Archangel's Sun (Guild Hunter #13)(8)

Titus snarled at her, but he had no rebuttal. He didn’t believe in harming those who didn’t put themselves forward in battle. That applied, regardless of gender, but yes, he had a special soft spot for women. But the instant a woman picked up a sword, she went from woman to warrior. A warrior was fair game. A woman was to be protected.

Yet even though two of his sisters were warriors, he didn’t meet Zuri and Nala on that field. He met them as brother to sisters. Thus, much as they aggravated him, he wouldn’t ever do them harm. Even when they constantly sent him suggestions for battle strategy against the reborn. As if he wasn’t in his fourth millennium! As if he wasn’t an archangel who’d just defeated another archangel!

The last time around, he’d threatened to tell Alexander they were being lax in their duties if they continued to hound him. Surely, he’d written, you would not have so much time on your hands if you were actually doing your assigned tasks.

The twins had gone silent. That would last about five minutes.

His sisters didn’t know the meaning of defeat.

“Come,” he said to Tanae, “we must clear the next field so that the barriers can be put up.” That was how they were doing this—section by section, with teams of mortals and young vampires in charge of moving each barrier outward as more land was cleansed of the reborn infection.

It worked, but progress was slow. It would’ve been glacial if not for Raphael’s and Alexander’s assistance. The two had helped Titus completely clear the area directly around the thriving hub of commerce and trade that was the city of Narja. That it’d become his battle citadel was an accident of location—Charisemnon had been a friendly neighbor when Titus first took over as Archangel of Southern Africa, and Narja had been born naturally, a result of the trade between the two sides of Africa.

The battles had come long afterward, and by then, the people of Narja were of a mind to hunker down in support of the citadel that sat on a rise at the center of the city. It helped that the city wasn’t actually right on the border and thus protected from the worst of the fighting.

Nothing could’ve protected it from the plague of reborn, however. Charisemnon, that bastard son of a diseased ass, had—while acting the ally—quietly set his ground troops to shepherding the infectious creatures over the border. The reborn had rampaged through Titus’s people, a putrid wave of death and horrific resurrection.

Even with Titus, Raphael, and Alexander all in play, they’d had to fight with brutal intensity to erase the threat from Narja. Whatever Charisemnon and/or his megalomaniacal partner had done to the reborn, the strain in Africa was even more vicious and virulent than in the rest of the world.

These new reborn hunted in packs, and seemed to have a rudimentary intelligence that harked back to the very first reborn Lijuan had created; many of the creatures had learned to dig dens in which to hide during the bright hours of daylight, crawling out only at dusk to begin their attacks.

And unlike the transmission rate in other parts of the world, here, as long as the victim’s head hadn’t been ripped off, it appeared to be one hundred percent. To die by reborn hands was to return reborn. That was nowhere near the worst of it—for a vampire or a mortal to be scratched or bitten by a reborn led to an ugly infection that had a fifty percent fatality rate.

The Archangel of Death and the Archangel of Disease had created a horrific hybrid. But the ugliest “improvement” was why all of the dead in Titus’s territory were now being cremated—these reborn had the ability to pass on the infection to the dead who yet had a shred of flesh on their bones. The creatures dug up graves, hauled out corpses, fed on them, but if any flesh remained afterward, the dead would be reborn.

An entire village had been butchered by their just-buried war dead in the hours after Titus left the continent to fight Lijuan. Now, people across this land spent daylight hours digging up their dead as tears streaked their faces and their hearts broke; each body was treated with respect, but there was no choice—their dead had to go into the cleansing cauldron of fire.

“Charisemnon and Lijuan must’ve had a plan to spread this new strain,” Tzadiq had said to him after they first became aware of the horror they faced, his second’s clean-shaven head gleaming in the reprieve of the dawn sun. “Why do you think that plan stalled in Africa?”

“We’ll never know for certain,” Titus had answered, his back drenched with sweat after yet another night fighting the reborn, “but if I had to lay bets, I’d say that whatever Charisemnon did to blend his disease with her death, it cost him.” Disease was a “gift” that cut both ways. “He likely couldn’t maintain the projected pace.”

But the archangel formed of pestilence and vanity had done plenty.

It was all more than enough to deal with—yet a nagging worry haunted Titus. When he’d entered Charisemnon’s inner border court after his return from New York, it was to find a number of badly decomposed bodies. No one had been inside the court buildings in the interim, both his and Charisemnon’s former forces caught in a desperate battle against the reborn.

The creatures had gone berserk upon the death of their master.

Only later, after questioning several senior members of the enemy court, had he learned that Charisemnon had shut off the inner court to everyone but a favored few. The other courtiers had worried they’d fallen in their archangel’s favor. Turned out, from what Titus had discovered, that the favored few had actually been the unlucky few.