by Nalini Singh
In the ordinary scheme of things, they knew never to interfere with Charisemnon’s people, but Sharine had made the decision to breach that rule when the reborn began to spread across Africa—she’d ordered her warriors to quietly eliminate any reborn threats they saw. The shambling creatures who’d reached this far north had been small in number and soon dispatched.
Charisemnon had been too focused on his battle with Titus to pay attention.
The true scars appeared a half hour or so beyond that perimeter. A small village lay half in ruins, a large central area burned to blackened beams and collapsed roofs. Wanting to understand what had taken place there, she did a careful circle above the dead silence to ensure she wasn’t dropping down into danger.
Only when she was certain she saw no movement, no indication of anything living below, did she come down in the center of the long, wide road that seemed to be the heart of the village. Her position gave her an excellent view in all directions; she’d rapidly spot any reborn who might be scuttling toward her.
However, the only things moving in the charred landscape were pieces of fabric that might’ve once been curtains, tiny flags in the light wind. Perhaps this village had fallen prey to the battle between the two archangels. But no, that could not be. The fighting had taken place far from here, near what had been the north/south border.
Then she saw the red can tumbled on the ground, recognized it as the same type of can she’d seen the people of her town use to carry fuel. Once she began to search, she saw the other cans. Many had rolled away from whatever had been their original position, likely pushed or blown out by the storm of fire, but there was no hiding their widespread nature.
The fuel had been carefully dispersed to burn this place down.
A chill in her blood, she headed toward a large, blackened building that might’ve once functioned as a school or community hall. She took extreme care; she had no wish to make herself a victim of the reborn. She might be old and thus difficult to kill, but she wouldn’t survive decapitation—and, according to Tanicia, recent updates from the border had the creatures hunting in packs.
Again, however, she heard only a silence piercing in its intensity.
She didn’t know what she’d expected when she looked through the narrow gap created by the shattered and half-fallen wall of the large building . . . but it wasn’t bones. So many bones. Horror struck her at the thought of all who had died within; wondering if she should attempt to find a way to get deeper inside, unearth more answers, she looked down.
Just inside, shadowed by the way the wall had fallen, lay a hand that had somehow become mummified by the inferno, the skin a shiny and unnatural hue and the flesh long melted away. Like a piece of meat smoked too long. Its fingers bore sharp clawlike nails blackened from the smoke. She frowned. Perhaps it was simply her perspective, but the claws appeared oddly elongated.
But no, it wasn’t perspective because even when she twisted into the gap to look as closely as possible from her awkward position, the sense of odd dimensions remained. This individual’s finger and hand bones were . . . stretched. Spidery.
This wasn’t a vampire’s hand. As far as she was aware, the reborn, too, didn’t look like this. They had the correct proportions of the mortals from whom they were created. Thankfully, Africa hadn’t had to deal with the black-eyed dead Lijuan had made of her people. Those black-eyed ones had died with their liege in any case. However, it was possible the reborn had begun to mutate. If all within the hall were like this one, then perhaps the burning had been an act of self-protection.
Remembering something Illium had said to her, she stepped back out of the gap, then retrieved the device he’d given her. The phone. He’d told her it could record images. Given the desultory attention she’d paid at the time, it took her five long minutes to work out how, but then she took a careful set of images and recordings to show Titus.
It could be that he’d seen similar corpses many times by now, but that was no reason for her not to be vigilant. Putting the phone safely back into a zippered pocket of the backpack, she walked around the building to see if she could get inside without stepping on bones and finally found a path.
Most of the bones she saw near that area were brittle and disarticulated—no clawed fingers like the earlier one. And there was no way she could get to the original body without having to break walls. She made the decision to leave it. This place was desolate and forgotten. No one would disturb it in the interim.
The eerie silence of the village whispered after her as she made her way to an empty area, then spread her wings and took off. The wind created by her wings disturbed the dust on the ground and for a moment she was almost certain she saw movement. But when she looked again, it was to see a crumpled bit of discarded paper coming to a rolling stop.
No, there.
A striped hyena, thin and light of feet, prowled in the shadows.
Concern heavy in her blood, and unwilling to abandon any survivors to starvation or attack by emboldened natural predators, she did another sweep over the village, going low enough to spot any hint of life. Nothing. No breaths in the air. No hands reaching for help. At last, she flew on, accompanied by a solitary black-winged kite that broke off its flight when it sighted prey on passing grasslands. She saw more damage as she continued on, more abandoned settlements, but nothing like that first one.
Then she began to see the places where people still lived—the cities were too quiet, with tense groups of winged and ground-based guards at the borders, many holding bulky weapons she didn’t recognize. Too few people moved in the streets and fire damage was black streaks in the landscape around each city.
As if its people had protected their home with a fortress of fire.
More than one guard spotted her along the way, but it was at the second city she overflew that a battle-hardened warrior with what appeared to be a badly broken arm flew up to talk to her. “Lady Hummingbird,” he said on reaching her, the dark skin of his face marked by patches of pink where his skin had either been burned, or shredded by reborn claws. “The landscape is not safe.”
Raphael’s Elena would no doubt be irritated at being spoken to with such protective care, but Elena was a warrior through and through and had earned her stripes. To this angelic commander, Sharine remained the broken Hummingbird. He had the right to question if she brought more problems to his city, whether he’d have to now offer her an escort.
“I am aware,” she said with conscious gentleness, having caught the lines of pain around his eyes. Simply because angels healed quicker than mortals didn’t mean the healing didn’t hurt. “I fly to Titus, and I’m taking care not to land anywhere except on empty stretches of land that offer total visibility.”
An easing of the tension across his shoulders. “Do not land after dark unless it’s in a city or a town with plans of protection. That’s when the creatures are most active—though please don’t let that make you complacent in the sunlight. When they’re hungry enough, they do not care about being caught in the light.”
“I thank you for the information.” She took in his city again. “You are few in number.” A sense of emptiness permeated the landscape.
“We lost many in the war.” Flat, tired words. “Others fell to the reborn.”
Sharine knew without asking that this warrior would never disparage his former archangel, but she heard the anger in his tone. “Do you wish me to take any news to Titus?”
When he hesitated, she said, “He is your archangel now. Past enmities do not matter, for such enmities are for the Cadre alone.”
He searched her face. “Even for the soldiers and people of an enemy archangel who sought to annihilate his land?”
“When titans fight, they pay no attention to the minnows.” A simple, brutal fact of life.
“Yes.” A bow of his head before he gave her a report that she promised to pass on.
>
Then, after assuring him she had no need of an escort, she flew past the scorched edge of the city and beyond. If the cities had caused her concern, the isolated rural settlements devastated.
Entire houses were piles of blackened rubble and farm fields lay barren.
Vultures scavenged on the remains of dead domestic animals, while leopards prowled deadly close to a populace become weak and incapable of defending itself. The hunting cat would wait for the night hours to strike, but that it was so far outside its normal wild territory told her the reborn—with their urge to tear apart all living creatures—had done significant damage to the ecosystem.
In one village, the mortals and those few vampires who hadn’t been called up to battle looked up with tired eyes that widened when she changed her path and came in to land. Bedraggled, lines of exhaustion carved into their thin faces, the people bowed deeply to her. “Lady,” they said. “We are honored.”
She didn’t know if they said that because they felt it, or simply because it was expected. It didn’t matter to her. She wasn’t here to be praised or feted. “Does Titus know of your state?” she asked, spotting the bones pushing against the dark gold skin of a child who was hiding behind his mother.
The villager who’d spoken first, an old woman who seemed to be the elder, swallowed hard. “We wouldn’t concern the archangel with our small problems. Not when the eaters of the living roam the landscape.”
Sharine could understand her reticence, but as with the angelic warrior, she had the feeling there was more to this. These people had belonged to another archangel their entire lives, and likely also believed that Titus would begrudge them their earlier loyalty.
Such a thing was not possible—and it had nothing to do with Titus himself.
In truth, humans rarely featured in the thoughts of archangels. One of the Cadre would no more blame humans for their archangel’s behavior than they would blame a pet cat. A harsh thought but that was the way of so many of the most powerful of her kind.
Raphael was different, but only because he had a consort who’d once been human—a consort who refused to forget her humanity even as she walked in the world of immortals. Without Elena, Sharine didn’t believe even Raphael would see mortals and young vampires as anything other than expendable pieces on a chessboard.
Sharine had been the same . . . and always different. Same in that she didn’t pay much mind to mortals, her life lived on the immortal plane and among their places. But different in that when she had come across mortals, she’d treated them as simply a short-lived species, no more or less worthy than angelkind.
Her beliefs had changed in the time since she’d taken oversight of Lumia. Now she knew humans as individuals. Now she looked forward to the shy, lopsided smile of Kareem, the stall owner who always offered her fresh mint tea. Now she had a favorite among the innocent, mischievous children who followed her in the streets. Now she began to understand why her son had mourned so when he lost his human lover.
Those memories were tangled in her mind, but she remembered his sadness. Sadness so deep and true that it had penetrated her madness with the efficacy of a sharpened blade. Her boy was not naturally a being of sorrow, his laughter the soundtrack of his childhood for her. So she had noticed when he stopped laughing, when he stopped getting that glint in his eye that meant mischief and play. It had returned eventually, but altered in a subtle way.
His loss had left a scar that would live forever in his heart.
She thought she had held him then, rocked him in her arms as she’d done when he was a babe. She hoped that was a true memory and not a figment of her broken mind. She liked to think that she’d been there for him not only then, but at the other dark events in his life.
His small heart had first broken when his father left them. Though Sharine’s mind had fractured at the moment of Aegaeon’s calculated cruelty—not because he’d left, but because of how—she still retained fragments of memory from that time. One of the strongest was of squeezing her little boy close and murmuring to him that it would be all right.
But it hadn’t been all right. She hadn’t been strong enough. That her boy loved her still was the greatest gift of her life. Often, children strove to be like their parents, but Sharine would strive to be like her son: an honorable, kind angel who saw mortals and did not ever think them lesser.
“I will speak to Titus,” she promised the villagers. “He isn’t an archangel who would have his people starve. In the interim, I’ll ask my people to bring you food.” Lumia and the township had their own growing fields and internal storage areas, and those had escaped all harm.
She’d ask Farah to lead the mercy drops, to distribute as much as was safe without putting the township at risk. Immortals could survive a long time without food, but mortals had far less leeway. “Do not despair. Our land has undergone a devastating war, but it’ll rise stronger and grow into a beautiful jewel once more.”
Eyes bright, the people bowed low and deep, saying, “Thank you, Lady.”
It disturbed her, the shining hope in those eyes. They didn’t know to whom they bowed. They had no knowledge of the fractures inside her. And they didn’t hear the fear that whispered constantly in her ear: You are broken. You are mad. You will fail. And you will fall.
8
Avelina, your son does you proud. Barely half-grown, yet he has no fear of an archangel. Did you know he challenged me to a duel?
I stake my claim now—he will come to my court after he is of age. I’ll ensure your Titus is taught by the best of the best as he grows into his warrior spirit, as I did for the twins. And if I do my task right, he’ll wish to stay with me in the years to come. I would be lucky indeed to have both you and your children by my side in battle.
—Letter from Archangel Alexander to First General Avelina
9
Titus had just come in from the field, the dawn sun rising in a glory of orange-red, when one of his sentries sent back the message that Lady Sharine had—at long last—been sighted at the city border.
Groaning, he looked down at his blood-and-grime-splattered clothing, thought of his swords that needed to be cleaned, and just threw up his hands. There really was no point in trying to tidy himself up—it’d be more of an insult if he didn’t turn up to welcome her when he was at the citadel and not out fighting reborn.
Striding out the huge doors that flowed from his personal living area—doors he mostly kept open—he stepped onto his balcony, then took off. In the massive courtyard below, his people toiled, exhausted but devoted. Some were coming in, some going out, while another section dealt with the animals.
Still another group was sorting the weapons that had been brought in damaged or broken by the teams out in the field. Beside them worked the mechanics whose task it was to keep the vampiric troops’ heavy-duty vehicles maintained and ready to take hit after hit from the reborn.
The rotting creatures had yesterday succeeded in acting together to tip over one of the vehicles, but the vampire fighters within had survived because the vehicle was built like a tank. It also helped that they’d had flamethrowers on hand to fry any reborn who tried to crawl through the cracked glass of the windscreen.
The other glass, all of it toughened, had held.
The dull murmur of voices, the clang of weapons and the noise of the engines, the snuffing of the horses, it was familiar music that meant home. But he couldn’t rest this morn, couldn’t share a mug of ale with his people or just sit in the courtyard and clean weapons to wind down from a night of battle against the reborn. Groaning again at what awaited, he angled his wings and headed out beyond the bustle of his city and toward the northern border.
The sky blazed around him, red and pink and dazzling shades of orange. He loved this landscape and he loved the colors of the sky. He’d been Archangel of Southern Africa some thousand six hundred years and he would swear tha
t each and every sunrise and sunset was different, was unique.
Yet despite the show of glory, he still saw the glint of a far different color in the distance, the indigo of the Hummingbird’s distinctive wings caressed by light—as if the sun itself was in love with her ethereal beauty.
Wings beating hard because there was no breeze today, no thermal to ride, he quickly closed the distance between them. The sooner he got to her, the sooner he could do away with the formalities, and have the bath he craved. But his forced smile of welcome turned into a black scowl as he brought himself to a polite hover a short distance away.
She wasn’t wearing her customary gown, and her hair was not only covered with dust, but in a braid that dropped over one shoulder. She was, in fact, in black pants and a light brown tunic not so different from his own garb—though he’d long done away with the tunic.
And while the straps that crisscrossed his chest were part of his sword harness, one hilt visible over his left shoulder, the other over his right, it looked like her straps attached to some type of pack.
The Hummingbird was wearing pants and carrying a pack.
He blinked.
Had he not known better, he’d have thought her a young angel out for the day. Perhaps even a warrior, though she was a little too slender to pull that off, no real muscle to her. Like most of the pretty beings in what the people within it chose to call the “gentle court,” and he saw as the tender heart of his warrior stronghold.
“Lady Hummingbird!” he boomed, then winced, because he’d told himself not to use his proper voice. The last thing he needed was for her to get the vapors and fall out of the sky. That would be wonderful. Then Raphael would be angry with him because he’d managed to insult and pain the mother of one of Raphael’s cherished Seven, and no doubt the rest of angelkind would think him an ogre.