Archangel's Sun (Guild Hunter #13) - Nalini Singh Page 0,17

to annihilate his land?”

“When titans fight, they pay no attention to the minnows.” A simple, brutal fact of life.

“Yes.” A bow of his head before he gave her a report that she promised to pass on.

Then, after assuring him she had no need of an escort, she flew past the scorched edge of the city and beyond. If the cities had caused her concern, the isolated rural settlements devastated.

Entire houses were piles of blackened rubble and farm fields lay barren.

Vultures scavenged on the remains of dead domestic animals, while leopards prowled deadly close to a populace become weak and incapable of defending itself. The hunting cat would wait for the night hours to strike, but that it was so far outside its normal wild territory told her the reborn—with their urge to tear apart all living creatures—had done significant damage to the ecosystem.

In one village, the mortals and those few vampires who hadn’t been called up to battle looked up with tired eyes that widened when she changed her path and came in to land. Bedraggled, lines of exhaustion carved into their thin faces, the people bowed deeply to her. “Lady,” they said. “We are honored.”

She didn’t know if they said that because they felt it, or simply because it was expected. It didn’t matter to her. She wasn’t here to be praised or feted. “Does Titus know of your state?” she asked, spotting the bones pushing against the dark gold skin of a child who was hiding behind his mother.

The villager who’d spoken first, an old woman who seemed to be the elder, swallowed hard. “We wouldn’t concern the archangel with our small problems. Not when the eaters of the living roam the landscape.”

Sharine could understand her reticence, but as with the angelic warrior, she had the feeling there was more to this. These people had belonged to another archangel their entire lives, and likely also believed that Titus would begrudge them their earlier loyalty.

Such a thing was not possible—and it had nothing to do with Titus himself.

In truth, humans rarely featured in the thoughts of archangels. One of the Cadre would no more blame humans for their archangel’s behavior than they would blame a pet cat. A harsh thought but that was the way of so many of the most powerful of her kind.

Raphael was different, but only because he had a consort who’d once been human—a consort who refused to forget her humanity even as she walked in the world of immortals. Without Elena, Sharine didn’t believe even Raphael would see mortals and young vampires as anything other than expendable pieces on a chessboard.

Sharine had been the same . . . and always different. Same in that she didn’t pay much mind to mortals, her life lived on the immortal plane and among their places. But different in that when she had come across mortals, she’d treated them as simply a short-lived species, no more or less worthy than angelkind.

Her beliefs had changed in the time since she’d taken oversight of Lumia. Now she knew humans as individuals. Now she looked forward to the shy, lopsided smile of Kareem, the stall owner who always offered her fresh mint tea. Now she had a favorite among the innocent, mischievous children who followed her in the streets. Now she began to understand why her son had mourned so when he lost his human lover.

Those memories were tangled in her mind, but she remembered his sadness. Sadness so deep and true that it had penetrated her madness with the efficacy of a sharpened blade. Her boy was not naturally a being of sorrow, his laughter the soundtrack of his childhood for her. So she had noticed when he stopped laughing, when he stopped getting that glint in his eye that meant mischief and play. It had returned eventually, but altered in a subtle way.

His loss had left a scar that would live forever in his heart.

She thought she had held him then, rocked him in her arms as she’d done when he was a babe. She hoped that was a true memory and not a figment of her broken mind. She liked to think that she’d been there for him not only then, but at the other dark events in his life.

His small heart had first broken when his father left them. Though Sharine’s mind had fractured at the moment of Aegaeon’s calculated cruelty—not because he’d left, but because of how—she still retained fragments of memory from that time. One