I’m sending something into your body to counter Lijuan’s poison. Don’t fight it. With that warning he hoped the stubborn warrior would heed, he released a tiny ball of white gold fire swirled with luminous blue, directly onto Alexander’s wing.
The Ancient’s body went rigid as the wildfire entered his system, tendons and muscles stretched and his hand crushing Raphael’s, but Alexander made not a sound. He was a general, would suffer pain in silence. As Raphael watched, the black slowly receded from that part of his wing.
Breathing heavily, Alexander stared blindly toward Raphael. Your cure is as bad as the disease.
Raphael hadn’t heard that deep voice with its touch of Ancient arrogance, in four hundred years. And though Alexander had been threatening to go to war against him at the time, he felt an unexpected welcome inside him for this man he’d always respected. I must be careful. The wildfire may kill you if I use too much. Any more than needed to counter the poison and it became a weapon in itself.
Alexander suffered excruciating pain throughout the operation. He bore it with the grace of a warrior and when his eyes cleared at last, he looked at Raphael and said, “Well, young Rafe. It’s as well that I didn’t kill you, isn’t it?”
Raphael felt his lips curve at the name no one had ever called him—no one but an Alexander who refused to see the archangel he’d become. “Try to remember that, Xander.”
Alexander’s smile at the familiar address he permitted only intimates, was fleeting. “She took my son from this world.” Rage boiled in every word. “I will not stop until I hunt her down and cut out her venomous heart.”
That, Raphael thought, was what many people had forgotten about Alexander: he was wise and strong and a great peacemaker, but he’d begun life as a warrior and it was the bloodthirsty heart of a warrior that beat in his chest.
“I will be at your side.” Raphael moved down Alexander’s body to see if he could speed up the Ancient’s healing. This much damage on the heels of an early waking could leave Alexander broken for days.
“What has become of Lijuan?” Confusion beneath the blood fury. “She was many times arrogant after her ascension, but she showed signs of greatness.”
“That was true enough even a hundred years earlier.” Raphael had found Lijuan disturbing at times, eerie more than once, but the old ones of their race were often a touch removed from the world. He’d asked her advice on countless matters over the centuries, received genuine responses.
After spending an eternity wondering if his parents’ madness would one day claim him, Raphael saw Lijuan’s devolution and couldn’t help but consider if age alone was the killer of souls. Was it possible Lijuan had no choice in her evil, that eternity itself had betrayed her?
We are not your parents and you sure as hell aren’t anything like Her Evilness. She killed her mortal lover, remember? You made your lover your consort. She had a choice. Elena’s voice was as sharp and as annoyed as if she stood beside him. He knew it was exactly what she’d say should he articulate his thoughts.
The incipient cold inside him burned off by her fire, he spoke to Alexander. “I don’t know what precipitated the change, but Lijuan has become a scourge upon the world. She believes herself a goddess—the rest of us are hindrances to her desire for omnipotent rule.”
Alexander turned his head toward the destroyed village in the distance. “My people come. I do not want them here.”
Raphael understood; it was why he’d told the snipers to go. Touching Naasir’s mind, he said, Naasir, tell the ones with you to prepare a place suitable to receive Alexander. He will come down in his own time. They are not to come to him. No archangel would want to greet his people looking weak and broken.
I’ll make them obey, Naasir said with the brutal honesty that was part of his nature.
“It is done,” Raphael told Alexander.
“You are no longer the stripling I left behind.”
Raphael had been more than a thousand years old when Alexander chose to Sleep. No stripling. Though, in the eyes of an Ancient who had lived countless eons, perhaps it was correct enough. “I am Cadre, Alexander, and I’ve held my own in battle against Lijuan. You would do well not to forget that.” Raphael respected Alexander but he also knew the other man had a warrior’s instincts—weakness was despised, strength admired.
“The feral creature who came to warn me,” Alexander said as his bones began to knit together as a result of a combination of his own archangelic healing ability and Raphael’s powers, “he was the wild thing you rescued from Osiris and adopted into your court.”
“Naasir has become a warrior unlike any other.” Fierce and loyal and with an unquenchable hunger for life.
“He has little respect for anyone.”
Raphael raised an eyebrow. “He is one of mine.”
Alexander laughed, the sound rusty. “Yes, you never did have enough respect for your elders either.” Laughter fading, he stared out at the horizon. “My son is gone from this world, Raphael. The babe I held in my arms, the boy I taught to wield a sword, the man with whom I fought in battle, he is gone forever.” Open grief in his voice, raw and endless.
Raphael said nothing, giving the other archangel time to mourn the son he would never again see. Rohan had made mistakes, most specifically when he’d attempted to hold Alexander’s entire sprawling territory himself after his father chose to Sleep, but in the end, he’d proven himself.
“Your son was a man respected far and wide,” he said a long time later, after Alexander’s leg was nearly healed and the clouds above had begun to dissipate. “He held this section of territory for the archangel who came after you . . . and he sired a son of his own.”