It should’ve reminded her of Lijuan, but it didn’t, because where Lijuan carried death and a putrid evil in her eyes, the being that looked through those colorless eyes was near to a blank slate. As if he hadn’t yet decided who he would be.

“You call me Sire.” Raphael’s wing was heavy against her own as they stood side by side, their bodies aligned under the falling snow that was a cold, welcome kiss on the wounds that scored her flesh. “Tell me why.”