Guild Hunter 02 - Angels' Flight

would be impossible to infiltrate, and Alexander is a warrior, too.”
     
    Shaking her head, Jessamy put her hand on his wing. “No. Alexander has long made it a policy to walk and fly among his troops once every five days. He does it rain or shine, hail or snow. He has always led from the front.”
     
    “The irony,” Raphael continued, “is that I took my example from Alexander on this. Yet Jason has not seen him appear to perform his duty in recent memory.” The archangel paced the confines of the cabin. “While word in the taverns is of his favorite concubine, I assumed that in truth, he was holed up with his generals, in a deliberate attempt to ensure nothing could be gleaned of his battle strategy.”
     
    “That remains a possibility.” Galen rubbed at his jaw. “But Alexander also has a son. His weapons-master, Rohan.”
     
    Raphael’s eyes met Galen’s. “Yes. And Rohan is quite capable of mounting a battle campaign.”
     
    Jessamy’s blood turned ice-cold, as she registered the implications of Galen’s suggeston. If Alexander was dead… but no, how could that
possibly
be? Only another archangel could have killed him, and such killings were always catastrophic events that sent tremors across the world—archangels did not easily die. They took people and places with them. No poison, no stealthy—
     
    Oh no.
     

11
     
    “O nly an archangel can kill another archangel,” she whis pered. “But if he was betrayed by someone he trusted, he could be entombed.” Such a horror had happened just once, long before even Lijuan had been born.
    Cut into pieces after being ambushed in sleep by those he considered friends, the archangel’s body had been scattered and buried deep in far corners of the earth. But archangels could regenerate even from ash. This time, the piece that regenerated into the whole man was buried in a mountain range deep in what was now Uram’s territory.
     
    That mountain range no longer existed, and neither did anyone who bore even a single drop of blood related to those who had buried the archangel, the carnage so absolute that
no one sane
would ever dare such an act again. She swallowed, continued. “I don’t think Rohan would be disloyal to his father”—they had a true father-son bond—“but if Alexander is missing, Rohan may well be running the battle campaign, certain his father will soon rise.”
     
    “Jessamy is right,” Raphael murmured. “But if Alexander has indeed been missing so long, then he is likely to be dead.” A reminder that an archangel regenerated at a speed no ordinary angel could comprehend, and that nothing could keep him contained, earth or rock or water. “If he fell into
anshara
for some reason,” Raphael continued, naming the deepest of healing sleeps, “and was betrayed to an archangelic enemy, even Alexander may have been unable to fight a burst of angelfire direct to the heart.”
     
    The ability to create angelfire, Jessamy knew, was a rare gift—and a lethal one. Caliane had possessed it, but her son did not…not yet, his power escalating at too rapid a rate to predict anything. “So far as I know, four of the Cadre can call angelfire.”
     
    “Would the victor not claim Alexander’s territory?” Galen said.
     
    “It may not have been about territory.” Raphael blew out a breath. “There are some in the Cadre who would find pleasure and amusement in the game, in the kill, and in watching the resulting disintegration.”
     
    A terrible feeling bloomed in the pit of Jessamy’s stomach. She liked Alexander, though he was an Ancient, with an Ancient’s conceit. He was intelligent, could be kind in the absent way of a being of such power, had led his people well. It sickened her to imagine him killed with such stealthy malevolence. But that was not the worst of it—if an archangel was dead or missing, and no one had informed the entirety of the Cadre, then his territory was currently under the rule of an angel who had no right to rule.
     
    It wasn’t simply politics—it was brutal fact. Archangels ruled because they had the vicious power to control the vampires who were their servants. Without an archangel at the helm, the chances of the more violent of the Made turning feral, driven by the unthinking fury of blood hunger, were catastrophic. “The entire mortal population of his region could be wiped out in days.” Horror was an iron-dark taste on her tongue.
     
    “It also explains why a vampire came to