by Nalini Singh
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.
16
She actually rolled her eyes at him. Rolled her eyes at the Archangel of Africa. “No,” she said. “I’d simply like to make sure we have all the details, so we can see if there’s something to be learned from it.”
Titus went to grumble back a response, when a herd of buffalo below caught his eye. The large and aggressive creatures with dark coats were moving in erratic ways, slamming their heads against each other and pawing at the earth. More than one set of wickedly thick horns glinted red with blood.
He flew lower. “Don’t get close enough for them to make contact!” he yelled back to the Hummingbird; he didn’t believe the creatures were in any way sentient, but there was a feral energy to them.
Cold infiltrated his bones. “They’re reborn,” he said to Sharine when she came to hover next to him.
Nothing and no one but the reborn had that particular vicious look in the eye—a kind of rapacious voraciousness that nothing could assuage. A hunger that was endless and even worse than the bloodlust that had taken hold in vampires across many territories. Titus’s theory on why Africa had been spared that scourge was that even the vampires were terrified of the reborn.
That, and any vampire who got out of fucking line was soon terminated by his fellows. No one sane wanted to foster or create a distraction from the battle taking place on the continent.
Sharine sucked in a breath. “I didn’t know it could be transmitted to animals.”
“Neither did I,” he said, his power alive in his hand. “No one else has reported anything of the like.” He had no proof as yet, but he knew this was Charisemnon’s doing; whatever poison he’d created, however he’d hybridized the reborn with his disease, it meant the horror could now jump between species.
“Sweet mercy.” Sharine’s lovely voice was as cold as his blood. “Lijuan and Charisemnon would’ve turned our entire world into a mockery of life.”
“I must end these buffalo, but I’ll need to take a sample back for my scholars and scientists.” He frowned. “I don’t have anything in which to preserve and carry a sample.”
“Create a hole in the earth,” Sharine suggested. “Dump some feed within. As long as the hole isn’t shallow, the creature won’t be able to clamber out.”
It was a smart idea. There was just one problem. “They’re no longer grazing on grass.” He pointed out the hunks of flesh that one buffalo had ripped out from the flank of another.
“Such horrors.” Sharine’s expression was open, her renowned kindness and heart at the forefront—yet there remained nothing fragile about her. “You’ll have to leave a dead animal in there with the reborn one, for your scientists need a live sample to study—if the infection melts the flesh of the reborn, you may otherwise end up with no sample at all.”
The reborn tended to be drawn to living flesh, but Titus wasn’t going to trap two maddened creatures together so one could eat the other. There were some lines he wouldn’t cross. “A living creature should survive if I create the hole under shade. I’ll send word back to my people as soon as I see a scout.”
Titus could speak mind-to-mind with his senior people from some distance away, but they’d flown beyond his maximum range. Mental speech had never been one of his stronger skills regardless, and was perhaps a reason he’d retained so much of his Cascade-born abilities. To even out the spread of power in the Cadre.
“Wait.” Sharine’s voice was breathy . . . flustered? “I’m foolish. We can use the phone—I have a number within it that connects to your court.”
“I don’t deal with such.” Titus examined the creatures below to see which he could most easily cut from the herd and corral.
“Careful, Titus,” she said, “lest you morph into a monument of yourself—one stuck in stone and in the past.”
As he watched her touch her fingers to the screen of the device, he chewed over her words, heat in his blood. He was who he was and he had no argument with himself.
Tito! Stop being so stubborn.
His eldest sister’s voice, an echo from childhood—or possibly from last year. Phenie still scolded him from time to time. She also went to great lengths to bring him his favorite fruit from the Refuge, and, when he’d been a child, had never begrudged the fledgling who tottered after her, eager to poke his nose into her business.
Come, Tito, we’ll go visit Master Carvari. It’s possible you have untapped musical abilities.
To Phenie’s great horror, Titus’s only interest in instruments was how to use them as weapons should he need to. Yet she’d never stopped him from being underfoot, not even when he spent an entire year with her while their mother led Alexander’s troops in battle.
Titus had long forgotten what that battle might’ve been or against whom, but he remembered sitting on the stone wall outside Phenie’s house, listening to her play the harp—and waiting in happy anticipation for when she’d inevitably call his name.
It’s time for a snack, Tito! Hurry home or I shall eat it all!
The memory made his lips curve. Perhaps, in Phenie’s honor, he’d concede that Sharine was right in her reproof. The device in her hand would ensure his scientists could get under way at speed.
Not that he’d tell Sharine he agreed with her—she struck him as the kind of woman who’d say “I told you so” and he’d heard quite enough of that in his childhood, thank you very much.
Especially from Charo. The youngest of his sisters was an inveterate gloater.
“Here.” Sharine handed over the device that felt flimsy and breakable in his hand. “I’ve touched the button that should connect you to your court.”
It was his steward who answered the call. “Yash,” Titus boomed. “I need you to fetch either Tzadiq, Tanae, Orios, or Ozias.” Yash was brilliant at running the household, but it’d be better to give this particular information to someone who’d ensure the scholars and scientists didn’t get themselves eaten by a deranged buffalo.
“Sire.” A stunned response, but the man recovered fast. “I’ll fetch Orios at once; I saw the weapons-master just now.”
Glancing down, Titus saw that three of the creatures had managed to take down a fourth, were now feasting on his yet-pink flesh. That meant the infection was recent. Unable to stand by and watch any being writhe in agony, Titus sent down a bolt of power that erased all four from existence. The rest of the herd screamed in a way that was eerily unnatural—buffalo didn’t make that sound—but they didn’t scatter.
Rather, they turned and looked up at him, trying to jump in a way that was impossible for their ungainly bodies.
Orios came on the line. “Sire, when Yash told me it was you on the line, I thought for certain he’d taken a blow to the head!” The weapons-master’s voice was as deep and resonant as Titus’s. “What calamity has befallen us now?”
Of all the people in his court, Orios was the one with whom Titus was the closest. Perhaps because Orios had been with him from the very beginning; the only reason he wasn’t Titus’s second was because he preferred the duties of a weapons-master.
I have no patience for the politics that come with being second, he’d said when Titus brought up the question soon after his ascension. You need a second with a bit more cunning and charm to him, one who’ll soften your blunt edges when it comes to dealing with the seconds of others in the Cadre. You should promote Tzadiq—he’s an excellent general, but he will be a brilliant second.
Orios had been right in his advice, and now Titus had an intelligent and urbane second he trusted to uphold Titus’s honor—while not insulting everyone in the vicinity. “It has reached the animals, my friend,” he told Orios, then laid out the details.
“I’ll send out a science team with an escort,” Orios told him, his tone grim. “The scholars have become more practical since the war, but I don’t trust them outside without protection.”
Neither did Titus; immortal scholars could sometimes live on their own planet. “I leave it in your capable hands.” After ending the conversation, he passed the phone back to Sharine, then went about creating the earthen prison for the chosen buffalo.
That done, he erased the rest of the infected animals from existence, his power leaving another scar in the landscape of his territory. It bruised his heart to see that, but it had to be done.
They saw no other unnatural creatures in the hours th
at passed, but while the cities appeared well enough—if quiet and on edge—the damage to the passing villages and farms was becoming increasingly worse. “Lumia?”
Though he hadn’t spoken for the past two hours, Sharine understood what he was asking. “We were safe—the reborn never reached that far.” She indicated below. “From what I saw on my previous journey, this is the worst-hit section on this side of the border.”
Titus took in the damage. “Charisemnon was playing with fire thinking he could control the reborn.” Only Lijuan’d had that ability.
“He also left his people helpless against them,” Sharine said, her tone full of cut glass, bright and bloody. “I was informed that he drafted not only angels and vampires, but strong mortals into his troops—including people from farmsteads and villages.”
“My spymaster has confirmed this.” Titus still had difficulty understanding the why of it. “Farmers and field workers?” None would’ve stood a chance in a battle between immortals. It wasn’t the same as when Guild Hunters or mercenaries joined in—they were highly trained and made the decision of their own free will.
The African Guild had all defected to Titus’s side as soon as Charisemnon’s perfidy and evil became clear, and they’d fought with courage and heart and skill. The Guild had taken losses, but at about the same percentage as the rest of Titus’s forces. No one would ever consider a hunter easy prey.
Quite unlike the poor scared mortals called up by Charisemnon.
“I understand now why so many villagers burned their homes to the ground—they would’ve had no chance one-on-one. It was a smart choice to lead or drive the monsters inside a house, then turn it into a funeral pyre.”
“The only choice, I think.” Sharine’s eyes were soft with sadness. “Even if it left them without a home.”