by Nalini Singh
None of that explained why she was being asked to join Titus. “I don’t have the powers of your Seven, far less the power to take on an archangel.”
Raphael looked at her in a careful way. “My mother once told me to look at Illium with care if I wanted to see the root of his power—I didn’t understand then, but now I ask myself from whom he inherited his fidelity, his hair, his heart . . . and his speed.”
A stirring in the back of her mind, the creaking of long-buried memories. “That is why Raan called me a hummingbird.” It was a murmur more to herself than to Raphael, aged memories sighing to wakefulness.
So fast you are, my little bird. Sunshine in your eyes, color streaked across your skin, light of feet—and the speed of a hummingbird. I could not ever catch you should you seek to fly away.
She had forgotten the genesis of her other name until this very instant, forgotten that it had been a loving caress from Raan. Forgotten that he’d done a painting of her in flight, her wings and body creating streaks of color in the sky just like the small, jeweled bird.
“Lady Sharine?” Raphael’s voice, interrupting her thoughts, reminding her again of the now, of the here—but without impatience.
The blue-eyed boy’s mother was an Ancient; he understood that memories took time to unfurl within the minds of the very old. Tangled skeins with knots and, in Sharine’s case, many a cut thread, that was the repository of immortal memory.
“I accept the task,” she said with a sense of taking a step into the future. “I will make ready to join Titus.”
5
Titus roared to the starless sky as he dispatched another ravenous monster born of those putrid boils on the history of the world, Lijuan and Charisemnon, turning his head at the last moment so that the fetid blood didn’t hit his face. He’d had more than enough of that—but he could do nothing about the repulsive smell of the blood.
The reborn down, he picked up his conversation with his troop trainer, Tanae. “The rest of the Cadre are sending me the Hummingbird!” It came out a disbelieving shout.
“So you have said. Four times.” Dark red strands of hair stuck to her cheeks by a combination of blood and sweat, Tanae dispatched another reborn, then wiped her blade on the already wet dark of her pants.
Her wings were a horror of blood and brain matter from a half hour past when she’d turned into a spinning dervish to eliminate a nest of reborn. “You are one of the Cadre, sire. You don’t have to accept anything you do not want.”
He glared at her. “The Humming Bird,” he said, deliberately spacing out the two words that made up the name of the greatest living artist in angelkind. “Do you wish me to make enemies of our entire people?”
Everyone loved the Hummingbird. Even Titus loved her—in a distant kind of way. He didn’t know her as a person. He knew of her. That she was a gift to angelkind, that her kindness was legendary, that she had never had an enemy in her life. And of course, that she had given birth to Illium, a young angel Titus greatly liked.
Tanae, who had little relationship with her own son and was not a woman of large emotions, rolled eyes of a pale gray. “She isn’t a warrior and we’re in the midst of an infestation of reborn. No one will be surprised if you—respectfully—reject the offer.”
Titus had to turn and take care of another three rotting reborn before he could respond. “No one else will come,” he grumbled. “I scared all those who might’ve been free to join us, and now no warriors are left.”
“I told you not to yell at the last one,” Tanae said in a steady tone after chopping off a reborn head that featured a crushed eyeball hanging out of its socket. “He was competent.”
“He was lily-livered!” Titus roared. “What warrior runs from a good strong yell? You don’t run.”
“That’s because I’m deaf after all these years at your side.” Glancing around the field and seeing only dissolving bodies, she slid her sword into a thigh sheath.
The dissolving was a new thing that the reborn had begun to do after Lijuan’s death. The resulting gelatinous mess had so disgusting a stench that Titus’s second, Tzadiq, had rounded up a civilian crew whose sole job it was to dig deep holes using large earthmoving machines, then scrape all those dissolving bodies inside.
It was a luxury given all else that was going on, but it was a luxury for which his people thanked him, else their homes would be filled with the odor of decomposing flesh and no one could eat.
And food was a pleasure Titus treasured.
As for whether the gelatinous goo would poison the earth, Titus had plans to one by one cleanse the graves using archangelic power—but he couldn’t do that and fight the reborn at the same time. It’d have to be done at the end. In the interim, the holes were lined with a material created to keep contaminants from escaping into the soil, with his scientists monitoring the situation.
“You show me no respect,” he said to Tanae. “I should banish you.”
“I have a standing offer from three other courts.”
If he didn’t like her so much, he would banish her, he thought with an inward grumble. But if there was one thing Titus knew, it was that having bowing and scraping sycophants around an archangel did nothing but lead to rot. Look at Lijuan—all those fawning courtiers and a once competent leader had turned into a woman who thought death was life.
Tanae might have an edge to her tongue and no time for massaging anyone’s ego, but she was also loyal to the bone. Though he did sometimes wonder how her mate, Tzadiq, dealt with her. A man liked a little softness in his lover.
Not that Titus was getting any of that at present. While he well appreciated pleasures of the flesh, he had no time or inclination to soothe and gentle the pretty and fragile creatures with whom he usually kept company.
“I’ll have to clean up, entertain her.” It came out a groan unbecoming of an archangel but dear glory, the idea of it!
“Perhaps she’ll be more helpful than we believe,” Tanae said with her customary practicality. “She has, by all accounts, done a stellar job in her oversight of Lumia. You cannot argue that your household is in chaos and could do with a firm hand at the helm.”
“That’s because anyone who can lift a sword is out battling reborn, the others are digging holes to bury the resulting goo, and I’ve sent the vulnerable to safe havens.” Those safe havens were mostly islands off the coast of Africa. “She’ll have nothing to do but sit around and take insult at not being pampered like a lady.”
Titus had not expected this of Raphael—after his brutal and exhausting sojourn assisting in Africa, the pup knew very well what Titus needed. He categorically did not need a fragile artist renowned for her existence on a higher plane far from crawling reborn and war and blood.
There was no higher plane here. Just death and decay and devastation.
“Perhaps the others had no choice,” he admitted with a loud sigh. “We’ve lost too many good people.” Thousands of warriors had died in the battles, and though Titus now had control over what remained of Charisemnon’s forces, he couldn’t trust them.
Knowing a resentful fighter could do far more harm than good, he’d offered those troops the choice to leave for another territory if they so wished. Only a minuscule number had taken him up on it and departed Africa: all people who’d been high up in Charisemnon’s court.
Good riddance.
The rot in his enemy’s lands ran deep and it had come from the top.
Those who’d stayed had likely done so because they’d face the same lack of welcome outside Africa. Angelkind knew that fighters lower down in the pecking order had no control over the actions of their archangel, and so no one would outwardly shun those fighters, but the simple fact of the matter was that every angel had a choice.
These angels—and vampires—had made the choice to follow orders even when those orders were unforgiveable. That decision would s
tain them for centuries to come—how they responded to it, how they acted now, that would be their legacy. At present, however, Titus had command of too many sullen warriors he didn’t want anywhere near his people.
Some, he’d left in command of various northern cities—it was pointless to send his own people to do the task when Charisemnon’s commanders were already experienced in the job and had intimate knowledge of those cities.
It wasn’t as if even the most sullen and hostile would dare foment rebellion against an archangel. No one but the suicidal would listen to them. The worst they could do was deliberately fail in their duties as city commanders, and Titus’s spymaster had enough operatives scattered through the cities to ensure they’d soon hear of any such.
As for any overflow of warriors, he’d asked Tzadiq to situate them in the more isolated sections of the territory. They could be useful and clear up the reborn infection in that area, while keeping the poison of their hate safely away from his court.
“That’s good,” Tanae said in response to his acknowledgment of the Cadre’s lack of options. “You’re being positive. Is that not what your sisters suggested?”
Titus wanted to stop and bang his head against the nearest hard surface. It was not enough that he had to deal with the vicious seeds left by a bringer of disease. No, he also had to have four elder sisters, all of whom chose to be awake in the world, and all of whom considered it their business to give him advice. Really, a much younger brother had to grow a big voice to stand up for himself.
Was it any wonder his voice was now so big it scared and insulted others? That was another thing. “If I’m so terrifying, why is it my sisters show no fear?”
Tanae came as close to a smile as she ever did. “Titus, I know you’d chop off my head in battle should I come against you, but were I someone you thought of as a woman first and everything else second, you wouldn’t lift a finger to lay so much as a bruise on my skin. Every woman in the world knows this.”
Titus snarled at her, but he had no rebuttal. He didn’t believe in harming those who didn’t put themselves forward in battle. That applied, regardless of gender, but yes, he had a special soft spot for women. But the instant a woman picked up a sword, she went from woman to warrior. A warrior was fair game. A woman was to be protected.
Yet even though two of his sisters were warriors, he didn’t meet Zuri and Nala on that field. He met them as brother to sisters. Thus, much as they aggravated him, he wouldn’t ever do them harm. Even when they constantly sent him suggestions for battle strategy against the reborn. As if he wasn’t in his fourth millennium! As if he wasn’t an archangel who’d just defeated another archangel!
The last time around, he’d threatened to tell Alexander they were being lax in their duties if they continued to hound him. Surely, he’d written, you would not have so much time on your hands if you were actually doing your assigned tasks.
The twins had gone silent. That would last about five minutes.
His sisters didn’t know the meaning of defeat.
“Come,” he said to Tanae, “we must clear the next field so that the barriers can be put up.” That was how they were doing this—section by section, with teams of mortals and young vampires in charge of moving each barrier outward as more land was cleansed of the reborn infection.
It worked, but progress was slow. It would’ve been glacial if not for Raphael’s and Alexander’s assistance. The two had helped Titus completely clear the area directly around the thriving hub of commerce and trade that was the city of Narja. That it’d become his battle citadel was an accident of location—Charisemnon had been a friendly neighbor when Titus first took over as Archangel of Southern Africa, and Narja had been born naturally, a result of the trade between the two sides of Africa.
The battles had come long afterward, and by then, the people of Narja were of a mind to hunker down in support of the citadel that sat on a rise at the center of the city. It helped that the city wasn’t actually right on the border and thus protected from the worst of the fighting.
Nothing could’ve protected it from the plague of reborn, however. Charisemnon, that bastard son of a diseased ass, had—while acting the ally—quietly set his ground troops to shepherding the infectious creatures over the border. The reborn had rampaged through Titus’s people, a putrid wave of death and horrific resurrection.
Even with Titus, Raphael, and Alexander all in play, they’d had to fight with brutal intensity to erase the threat from Narja. Whatever Charisemnon and/or his megalomaniacal partner had done to the reborn, the strain in Africa was even more vicious and virulent than in the rest of the world.
These new reborn hunted in packs, and seemed to have a rudimentary intelligence that harked back to the very first reborn Lijuan had created; many of the creatures had learned to dig dens in which to hide during the bright hours of daylight, crawling out only at dusk to begin their attacks.
And unlike the transmission rate in other parts of the world, here, as long as the victim’s head hadn’t been ripped off, it appeared to be one hundred percent. To die by reborn hands was to return reborn. That was nowhere near the worst of it—for a vampire or a mortal to be scratched or bitten by a reborn led to an ugly infection that had a fifty percent fatality rate.
The Archangel of Death and the Archangel of Disease had created a horrific hybrid. But the ugliest “improvement” was why all of the dead in Titus’s territory were now being cremated—these reborn had the ability to pass on the infection to the dead who yet had a shred of flesh on their bones. The creatures dug up graves, hauled out corpses, fed on them, but if any flesh remained afterward, the dead would be reborn.
An entire village had been butchered by their just-buried war dead in the hours after Titus left the continent to fight Lijuan. Now, people across this land spent daylight hours digging up their dead as tears streaked their faces and their hearts broke; each body was treated with respect, but there was no choice—their dead had to go into the cleansing cauldron of fire.
“Charisemnon and Lijuan must’ve had a plan to spread this new strain,” Tzadiq had said to him after they first became aware of the horror they faced, his second’s clean-shaven head gleaming in the reprieve of the dawn sun. “Why do you think that plan stalled in Africa?”
“We’ll never know for certain,” Titus had answered, his back drenched with sweat after yet another night fighting the reborn, “but if I had to lay bets, I’d say that whatever Charisemnon did to blend his disease with her death, it cost him.” Disease was a “gift” that cut both ways. “He likely couldn’t maintain the projected pace.”
But the archangel formed of pestilence and vanity had done plenty.
It was all more than enough to deal with—yet a nagging worry haunted Titus. When he’d entered Charisemnon’s inner border court after his return from New York, it was to find a number of badly decomposed bodies. No one had been inside the court buildings in the interim, both his and Charisemnon’s former forces caught in a desperate battle against the reborn.
The creatures had gone berserk upon the death of their master.
Only later, after questioning several senior members of the enemy court, had he learned that Charisemnon had shut off the inner court to everyone but a favored few. The other courtiers had worried they’d fallen in their archangel’s favor. Turned out, from what Titus had discovered, that the favored few had actually been the unlucky few.
For the vampires, Titus believed that their liege had either accidentally infected them with a disease or he’d used them as guinea pigs. It was possible the angels had been thrown to the vampires as sacrificial food, but it was equally possible the decomposition hid what might’ve been indications of disease. It was the latter prospect that haunted Titus—because angels weren’t supposed to be vulnerable to disease.
It was a law written into stone.
As immutable as the wind and the s
ky.
Or it had been before Charisemnon.
Then Tzadiq had discovered the worst thing: a slimy black-green trail along the hallway that led out of the room of the rotting dead . . . in a shape that couldn’t be of anything but an angel. No other being in the world could’ve made that particular pattern. Only an angel whose wings were dragging along the stone as they clawed and crawled their way down the hall.
Needless to say, Titus was handling serious and deadly problems.
The Hummingbird had exactly zero useful skills when it came to the grim tasks that lay ahead.
He wanted to groan all over again. Did he even have anyone left on his staff who could pretty up a room for her?
This was going to be an unmitigated disaster.
6
Sharine’s first action was to consider the well-being of Lumia and its connected township. To that end, she called together those of her current team who wore the mantle of leadership: Trace, Tanicia, and Farah.
The most senior of the three, Tanicia, her black hair delicately braided around the front but a halo at the back, said, “We won’t flinch at maintaining the rules you’ve set down, Lady Sharine.” Her voice was husky, her gaze resolute, and her wings a deep autumnal orange-red against skin of darkest brown. “We will allow no stain to fall on your honor.”
She should not have favorites, Sharine thought, but Tanicia was one of hers. A warrior through and through, but one with heart. Sharine had seen her slipping sweets into the hands of the younglings who ran after her in the streets, wanting to touch her wings but too well-taught by their parents to dare.
“I have every faith in you,” she reassured all three, lest they believe she was questioning their loyalty or commitment. “But we are short in number—and now you’ll lose me for a time. We must have contingencies in place should the vampires in the area begin to act out.” As Raphael had reminded her, bloodlust was always a threat, especially in the absence of archangelic oversight.