Archangel's Sun (Guild Hunter #13)(41)

“You can erase his face and his eyes instead,” Titus muttered. “And release your anger in his flesh.” It would still not be enough.

An unexpected burst of that astonishing laughter that was sunshine falling in a rain over him. He clenched his gut against the glory of it. If he’d thought her beautiful before . . . well, if the Hummingbird was beautiful, Sharine with her blade of a tongue and golden laughter was extraordinary.

Fighting the urge to touch her, this being beyond his reach, he said, “Am I to take it that you have no more feelings for the blue-green donkey?” He had to break the moment, break his entrancement. “If you are pining for him, admit it now so that I can smite you for bad taste.”

“Smite me?” Sharine couldn’t believe he was serious, but he sounded so very solemn. “Surely you have someone in your court who occasionally pops the bubble of your enormous ego?”

His response was a thunder of sound. Shifting, he flew away from her. She watched him go without concern, knowing he wouldn’t leave her behind. Titus stuck to his promises.

When he returned after sulking a short five minutes, it was to say, “How did you fool angelkind into thinking you a soft, ethereal creature? Did you sit each night in your home and cackle over the game you were playing?”

It delighted her that despite all he knew of her now, he treated her exactly the same. No pity or even a hint of feeling sorry for her. Titus, it seemed, had come to see not the Hummingbird, but Sharine—and he wished to pick a fight with her. Sharine found she wasn’t averse to crossing swords with the Archangel of Africa.

It was dangerously exhilarating.

“Just as I’m sure you must sit in your room at night and think up wooing words that have women dropping at your feet.” She fluttered her lashes at him. “Please do try out your prepared charm on me. I promise to be a receptive audience.”

“You’ve been sent by my sisters.” A horrified stare. “They cannot torment me in person, and so they’ve sent you to torment me by proxy.”

To think of Titus as a beleaguered younger brother astonished and intrigued her in equal measures. She had so many questions, but there was no time to ask them because below them came a movement jerky and unnatural that made her blood run ice cold. “Titus.”





21


I see it,” he responded, all irritation gone from his tone and his attention a blade.

Reaching to his back, he unsheathed his swords. She went to ask him why he didn’t simply use his fire to scour the earth, but the answer was there in her question. The land had already been devastated by the burnings its people had to undertake in order to protect themselves. It’d take time for the soil to regenerate, for any poison from the reborn’s decomposing bodies to dissipate.

Far better that Titus take down the slavering horde with the gleaming weapons in his hands than he create another scar in the earth.

Stay up here, he ordered as he began to drop from the sky. You don’t have the skills to avoid the creatures at close range.

She didn’t bristle; truth was truth. At least thirty of the reborn scrabbled under the late-afternoon light. The rotting beings were gathered around the long-limbed carcass of a giraffe they appeared to have brought down. I’ll remain aloft and out of reach.

The reborn must’ve been desperate to resort to feeding on an animal. From the way they moved, however, while the animal flesh was keeping them functional, it wasn’t truly revitalizing them—they didn’t have the smooth motion of those who fed from humans. Wanting to help in a way that didn’t make her a fatal distraction, she flew to where she could see the entire battle; this way, she could warn Titus if a creature was about to come at his back.

Power wreathed her hand, as if summoned by her fear for him—yes, he was an archangel, but there were a lot of reborn and they could do massive damage to his body, including tearing off his wings.

Curling her fingers, she held the power back with significant effort. She’d intervene only if it appeared that Titus needed the assistance . . . because while she had all this rich, old power, she had little experience with her aim. She couldn’t afford to get it wrong with Titus down there, his big body surrounded by monsters.



* * *



*

Titus took out the first ring of reborn even as he landed in the remains of the carcass of the animal they’d brought down. It was as well that his boots were solid, came up to his calf, and were impenetrable to the blood and viscera in which he stood as he swept out his swords in a rapid-fire motion that cut off reborn heads so quickly that one hadn’t yet fallen to the ground when another joined it.

His wings were his biggest vulnerability—this iteration of the rotting, voracious creatures had developed razor-sharp hooked claws. As a result, he had to keep lifting off when they got too close, then coming down again to lop off their heads.

Previously, reborn this hungry would’ve just kept coming, stupid machines driven by the urge to feed. The newer strains seemed to have gained a semblance of self-protective instinct—but from the emaciated state of their bodies, this nest was starving and thus too desperate to give up the fight, run.

Snarling, hissing, spitting putrid fluid, they kept on coming.

Behind you!

He twisted to eliminate the one about to go for his wing . . . and saw the creature was already falling, a blade in his eye. Grinning, he ripped out the blade and spun it back to Sharine, while stomping his boot over the reborn’s chest. He preferred a clean beheading, but he had three others coming at him and crushing the heart to pulp stopped them in their tracks.