Archangel's Sun (Guild Hunter #13)(29)

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!”