Archangel's Sun (Guild Hunter #13) - Nalini Singh Page 0,51
dead and someone had taken his corpse. In that fragment of time, I truly believed my child was dead.”
No tremor in her voice as she finished the story. “The only mercy in it all was that Illium didn’t have to see his mother break down and his father be carried out of his home by a solemn squadron in full regalia.”
Titus’s jaw worked, his hand fisted to bloodless tightness. “I’ve long known Aegaeon to be worthless, but now I know the depth of his cruelty.” If the archangel’s second knew to come for him, then Aegaeon had planned it. Most archangels slipped into Sleep without warning, and without assistance, so their place of rest would be secret; it was a measure of Aegaeon’s cruelty that he’d chosen to allow at least four of his court to know of his place of rest in order to shatter Sharine.
“I’ve never known why he did it,” Sharine said, and right then, she was magnificent in her cold anger. “If I ever see him again, I will ask him—if I can stop myself from first stabbing out his eyes.”
Titus approved of her bloodthirsty need for vengeance.
“I think at times, that I should release the anger,” she said, “that my vengeance should be to erase him from my thoughts.”
“You can erase his face and his eyes instead,” Titus muttered. “And release your anger in his flesh.” It would still not be enough.
An unexpected burst of that astonishing laughter that was sunshine falling in a rain over him. He clenched his gut against the glory of it. If he’d thought her beautiful before . . . well, if the Hummingbird was beautiful, Sharine with her blade of a tongue and golden laughter was extraordinary.
Fighting the urge to touch her, this being beyond his reach, he said, “Am I to take it that you have no more feelings for the blue-green donkey?” He had to break the moment, break his entrancement. “If you are pining for him, admit it now so that I can smite you for bad taste.”
“Smite me?” Sharine couldn’t believe he was serious, but he sounded so very solemn. “Surely you have someone in your court who occasionally pops the bubble of your enormous ego?”
His response was a thunder of sound. Shifting, he flew away from her. She watched him go without concern, knowing he wouldn’t leave her behind. Titus stuck to his promises.
When he returned after sulking a short five minutes, it was to say, “How did you fool angelkind into thinking you a soft, ethereal creature? Did you sit each night in your home and cackle over the game you were playing?”
It delighted her that despite all he knew of her now, he treated her exactly the same. No pity or even a hint of feeling sorry for her. Titus, it seemed, had come to see not the Hummingbird, but Sharine—and he wished to pick a fight with her. Sharine found she wasn’t averse to crossing swords with the Archangel of Africa.
It was dangerously exhilarating.
“Just as I’m sure you must sit in your room at night and think up wooing words that have women dropping at your feet.” She fluttered her lashes at him. “Please do try out your prepared charm on me. I promise to be a receptive audience.”
“You’ve been sent by my sisters.” A horrified stare. “They cannot torment me in person, and so they’ve sent you to torment me by proxy.”
To think of Titus as a beleaguered younger brother astonished and intrigued her in equal measures. She had so many questions, but there was no time to ask them because below them came a movement jerky and unnatural that made her blood run ice cold. “Titus.”
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I see it,” he responded, all irritation gone from his tone and his attention a blade.
Reaching to his back, he unsheathed his swords. She went to ask him why he didn’t simply use his fire to scour the earth, but the answer was there in her question. The land had already been devastated by the burnings its people had to undertake in order to protect themselves. It’d take time for the soil to regenerate, for any poison from the reborn’s decomposing bodies to dissipate.
Far better that Titus take down the slavering horde with the gleaming weapons in his hands than he create another scar in the earth.
Stay up here, he ordered as he began to drop from the sky. You don’t have the skills to avoid the creatures at close range.