My eldest says that he has my eyes and my temper. The twins already believe he will follow their warrior ways, while Euphenia is the only one who can get him to sleep when he is determined to stay awake and roar out his battle cry.
His father is in astonishment at having helped create such a child. I tell him it will pass, and he will be a good father. He has a patience I lack—but this boy of mine will not be afeared of even his mother, this I know.
I will name him Titus.
—Letter from First General Avelina to Archangel Alexander
3
One month ago . . .
He couldn’t remember his name.
His lungs fought to suck in air, his vision blurred . . . and his wings lay heavy and useless on his back. Still he crawled forward, dragging himself out of hell and toward the sunlight.
His eyes fell on the back of his hand, on his formerly ice white skin. Skin he’d pampered and protected and examined with care in the mirror each day. Skin that had highlighted the intense topaz shade of his eyes. Skin that was now mottled with green.
He had to get out.
He had to find a healer.
But he was so weak. How would he . . .
Snatching out a skeletal hand with reptilian speed, he gripped the small creature that had scuttled across his path, had his teeth sunk into its small furred body before his conscious mind could process the decision. The creature’s furless tail whipped in panic, but it had little blood and died soon.
Throwing the creature aside, he wiped the back of his hand over his mouth . . . and felt a spurt of energy. So, was he a vampire now? No, that couldn’t be. Vampire-angel hybrids existed only in tales spun by mortals. Immortals understood the fundamental truth that vampires and angels weren’t biologically compatible . . . but that he’d gained energy from the creature’s blood was indisputable.
His head jerked toward the small corpse.
Again, he snatched it up without thought. This time when he bit in, it was to eat the raw flesh, spitting out only the bristled fur. A tiny part of his mind, a mind that had once been of an urbane courtier in an archangel’s court, screamed and gibbered, but it was a distant, faded sound. It couldn’t stand against the rush of energy hitting his bloodstream.
Now he knew how to fly again.
How to stop the crawl of green beneath his skin, foul and debilitating.
How to clear his mind so he could think.
As for the coughs wracking his frame and the green-black sputum he couldn’t stop from spitting out, it would all heal. He just needed enough fuel. Enough flesh plump and red and dripping with life.
Hawking out the chewy, indigestible tail on another cough, he crawled on, his clawed nails creating furrows on the tile and the flesh sloughing off his legs to leave a liquid trail. Caught within that sludge were feathers lovely and unique, a deep brown threaded with filaments of topaz.
4
Present day
Sharine stood on the railingless and flat roof of her new home in the sands of Morocco, and looked out at the buildings gilded by the rays of the setting sun. The light had an almost molten quality, a perfect kind of richness to it that appeared only at sunset. As if the star itself had been melted and was being poured over the landscape by a benevolent painter.
The vampires and mortals who walked in the streets below were busy with their business, setting up for the evening market, or heading home after a day’s work, but every now and then, one of the townspeople would think to look up and they would see her. It was a thing of pride for her that the children would smile and raise a hand in excited greeting. The older ones would bow with respect.
These same people had scuttled afraid and wary when she’d first come to this place. Damaged by the oversight of an angel who’d cared more for power and cruelty than the valued responsibility he’d been given—to look after angelkind’s most precious treasures. Yet Lumia, the repository of angelic art and treasures, would be a cold and lonely place without the thriving life of this adjacent settlement. To Sharine, that made the town and its people treasures as rare and beautiful as those protected in the walls of Lumia.
Spreading out her wings, she held the luxuriant stretch for a full minute before pulling them slowly back into alignment against her spine. She took care to ensure precision muscle control. It was a strengthening exercise she’d long ignored, the discipline lost in the fractured kaleidoscope that had been her self.
Large parts of the last half millennium—give or take a few decades—were shattered and confused images in the landscape of her mind, viewed through a filter that was broken and cracked. She would never get back those years. She would never get back the time during which her mischievous, laughing son had grown into a courageous and powerful man.
The hot flame of anger in her gut flared anew, searing her blood.
“Lady Sharine.”
She turned her head to meet Trace’s gaze. With his pretty eyes of midnight green and his moonlight skin, his languid voice that of a poet’s and his hair a silky black, the slender vampire reminded her of her son. Not the coloring, that was unique to each of them. But, like Trace, her playful boy had caused more than one heart palpitation in those susceptible to such charms in her court.
Many, many had proved susceptible.
“What is it you have for me, youngling?” she asked him with an affectionate smile.
Trace shook his head, his angular features creating shadows against his cheeks; no soft beauty was Trace’s, but beauty it was nonetheless. “I’ve told you, my lady,” he said, “I’m a fully mature man, not a boy.” Stern words, but his gaze held equal affection.
“And as I have said,” she replied, “when you are as old as dirt and the stars combined, everyone is a youngling.” Even Raphael, the archangel who’d once been an energetic little boy she’d taken to her studio so he could exhaust himself throwing paint at canvases, his little hands becoming tiny, sticky stamps—even he had accepted that he’d always be a child in her eyes.
She wondered what had become of his exuberant paintings; she was sure she must’ve stored them away in the Refuge, but those memories were hidden beyond the tangled mental pathways of the splintered madwoman she’d become after Aegaeon’s premeditated and inexplicable cruelty.
There was unkindness, and then there was what Aegaeon had done.
Sighing, Trace held out an envelope. Made of thick creamy paper and sealed with the wax stamp of the Cadre, it held a sense of the portentous, as if the news within had been imbued with the power of the archangels who ruled the world.
“A courier dropped this off a moment ago,” Trace said in a voice that had seduced many a maiden. “A vampire,” he elaborated, before she could ask why the courier hadn’t landed on the rooftop next to her.
Taking it, she said, “How did your rounds go?” Trace had come to her only a month past, sent by Raphael after several of her court had to return to their home bases—angels and vampires, junior and senior, they’d gone to help their people cope with the devastation caused by Lijuan’s attempt to become the ruler of the world.
The war had ended a month earlier, but no one had time to rest, to heal.
It wasn’t just the awful damage to cities and towns and villages, nor the shambling hordes of reborn. Over the past two weeks, a far larger than average number of vampires had begun to surrender to murderous bloodlust.