Just inside, shadowed by the way the wall had fallen, lay a hand that had somehow become mummified by the inferno, the skin a shiny and unnatural hue and the flesh long melted away. Like a piece of meat smoked too long. Its fingers bore sharp clawlike nails blackened from the smoke. She frowned. Perhaps it was simply her perspective, but the claws appeared oddly elongated.
But no, it wasn’t perspective because even when she twisted into the gap to look as closely as possible from her awkward position, the sense of odd dimensions remained. This individual’s finger and hand bones were . . . stretched. Spidery.
This wasn’t a vampire’s hand. As far as she was aware, the reborn, too, didn’t look like this. They had the correct proportions of the mortals from whom they were created. Thankfully, Africa hadn’t had to deal with the black-eyed dead Lijuan had made of her people. Those black-eyed ones had died with their liege in any case. However, it was possible the reborn had begun to mutate. If all within the hall were like this one, then perhaps the burning had been an act of self-protection.
Remembering something Illium had said to her, she stepped back out of the gap, then retrieved the device he’d given her. The phone. He’d told her it could record images. Given the desultory attention she’d paid at the time, it took her five long minutes to work out how, but then she took a careful set of images and recordings to show Titus.
It could be that he’d seen similar corpses many times by now, but that was no reason for her not to be vigilant. Putting the phone safely back into a zippered pocket of the backpack, she walked around the building to see if she could get inside without stepping on bones and finally found a path.
Most of the bones she saw near that area were brittle and disarticulated—no clawed fingers like the earlier one. And there was no way she could get to the original body without having to break walls. She made the decision to leave it. This place was desolate and forgotten. No one would disturb it in the interim.
The eerie silence of the village whispered after her as she made her way to an empty area, then spread her wings and took off. The wind created by her wings disturbed the dust on the ground and for a moment she was almost certain she saw movement. But when she looked again, it was to see a crumpled bit of discarded paper coming to a rolling stop.
No, there.
A striped hyena, thin and light of feet, prowled in the shadows.
Concern heavy in her blood, and unwilling to abandon any survivors to starvation or attack by emboldened natural predators, she did another sweep over the village, going low enough to spot any hint of life. Nothing. No breaths in the air. No hands reaching for help. At last, she flew on, accompanied by a solitary black-winged kite that broke off its flight when it sighted prey on passing grasslands. She saw more damage as she continued on, more abandoned settlements, but nothing like that first one.
Then she began to see the places where people still lived—the cities were too quiet, with tense groups of winged and ground-based guards at the borders, many holding bulky weapons she didn’t recognize. Too few people moved in the streets and fire damage was black streaks in the landscape around each city.
As if its people had protected their home with a fortress of fire.
More than one guard spotted her along the way, but it was at the second city she overflew that a battle-hardened warrior with what appeared to be a badly broken arm flew up to talk to her. “Lady Hummingbird,” he said on reaching her, the dark skin of his face marked by patches of pink where his skin had either been burned, or shredded by reborn claws. “The landscape is not safe.”
Raphael’s Elena would no doubt be irritated at being spoken to with such protective care, but Elena was a warrior through and through and had earned her stripes. To this angelic commander, Sharine remained the broken Hummingbird. He had the right to question if she brought more problems to his city, whether he’d have to now offer her an escort.
“I am aware,” she said with conscious gentleness, having caught the lines of pain around his eyes. Simply because angels healed quicker than mortals didn’t mean the healing didn’t hurt. “I fly to Titus, and I’m taking care not to land anywhere except on empty stretches of land that offer total visibility.”
An easing of the tension across his shoulders. “Do not land after dark unless it’s in a city or a town with plans of protection. That’s when the creatures are most active—though please don’t let that make you complacent in the sunlight. When they’re hungry enough, they do not care about being caught in the light.”
“I thank you for the information.” She took in his city again. “You are few in number.” A sense of emptiness permeated the landscape.
“We lost many in the war.” Flat, tired words. “Others fell to the reborn.”
Sharine knew without asking that this warrior would never disparage his former archangel, but she heard the anger in his tone. “Do you wish me to take any news to Titus?”
When he hesitated, she said, “He is your archangel now. Past enmities do not matter, for such enmities are for the Cadre alone.”
He searched her face. “Even for the soldiers and people of an enemy archangel who sought 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.