by Nalini Singh
“Enough.” Antonicus stepped back from the group on that single contemptuous word and spread out his wings. “It is time I do what must be done—I am not a child to be scared by ghost stories. I will see you all after I return from speaking to this Lijuan who believes herself a goddess even over immortals.”
The Ancient lifted off. He’d initially intended to fly to the part of the fog over Lijuan’s stronghold before he dropped down, but that would put him far from sight and they needed to know what would happen to an archangel who flew into the fog.
Antonicus had finally agreed to do a short flight into the fog within their line of sight, rise up to show them he was well, then make his way to the coordinates of Lijuan’s former stronghold—in that at least he’d accepted assistance, and was wearing a watch that would help him find the correct location. He also wore a small camera on his left shoulder that would transmit images back to a unit that sat to one side of the roof.
Antonicus crossed the border. No one spoke. Not even when the Ancient reached the test location deep within the fog area but still visible to them.
He lifted an arm, and Neha raised hers to show him they could see him. That hadn’t been guaranteed given the darkness, but enough torchlight leached out that far to make Antonicus a clear silhouette.
The Ancient flew down into the fog.
One.
Two.
Three.
No one looked at the transmitted images; those were being recorded, could be gone over at will.
Four.
Five.
Antonicus should’ve emerged by now.
“He’s dead,” Neha said, not coldly but with the conviction of belief.
An arm erupted out of the fog, the fingers locked into a tight fist. It was followed by a head, then a torso, then wings, and suddenly, Antonicus hovered over the spot where he’d gone in. Raphael’s gut clenched against the hard punch of relief. If the Ancient could survive this, they had a chance against Lijuan if—when—she made war on the world.
Antonicus wobbled, his wings dipping this way then that.
“What is he doing?” Michaela asked, but Raphael was already lifting off.
Stay here, he told the others. He flew on wings of white fire across the short distance.
Antonicus was attempting to fly toward him, but his wings were listing heavily and he was halfway back inside the fog when Raphael reached him. Grabbing his visible arm, Raphael fought to stop Antonicus’s momentum from dragging them both down into the darkness.
44
Raphael’s arm jerked in his shoulder socket, and then he had control, Antonicus’s weight less than he’d expected. Raphael hauled him out. The Ancient’s face was skeletal, his eyes glistening orbs infected with lines of liquid black.
Raphael had been hit by the same energy once, had gone blind from it before the wildfire forced it out. Seeing Antonicus’s wings crumple, he shifted his hold so the other archangel was in his arms.
He was light. So light. His clothes hung off his frame, his dark brown hair thinning in the wind before Raphael’s eyes. “Hold on.”
The archangels gathered on the roof parted for them. Raphael landed in the center, placing Antonicus on a plush blue rug Neha must’ve had brought up. Kneeling down beside the other archangel, he placed his hand on Antonicus’s chest and said, “I am going to attempt to fight this infection.” He thrust wildfire into the Ancient.
Antonicus’s eyes burst with light from within before the black retreated to reveal the gray of his irises. “Death,” the injured archangel rasped. “It is pure death.”
The liquid black began to creep again. Raphael pulsed more wildfire into his system; Antonicus clutched at his hand as the bolt arced through his body. His eyes cleared once more.
“What did you see below the fog?” Neha asked from the fallen angel’s other side. “The recorded images are blurred by severe movement.” She closed her hand over Antonicus’s.
Raphael noted the contact, noted also that the infection—or whatever this was—didn’t seem to be crossing over. At the same instant, he saw that Antonicus’s wings were turning black from the edges in. The Ancient’s primaries began to curl inward. One detached to lie on the rug. Favashi had shown similar symptoms, though she hadn’t been as far along. He calculated rapidly as Antonicus began to speak.
“No life. No lights,” he rasped. “Death.” Liquid black crawled over his irises.
“Raphael.” Caliane’s hand on his shoulder.
Raphael spoke directly to Antonicus. “I could kill you. The wildfire is a blunt weapon designed to attack Lijuan’s power and you’re riddled with it.”
“It is killing me anyway.” Antonicus coughed and what came out was a thick black slime—his insides being liquefied in front of them.
Raphael thrust two more bolts of wildfire into the Ancient. The second surge crackled all over him in a violence of white-gold and electric blue, clearing his eyes and putting a shine back in his skin, and for a moment, Raphael thought they had defeated Lijuan’s brand of death.
Then the signs of Lijuan’s poisonous power surged back faster and more virulent than ever. It covered his irises, ran through his skin, blazed across his wings. Further jolts of wildfire had no effect.
Titus crouched by Antonicus’s head and put a hand on his shoulder in a grip that told the archangel he wasn’t alone. Raphael held on to Antonicus’s left hand as Neha held on to his right. The others all crouched down, their wings trailing on the dusty roof, and together, they watched the final breaths of an archangel who had lived millennia, only to be brought down by a death that was beyond anything this world had ever seen.
“He is gone,” Caliane murmured when Antonicus’s breath had ended, no sign of a heart beating in his chest, and his skin holding a putrid greenish cast. It was a decaying corpse that lay before them in place of a powerful Ancient who had blazed with life and arrogance only an hour ago.
“We must burn him—we do not know what he carries in his blood.” Neha’s words might’ve been harsh, but it was with a gentle touch that she reached out to close the Ancient’s staring eyes.
“Are we sure?” A soft question from Michaela, who had understandably kept her distance. “We do not need to breathe or have beating hearts to live.”
They all considered that. In front of them, the liquefaction process seemed to have stopped at the moment of Antonicus’s final breath. His wings were shreds of rotted tendon and blackened feathers, his chest sunken inward, but nothing new had been lost since his apparent death. Either the process had halted now there was no living flesh on which the infection could feast, or the archangel was somehow fighting back.
“We cannot have this body in any of our territories,” Titus said. “It pains me to reject a warrior so courageous, but we must care for our people. We cannot bring in a source of infection where it may leach from his body to poison the soil.”
Raphael thought of Naasir, of the ice and snow where he’d been born. “There are islands in the Antarctic ice that are peopled by no one. They are also small enough that we can erect high fences around and above our chosen island to stop animals from coming in and spreading any infection.”
“We will bury him deep,” Elijah murmured. “We have enough power to dig a hole so far into the earth that only a living archangel will be able to force his way out.”
Raphael and Titus began to roll Antonicus’s body up in the rug on which he’d died, their faces solemn and their actions as respectful as they could make them.
“I will contact one of my generals to find large plastic sheeting and tape,” Neha said, and went down to pick up the items herself, not wanting anyone less powerful than an archangel near the corpse. On her return, they sealed the rolled-up carpet in the sheeting, then locked it tight with the tape.
Three times.
No one argued or stated it
was overkill. “I will carry him,” Raphael said afterward. “I am the only one who has any kind of an immunity.” That Neha and Titus had touched Antonicus in his dying moments was a testament to their heart and courage.
Neha locked the dark of her eyes with his. “But it appears even you cannot defeat this evil any longer and that chills my heart.”
Not answering because Neha’s words were the simple and cold truth, Raphael picked up Antonicus’s body, a body made heavier by the carpet but not so heavy that he couldn’t carry it. “I’ll need to rest at times,” he began, but Elijah frowned.
“We can all help with the passage without risk of infection. All we need are ropes. If we create a sling, no one of us has to bear the entire burden.”
Neha added, “I will ask for the rope to be brought to the room below.”
Raphael put Antonicus down while they waited. “Will you burn this building?” he asked Neha.
“Yes. I’ve ordered everyone but those bringing the rope to evacuate. I will send this fort up in flame as soon as they are clear and we rise.” Her face was half in shadow as she turned her head toward China. “Lijuan has evolved beyond us. Archangels cannot be killed by anything but another archangel, yet she is killing from a distance with this dark fog.”
“Cassandra prophesied that the Cadre alone would not be enough this time.” He took in Zanaya’s and Aegaeon’s motionless, expressionless faces; neither had said a word since Antonicus began to die. “It is why you are awake.”
“But if your wildfire has failed, Raphael, then I fear their waking will not matter.” Caliane’s hair flew back in the night breeze. “This time, our world may end.”
* * *
• • •
The explosion boiled the sky behind Raphael as Neha incinerated the fort’s roof before collapsing the building inward into a hole that Caliane had helped her create. He and the others had flown ahead, with Antonicus in a sling between them. Those with glamour used it to hide the body.
Anyone who looked up would see many archangels together, but that was an explicable thing given the deadly fog and other catastrophic incidents around the world. No one would see a body. No one would know that an archangel had died. Antonicus had gone into Sleep, that was all the world would be told.
If Antonicus’s end caused havoc with the weather, as sometimes happened when an archangel passed, it would be believed to be part of the recent chaos.
When day broke, Michaela and Astaad flew down to wild fields full of flowers and returned with bunches of them to drop on Antonicus’s body. The rope sling the Cadre had woven together was tight enough that the flowers collected around the body and by the time they left the fields, it was a flower-draped bier such as was their way and not just a makeshift coffin created to contain infection.
No one spoke as they flew. On the roof, there’d been some discussion of leaving half their number at the border with China, but in the end they’d decided that there was nothing half their number could do to stop Lijuan. Better they deal with this together, then go to their territories, to prepare in any way they could . . . and to mourn all those of their own who’d been trapped within when the fog crawled across China on a tide of death.
Gadriel, a little set in his habits but noble in a quiet way, hadn’t made it out. Raphael had no body to take home to his family. The angel wasn’t the only one who’d vanished into the murderous dark; Raphael had lost too many good people and the war hadn’t yet begun.
It was a risk to assume nothing would change during the short time they disappeared to bury Antonicus, but the risk was a considered one. The more opaque patches seen by Neha’s drones and confirmed by Alexander and Zanaya seemed to indicate that the Archangel of China was consolidating herself. How she might be doing so was a thing Raphael didn’t like thinking about.
He remembered too well the pathetic half-consumed husks he and Elena had discovered. Lijuan fed from life to make death. There’d been millions of people in China before the fog. Now, no voices penetrated the dark wall and Antonicus had said the landscape was devoid of light.
The blurry green-tinged images picked up by the camera worn by the Ancient had shown the same: an endless wall of pitch black, so murky that even technology meant to penetrate night had failed.
Raphael did not want to see what remained when the fog retreated.
Resting one another by taking turns with the sling so they had no need to stop, the eleven archangels made a direct trek to an ice island that Alexander and Charisemnon flew ahead to scout.
Conscious of her vulnerable physical state, Raphael had checked in with Michaela multiple times during the trek. I can ask for a break if you need it, he’d said. I will blame it on the output of wildfire.
A little pale under the smooth richness of her skin, she’d nonetheless demurred. We must do this if my son is to be safe. I cannot stand any delay.
So they flew on. He noticed that Caliane stayed close to Michaela, not enough for it to be remarked on, yet enough to render assistance should it be necessary. But Michaela managed to stay airborne until they landed at their destination: a small, rocky island encased in clear ice.
Together, Zanaya and Elijah created the deep hole needed for the burial, then all eleven of them joined to lower Antonicus into it using the ropes. They took it slow, none of them wishing to simply dump him. Once the sling touched the frozen soil that was his resting ground, they dropped the ropes into the hole with him.
Caliane stepped forward to the edge of the grave. “Antonicus is gone from this world, perhaps forever, but before he went, he gave us a great gift. He showed us the enemy we must be ready to fight, the evil that may defeat us all if we are not ready. For that, he will be remembered forever in our histories. I will ensure the Historian knows of this, so she can share it with angelkind when the time is right.”
Right now, Raphael understood, the knowledge of Antonicus’s passing would only spread fear and terror. Archangels were not vulnerable. That was their legend and what kept the world in balance.
“To Antonicus.” Caliane lifted a handful of shattered ice-rock.
“To Antonicus.” Together, they threw the handfuls into the grave, then Raphael, Titus, and Astaad collapsed the grave inward before filling it with the material excavated during its creation. It left a depression over which they built a cairn using rocks taken from another small and distant island.
Then, while Michaela and Caliane kept watch, the rest of them flew toward a trawler anchored about two hours from the island. Each of them had contacted their seconds while yet in India, gotten details of any ships that’d be passing through the wider Antarctic area at the correct time.
Their target flew the flag of Elijah’s land.
On it were the timbers, sheets of metal, wires, and other materials necessary to build a research station in a different area of this remote continent. Distant as the trawler was, there was no danger the crew would realize the archangels’ flight path or final destination. That crew watched goggle-eyed as archangel after archangel flew down, before flying off with materials to build a crypt that would act as a cage for the infection.
I shall destroy the ship and its crew, Aegaeon said after the last pickup.
There’s no need, Neha replied. I wiped their memories. They know only that they have been ordered by their archangel to return to base and renew their supplies. Better to leave no ripple here, not even the small one caused by the loss of a trawler.
Raphael knew his hunter would be horrified by Neha’s unilateral choice, but those mortals could now live out their lives in safety. This secret was too huge, too deadly.
It had been decided they would embargo the entire area of the grave for fifty miles in every direction. No ships or flyers. As a final act, they would brand the crypt with each of their sigils.
No one in the world was suicidal enough to take on the entire Cadre.
With so many of them, the crypt was built by nightfall. They burned their sigils into the metal walls in silence. After his ascension, Raphael had chosen a simple marker for his name in the angelic tongue as his sigil, but he’d altered that to include Elena in the months after they fell, while he waited for her to wake.
The marker for his name now twined around a dagger.
Aegaeon sneered. “You broadcast your heart’s weakness.”
“The world knows well what I feel for my Elena, and I would not hide it.” His words held cold judgment, but Aegaeon was too drunk on his own belief in himself to sense it.
Caliane was the last one to burn in her sigil. “It is done.”
Eleven archangels rose up in silence from a grave that should not exist.
Cassandra’s voice rang in Raphael’s head, an echo from the final moments before he’d released the power that had shattered the chrysalis.
The future aligns. Paths are chosen. Death comes.
Such death, child of flames.
Goddess of Nightmare. Wraith without a shadow. Rising into her Reign of Death.
Wings of silver. Wings of blue.
Mortal heart. Broken dreams.
Shatter. Shatter. Shatter.
A sundering.
A grave.
I see the end. I see . . .
Was this the grave Cassandra had foretold? Or would there be more? How many of the Cadre and the awakened ones would be alive by the time this ended?
45
Elena hugged the Hummingbird, inhaling the gentle love that was her scent. “Are you sure you want us to go?” she asked after drawing back. “We can stay longer.”