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.”
Alexander’s eyes locked with Raphael’s, happiness blazing out of the grief. “I have a grandchild?”
“Yes. He wasn’t at the stronghold—Rohan fostered him with Titus so that he could learn from Titus’s warriors. He is a stripling of two hundred. His name is Xander, after his grandfather.”
Fierce joy in Alexander’s expression. “Did Rohan take a mate?”
“Yes. He and Xander’s mother were a pair, but she is likely gone. She lived in the palace with Rohan, would’ve fought beside him to the end.” As Elena would with Raphael. “She loved him and together, they loved their son.”
“The boy will have a home with me,” Alexander said, his voice a passionate roughness of grief, joy, and rage. “And one day, he will have vengeance.”
43
Andromeda and Naasir helped the wing brothers hurriedly pick up and set aside the broken pieces of their homes. Part of the village was just gone, crumbled into dust. What remained was nothing whole.
“We will have to greet the sire under the open sky,” Tarek said, and though his expression and tone were controlled, the same couldn’t be said for all his men and women. Their distress at being unable to show due honor to their archangel was clear.
Andromeda thought of everything she’d heard of Alexander. “The stories say that your sire preferred to drink mead with his warriors around a fire, rather than to sleep comfortably in a sumptuous tent.”
The wing brothers visibly relaxed.