He growled at her and didn’t say anything else for the next ten minutes as they made their way through the forest. Finally, she couldn’t stand it anymore. “Stop sulking.”

Another rumbling growl. Turning, he snapped his teeth at her.

She jumped even though she’d thought she was ready for an aggressive reaction. Teeth gritted, she glared at his infuriating face. “Growl at me again and I’ll bite you.” She didn’t know where the words came from, probably from aggravation.

Staring at her, he went as if to speak. His nostrils flared. “Reborn,” he said, and placed Suyin against a tree with a wide-enough trunk that her back was fully protected.

Andromeda didn’t need to be told where to stand; she stood with Naasir behind her, Suyin to her left. His back pressed into her wings, but she knew he wasn’t being provocative for once.

“Be careful of your wings.”

She suddenly remembered his bare hands. “Do you have weapons?”

A joyous laugh. “Yes.”

And then there was no more time to talk. The slavering, blank-eyed and ferociously hungry creatures who were Lijuan’s reborn boiled out of the woods around them.

15

Naasir drew deep on the primal heart of his nature. His claws released and his canines elongated, his vision a knife blade through the dark and his sense of smell acute. All trappings of civilization gone, he wanted to turn and nuzzle at the neck of the woman who smelled like his mate, but that had to wait.

First, he had to kill the foul creatures howling toward them.

They were shambling and laughingly slow in comparison to his speed, but their infectiousness made them a threat against which he couldn’t risk using his teeth. From all evidence to date, it appeared the reborn needed to kill their victim for that victim to become reborn, but Naasir wasn’t going to take the risk that the creatures hadn’t mutated and become strong enough to infect living flesh.

His teeth might be out, but he utilized his claws like blades, slicing and ripping and tearing. At his back, he could feel Andromeda moving with a fighter’s grace, her sword slicing through the air on a deadly whistle of sound.

Heads rolled to the leaf-strewn earth around him.

“Naasir?”

He growled in answer at the concern in her tone. He couldn’t speak quickly when living in this skin that was another aspect of his nature, but he was pleased she was thinking about him.

A clean slice of sound as her sword moved again, blood spraying the air.

He clenched his teeth against the putrid smell and reached out to rip a reborn’s head from its shoulders. That emptied more blood around them, splattering him, but it was worth it to get rid of the tainted creatures. Kicking out with clawed feet, he disemboweled one while decapitating another. He didn’t like to cause the reborn unnecessary pain—Lijuan had likely used innocent villagers as her fodder—but he couldn’t rip off two heads at once.

Behind him, he could hear Andromeda breathing hard. She leaned against him. “Are they all dead?”

He took care of the one he’d disemboweled and thought hard about the words he’d been taught as a child after Raphael carried him to the Refuge. “Yes.” It came out a growl so deep, he knew he didn’t sound human.

Shifting to face Andromeda, he gripped her jaw with a clawed and bloody hand. He turned her head—gently—to one side then the other before checking her neck and body. Her wings were bloodied, but it was from spray. “You’re not hurt,” he got out just as part of him realized he’d probably scared her.

Women didn’t like his claws, didn’t like the way his eyes glowed after a hunt.

Andromeda pushed off his hand and grabbed his jaw. He was so surprised he let her pull him forward and turn his face this way and that. Releasing him, she walked around to his back and pushed up his T-shirt, then came around to do the same to the blood-soaked front.

“You’re not hurt either.” She looked down at his feet. “Did you get cut or bitten there?”

He snorted at the ridiculousness of her question. Dropping her hand from his T-shirt, she scowled at him. “Are those things all dead or do you think we’ll run into more?”

Thinking about it, about words and how they worked, he said, “They would’ve come toward the scent of blood.”

“Good.” She knelt down to look at Suyin. “Can you carry her the whole way?”

“Yes.” It would slow them down, but he didn’t leave helpless people behind to be eaten by monsters or imprisoned by Lijuan.

*   *   *

Andromeda rose to her feet as Naasir bent to pick Suyin up with an effortlessness that betrayed his strength. He was splattered with blood, his silver hair streaked with it. She wanted to scrub it all away; Naasir was as real and honest as the reborn were unnatural abominations.

At least the rain washed off the worst of it as they walked.

“Why did you decide to study the Sleeping archangels?” Naasir asked some time later.

She noted that his voice was less growly now—she liked it either way. The only voice she didn’t like was the cold, cultured tone he’d used when she’d first made him angry. “I’m just fascinated by the idea of all these powerful beings resting in hidden places on and in the earth.”

“How many?”

“No one knows. The Ancestors are stories we tell children, but there are more credible legends of Ancients who’ve Slept so long that they, too, have become myth.” She bit her lip and admitted her secret wish. “Jessamy says Alexander could sometimes be coaxed to speak of times of myth. They are his memories. With him and Caliane both in the world, we could find out so much.”