Archangel's Sun (Guild Hunter #13)(92)

He felt like a pup, waiting for her every call or message.

Then one day she sent a message that sheared ice through his veins.

Titus, we’ve found another infected angel.



* * *



*

Sharine should’ve expected this. The first infected angel had gone north for a reason—from all they’d been able to divine from their conversation with the survivor, the angel had retained a limited sense of reason until the final break from sanity. It was safe to assume he’d been more rational at the start.

As he’d been part of Charisemnon’s inner court, he’d also have known the battle was taking place in the other direction. While the border was no longer a political fact, the north remained safer if you wished to hide. Until now, Titus’s people had focused on the more badly overrun southern side of the continent.

It was Ozias who’d found this infected angel, her sharp eyes spotting the primary wing feathers of an angel lying outside a small cabin in the middle of nowhere. In angelkind, primary feathers didn’t shed in the same regular fashion as other feathers. For the majority of angels, it took a long time for a damaged primary feather to grow back, and the feathers on the ground were each the same shade of charcoal gray. They belonged to a single angel. For one of their kind to have lost that many . . .

“I’m going to check if we have a wounded angel,” Ozias had said, the sun a glow against the left side of her face, her features exposed because she’d braided her hair at the sides before pulling the rest of her curls into a tight bun. “Everyone else, stay up here.”

Sharine had disagreed. “Ozias,” she’d said softly, “there’s another possibility.”

The spymaster’s pupils had dilated before she gave a small nod. “Lady, I’d be grateful for your assistance.”

The two of them had landed together, but Ozias had insisted on going first. Inside the cabin was an angel; he lay on a cot pushed against one wall of the small and sparsely furnished space. The cot was narrow and obviously not built for an angelic body, but the angel who lay within it was beyond caring about that. He was flushed, his body hot with fever, and his eyes unseeing.

Under the brown of his skin crawled patches of green-black.

Sharine thought back to how the surviving villager had described the angel who’d attacked their settlement: His skin was like a bruise almost all over and it was peeling away in places, shriveled in others. His fingers were hooked, his nails like claws, and it seemed as if his tongue was rotting green, his lips too plump and red.

The angel on the cot looked relatively healthy in comparison, if the word could be used in this context—as if the infection hadn’t advanced as deep. Despite that, he showed no awareness of their presence, one of his arms hanging limply over this side of the cot. One wing was the same, the other crushed under his back.

When Sharine looked around the cabin, she spotted something that had her last meal threatening to rise from her stomach. “Unless I’m very wrong, that was his food source.”

Ozias crouched by the pile of bones and used her sword to nudge out the skull. “Mortal.” A pause, a closer look at the teeth. “No, vampire.” Voice cold, she said, “From the state of the bones, they’ve been here a number of days.” She got to her feet. “There’s no flesh or marrow.”

“A lack of food might explain his current state.” No normal reborn would appear as healthy after being deprived of food for days, but that was the thing that had become clear since their first discovery—infected angels might not be reborn at all. “Charisemnon’s journal states that his goal was to create an infection that didn’t need death as a starting point.”

Sharine had read the relevant journals over and over in an effort to discover the tiniest bit of data, and it had struck her that for an antidote or cure to work, the individual had to be alive in the first place—Lijuan had been the strongest of them all and even she hadn’t been able to bring the dead back to true life.

Add to that the information that Charisemnon’s “gift” had been disease, and it became even more probable that he hadn’t been capable of creating reborn on his own. All the initial stock of reborn had been birthed by Lijuan. “Our only indication that he might’ve succeeded is the pregnant angel.”

Titus’s medics, healers, and scientists were united on that one point: life, actual life, couldn’t come from one of the dead. Disregarding all philosophical discussion on the point, the internal organs of the reborn started to undergo a metamorphosis at the very moment of “resurrection”—a number of the more intrepid healers, including Sira, the leader of the entire team, had flown with the fighting squadrons and had studied enough “fresh” reborn to be sure of their conclusion.

The metamorphosis included the total desiccation of certain internal organs—including the womb. No reborn who’d existed longer than twenty-four hours could carry a child. Neither could a reborn sire one, as those organs also desiccated into nothing. The latter discovery had apparently caused a shudder to run through the ranks of all those who possessed said organs.

“You think he might be alive?” Ozias, Sharine had learned, was as adept as any spymaster in concealing her emotions—but now she compressed her lips and swallowed. “I’ll check his blood. Did Sira’s healers not theorize it might remain red until the infection took a strong hold?”