A long moment where he swallowed repeatedly. “You know the rest, my lord Archangel. After the burning began, we cried for our lost ones as the flames licked the night sky. One was my firstborn grandson. I lost my eldest daughter-in-law in the next attack.”
Titus couldn’t imagine the depth of this man’s pain. Those who saw mortals as weak and without courage had never spoken to one who’d experienced loss such as this, a loss rare among angelkind.
“Then the goats began to get sick, their flesh turning green-black,” the elder said after a sip of ale, though his voice remained rough. “We lost half of them. All of us too scared to eat the meat, so it went to waste.” He hacked a cough. “The rest appear healthy but we’re keeping them penned up under constant watch.”
“When was this?” Titus asked. “The animals turning?”
“About three days ago?” The headman scratched his head, then turned to yell out the question to his son.
“Three days ago,” the male replied.
“Yes, that sounds right.” The headman turned back to Titus. “It feels an endless time, but it has been only days.”
“How does it begin?” He had to be sure it wasn’t in the air.
“A bite,” was the response. “We suspect one of the goats panicked and ran into the rotting ones and that was when it was infected. It then savaged a few others before we realized what was happening.”
Titus held back an exhale. Containable, he said to Sharine. If we eliminate the reborn, we eliminate the risk to animals at the same time.
Ask him if he noticed if the birds were affected. They have domestic fowl here, so he wouldn’t have had to look skyward.
The import of her question was an arrow deep in his heart. Angels were unlike any other living creatures on this planet—but birds came the closest. Not in their genetics, but in the simple fact that they lived so long in the sky.
“Were any of your animals untouched by the disease?” he asked instead of specifically speaking about birds. We can’t allow humans to see us as weak or vulnerable, he reminded Sharine, who wasn’t an archangel and couldn’t be expected to immediately consider such things.
Every member of the Cadre knew that should humans begin to see angels as vulnerable, they might get it into their heads to rebel against immortal rule, and that could have only one end: annihilation of mortals.
Angels needed mortals, but they didn’t need a lot of mortals.
Certain groups of angels had even been known to mutter that mortalkind needed to either be culled or have their population strictly controlled: They are insects, pests but for their one use. Pen them up in a corner of the globe, and ship out cargo loads as necessary. Mortals do not need to infest the whole planet.
18
Thankfully most of angelkind didn’t live on the fringe with the genocidal. But the reason behind the forbearance wasn’t always a thing of kindness. One old angel had put it bluntly to Titus: “Humans are born and die at such a rapid pace, regular outbreaks of disease devastating large swaths of their population, or bloodlust-driven vampires killing entire villages, that their growth isn’t really an issue.”
At first, Titus had believed that the zealots who argued for partial genocide hadn’t considered that the fewer the humans, the fewer the vampires. And many of the same old ones relied on vampires for almost everything in terms of the running of their households, and any necessary grunt work. But it turned out they had considered it.
It was Uram who’d told Titus that fact some five years before his death. “The hidebound ones talk of human farms to feed and maintain the vampires in the world, with only a limited number of new vampires created each year—to replace any who are lost. Mortals farmed for blood would have their brains intentionally stunted so they become true cattle, while any extra angelic toxin would be pumped into said cattle who’d then be executed before the transition was complete.”
The green-eyed archangel had laughed. “Who do they think will clean up after their cattle, feed and bathe them? Or perhaps they are to be in huge farms with their bodies permanently hooked up to blood-harvesting machines. That’s if the toxin transfer even works with all the changes—our kind has never been able to explain the why behind how mortals save our sanity.”
Uram had made the whole idea sound ridiculous . . . but he hadn’t been revolted, while Titus’d had to fight his rising gorge. Sometimes, he wondered if that had been an early sign of Uram’s madness, but then again, so many of the older angels thought little of discussing humans with such a lack of empathy.
Across from him, the headman frowned. “The goats were the first,” he murmured to himself.
As Titus listened with forced patience, the older male went through the various animals in the village including domestic cats and dogs. “The chickens!” He smiled. “No oddities with our chickens. And also the cats.
“We’ve eaten some of the chickens since and are all unaffected, so I think they must’ve been kept safe by being in their coop. As for the cats, they’re very fast and good at climbing, so they probably escaped being scratched by the rotting ones. It must also be said that cats will do as they will.”
Throwing back his head, Titus laughed. “Cats are like women,” he said in the aftermath of his mirth. “Unpredictable and as apt to hiss and claw as purr.”
The headman cackled but Sharine’s voice was frigid in his head. I am astonished that Tanae has not murdered you in your sleep.
Tanae is not a woman. She is a warrior.
Ah, all is clear now. Such sense you make. The tone of her voice declared him an imbecile.
Adding that to her list of infractions against an archangel, Titus returned to his conversation with the headman. “Did you notice any differences between the first attack by the reborn, and the ones that came after?”
“We’ve survived three nightmares, and each group of the rotting ones have been faster,” the elder said without hesitation. “My son and the other young ones say they also seem to hunt more as a group. A pack.”
He ran the long salt-and-pepper of his beard through his hand. “Many of us also believe their faces and bodies have changed as well, though it’s hard to say for certain—I saw them only in fleeting glimpses as we fought them with fire.”
The headman indicated the flaming torches Titus had seen from above. “It’s why we religiously feed these flames—so they won’t come near.” Another hacking cough before he returned to the matter at hand. “The first rotting ones, they looked human but for the madness. The ones that came after . . . there was something twisted about their bodies and they walked in a way I find difficult to describe.”
He ran his hand over his opposite forearm. “My skin is the deep brown of the richest soil, as is yours—if I may be so bold as to compare us even in this way. My wife’s skin is darker yet, a gleaming ebony that has returned in our spoiled and loved third grandchild.” A hint of a smile. “But you see we have people from the north in our village, and even Pieter who married our Sarra; he has white skin that burns before it alters its shade.”
This time, the headman’s cough had Titus nudging the other man’s ale toward him. After taking a drink, and though his voice continued to rasp, the other man said, “So hear me when I say I know mortal hues. The skin of the rotting ones has darkened but not in any way that ordinary flesh might do so.”
Chewing on his lower lip, his bushy eyebrows drawing together, the headman stared unseeing at the table. “It has changed color in the way that a piece of fruit does when it rots from within, a greenish tinge below the skin, the darkness that spreads a sickly bruise.”