Archangel's Sun (Guild Hunter #13)(39)

Sharine frowned. Perhaps she had known that once upon a time, but if so, she couldn’t lay her mental fingers on the knowledge. “Are they older than you?” she asked instead of answering.

“The youngest was a thousand years old at the time of my birth. My oldest sister is now some eight thousand years old.”

“Is it a mother you share or a father, or both?”

“Zuri and Nala are twins, thus share both parents. We, all five of us, are linked by our mother, Avelina. My sisters,” he muttered, “are also bonded by their shared aggravating temperament.”

“Your mother is very fertile.” Sharine felt the stab of admiring envy, for such fertility was not often found in their kind.

“She also loves children and is brilliant at raising them to be strong, honorable angels—I’m quite sure I would have another sibling by now if the first general hadn’t decided to go into Sleep a millennium after my birth. Truly, my mother would have to beat men off with a stick were she not so formidable they don’t dare advance on her without permission.”

His pride in his mother was open, as was his exasperated affection for his sisters. Again, her heart threatened to open for him, this man so blunt about his loves and his hates. With Titus, nothing was hidden, nothing was a subtle game. Despite all she’d told herself, he was nothing like Aegaeon but for the fact both were archangels.

That made Titus far more dangerous to her than she’d realized.

“My sisters are equally desired,” he said, with a grimace only a brother could produce. “Aegaeon made a play for Charo, the scholar among us. Wickedly witty with her friends, but shy with others. He hurt her.”

The potent simplicity of that statement hit hard. “Yes, he is that kind of man.” One who seemed to have none of the empathy so evident in Sharine’s son. “He hurt me, too.”

“Is that why you were lost?” Titus asked, then made a grumbling sound. “All of angelkind says the Hummingbird is lost in her own world, but unfortunately for me, you seem to be quite present and aware in my world.”

Her lips twitched, her amusement a surprise to herself. But his grumble was half-hearted at best . . . and that was a surprise. “I didn’t fragment because he left me,” she clarified, for the idea of Titus seeing her as fragile was unbearable. “I had a young son whom I loved with every part of myself. Illium was my reason for being.”

“Then what?” Titus asked at his usual volume.

“Why do you feel you have any right to ask me that question?”

He shrugged. “How will I discover anything if I don’t ask? It’s not as if I’m holding your feet to the fire to force you to answer.”

It was such a Titus thing to say that she felt laughter burst the seams of her being, such amused delight as she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. She laughed with her son at times, but that was different, a moment between mother and son. This, laughing with Titus, it felt an adult thing that reinforced her feeling of wholeness.

He was staring at her when she caught her breath and glanced at him, his eyes stunned. “Doppelganger,” he said at last, the boom of his voice a rasp. “It’s the only explanation.”

Laughing again, she wiped away her tears . . . and had to fight the urge to fly over and tug up his scowly lips into a smile. Such a childish impulse for an old immortal, but Sharine didn’t feel old right then. Maybe it was because this blunt hammer of an archangel had given her the gift of laughter, and maybe it was because it was time, but she told him the truth.

“To understand why my mind fractured,” she said, “you must understand my history.” A single glance and she knew she had his full attention—though he continued to scan the landscape as they flew. “I loved a man named Raan at the very dawn of my existence. I was a decade past my majority and he thousands of years old when we fell in love.”

Titus growled akin to one of the lions that roamed his lands. “He shouldn’t have put his hands on you.”

Anger was a whip in her voice when she set him straight. “Even with the gift of hindsight, I can tell you there was no coercion, no manipulation. Some souls are just meant to meet and to entwine.”

A stubborn silence from Titus before he blew out a breath. “I first became friends with Alexander when I was a pup of some two hundred. We are friends still, though he is an arrogant old man.”

It took her a second. “You’re speaking of Archangel Alexander?” Caliane called him “Alex” but theirs had always been a deep friendship quite apart from Sharine’s own with Caliane.

When Titus gave a nod, she shook her head. “You astonish me, Titus.” It was no lie; Alexander was an Ancient, would’ve been an Ancient during Titus’s youth, and yet she could see why the archangel had formed a liking for the undoubtedly brash young warrior Titus had been.

“My apologies to your Raan,” he said. “If you say he was a good man, he was a good man.”

It shook her, how much that trust meant to her. Titus, she knew, didn’t take honor lightly. Swallowing hard against the surge of emotion, she looked away from his handsome profile and carried on. “We had a joyous half a century together. Then Raan died.”

Titus stopped flying, dipping a fraction in the sky before he pulled himself back up into a hover. “Battle?”