Archangel's Sun

21

“I see it,” he responded, all irritation gone from his tone and his attention a blade.

Reaching to his back, he unsheathed his swords. She went to ask him why he didn’t simply use his fire to scour the earth, but the answer was there in her question. The land had already been devastated by the burnings its people had to undertake in order to protect themselves. It’d take time for the soil to regenerate, for any poison from the reborn’s decomposing bodies to dissipate.

Far better that Titus take down the slavering horde with the gleaming weapons in his hands than he create another scar in the earth.

Stay up here, he ordered as he began to drop from the sky. You don’t have the skills to avoid the creatures at close range.

She didn’t bristle; truth was truth. At least thirty of the reborn scrabbled under the late-afternoon light. The rotting beings were gathered around the long-limbed carcass of a giraffe they appeared to have brought down. I’ll remain aloft and out of reach.

The reborn must’ve been desperate to resort to feeding on an animal. From the way they moved, however, while the animal flesh was keeping them functional, it wasn’t truly revitalizing them—they didn’t have the smooth motion of those who fed from humans. Wanting to help in a way that didn’t make her a fatal distraction, she flew to where she could see the entire battle; this way, she could warn Titus if a creature was about to come at his back.

Power wreathed her hand, as if summoned by her fear for him—yes, he was an archangel, but there were a lot of reborn and they could do massive damage to his body, including tearing off his wings.

Curling her fingers, she held the power back with significant effort. She’d intervene only if it appeared that Titus needed the assistance . . . because while she had all this rich, old power, she had little experience with her aim. She couldn’t afford to get it wrong with Titus down there, his big body surrounded by monsters.

Titus took out the first ring of reborn even as he landed in the remains of the carcass of the animal they’d brought down. It was as well that his boots were solid, came up to his calf, and were impenetrable to the blood and viscera in which he stood as he swept out his swords in a rapid-fire motion that cut off reborn heads so quickly that one hadn’t yet fallen to the ground when another joined it.

His wings were his biggest vulnerability—this iteration of the rotting, voracious creatures had developed razor-sharp hooked claws. As a result, he had to keep lifting off when they got too close, then coming down again to lop off their heads.

Previously, reborn this hungry would’ve just kept coming, stupid machines driven by the urge to feed. The newer strains seemed to have gained a semblance of self-protective instinct—but from the emaciated state of their bodies, this nest was starving and thus too desperate to give up the fight, run.

Snarling, hissing, spitting putrid fluid, they kept on coming.

Behind you!

He twisted to eliminate the one about to go for his wing . . . and saw the creature was already falling, a blade in his eye. Grinning, he ripped out the blade and spun it back to Sharine, while stomping his boot over the reborn’s chest. He preferred a clean beheading, but he had three others coming at him and crushing the heart to pulp stopped them in their tracks.

When he lifted off the next time, he took stock of remaining numbers. The creatures screeched and clawed up at him, their faces twisted into a caricature of life. Adrian, the very first reborn Lijuan had displayed to the rest of the Cadre, had been a man of glossy dark skin and rich brown eyes, and he’d possessed a mind. Mind enough to understand that his goddess had turned him into an abomination.

Titus could still remember how blood, scarlet and wet, had dripped down Lijuan’s white skin after Adrian sank his fangs into her neck in a futile effort to end the nightmare, end his goddess. The reborn male’s eyes had held infinite sorrow—and so deep a pain that it had scraped across Titus’s bones.

Adrian had been the final truly intelligent reborn Titus had ever seen.

Unwilling to risk another defection, Lijuan had turned her reborn into stupid, mindless machines that wanted only to feed. It didn’t matter if a person had been a scholar or a warrior before being infected, the infection that brought them back from the dead also erased all evidence of who they’d been in life.

For all Titus knew, some of these people had once been in his court. He’d lost many good people in the battle against Charisemnon and in the battles against the reborn that had followed. It was equally possible that they were so emaciated because they’d been buried a short time earlier; long enough for their flesh to begin to decompose, but “fresh” enough for the reborn to pass on their contagion.

The latter might explain the dirty, blood-dotted suit being sported by one of the reborn.

Whatever their story, Titus could have no mercy on them—and he knew none of his people would want to exist in such a form. Roaring, his dual swords a blur, he dropped. When he came up for air this time, sweat gleaming on his skin, it was to devastation. Decapitated bodies. Reborn cut in half. Some with all their limbs chopped off. His swords had become razors that sliced and ended.

To the right.

The reborn Sharine had pinpointed was using its chin to try and drag itself away. Two steps to close the distance between them, then Titus brought down a blade on the creature’s neck. He took no satisfaction from the act; this hadn’t been an honorable battle. These people hadn’t had a choice. To him, this was simple mercy. Do you see any others not yet properly decapitated?

Sharine flew over the entire scene and hovered over several bodies before saying, “No.” Landing not far from him, she held her wings scrupulously off the blood and gore seeping into the ground. “We’ll have to burn the bodies.”

Nodding, he wiped his swords on a clean patch of grass, then slid them home. “I’ll take care of it.” A single pyre would do far less damage to the soil than if he’d used his power to scour the entire area.

“It’ll go faster if we both help.” She picked up a severed arm. “Where do you want to build the bonfire? I’m assuming somewhere close to the main mass of bodies.”

Titus blinked, but no, she was still standing there, radiant and ethereal . . . and with a rotting severed arm held by the wrist, while she bent to pick up a decapitated head. “Yes, atop the animal carcass,” he said, his instincts taking over; the longer they lingered, the higher the risk of attracting another nest, and the longer his people would have to fight the worst area of infestation without their archangel.

Sharine didn’t complain even as her hands became slippery with putrid green-black reborn blood, her body flecked with more of the same. The two of them would stink of decaying flesh for the rest of the journey, but it couldn’t be helped.

“Such cruelty,” she murmured at one point, her eyes bruised.

Glancing over, he saw her picking up what appeared to be a small carving. And he understood. In those who’d come from the far north, such carvings were sometimes tucked into the pockets of the clothing worn by the dead, to act as guardians on the journey beyond death that mortals believed awaited.

Now those carefully and lovingly buried dead were being desecrated.

Jaw set, Titus carried on, even as he saw Sharine add the carving to the pile of bodies. It didn’t take long to complete their task, the giraffe carcass at the bottom. After they’d gathered up some dry branches and leaves to act as kindling, he used a tiny fragment of his energy to start a flame. Then they watched, because he wouldn’t leave this fire to burn and spread across the land.

The heat blasted their faces, sparks jumping out, but they stood firm with their slimy blackened hands and stinking clothes. That was when he noticed light coming from Sharine’s palms. “I also wish I could blast them all into oblivion, but we must care for this land or it’ll become a desert.”

“What?” Following his gaze, Sharine stared down at one hand. Then, as he watched, the blood on her skin began to crystallize into dust and fall away.

Titus watched in fascination as she repeated the process with her other hand. “Useful.” It wasn’t a skill for which he’d give up his own abilities, but it would be a prized one in battle—something as simple as filth could demoralize an army.

Still staring at her own hands, as if she didn’t understand what she had done, she said, “Why don’t I know myself?” A vibration of anger.

“Do you want to see if you can repeat the process on someone else?” He thrust a hand in her direction—he was no stranger to the smells and liquids of battle but that didn’t mean he enjoyed it.

Sharine seemed to snap out of wherever it was that she’d gone. “Yes, let me try.” She took his hand in her clean ones.

Light glowed.

It felt . . . like a tickle across his palm, the gentlest power he’d ever sensed, yet it was paradoxically old and heady. He should’ve worried about what power lay dormant inside her, but as the blood and other fluids fell away into dust, he became aware of the softness of her hand, the gentle way she held him. As if he wasn’t so powerful he could break her in half with his physical strength alone.

It was all he could do to stand still while she cleansed his other hand, too.

“Thank you.” It came out stilted. “That’ll make it easier to fly. Can you take the stains out of our clothes, too?”

As a distraction technique, it proved a marked success. “No,” she said after trying multiple times. “At least the sun is hot enough to bake away the scent rather than causing the fluids to rot.”

Shuddering at the idea, he decided on another option. After removing his sword harness, he released the wing slits of his tunic, then pulled it off over the top of his head and threw it into the flames.

Sharine sucked in a quiet breath, struck by the blunt force of Titus’s masculinity. From the lack of differentiation in the hue of his skin, being shirtless was nothing new to the Archangel of Africa. His skin was smooth and silky-looking, his muscles flexing powerfully as he bunched up the filthy shirt and threw it into the flames.

The stunning sunlike golden marking on his chest—a marking that had emerged during the chaos of the Cascade—was a thing of beauty, potent yet oddly delicate in line and composition. It served to draw her eye back and back again to the raw beauty that was Titus.

Her mouth dried up.

Stunned and shocked by her visceral response, she forced herself to look away as he went to put his sword harness back on. It had been . . . a very, very long time since she’d felt the bite of physical attraction. She’d never been a woman of strong sexual appetites, more focused on looking for companionship and friendship and love. For an end to the loneliness that had haunted her since she was a child.

Her parents had left her long before they’d gone to Sleep.

It wasn’t that she’d become celibate after Aegaeon. Some spark of the Sharine who’d flown with a battle army had remained in the Hummingbird and she’d fought against the fragmentation of her mind, tried to cling to the shreds of herself that remained. Part of that had included a foolish effort to find an anchor using her body.

Foolish, for she wasn’t a woman for whom the physical had ever been a priority.

After finally realizing the futility of it, she hadn’t missed being a sexual creature, as her life hadn’t otherwise been devoid of touch. She’d had a son who’d hugged her often. Aodhan and Raphael, too, had been there for long periods. Her boys. Surrounding her with so much love and affection that she’d never even thought of the carnal, of the deeper needs of the body.

Today, however, her body had awakened with a vengeance, sexual need punching through her hard and brutal. For Titus, a man even more beautiful than Aegaeon. Though she still didn’t understand the superlatives about his charm. Titus was too blunt a hammer.

A fact he demonstrated to good effect when he said, “Are you wearing anything under that tunic? If you are, I suggest getting rid of the tunic. Reborn fluids tend to be disgusting in the extreme even when they dry—they grow black mold.”

Sharine hesitated; she was wearing a garment Tanicia had called a singlet. Soft and shaped to Sharine’s body, the white item held her average-size breasts in place, the wing slits fastened with small enclosures. But never in her life had she worn anything so revealing as outerwear.

She shifted on her feet . . . and got a whiff of her own odor.

Stomach threatening to turn itself inside out, she reached back to undo the wing slits on her tunic, then pulled the garment over her head and threw it into the flames. “I liked that tunic,” she muttered. “Now I only have one. My entire wardrobe in your stronghold is filled with dresses and gowns.” She scowled at him, careful to keep her eyes strictly to his face.

His square-jawed and rough-edged and altogether-too-handsome face.

“Don’t talk to me of gowns and clothing,” he grumbled. “I’m a warrior, not your dresser.”

“And how do your clothes appear, my lord Archangel? By magic?”

He threw back his head and roared to the sky, his shoulders bunched and his hands clenched as hard as his jaw. The sound was thunder that made the birds take flight from the trees and her own bones vibrate . . . but not in fear.

Holding her ground, her heart pounding, she met his gaze without flinching.

“I respect my people.” His eyes flashed. “That means I leave them to their duties. My steward should be able to point you to the right person.”

“Thank you for your kindness in sharing that information,” she said, not sure why she was taking such pleasure in antagonizing him—never in all her existence had she behaved this way; it was oddly exhilarating. “I’m sure I wouldn’t have figured that out for myself.”

Titus stared at her, just stared at her. “Tell me the truth—have you taken up drinking some concoction that turns a sane woman into a shrew?” It was a solemn question and maybe that was why the meaning of it took a moment to penetrate.

She bared her teeth at him, feeling . . . free. For so many years, she’d been caged. Caged inside her parents’ rules, then her own fears, then her broken mind. For the first time since she’d begun to store memories, she didn’t—what was that statement she’d heard one of the young townswomen say?—yes, that was it: she did not give a shit. And it was glorious.

“Men who call strong women shrews,” she said in a tone formed of sugar syrup and molasses, “are often men scared of a woman’s strength.”

“My mother,” he enunciated with care, “was first general to an archangel. I was born with a respect for female strength.”

“If you say so.” She brushed imaginary dirt off her arms, then walked around to the other side of the bonfire. “I’ll keep an eye on this side.”

Through the curtain of flame, he was a big and powerful and infuriated man standing with his hands on his hips and his chest bare. His eyes pinned her to the spot as the fire began to die down—or they made the attempt in any case, his eyebrows drawn together in a glower.

Sharine smiled at him. She felt zero fear. All her life, she’d been afraid in one way or the other, but it was as if she’d gone through a fire of her own and come out reborn. On the other hand, the latter wasn’t the best choice of word, especially with her skin hot from the heat of a fire built to turn the reborn to ash.

Shedding of the skin, remaking, resurrection, they were all just words. What mattered was that she was becoming someone new, a woman she’d always had the potential to be—an angel of whom her son could be proud . . . and an angel who could look herself in the mirror and smile.