The great work of art bared her teeth at him. “Oh, I’m not.” She waved her free hand. “I just worry about the women you use and discard.”

“That is enough!” he boomed, certain she was attempting to annoy him on purpose.

A wince. “I’m right here, my lord Archangel.” A hand rubbing over her ear. “There’s no need to try and blow out my eardrum.”

Did nothing terrify her? “Are you certain you’re not still insane?” In truth, he was sure that she’d never actually lost her sanity—she’d just lost herself for a period. “Baiting an archangel isn’t considered good for one’s health.”

“It is possible,” she said thoughtfully, tapping a finger on her lower lip. “But I find that I don’t give a shit. Is that not a wonderful statement? Think about it. To care so little for a thing that you wouldn’t even offer excrement for it!”

He was so agog at the vulgarity coming from her mouth that he stopped flying for a second. They both dropped. He recovered at once, but she dug her nails into his neck regardless. “Concentrate.”

Titus’s cock thickened even more, his skin hot, and his pulse rapid. “I’ve treated with respect each and every woman who has shared her body with me. I’ve never made promises of forever.” That would’ve been a lie and Titus didn’t lie. “Any woman who comes into my arms understands that I offer only pleasure and affection.”

Uncharacteristically for the fascinatingly impertinent woman he’d come to know, Sharine went silent. For so long that he began to fear he’d scared her to silence . . . and that chilled his blood. About to apologize for yelling at her, even though he’d been speaking at his usual tone, he was stopped by her saying, “Do you know what’ll happen to Astaad’s harem? I know they’ve been helping their people, but what’ll happen to them in the longer term?”

He blinked. “Heartbroken though they are, they’re not just helping on the ground—they’ve been acting as a kind of advisory board to Qin, assisting with the transition of power. Qin’s asked Mele and the others to stay on, but if they don’t wish to continue to advise him beyond the transition period, he’s promised to pension them to lives away from the court.”

“Do you think he’ll keep his word?”

Titus hesitated. “Qin rarely speaks,” he said at last, searching for the right words to describe the Ancient. “It’s as if he has half a foot in this world, half in another.” In that second world lived the mad, beautiful prophetess whom Qin loved so profoundly that for him to be in this world without her was pure pain.

“That he doesn’t wish to be awake couldn’t be more clear.” Qin was a creature out of time and place, woken from the depths of the ocean by the pitiless Cascade and left stranded on the unforgiving sand. “But unlike Aegaeon’s posturing, Qin is quietly going about doing his job as an archangel. So yes, I believe he’ll keep his word.”

He tightened his hold a fraction, so he could have more of Sharine’s warmth against him. “Also, even if I’m wrong in my reading of him, Mele is too strong and too intelligent to take any deceit or force lying down. She’ll find a way to protect herself and the other women of the harem.”

“So she’s a warrior? Good.”

Titus frowned. Mele wasn’t a warrior, not in the sense of sword and shield, but he couldn’t argue with the characterization—from everything Titus’s spymaster had managed to discover through her sources on the islands, Astaad’s most beloved concubine was standing shield to the other ladies of the harem. Mele alone dealt directly with Qin, though she was but a vampire and he was an archangel.

“Yes,” he said slowly. “Mele is a warrior who doesn’t carry a sword.”

Sharine searched his face. “I worried,” she said, “because I saw what happened to Aegaeon’s harem after he went to Sleep. A kind of bloody savagery as the women sought to find positions in the courts of other strong angels.”

Titus curled his lip. “Aegaeon harps on about not wishing to be awake, but he’s already begun to form a new harem, full of the type of women that he prefers. Vicious backbiting spiders who eat their own young.” The words were barely out when he realized that he’d put his entire giant foot in his mouth.

Wanting to groan, he said, “I don’t count you in that number.”

The nails that dug into his neck this time were deliberate. “That’s good, because I was never part of his harem.” Ice-cold words. “He invited me to live in his court more than once, but I couldn’t exist in that sphere. I couldn’t survive there.” The latter words were flat. “At the time, I was a soft creature, a crab without a shell. I preferred to live in the Refuge with my art and—later—with my son.”

Titus had to fight the urge to crush her to him. “I think you don’t have to worry about Mele and the others. They’re a family, and they’ll make the decision as a family.”

“Do you believe Astaad will rise?” No more nails digging into his neck . . . and possibly a small caress of fingertips over skin to soothe the earlier bite. “Did not Lijuan suck out part of his life force?”

“As a small child,” he said, soaring underneath a banner of brilliant stars, “I was told the legend of an archangel who was cut into a hundred pieces by his enemy then burned up with angelfire. But the enemy missed a fragment of his brain. It was left in a rock crevice and there it stayed for many years. It was covered by snow and then by the grasses of the distant plateau where it lay among the rocks and it was pecked at by birds, but it didn’t decay and it wasn’t lost.

“Then, one day, a bird picked it up but lost it mid-journey, dropping the piece of brain matter into a massive gorge. There it lay in the dark shadows for hundreds of years as the archangel slowly rebuilt his body cell by cell, the action one of instinct, of the natural order. For all you need for an archangel to come back to life is a fragment of a healthy cell.” That was also why he was sure that Lijuan would never return—nothing of her had remained.

“A most gruesome story.” Sharine pressed her free hand to his chest. “Tell me the rest.”

He grinned, delighted with the unpredictable woman in his arms. “Well, the archangel stayed silent even after his head grew, for his torso wasn’t yet complete. He knew he remained vulnerable. So he lay there in silence for tens of years more—I’m told that once the brain and the head have regenerated, the rest of the body doesn’t take as long.

“Still, because he had no sustenance except for the insects that flew into his mouth and the rainwater that fell on him, he regenerated far slower than is possible with more fuel to power the growth. Once he had arms, he dragged himself to a spot in the gorge that had a small stream, and in that stream lived such creatures as small frogs that he could catch and eat.

“He also ate the wildflowers on the stream’s edge, and the moss that grew on the shadowed rocks that were his home. Even once he had his whole body, he remained weak, so he waited crouched in the dark crevices of the gorge and hunted any animal that came close. It’s said that it took him another ten years to regain his strength to the point that he could fly out of the gorge. Once out, he hunted for bigger creatures until he was brimming with power.”

He paused.

The Hummingbird slapped him lightly on the shoulder, a butterfly’s sting. “Stop dragging this out, tell me the rest!”

He chuckled. “So, Sharine likes a good story.”

“What Sharine likes is flaying infuriating men alive.”

Grinning, he carried on. “Once he was full of power, the archangel didn’t attempt to pull together his court. He knew who was loyal and who wasn’t, and he knew they’d come to him. First, however, he had a task to complete. He stalked his enemy, and then, when the enemy was alone, he incapacitated him by chopping off his head.”

“That seems a bit anticlimactic.”

“Do you always interrupt your storytellers?” he asked, though he’d made a similar judgment as a child.

“Carry on, my lord storyteller. Please do carry on.”

Despite her poor demeanor, he could feel the tension in her body and knew she was hanging on the edge, waiting for the next part of the story. “After chopping off his head, the archangel incinerated his enemy’s body. Then, before he flew the head back to the same gorge where he’d lived all that time, he destroyed the mouth and jaw of his enemy.

“He hid the silent head deep in a shadowed corner, where no one would ever find it. He knew his enemy would regenerate his mouth but no one would hear him when he screamed. Then, for millennia, the archangel would fly back at regular intervals to destroy any part of his enemy’s body that had regenerated.

“The enemy remained forever a head, sitting there oozing on the bloody stump of his neck, screaming into the void. It’s said that he is there still. Insane beyond all understanding, a thing no longer sentient.”

He lunged his head toward Sharine.

She screamed.

Titus burst out laughing, shaking so much with mirth that he was barely aware of her hand slapping his shoulder while she called him “a fiend.” “I thought you were narrating a true story! Who came up with that hideous tale?”

“One of my sisters.” Still chuckling, he found his gaze dropping to the sweet plumpness of her lips, had to consciously force it away before he gave in to temptation and broke about a thousand unwritten laws of angelkind. “I was perhaps five decades old.” The midpoint between child and adult. “I spent the next five years searching every gorge I could find for the decapitated head of the insane archangel.”

“Did you never wonder about the identity of the other one? The one torturing his nemesis for eternity?”

“I was fifty.” A boy ready for mystery and adventure. “And it’s a very good story. Charo has always had a great talent.”