The wings that spread out behind him were a darker green with streaks of wild blue.
“I am Aegaeon!” he roared. “I am not to be disturbed!”
Astaad wished he weren’t drenched, his tunic filthy from the work he’d been doing to save as many of his people as he could, but that was how things had fallen and he was an archangel. “I am Astaad!” He made his own voice boom, for yes, he was capable of such—he just preferred to be more refined. “You encroach on my territory!”
The scythe caught the silver from the sky, its edge glowing. “Why do you wake me?” Aegaeon’s eyes gleamed hard as gemstones. “I am not ready to wake!”
“We are in the midst of a catastrophic Cascade.” Astaad had no more answers for him than this. “It is why your island is submerged.”
Aegaeon looked down, his hair falling around the square lines of his jaw, seemed to notice the water for the first time. A curl of his lip. “Can you not clear such things?” A wave of the scythe and the water retreated.
“I prefer to save my energy for the lands that remain inhabited.” Astaad would not allow an interloper to make the rules in his lands; he would however, make use of Aegaeon’s penchant for flaunting his power. “My people are dying and islands are being submerged faster than we can evacuate them.”
“Show me!”
Every word out of the man’s mouth was headache-inducing. “Come.”
Aegaeon flew after him without argument, but Astaad knew the cooperation would soon devolve into aggression. Aegaeon was not an angel who would be satisfied with anything but a full territory.
Even as Astaad saw the first geyser of water on the island, a wave of sound hit Alexander’s territory while he stood ankle-deep in snow. The clear sky turned into a moonless night, ebony and without end.
“Zanaya is rising,” he said to his second.
Taking to the air, he soon spotted snow-covered sands in the distance from which emerged a mirage of light and darkness, a woman colored in starlight. Waist-length curls of silver washed with purple until it was a hue he’d seen on no other, skin of night, eyes huge dark orbs that he knew flickered with silvery light and lips so plush a man could look at them and think himself lost.
Until she cut out your heart and fried it to eat with her most prized wine.
Shorter than him by several inches, Zanaya wore her sword across her back because of course Zanaya would go into Sleep with a sword. It was her most beloved lover.
Her body was clad in a short wrap that hugged every curve and valley. A glittering starlight creation that covered her breasts and thighs and yet left her more alluring than if she’d been unclothed. Though, as Alexander was personally aware, Zanaya was beyond alluring when bare to the skin.
He landed in front of her with a feeling of inevitability in his gut.
“Xander.” A purr of sound, the language one he hadn’t heard for millennia even before his Sleep. “We meet again.”
“That is my grandson’s name now.”
The sparks of moonlight in her pupils grew brighter. “You jest? You are a grandfather?” A slow seduction of a smile. “I have Slept long.”
“That is a matter of opinion,” he muttered under his breath.
Throwing back her head, she laughed and the sound wrapped around him as it always had, luscious and drugging and Zanaya. “Oh, Alexander, do not say you are not happy to see me. I am crushed.”
She stretched her arms to the sky, back arched and toes digging into the snow, and it was like watching a lioness wake to the sun that even now chased Zanaya’s sudden night from the sky. “It did not snow in this desert when I went to Sleep.” She crouched down, lifted a handful of glittering ice crystals. “Does my Nile yet flow, or is it ice?”
“It’s begun to ice over,” he told the deadly, lovely archangel who’d preferred to be called the Queen of the Nile over any other title. “We are in a Cascade. You are the only Ancient I know who has woken with such suddenness, but there are signs Aegaeon is also stirring. Caliane woke before I did.”
No smile as she rose, regal and so beautiful that he had never comprehended why the world considered Michaela the epitome of beauty. “I will Sleep,” she said, because infuriating and half insane she might be, but Zanaya was also an archangel who’d been beloved by her people—and once, by Alexander.
“I do not think the Cascade will let you Sleep.” He folded his arms with rigid tightness to stop himself from stroking his fingers over her shoulders, down her arms, as he’d done a thousand times in another age. “I will call a Cadre meeting about you, but first, I have to rescue a village buried under ice and snow.”
“Why so bad-tempered, lover?”
“I am an Ancient. Treat me as such or . . .”
“Or what?” A wink, long lashes coming down like a fan. “So, tell me what you’ve been doing since I decided I’d caused enough mayhem for ten immortal lifetimes.”
As if they had not been apart for a hundred thousand years. She had gone into Sleep ten years after their last fight, while he was still half furious and half in love with her. Not because of him. Zanaya had never been tied to the decisions of others and it was part of why she’d so bewitched him.
“I have work to do.” He rose into the air.
She followed with a laugh, her wings rippling black with flecks of silvery white.
That was when the world turned black in a way that was nothing akin to Zanaya’s luxuriant darkness. The silence that descended was oppressive . . . until it was broken by screams that drilled into the ears and shrieked.
“What is this cacophony!” Zanaya yelled. “No archangel I know wakes with such darkness!”
“You do not know her. Her name is Lijuan.”
39
Neha watched Lijuan’s return from a border fort in her own territory, Nivriti by her side. She and her twin had declared a strange, unsteady truce in the face of the chaos fostered by the Cascade and when Nivriti stood with her this way, the peacock hues of Nivriti’s wings nearly touching the white and indigo of hers, Neha remembered all that she’d lost and wondered if it was her time to Sleep.
Everything hurt. Her heart. Her soul.
She was so tired.
But none of them could Sleep now, with Lijuan rising once more. The screaming blackness that had announced her waking had finally withdrawn its suffocating presence from Neha’s lands, but it stayed solid over and around China. “Do you think the people within see any light?”
“I think that one likes to keep her people in the darkness.”
The wind brought scents across the border, all the way to the top of the fort. Tiny hairs rising on her nape, Neha sent out a mental order to her generals to mount a permanent guard across the entire border. She would not be taken by surprise, would not be a prize for Lijuan to claim.
Yet even as she thought that, she knew that Lijuan had come back different from the Cadre. The Archangel of China had already been able to go noncorporeal prior to her disappearance, and now she was back after no real Sleep at all—with the power to opaque her entire territory from the rest of the world.
The black fog hovered over China, only to curve down to meet the earth at the border. As Neha watched, a bird disoriented by the sudden changes in the sky flew into the wall of fog. Its small body tumbled to the earth a heartbeat later. Jumping off the roof of the fort, strands of hair that had escaped her braid sticking to the sides of her face, Neha flared out her wings so she could make a soft landing on the dirt below.
Nivriti was already down. She’d always done that. Tried to be faster, better, stronger. Not that it mattered any longer. Sliding her sword from the sheath at her hip, Neha nudged the bird’s small body out of the danger zone. “Do not touch it,” she said when Nivriti hunkered down, the emerald and cobalt and black of her wings spread out behind her.