by Nalini Singh
“Is it a mother you share or a father, or both?”
“Zuri and Nala are twins, thus share both parents. We, all five of us, are linked by our mother, Avelina. My sisters,” he muttered, “are also bonded by their shared aggravating temperament.”
“Your mother is very fertile.” Sharine felt the stab of admiring envy, for such fertility was not often found in their kind.
“She also loves children and is brilliant at raising them to be strong, honorable angels—I’m quite sure I would have another sibling by now if the first general hadn’t decided to go into Sleep a millennium after my birth. Truly, my mother would have to beat men off with a stick were she not so formidable they don’t dare advance on her without permission.”
His pride in his mother was open, as was his exasperated affection for his sisters. Again, her heart threatened to open for him, this man so blunt about his loves and his hates. With Titus, nothing was hidden, nothing was a subtle game. Despite all she’d told herself, he was nothing like Aegaeon but for the fact both were archangels.
That made Titus far more dangerous to her than she’d realized.
“My sisters are equally desired,” he said, with a grimace only a brother could produce. “Aegaeon made a play for Charo, the scholar among us. Wickedly witty with her friends, but shy with others. He hurt her.”
The potent simplicity of that statement hit hard. “Yes, he is that kind of man.” One who seemed to have none of the empathy so evident in Sharine’s son. “He hurt me, too.”
“Is that why you were lost?” Titus asked, then made a grumbling sound. “All of angelkind says the Hummingbird is lost in her own world, but unfortunately for me, you seem to be quite present and aware in my world.”
Her lips twitched, her amusement a surprise to herself. But his grumble was half-hearted at best . . . and that was a surprise. “I didn’t fragment because he left me,” she clarified, for the idea of Titus seeing her as fragile was unbearable. “I had a young son whom I loved with every part of myself. Illium was my reason for being.”
“Then what?” Titus asked at his usual volume.
“Why do you feel you have any right to ask me that question?”
He shrugged. “How will I discover anything if I don’t ask? It’s not as if I’m holding your feet to the fire to force you to answer.”
It was such a Titus thing to say that she felt laughter burst the seams of her being, such amused delight as she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. She laughed with her son at times, but that was different, a moment between mother and son. This, laughing with Titus, it felt an adult thing that reinforced her feeling of wholeness.
He was staring at her when she caught her breath and glanced at him, his eyes stunned. “Doppelganger,” he said at last, the boom of his voice a rasp. “It’s the only explanation.”
Laughing again, she wiped away her tears . . . and had to fight the urge to fly over and tug up his scowly lips into a smile. Such a childish impulse for an old immortal, but Sharine didn’t feel old right then. Maybe it was because this blunt hammer of an archangel had given her the gift of laughter, and maybe it was because it was time, but she told him the truth.
“To understand why my mind fractured,” she said, “you must understand my history.” A single glance and she knew she had his full attention—though he continued to scan the landscape as they flew. “I loved a man named Raan at the very dawn of my existence. I was a decade past my majority and he thousands of years old when we fell in love.”
Titus growled akin to one of the lions that roamed his lands. “He shouldn’t have put his hands on you.”
Anger was a whip in her voice when she set him straight. “Even with the gift of hindsight, I can tell you there was no coercion, no manipulation. Some souls are just meant to meet and to entwine.”
A stubborn silence from Titus before he blew out a breath. “I first became friends with Alexander when I was a pup of some two hundred. We are friends still, though he is an arrogant old man.”
It took her a second. “You’re speaking of Archangel Alexander?” Caliane called him “Alex” but theirs had always been a deep friendship quite apart from Sharine’s own with Caliane.
When Titus gave a nod, she shook her head. “You astonish me, Titus.” It was no lie; Alexander was an Ancient, would’ve been an Ancient during Titus’s youth, and yet she could see why the archangel had formed a liking for the undoubtedly brash young warrior Titus had been.
“My apologies to your Raan,” he said. “If you say he was a good man, he was a good man.”
It shook her, how much that trust meant to her. Titus, she knew, didn’t take honor lightly. Swallowing hard against the surge of emotion, she looked away from his handsome profile and carried on. “We had a joyous half a century together. Then Raan died.”
Titus stopped flying, dipping a fraction in the sky before he pulled himself back up into a hover. “Battle?”
“No, I woke one morning and he was dead beside me.” She could speak those words now and feel only a distant sadness; always, she would remember and love Raan, but she was no longer caught in the sticky tendrils exuded by the past.
Titus started to fly again, but he was silent for a good long while. She gave him time to digest the news, aware it was a big thing for an immortal to accept that death could come at them, silent and unseen. It didn’t matter that Raan’s and her parents’ deaths were the last such ones she knew of in the eons of her existence—that the possibility existed at all was a horror story for angelkind.
“I don’t know how to understand this,” he said at last.
She liked him even better for his honesty. “It took me a long time, but, Titus, there is more. Do you wish to hear it?” Now that she’d opened the door, she found she wanted to talk about it. Only one other person knew her full history, and Caliane was yet in anshara.
“Yes.” Titus’s response was firm. “I would hear it all.”
“My parents went into Sleep when I was eighty-five years of—”
“WHAT?” It was a boom so loud that she half expected the sky to crack open. “Your parents left an infant on her own?!”
“I was hardly an infant.” But she had been a scared child who’d spent her whole life trying to cling to parents who were never quite present. “But that isn’t the story.”
“I’m not sure my heart can take any more,” he said, anger yet vibrant in his tone. “When your parents wake, make sure it’s not in my vicinity. My fury would surely singe their flesh off their bones.”
“My parents are dead,” she said softly, this pain even more faded than the grief of Raan’s death, for that good-bye she’d made as a child, never knowing if she would see them again. “I went to check on their place of Sleep when I was two centuries old, and I found their bodies just bones, their flesh dust.”
* * *
* * *
Titus turned to look at her, his mind unable to comprehend the depth of her loss. Her radiant voice was quiet with sorrow, but the grief wasn’t a sharp knife. No, it wouldn’t be, not after so many millennia. “My heart would break should I go to check on my mother and find her gone.”
To think of First General Avelina gone from this world in dusty silence . . . it was such a wrongness that he couldn’t bear to imagine it. As soon as it was safe, he’d go visit his mother, make sure she was warm and whole . . . as Sharine’s parents would never again be.
“My heart did break,” she said, “but I think, not the same way as yours would.” She angled her wings to take further advantage of the draft he was creating, and he could tell she was tiring. “My parents were old angels, and I knew from infancy that they’d one day leave me.”
Titus simply couldn’t imagine parents who’d abandon their vulnerable child, but then, Aegaeon had done the same. “Aegaeon’s abandonment of your son? It reminded you of the loss of your parent
s?”
“No, the fracture lines were in a different place.” A strand of hair that had escaped her tail kissed her cheekbone before flying back. “Death, you see, was my greatest fear. Specifically the quiet and unwitnessed deaths of those I loved.”
Titus’s skin grew cold with a rage so deep, it had no name. “He went to Sleep in your bed.” So that when she woke, it would be to an unmoving, unresponsive angel. Her traumatized brain wouldn’t have made sense of the single sign of life—a certain warmth of the skin.
To Sharine, Aegaeon would’ve appeared as the dead.
“His second and three others of his innermost court arrived the hour after dawn, to take him to his secret place of rest.” Fury in every syllable. “I was whimpering in a corner by then, my fist thrust into my mouth to muffle my screams. My mind was gibbering that everyone I loved died. Over and over again in an endless loop, that was my only thought.
“After I first woke, I ran to check on Illium. In my screaming panic, I forgot that my baby boy was staying with his best friend that night, and when I saw his empty bed, I was convinced he was dead and someone had taken his corpse. In that fragment of time, I truly believed my child was dead.”
No tremor in her voice as she finished the story. “The only mercy in it all was that Illium didn’t have to see his mother break down and his father be carried out of his home by a solemn squadron in full regalia.”
Titus’s jaw worked, his hand fisted to bloodless tightness. “I’ve long known Aegaeon to be worthless, but now I know the depth of his cruelty.” If the archangel’s second knew to come for him, then Aegaeon had planned it. Most archangels slipped into Sleep without warning, and without assistance, so their place of rest would be secret; it was a measure of Aegaeon’s cruelty that he’d chosen to allow at least four of his court to know of his place of rest in order to shatter Sharine.
“I’ve never known why he did it,” Sharine said, and right then, she was magnificent in her cold anger. “If I ever see him again, I will ask him—if I can stop myself from first stabbing out his eyes.”
Titus approved of her bloodthirsty need for vengeance.
“I think at times, that I should release the anger,” she said, “that my vengeance should be to erase him from my thoughts.”
“You can erase his face and his eyes instead,” Titus muttered. “And release your anger in his flesh.” It would still not be enough.
An unexpected burst of that astonishing laughter that was sunshine falling in a rain over him. He clenched his gut against the glory of it. If he’d thought her beautiful before . . . well, if the Hummingbird was beautiful, Sharine with her blade of a tongue and golden laughter was extraordinary.
Fighting the urge to touch her, this being beyond his reach, he said, “Am I to take it that you have no more feelings for the blue-green donkey?” He had to break the moment, break his entrancement. “If you are pining for him, admit it now so that I can smite you for bad taste.”
“Smite me?” Sharine couldn’t believe he was serious, but he sounded so very solemn. “Surely you have someone in your court who occasionally pops the bubble of your enormous ego?”
His response was a thunder of sound. Shifting, he flew away from her. She watched him go without concern, knowing he wouldn’t leave her behind. Titus stuck to his promises.
When he returned after sulking a short five minutes, it was to say, “How did you fool angelkind into thinking you a soft, ethereal creature? Did you sit each night in your home and cackle over the game you were playing?”
It delighted her that despite all he knew of her now, he treated her exactly the same. No pity or even a hint of feeling sorry for her. Titus, it seemed, had come to see not the Hummingbird, but Sharine—and he wished to pick a fight with her. Sharine found she wasn’t averse to crossing swords with the Archangel of Africa.
It was dangerously exhilarating.
“Just as I’m sure you must sit in your room at night and think up wooing words that have women dropping at your feet.” She fluttered her lashes at him. “Please do try out your prepared charm on me. I promise to be a receptive audience.”
“You’ve been sent by my sisters.” A horrified stare. “They cannot torment me in person, and so they’ve sent you to torment me by proxy.”
To think of Titus as a beleaguered younger brother astonished and intrigued her in equal measures. She had so many questions, but there was no time to ask them because below them came a movement jerky and unnatural that made her blood run ice cold. “Titus.”
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 st
ock 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?
