Archangel's Sun (Guild Hunter #13)(94)

Expression twisting, Eryna bowed from the waist before departing to resume her duties.

“Regret has a taste, does it not?” Sharine murmured to Ozias. “Like ozone in the air but a far heavier and darker thing.”

“She made a choice.” No mercy in the spymaster’s tone. “All of Charisemnon’s people made a choice, but the ones like Eryna? They had the power to defect and stand against him. Instead, they helped Charisemnon with his ugly quest—even if it was only by doing nothing. I can accept Eryna isn’t evil without ever forgiving her for her choice.”

Sharine could say nothing to that. Ozias was right.

Some choices echoed through time.

“How do we hunt the perpetrator of the maulings?”

“Lady Sharine, I am a spymaster,” was the quelling response.

Even with Ozias’s skills and underground contacts, it took them two days to track down the murderer. An infected angel, as they’d feared. One who was beyond saving. Her entire body was a rotting green-black that was nothing natural, her claws hooked. But even had the physical deterioration not been so bad, her mind was gone. She was crazed.

Her lack of reason was part of how Ozias had tracked her down—she’d become careless and devoid of cunning, wanting only to feed, only to gorge. Dropping her current victim’s body to the alley floor, she came at Ozias with claws outstretched, her mouth coated with blood.

The spymaster was at the wrong angle to behead her without sustaining at least a small injury, and Sharine wasn’t about to risk her to infection as a result of those claws or teeth.

A pinprick bolt of power, and she obliterated the angel’s chest.

Crumpling in the alleyway in slow motion, the infected angel looked to Sharine and there was no peace in her eyes, nothing but fury and the manic need to devour. Then she was gone, one more victim of an archangel’s greed and vanity.





45


Titus was covered in reborn filth and exhausted from a night of fighting when his phone rang. He didn’t wish to speak to Sharine in such a state, but neither was he about to miss her call.

But when he answered, it wasn’t her face that filled the screen. Two identical ones had taken her place; the interlopers had skin of deep brown and hazel eyes slanted sharply over equally dramatic cheekbones, their hair in matching sleek black tails. Most of the world couldn’t tell them apart.

Titus wasn’t one of those people.

“Zuri, Nala, I see you couldn’t help poking your nose into my business,” he grumbled, but his heart expanded to see them alive and well.

“Oh, Tito”—Zuri blew him a kiss—“you know you missed us.”

Nala, the quieter of the two, just smiled, and it was the roguish smile of the sister who’d snuck him out of the Refuge so they could go track a bunch of tiger cubs. Zuri, meanwhile, had taught him to ride a wild stallion. Creatures with wings didn’t usually ride such beasts, but his sisters had never much cared for the ordinary way of things.

“What have you done with Sharine?” he asked, wondering what she’d made of the twins.

“We asked with much politeness if we could use her phone to speak to our brother—since you now have a phone.” A gleeful Zuri held up another phone. “I’ve put your number in mine and Nala’s phones, too. Now we don’t have to write you letters!”

Titus half groaned, half laughed, while the twins grinned. “The reborn cleanup?”

“Close to done on this side. Your beautiful and dangerous spymaster agrees with me.”

Lowering his brows, Titus pointed at Zuri. “Do not seduce Ozias.” His sister had inherited their mother’s ability to turn lovers into slaves. “I don’t wish to deal with a spymaster with a broken heart.”

Nala spoke for the first time. “I don’t know, Tito. I think your Ozias might crush Zuri here under her boot, and Zuri will be grateful for it.”

As Zuri shot her twin a glare, Titus found himself laughing. It was good to see his sisters, good to speak with them, good to hear their banter. “Is the boy with you?”

“Xander is gazing in awe at Lady Sharine.” Zuri waggled her eyebrows. “Careful, baby brother, or young Xander might steal your lady.”

Of course his sisters had already worked out that Sharine was special to him. “Sharine will shred any man who dares lay a hand on her without permission. She can’t be stolen.” No, his Shari would decide to whom she’d give herself . . . and if she decided to give him nothing but a fleeting moment of eternity, he’d take it.

Not that Titus was going to give up on fighting for forever. He wasn’t a man who surrendered at the first hurdle. The choice, however, would be hers. Always. “Report,” he said.

The words Zuri spoke now were of a commander in an archangel’s forces. She gave him numbers of nests cleared, updates on the situation in the outlying regions, and a rundown on the wounded among their squadrons. “The reborn infestation in the north was nothing in comparison to what we’ve heard of the south,” she finished. “A week at the most to deal with the final nests, and we should be in Narja.”

“Rest there, then fly on to me,” he said. “Much work remains to be done in the lower half of the southern part of the continent.”

“I’ve been an astonishingly brilliant ambassador for you, little brother,” Zuri added after the formal report. “Half the continent is now in love with me.” Buffing her nails on the leather of her jerkin, she beamed. “The other half are panting after our enigmatic Nala.”