Brows furrowed and shoulders bowed, the scholars had looked as tired as the warriors and household staff. No doubt, they’d been set to the task of seeing if there was another, faster way to stop the reborn.
Last but not least was the information that though Titus enjoyed women—tall and short, slender and voluptuous, pale-skinned or dark—he’d never come close to taking a consort.
The latter seemed to be a point of pride among his people, as if Titus gadding about like a fly laying its eggs on every possible surface was the epitome of masculinity. Sharine snorted to herself. Her mother would’ve been horrified at the inelegant sound but her mother was long-gone, turned to dust.
Aegaeon’s people, too, had been proud of their archangel’s virility and inability to commit his heart. Looking back, she saw not virility but weakness. It didn’t take any great skill to go about taking lover after lover if one was an archangel. Power alone was an aphrodisiac.
Oh, Archangel Titus’s charm is just . . . Sigh.
She’d overheard similar words more than once from those who’d passed through Lumia. Each smitten woman had placed her hands on her heart and spoken of how easy it was to melt into his arms, how gorgeous he was when he smiled, and how attentive he was as a lover. Sharine hadn’t thought she was paying attention at the time but, thanks to her accursed selective memory, she now remembered every morsel.
From what she’d seen, however, Titus’s charm consisted of being an archangel. She’d spotted no sign of any other talent in how he dealt with women. He was a blunt hammer and everyone seemed ready to fall for it.
Really.
If that was all one needed to be considered charming, she had a castle on a cloud she could sell them.
She snorted again.
Titus glanced to the right and slightly back. He could’ve sworn the Hummingbird had just snorted, but surely not. She was too refined and delicate a creature to snort.
Though she was also examining him as if he were an insect under a slide. There was a reason he didn’t spend too much time with the scholars of his court—he respected them as he respected all who had skills he didn’t possess—but half the time, he felt as if their greatest wish was to take him apart in order to work out how he functioned.
It was enough to raise the hairs on an archangel’s nape.
Deciding not to ask her if anything was the matter, because he’d long ago learned that lesson about women and poking hornets’ nests, he focused on his surroundings. His heart broke at seeing the devastation in the areas close to the border, the fallow fields and burned-out villages farther out.
They hadn’t yet hit the first major city on the northern side.
Most of the border damage would’ve come about during his battle with Charisemnon, but as they flew on, he saw that the situation had worsened significantly since his quick scouting run after he first took over his enemy’s territory. It also aligned with the updated report Ozias had given him, his spymaster having reached Narja right before he flew out.
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!”