Archangel's Sun

44

Titus fought himself to near exhaustion in the days that followed, going further and further from Sharine. In desperation, he asked Tzadiq to get him a phone device, and he began to learn to use it so that he could see her face when they spoke.

His second said nothing to the request, but his eyes did plenty of talking.

Titus cared little; he wasn’t a man to hide his emotions even if he knew the future held rejection and a terrible hurt. Sharine had been crystal clear that she didn’t wish to be tied to any man.

Titus couldn’t blame her for her stance.

His heart twisted, the pain more difficult to bear than any battle wound he’d ever taken. She’d flown inside him, had Sharine, and the idea of not having her there always . . . it was brutal.

“Some would say it serves you right,” Tanae said with a distinct lack of sympathy in her tone when she came upon him muttering imprecations at the phone device when it wouldn’t do as he ordered. “To fall so hard for a lover who doesn’t see you as the sun in her sky.”

Titus glared at her. “Gloating doesn’t become you, Tanae.”

“I said ‘some,’ sire.” Her gaze grew distant, his troop trainer focused on a secret inner landscape. “I’m happy for you, that you’ve finally come to know the depth and passion of your own heart and the intensity with which it can feel.”

She glanced down at the ground, her flaming hair in a braid. “I’ve kept my heart confined for centuries upon centuries, my fears old enemies, and now I have a son who is my pride—but to whom I can barely speak. When I do, I say all the wrong things and I see him move even further from me.”

Stunned speechless by this unforeseen and startling show of emotion, Titus watched Tanae in silence as she carried on past him. She’d never been particularly maternal with her son, but this was the first evidence he’d ever seen that the distance between them was a wound that bled.

Perhaps, after the world had settled into some semblance of sanity, he’d speak to Galen, see if his former protégé wished to fly home for a visit. Or would that simply lead to more pain for both parties? Fact was that Tanae could be a hard mother—Titus had thought that even when Galen was a babe, hungry for his mother’s approval.

He knew the gentle and pampered flitterbies—a particular group of orphans raised in his court—had tried to baby the boy, but Galen had been stubborn and resolute even then. That didn’t mean the boy’s brave heart hadn’t bruised each time Tanae withheld her approval. Tzadiq had done his best, but he was more warrior than father. Titus had spent more time with the boy than either parent, but even an archangel’s approbation couldn’t erase the hurt caused by a mother or father.

He sighed; he could appreciate Tanae and Tzadiq as warriors while disagreeing with their parenting strategy. Titus had been raised with discipline tempered by overwhelming love, and that was his template for how he dealt with children. To withhold affection from a child . . . no, he couldn’t agree with it.

He’d ask Sharine her opinion on the matter when he got this blasted device working and they spoke. At least he’d worked out how to send a message.

His fingers felt too big and fat on the sleek screen of the device, but he missed Sharine too much not to persevere. He wrote: I broke the original device by hitting too hard at the screen.

Her response was pure astonishment that he was even attempting to use a phone.

When he did finally succeed with the device, and asked her about Tanae and Galen, she was silent in thought for long moments. “I made awful mistakes as a mother,” she said, her eyes dark with sorrow, “but the one thing I did right was love Illium fiercely when he was a boy.

“I think Tanae has a much harder road to walk—her son is weapons-master to an archangel, and settled with a woman he adores. He’s no boy with a soft heart . . . but she remains his mother. If she truly wishes to build that bridge, she must be willing to forget pride and accept that he could choose to reject her outright. He has that right.”

Expression pensive, she added, “Talk to her, Titus. If she opened up to you, it’s as close to a cry for help as she might ever make.”

Titus had no expertise in such things, but he trusted Sharine’s, so the next time they broke from battle at dawn, he found Tanae and as they cleaned their weapons side by side, he said, “If you die, there ends the chance to speak to Galen—and to make any apologies you wish to make.”

Tanae grew stiff . . . but didn’t move away.

The next day, she said, “I don’t know what to say to him. I get it wrong every time—I’m harsh and mean when I want to be otherwise.”

Out of his depth, Titus asked her if she’d speak to Sharine. “She’s a mother, too, and she understands what it is to make mistakes as a parent.”

Three days later, Tanae said yes, and Titus passed the baton. He knew his skills and he knew Sharine’s.

Together, they made one hell of a team.

It felt good to have her at his side in such a way, to have her strength aligned to and augmenting his own. He could only hope he did half as much for her. Because for the first time in his existence, Titus knew he needed a woman—but he was rawly conscious that the need might not be reciprocated.

He felt like a pup, waiting for her every call or message.

Then one day she sent a message that sheared ice through his veins.

Titus, we’ve found another infected angel.

Sharine should’ve expected this. The first infected angel had gone north for a reason—from all they’d been able to divine from their conversation with the survivor, the angel had retained a limited sense of reason until the final break from sanity. It was safe to assume he’d been more rational at the start.

As he’d been part of Charisemnon’s inner court, he’d also have known the battle was taking place in the other direction. While the border was no longer a political fact, the north remained safer if you wished to hide. Until now, Titus’s people had focused on the more badly overrun southern side of the continent.

It was Ozias who’d found this infected angel, her sharp eyes spotting the primary wing feathers of an angel lying outside a small cabin in the middle of nowhere. In angelkind, primary feathers didn’t shed in the same regular fashion as other feathers. For the majority of angels, it took a long time for a damaged primary feather to grow back, and the feathers on the ground were each the same shade of charcoal gray. They belonged to a single angel. For one of their kind to have lost that many . . .

“I’m going to check if we have a wounded angel,” Ozias had said, the sun a glow against the left side of her face, her features exposed because she’d braided her hair at the sides before pulling the rest of her curls into a tight bun. “Everyone else, stay up here.”

Sharine had disagreed. “Ozias,” she’d said softly, “there’s another possibility.”

The spymaster’s pupils had dilated before she gave a small nod. “Lady, I’d be grateful for your assistance.”

The two of them had landed together, but Ozias had insisted on going first. Inside the cabin was an angel; he lay on a cot pushed against one wall of the small and sparsely furnished space. The cot was narrow and obviously not built for an angelic body, but the angel who lay within it was beyond caring about that. He was flushed, his body hot with fever, and his eyes unseeing.

Under the brown of his skin crawled patches of green-black.

Sharine thought back to how the surviving villager had described the angel who’d attacked their settlement: His skin was like a bruise almost all over and it was peeling away in places, shriveled in others. His fingers were hooked, his nails like claws, and it seemed as if his tongue was rotting green, his lips too plump and red.

The angel on the cot looked relatively healthy in comparison, if the word could be used in this context—as if the infection hadn’t advanced as deep. Despite that, he showed no awareness of their presence, one of his arms hanging limply over this side of the cot. One wing was the same, the other crushed under his back.

When Sharine looked around the cabin, she spotted something that had her last meal threatening to rise from her stomach. “Unless I’m very wrong, that was his food source.”

Ozias crouched by the pile of bones and used her sword to nudge out the skull. “Mortal.” A pause, a closer look at the teeth. “No, vampire.” Voice cold, she said, “From the state of the bones, they’ve been here a number of days.” She got to her feet. “There’s no flesh or marrow.”

“A lack of food might explain his current state.” No normal reborn would appear as healthy after being deprived of food for days, but that was the thing that had become clear since their first discovery—infected angels might not be reborn at all. “Charisemnon’s journal states that his goal was to create an infection that didn’t need death as a starting point.”

Sharine had read the relevant journals over and over in an effort to discover the tiniest bit of data, and it had struck her that for an antidote or cure to work, the individual had to be alive in the first place—Lijuan had been the strongest of them all and even she hadn’t been able to bring the dead back to true life.

Add to that the information that Charisemnon’s “gift” had been disease, and it became even more probable that he hadn’t been capable of creating reborn on his own. All the initial stock of reborn had been birthed by Lijuan. “Our only indication that he might’ve succeeded is the pregnant angel.”

Titus’s medics, healers, and scientists were united on that one point: life, actual life, couldn’t come from one of the dead. Disregarding all philosophical discussion on the point, the internal organs of the reborn started to undergo a metamorphosis at the very moment of “resurrection”—a number of the more intrepid healers, including Sira, the leader of the entire team, had flown with the fighting squadrons and had studied enough “fresh” reborn to be sure of their conclusion.

The metamorphosis included the total desiccation of certain internal organs—including the womb. No reborn who’d existed longer than twenty-four hours could carry a child. Neither could a reborn sire one, as those organs also desiccated into nothing. The latter discovery had apparently caused a shudder to run through the ranks of all those who possessed said organs.

“You think he might be alive?” Ozias, Sharine had learned, was as adept as any spymaster in concealing her emotions—but now she compressed her lips and swallowed. “I’ll check his blood. Did Sira’s healers not theorize it might remain red until the infection took a strong hold?”

“Yes.” Sharine shifted to take position near the angel’s head. “Should he rise in an attack, I’ll bring him down with my power.” Sharine had an artist’s soul, violence not in her usual lexicon, but she’d come to accept that violence was the only answer in the current situation—the reborn would never listen to reason, never agree to live in peace side by side.

And whatever the connection between Lijuan’s reborn and Charisemnon’s disease, the victims of both shared a single overriding desire: to feed on living flesh. Sira’s team was of the opinion that Charisemnon had used the blood of the reborn as a base to synthesize or “birth” his disease. Sharine was apt to agree with them.

“Ready, my lady?”

At Sharine’s nod, Ozias slid away her sword and took out a knife. Using the razored edge, she made a tiny cut at the tip of one of the angel’s fingers. The angel didn’t recoil, though his chest continued to rise and fall, his eyes to blink. What emerged from the miniscule cut was a fluid of viscous green streaked with black.

The smell was putrid and overpowering.

The spymaster staggered back. “I’ve smelled that stench before,” Ozias choked out. “It’s of a body decaying in the grave.”

Sharine thought back to the infant’s mother; had she had such an ugly odor to her? She couldn’t remember, her entire being had been so focused on giving the poor child peace in her final moments. “We must consult Sira.”

If this angel was alive—not reborn, simply badly infected with Charisemnon’s disease—then he could prove critical to those studying the infant and thus, to the infant’s life. “They may be able to use him to test if the babe’s blood holds a cure.”

Ozias sucked in a breath, then choked all over again. “Let’s talk outside.”

Once there, they both took huge gulps of the bitingly clean air and decided to call Titus. He was the archangel of this territory; the final decision had to be his. Sharine’s heart clenched at seeing his worried face on the small screen.

“Your opinion aligns with Ozias’s?” he asked after Ozias laid out all they knew.

A tightening of her abdomen, his words threatening to knock the air out of her and not for the first time. This man, he wasn’t afraid of strength, wasn’t afraid of using that strength to ensure the best outcomes for his territory—and for his people. “Yes,” she said. “He may be the key to understanding the babe.”

“I’ll dispatch Sira and their team.” His attention arrowed in on Sharine as Ozias went to speak to the three angels she’d be leaving behind to watch over the infected angel. “Your skin has become more golden, your bones sharper.”

“I’m becoming stronger the more I fly.” She wasn’t losing weight but adding lean muscle to her body. “How goes it in the south?”

“Day by day,” he said with warrior practicality . . . then touched his fingers to the screen, as if he would touch her.

She found herself responding in kind.

Titus ended the call with no good-bye, a little quirk of his that made her wonder in ways that weren’t good for her heart. Yes, Titus would leave a mark on her.

“Lady Sharine!” Ozias called from where she’d been briefing the angels who were to stand guard. “It’s time to fly!”

Sliding away the phone, Sharine rose into the sky.

As they fought on through the days that followed, she remained on edge, but they discovered no other signs of infected angels—until the commander of a large city to the northeast reported the appearance of mauled mortal and vampire bodies in a particular dark corner of her city.

Though the general angelic populace knew nothing of the infection, the commander said, “I’ve heard rumors that my sire was involved in terrible experimentation. If true, it’s possible one of his subjects escaped.” She swallowed. “I know little more—I’m a city commander, wasn’t part of the inner court.

“I’ve sent people to hunt the perpetrator,” she added, “but with protecting the city from the reborn threat, it’s been a low priority.” Exhaustion carved lines into the cream of her skin, her golden hair a feathered cap. “I’d more than welcome any assistance you can provide.”

Prior to this meeting, Ozias had briefed Sharine on the commander. “Eryna isn’t evil—she’s akin to Kiama’s parents: stupidly loyal.” No harshness in her voice, the words a simple truth. “As a city commander, she’s one of the best.”

Sharine felt a deep sense of compassion for those like Eryna, who’d been let down by the person they trusted above all others. Hadn’t she been much the same with Aegaeon? So needy and broken that she’d clung to the familiar even when it turned hurtful.

“Alexander has dispatched a number of relief squadrons,” Ozias said, and Eryna’s face visibly brightened, her spine no longer rigid. “In the meantime, it’s best if you maintain your border watch while we see what predator roams your streets.”

Eryna inclined her head. “A sound plan.” Then, for the first time, she met Sharine’s gaze with the blue of her own. “Lady Hummingbird, when you paint this war, will you make those of us who flew with Charisemnon into shadows? Into monsters?”

So much pain in the questions, a savagery of regret. “I think, child, you carry the shadows within. I have no need to create them with paint.”

Expression twisting, Eryna bowed from the waist before departing to resume her duties.

“Regret has a taste, does it not?” Sharine murmured to Ozias. “Like ozone in the air but a far heavier and darker thing.”

“She made a choice.” No mercy in the spymaster’s tone. “All of Charisemnon’s people made a choice, but the ones like Eryna? They had the power to defect and stand against him. Instead, they helped Charisemnon with his ugly quest—even if it was only by doing nothing. I can accept Eryna isn’t evil without ever forgiving her for her choice.”

Sharine could say nothing to that. Ozias was right.

Some choices echoed through time.

“How do we hunt the perpetrator of the maulings?”

“Lady Sharine, I am a spymaster,” was the quelling response.

Even with Ozias’s skills and underground contacts, it took them two days to track down the murderer. An infected angel, as they’d feared. One who was beyond saving. Her entire body was a rotting green-black that was nothing natural, her claws hooked. But even had the physical deterioration not been so bad, her mind was gone. She was crazed.

Her lack of reason was part of how Ozias had tracked her down—she’d become careless and devoid of cunning, wanting only to feed, only to gorge. Dropping her current victim’s body to the alley floor, she came at Ozias with claws outstretched, her mouth coated with blood.

The spymaster was at the wrong angle to behead her without sustaining at least a small injury, and Sharine wasn’t about to risk her to infection as a result of those claws or teeth.

A pinprick bolt of power, and she obliterated the angel’s chest.

Crumpling in the alleyway in slow motion, the infected angel looked to Sharine and there was no peace in her eyes, nothing but fury and the manic need to devour. Then she was gone, one more victim of an archangel’s greed and vanity.