Archangel's Sun (Guild Hunter #13)(74)

Shifting on her heel, she pointed in another direction. “Another one was completely naked and had rolled herself up into a ball under the table. It was as if each was part of a different experiment, but why then they’d be thrown in here together, we can’t answer except that perhaps Archangel Charisemnon was forced to rush at the end.”

“What of evidence that an angel might’ve been infected?” she asked, remembering what Titus had told the Cadre.

“If you’ll follow me.” Kiama showed her to a door on the other side, made sure it shut behind them, then led her down the wide hallway to the left.

Stopping at the first door, she opened it to reveal a large empty room. “The furniture within had been badly damaged and the lock was warped. It was as if someone or something had broken out. The sire found a trail of . . . I’m not sure how to describe it.”

After a long moment’s thought, she said, “It wasn’t blood, but there was blood mixed in with what appeared to be liquefied decomposing flesh. It had a greenish edge, and we thought the streaks on the stone of this hallway could’ve been from wings dragging on the ground, especially after we found a feather petrified in the substance. And these”—pointing at gouges in the floor—“appear to be claw marks.”

She then indicated a spot on the wall only a few inches from the ground. “We also discovered smeared handprints at this level made in the same liquid, as if the individual was dragging themselves along the ground. Later we found multiple bodies beyond the walls of the stronghold, including several dead angels, so we hoped that whoever or whatever had escaped was dead.”

A single angel, Sharine thought, could’ve easily slipped out in the time between Charisemnon’s departure with the majority of his forces, and the arrival of Titus’s. Especially if that angel was heading outward, past the cities, to more rural areas. Even more so if that angel had experience with remaining unseen.

The latter wasn’t always a skill possessed by courtiers, who were all about flash and show. But given Kiama’s story about her parents, Charisemnon’s court hadn’t been filled only with the useless. Titus had also identified the reborn angel as Skarde, a man rumored to be a skilled intelligence agent.

Skarde had been betrayed by his hunger for flesh, but if the angel who’d escaped this room had been someone other than Skarde, but of the same ilk . . . Well, a spy with a functioning mind could hide for a long time in the expansive landscape of Africa.

Shoving that fear aside, she said, “Did you find anything that looks like a laboratory?” She wasn’t truly expecting such a place—whatever it was that Charisemnon had done, it’d come from him, from the same thing that made him an archangel.

He’d birthed poisons in his blood.

“No,” Kiama confirmed. “But I can show you to his personal quarters.”

Those quarters proved opulent and overtly sensual to an extent far beyond her personal tastes, with too much red and gold, too much texture, just generally too much, but that didn’t stop the rooms from being surprisingly beautiful. But no . . . it wasn’t a surprise.

Sharine frowned, paging back through the book of memory. Michaela had long been called the muse of artists, but Charisemnon had been known for being a patron of the arts. “Once, long, long ago,” she murmured almost to herself, “Charisemnon offered me a palace in his lands where I could live and work. No strings except that he wished to be known as having the Hummingbird as a guest in his lands.”

She’d forgotten that until this very instant when she stood on a thick velvety rug of black with a design picked out in ruby red. “I hadn’t been to this land for far too long, so came to see if I wished to accept the offer and we met for a private dinner. He was a different man then.” The person he’d been before he decided to join Lijuan on a path to death and pain and murder.

“I can’t imagine you sitting across from him,” Kiama said, her voice taut with a thrumming anger. “My mind simply refuses.”

Sharine hoped this warrior would one day find peace, but it wouldn’t be today, in the space of her enemy. “Did you and the rest of Titus’s people do an intensive search of this part of the stronghold?”

Shaking her head, Kiama said, “We didn’t think it necessary. We were looking only for living creatures—of any size—rather than documents or notes.”

The pages of her memory book continued to flip. Charisemnon had sent her a letter with his invitation. “You have a beautiful hand,” she’d said to him when they met.

He’d smiled at her, a handsome man with silken hair the shade of mahogany and skin of dark gold, his lips lush and perfect in their shape. “Words and ink, they hold our history even as we grow old and the memories become lost in the tangles of our mind.”

Such a man would keep records.

With that in mind, she left Kiama to keep watch, then began to methodically search each and every place where an archangel sure of his privacy would hoard important documents. She didn’t think he’d have thought to hide them—first of all, he’d been confident in his power, and secondly, he’d had no reason to hide anything from the people in his court.

They’d seen what he could do and had chosen to stay with him.

Books lined the walls of the large study beyond the bedroom and living areas. A lot of knowledge; you’d have thought some of it would’ve given him pause as he began his association with Lijuan and with death, but, in the end, people chose their identity, and Charisemnon had chosen a life of darkness.