Archangel's Sun

15

Sharine rested first and foremost; her just over three hours of sleep rejuvenated her a considerable amount. Afterward, she put together the items she’d need for this journey. It wouldn’t be much. This was about speed and about what she needed to keep up with Titus.

The latter was why she stopped a harried member of staff and asked them to show her to the kitchens.

Eyes wide, the individual with smooth skin the hue of rich cream, a shaved head, and the barest impression of breasts against the court’s brown and gold livery, said, “My lady. I can bring you anything—”

“It’ll be faster if I can talk to the cook myself,” she said. “But I thank you for your care.”

A couple of hard swallows, but the staff member nonetheless didn’t protest any longer and led her to a huge kitchen filled with heat and light, and the energetic bustle of those who worked to prepare enough food to fuel this massive army.

Spotting her before his minions, the clear king of this space—a man of medium height blocky with muscle—rushed over. “My lady.” He bowed over her hand, his black hair tightly braided in neat rows against his scalp and his skin a light shade of brown. “You do me a great honor.”

“You are a fellow artist and I would speak to you of your divine dishes,” she said, because it was true. “Today, however, I come to ask you for something simpler.” She told him what she needed. “If it’ll take too much of your time, I can adapt.”

His face lit up, his rich brown eyes shining buttons in a face that was naturally plump and would probably stay that way all his life, regardless of the ongoing effects of vampirism. Some mortals seemed to have a presence so strong, it held sway no matter what. Raphael’s second, Dmitri, fell in that camp.

“No, it isn’t difficult at all,” the cook said. “We keep a store of prepared bars for our warriors who can’t stop for a full meal.” Rushing into what looked like a cool storage room, he returned with his hands full of bars that contained high levels of energy. “How many do you need?”

“This is more than enough.” Accepting the handfuls, she took a moment to look around the kitchen. “You must be tired, for this has been a continuous effort.” Even the most powerful angels needed constant replenishment when they were expending so much energy on a daily basis—including in healing wounds.

“What does it matter to be a little tired if what I do helps us fight the ugliness of the scourge?” His fangs flashed as he spoke, his shoulders square with justifiable pride.

Sharine didn’t ask how a vampire, a being whose system couldn’t process anything but small quantities of food, had ended up cook to an archangel, just smiled at him. “Yes, you and your people provide the fuel for this great engine.”

He was beaming when she left.

Once back in her room, she put the bars in her little pack, then stood there for a second and for the first time, thought of what she’d done with the burrow, how she’d exposed it with her power. Her hand tingled. Looking down, she saw a shadow of the champagne energy that had erupted from her.

It stirred deep within her, so potent that it stole her breath, but still only half-awake. An energy left unused so very long that it had grown darker and denser with each passing century.

Of what was she capable? It had been an eon since she’d allowed herself free rein. First, she’d throttled her power in a vain effort to hold on to her parents, then it had fallen by the wayside of her art but for the few occasions she’d been forced to use it, as on that long-ago battlefield. Then she’d . . . forgotten it.

A youngling like Obren wouldn’t understand how a person could forget a central element of their nature, but while angelic memory was in many ways infinite, that didn’t mean you could always access what had been stored away so very long ago. An angel as old as Sharine, especially one whose mind had carried fractures for so long, could’ve forgotten many lives, many pieces of her existence.

The realization haunted her even as she stepped out to meet Titus for their journey to the abandoned settlement.

Responsibility lay a heavy cloak over his shoulders.

He didn’t speak as they took off, and neither did she, her mind busy with myriad flashes of memory as she attempted to pinpoint the moment when she’d forgotten the power that lived in her veins.

The knowledge had been lost long before she bore Illium, her babe who’d grown into a dangerously powerful man. And she’d never known it with Aegaeon, either. But the time between her childhood and before that critical point in her life was an eternity that spilled out to the horizon.

Head aching from the futility of it, she finally stopped tugging at the memory threads. That could wait. Right now, she had to watch Titus’s back, ensure he didn’t get taken unawares by anything. He was flying to her left and slightly ahead, his wings powerful, while she rode the draft created in his wake.

Oh.

He was doing it on purpose. The man might be a blockhead who thought she’d collapse at a loud voice, but he was also an honorable and clever warrior. That was one of the few facts she knew about him. All her information on Titus came from comments made by those who served at Lumia, and a few passing words from Illium.

He was beloved of his people.

He was beloved of women.

He was a man of honor and truth.

He was a warrior who showed no mercy against evil.

He wasn’t a scholar and his court wasn’t a scholarly one—but Sharine no longer took that particular tidbit as fact. Not after hearing him speak of warrior-scholars, and, on her return from the kitchens, glimpsing a number of people working in a great library.

Brows furrowed and shoulders bowed, the scholars had looked as tired as the warriors and household staff. No doubt, they’d been set to the task of seeing if there was another, faster way to stop the reborn.

Last but not least was the information that though Titus enjoyed women—tall and short, slender and voluptuous, pale-skinned or dark—he’d never come close to taking a consort.

The latter seemed to be a point of pride among his people, as if Titus gadding about like a fly laying its eggs on every possible surface was the epitome of masculinity. Sharine snorted to herself. Her mother would’ve been horrified at the inelegant sound but her mother was long-gone, turned to dust.

Aegaeon’s people, too, had been proud of their archangel’s virility and inability to commit his heart. Looking back, she saw not virility but weakness. It didn’t take any great skill to go about taking lover after lover if one was an archangel. Power alone was an aphrodisiac.

Oh, Archangel Titus’s charm is just . . . Sigh.

She’d overheard similar words more than once from those who’d passed through Lumia. Each smitten woman had placed her hands on her heart and spoken of how easy it was to melt into his arms, how gorgeous he was when he smiled, and how attentive he was as a lover. Sharine hadn’t thought she was paying attention at the time but, thanks to her accursed selective memory, she now remembered every morsel.

From what she’d seen, however, Titus’s charm consisted of being an archangel. She’d spotted no sign of any other talent in how he dealt with women. He was a blunt hammer and everyone seemed ready to fall for it.

Really.

If that was all one needed to be considered charming, she had a castle on a cloud she could sell them.

She snorted again.

Titus glanced to the right and slightly back. He could’ve sworn the Hummingbird had just snorted, but surely not. She was too refined and delicate a creature to snort.

Though she was also examining him as if he were an insect under a slide. There was a reason he didn’t spend too much time with the scholars of his court—he respected them as he respected all who had skills he didn’t possess—but half the time, he felt as if their greatest wish was to take him apart in order to work out how he functioned.

It was enough to raise the hairs on an archangel’s nape.

Deciding not to ask her if anything was the matter, because he’d long ago learned that lesson about women and poking hornets’ nests, he focused on his surroundings. His heart broke at seeing the devastation in the areas close to the border, the fallow fields and burned-out villages farther out.

They hadn’t yet hit the first major city on the northern side.

Most of the border damage would’ve come about during his battle with Charisemnon, but as they flew on, he saw that the situation had worsened significantly since his quick scouting run after he first took over his enemy’s territory. It also aligned with the updated report Ozias had given him, his spymaster having reached Narja right before he flew out.

The north exists in terror, sire. Starvation is a hovering threat. It’s not only the reborn who are responsible for the latter—the plagues of locusts during the Cascade did far worse damage there than in the south.

As far as I’ve been able to discover, it’s because Charisemnon had already drafted large numbers of young and strong mortals into his forces. The farms had little manpower to protect their crops or to replant. Having to fight off reborn was the final straw—city or rural, the people are close to broken.

It didn’t sit well with Titus. These were his people now and this was his land to caretake.

“How could he do this?” he found himself saying out loud. “How could he cause such destruction to his own people and not care?” The reborn had been of Lijuan and so, aside from herding them toward the south, Charisemnon’d had no control over them; even had he lived, a number would’ve escaped and ravaged the north.

An abandoned farm lay below, its fields lonely and forgotten, the windows of the main house smashed. He knew the reborn had gone through it in a horde—he could spot the marks left in the dirt where the creatures had dragged away bodies, knew that no one had survived.

“Some do not think of their people.” The Hummingbird’s beautiful voice, a lush caress. “Power is all that matters. Humans, to them, are nothing but disposable pieces on the chessboard of immortal politics.”

Titus clenched his jaw, thinking of all whose voices had disappeared from this landscape. Even the sight of a herd of gazelles with fine curving horns and red-brown coats grazing peacefully on a field green with grass couldn’t temper his anger; he’d never forgive Charisemnon for what he’d done, the noxious poison he’d helped release with no care for the consequence.

“I wish I hadn’t killed him so quickly. I had to do so, so that I could join the battle against Lijuan, but I wish I had him here so I could rip him apart and leave him a limbless torso that I could then torture for an answer to this poison.” Titus wasn’t a man who believed in torture—better to fight your enemies face-to-face, honor to honor, but Charisemnon had no honor. You couldn’t reason with one such as him.

The Hummingbird didn’t recoil at his brutal words. “What do the scientists and scholars say?” she asked. “My focus during the war was to uphold my duties to Lumia and protect the repository of angelic art. As a result, I haven’t been part of any wider conversations on the aftereffects of the war—all I know, I’ve heard from others.”

Titus assumed that included from Raphael, and of course, from Illium. “There is little word of a vaccine to what they are calling the reborn infection—and that relates only to the original reborn created by Lijuan. We have even less knowledge of the variant altered by Charisemnon.”

His shoulders tightened as he overflew another abandoned town, its buildings scorched by fire and its gardens left untended. “My enemy was an archangel, for all his faults. And he was an archangel supercharged by the Cascade.

“Whatever it is that he created, it can’t be simply understood. It is a thing of power—the scientists say the cells of Africa’s reborn run with a kind of viscous energy that hungers. When they test the cells with droplets of blood, the cells are voracious, never fulfilled—and they are more infectious than anything else on this planet.”

A chill shivered its way across his skin as it had the first time he’d heard the report. “With the ‘ordinary’ reborn, mortals are doomed no matter the intervention, but we now have data to say many strong vampires have recovered after a non-lethal attack. Here, even vampires who chop off an arm or a leg that has been clawed by one of the reborn . . .”

Titus shook his head, his throat dry. “I’ve lost too many of my people. That’s why I’ve ordered my vampiric troops, as well as the Guild Hunters, and mortal mercenaries, to fight from inside their vehicles, with distance weapons.” Any close-contact fighting was to be done by an angel.

“Your people have incredible courage.”

Titus had no need for those words—he knew that truth to his bones. But it was nice to hear the acknowledgment. “Raphael told me something when he came to help me.” The pup had kept his word, given Titus so much of his time. Titus knew Raphael would return when he was able. “A truth he learned from the Legion fighters who lived in his home territory for so long.”

Those fighters had given up their lives so that the Cadre could defeat Lijuan, and for that, Titus honored them.

“Well?” A crisp demand. “Do you plan to tell me?”

Scowling, he glanced at her. “What is wrong with you?” It came out a boom of sound. “You’re not acting like the sweet and kind Hummingbird!”

Her response was a glare that would’ve stripped his skin from his bones were he not the son of First General Avelina, and the brother of Euphenia, Zuri, Nala, and Charo. “I have told you,” she enunciated through gritted teeth, “my name is Sharine. I would be most pleased if you should deign to use it.”

Perhaps she was suffering from the trauma of the war. She was an ephemeral creature. Having so much devastation on her doorstep had no doubt caused damage that was emerging as this strange, antagonistic behavior.

“Sharine,” he said with his most charming smile.

Her response was a baring of teeth that had him glad he wasn’t within arm’s reach. “What did Raphael tell you?” she snapped.

Affronted, he swept away from her for long wingbeats. Until he’d calmed down enough to return to fly at her side and just ahead enough to ease her journey. She didn’t look the least bit abashed at having driven him away.

Instead, she raised an eyebrow when he looked at her, and said, “Feeling better?”

Titus’s chest rumbled. If she were not the Hummingbird . . . “According to the Legion, there was another great war in our history.”

The information had come as no surprise to Titus. A race of immortals, many of them powerful, could not always live in peace. “During that war, an archangel released a poison that infected all of angelkind. Our people went to Sleep for an eon in the hope that our immortal bodies would find an answer to the poison while we Slept, but the poison was still part of our flesh when we woke.”

The horror of the story would’ve made Titus disbelieve it were he not living through Charisemnon’s plague. “In the interim, a whole new people were born—the mortals. According to the Legion, angelkind somehow discovered that by purging our poison into mortals, we could retain our health and sanity.”

“You’re speaking of the birth of vampires?” the Hummingbird said. No, not the Hummingbird. The Hummingbird was a creature gentle and vague and sweet. This was Sharine. Sharp-tongued, clear-eyed, and armed with a gaze like acid.

He shouldn’t be so fascinated with her. It was probably bad for his health.

“Yes, that’s what the Legion intimated.” The toxin that built up in angelic bodies over time, initiating a slow descent into horrific murderous madness, was his race’s greatest secret. It was their one weakness and it made mortals far more important to angelkind than mortals could ever know.

“I’ll ask Raphael more about this.”

“Do you think I lie to you?” he roared, his wings aglow with power.