“As will I,” Raphael said. “But I also plan to fight dirty.” A dangerous spark in the blue. “I have told Suyin I am sending her more help. I am a kind fellow archangel.”
Elena whooped, her grin huge. “You’re sending Illium.”
“Of course I’m sending, Illium, hbeebti. Now, we watch, and we wait.”
Life changes us. To wish otherwise is pointless.
—Nimra, Angel of New Orleans
3
Today
Aodhan was tired.
Not the tired of the body. He was a powerful angel, and tonight, he flew patrol over Suyin’s interim stronghold without any real drain on his resources. Young in the grand scheme of things at just over five centuries of age, but with veins bursting with an energy that made him suitable to be second to an archangel.
It was why Raphael had accepted his offer to assist Suyin as her temporary second.
It was why, three weeks earlier, Suyin had extended him a formal offer to make the position permanent.
Aodhan’s first call had been to Raphael. His sire had told Aodhan that he wouldn’t stand in his way should Aodhan wish to take up the position. “You are the only one who can make that call,” Raphael had said. “Whatever you decide, know that you will forever be part of my Seven.”
Aodhan’s immediate instinct had been to turn down the position. “It is Raphael I call sire—and I do so of my own free will,” he’d said to Suyin at the time. “It is a bond I will not break.”
“You will never be second to Raphael,” Suyin had said in her gentle way, her night-dark eyes vivid against the white foil of her skin and hair. “Dmitri has been too long in that position and is too good at what he does.”
“I do not aspire to be his second.” Aodhan already had another, equally critical position—to be one of Raphael’s Seven was to be part of a group unlike any in all of angelkind.
Suyin had smiled, the sadness that lingered always in her easing for a fraction of a second. “You have honored me with your fidelity and courage, given me counsel wise and patient, and so I ask you to take more time, consider my offer in more than the moment.”
And because Suyin was an archangel he respected, he was giving her offer the solemn thought that it deserved. To be the second of an archangel at just over half a millennium of age? It was unheard of; Aodhan would be the youngest second in the Cadre by far.
But, despite Raphael’s promise, he would never again be one of the Seven. They would become the Six until and unless they accepted another into their ranks. Because no matter how friendly the relationship between two archangels, there existed a distance nothing could bridge. A thing of power and age, for two alpha predators could never successfully occupy the same space.
Even Caliane and Nadiel, beloved of one another, hadn’t been able to always be in the same physical space. Aodhan hadn’t been born when they were together, but their tragic love story was legend. Prior to Nadiel’s madness and subsequent execution at Caliane’s hand, however, they’d simply been two archangels in love. But never had they been able to spend all their time together.
Power was a gift that demanded sacrifice.
Should Aodhan accept Suyin’s offer, Dmitri, Venom, Galen, Jason, Naasir . . . and Illium would be lost to him in a way that stabbed a stiletto blade straight into his heart, the cold steel severing their unseen bond even as it made him bleed. But was his vehement negative reaction not a bad sign? Could he say he was growing as a man, as an angel, if he clung to them with such fierceness? Or was he simply playing at freedom while keeping himself inside the cage that had altered the course of his life?
Then there was his tiredness. It was of the heart. He missed New York. He missed working by the side of his sire and the others of the Seven. He missed watching horror movies with Elena, both of them with their bare feet up on an ottoman and a bowl of popcorn in between.
He missed the new friends he’d begun to make in the Tower and in the Hunters Guild, those bonds one of the few good things to come out of Lijuan’s obsession with New York. He even missed the noisy chaos of the city’s streets, its drivers often yelling at each other as if for sport.
Wild blue flashed on the insides of his eyes.
Aodhan set his jaw and dived to do a wide sweep. He would not think about the person he missed most of all—because that person seemed to have forgotten him. Illium had sent him regular packages of items from New York alongside art supplies—only to come to a sudden screeching halt three months earlier.
The change had felt like a slap to the face.
Aodhan had called Elena to check that Illium was fine, that his silence had nothing to do with the sudden waking of his asshole of a father. He’d learned that his friend was hale and hearty and just ignoring Aodhan. So Aodhan had ignored him right back.
It was the longest they hadn’t spoken to each other in his memory.
Even during his lost years, when he’d gone silent and withdrawn almost fully from the world, Illium had been there, a spark of light in the enveloping blackness of Aodhan’s existence.
You are being childish, said a voice in his head that sounded like his mentor, Lady Sharine. The woman Aodhan affectionately called Eh-ma, a term of respect and love used for the mother of a friend who had become cherished of the speaker. Lady Sharine was gentle and kind and, of late, with a new steel to her. Not that Aodhan had spoken to Eh-ma of this.
He would never put her in the middle of this fight.
“If I wish to be childish,” he said to the cloud-heavy night, “I will be childish.” Moonless nights such as this were his favorite time to fly, for he could be a shadow as he couldn’t be in the sun. His body refracted far too much light.
Yet he missed Manhattan with its spiking towers of steel and light. So strange, that after a lifetime of solitude and distance, he should find such joy in a city that never slept. China, too, had once been that way in places. Shanghai had been a faceted jewel of technological marvels despite Lijuan’s preference for the past, Shenzhen a glittering mecca where mortals and immortals alike came to source objects, clothing, and curios found nowhere else in the world. Just two of China’s once-great cities.
Someone in Lijuan’s court had obviously had some sway with her. Enough for her to permit such high-tech developments—though never in Beijing, which had been the heart of her empire until the loss of the Forbidden City. In Shanghai, her people had gone so far as to erect a hyper-modern glass and steel structure meant to function as her citadel there.
Aodhan had seen it. It was striking, with glass that shimmered a silvery blue, its lines clean and precise as it flowed into an elongated pyramid. Suyin, an architect born in a far different age, had spent their rest break in the city staring at it. “I can build akin to this,” she’d murmured at last. “I understand it, see the beauty in its unadorned clarity.”
Her smile—of delighted happiness—had been unlike any he’d seen on her face till that moment. “I was afraid, you see,” she’d admitted to him. “That I’d been too long away from the world, that my art had moved on into places I couldn’t follow. Today, I know different. Perhaps I will meld old and new when I build my own citadel in a future where it is possible.”
She’d started the sketch for her future citadel that very day. As for Lijuan’s Shanghai residence, Jason had told Aodhan that the Archangel of China had never once stayed there. Her dismissal had left Shanghai to languish as a third-rate city populated heavily by mortals and vampires. But that Shanghai was lost, its colors erased and its technology coming to a stuttering halt as its wide streets and tall apartment blocks stood hauntingly empty.
So many dead to feed the dreams of power of a megalomaniacal archangel, so many lives and futures destroyed. All for nothing. Lijuan was dead and so were the vast majority of her people. Those who remained were living ghosts with broken hearts and haunted eyes. Nearly all had migrated to t
he place that Suyin had chosen as her interim base—a small stronghold hidden within the verdant green forests and strange stone pillars of Zhangjiajie.
“I would build anew,” she’d said at the time, “a place without any of my aunt’s dark stain, but that would be a foolish waste of energy and power when we have so little.” She’d looked at the neat stone edifice surrounded by lush green jungle, the air damp and humid then. “This will do. All signs are that she spent little time here—it wouldn’t have been grand enough for her.”
She’d made the decision before they’d discovered the secret beneath the stronghold, had decided to hold to it in the aftermath. Because by then, Suyin’s people had already begun to cluster around her, and she welcomed them.
“I would not uproot them again,” she’d said, strands of her hair flying across her face as they stood atop one of the pillars carved by time and nature, so high that it felt as if they could touch the clouds. “Not until it is time to move to my permanent citadel.”
She was a good archangel, would become better with time. And Aodhan could be by her side as she grew into her power. He could be to her what Dmitri was to Raphael. Dmitri, too, had grown with Raphael, rather than coming into the position after Raphael was already an established archangel. It built a different—deeper—bond between archangel and second.
More than that, Suyin needed him as Raphael and the Seven didn’t.
There was much Suyin didn’t know about the ways of the Cadre. Aodhan didn’t say that as an arrogant judgment—it was simple fact, the inevitable result of her eons-long captivity and abrupt rise to power. Young as he was, he’d stood beside Raphael for centuries, could assist her as she anchored herself in her new—
His nape prickled.
Halting in the air, his wings balanced in a silent hover, he looked around. His eyes had long acclimated to the dark, but the world was a stygian blackness tonight, the lights of the stronghold and settlement too small and few to make any difference to the sky. The suffocating weight of the night put him in mind of Lijuan’s death fog, a thing of whispering evil that had murdered by its mere presence.
Its memory would haunt all who had witnessed it.
Despite his inability to see the intruder, he knew someone was heading his way. Since he hadn’t been warned by the sentries posted farther out, either it was a cunning foe—or an expert at stealth like Jason. Aodhan respected the spymaster and fellow member of the Seven, but it turned out that the seconds of archangels did not appreciate stealth skills in the spymasters of other archangels.
“Oh, I love Jason and what he can do,” Dmitri had said with a slow grin when Aodhan brought up the topic over a call. “But it drives me insane to know other spymasters are ghosting in and out of our territory.”
At least Jason was no threat to Suyin. The same couldn’t be said of all the spymasters—a year after the war and a number of others in the Cadre had rehabilitated their territories to the point that they had the time to turn a critical eye to China’s untried new archangel.
Aodhan wasn’t concerned about a martial assault—no one wanted China, not when Lijuan’s malevolent shadow loomed large yet. The general consensus was that the territory wouldn’t be fully “safe” for at least a millennium, perhaps more. However, the rest of the Cadre could make things difficult for Suyin if they judged her unworthy of her ascension.
It wasn’t only the archangels, either.
Jason had passed on the tidbit that a few of the older angels had begun to mutter that her ascension had been a thing of war, an emergency measure that would’ve never kicked in were it a normal time.
That it wasn’t a normal time even now seemed to escape them.
The world was still down one archangel, and while Elijah had healed enough to have made an appearance at the last Cadre meeting, Aodhan—attending out of sight at Suyin’s invitation—had seen that he was far from his usual self. It was no wonder he’d turned down a physical meeting in favor of one held via technology.
Elijah wasn’t the only one marked by battle scars. Neha had turned reclusive and—per Jason—her senior court had begun to whisper that she craved Sleep; it wasn’t a future at which either her people or Aodhan looked on in pleasure. Whatever her faults, Neha had always been one of the most stable of the Cadre.
Added to that, Michaela hadn’t returned and neither had Favashi or Astaad or any of the others who’d fallen. As for Qin, he had half a foot in Sleep, half in the waking world.
Where was the intruder?
Power wreathed his hand as he considered whether to light up the sky, but that would be a waste of energy and would frighten an already scared populace. It’d take a very long time for the people of this land to sleep easy. Most were probably still awake at this late hour, haunted by nightmares of grief and pain.
Then he saw it.
A glow.
Such as that emitted by the wings of archangels who were powering up to strike.
He should’ve alerted Suyin at once, but something made him hesitate, frown. He knew those wings. The shape of them, how the bearer held them in flight, it was all familiar on the deepest level.
But it wasn’t Raphael, wasn’t Aodhan’s sire.
He sucked in a breath.
Because he knew one other person whose wings glowed at times. An angel who it was whispered would one day ascend.
His heart a huge ache, he altered speed to fly hard and fast toward that faint glow. With every beat, it grew brighter . . . before flickering out like a candle that had been snuffed out between uncaring fingers. But Aodhan was close enough to see.
He came to a hover across from the angel from whose blue wings the night had stolen all color, turning them obsidian. “Illium.” The single word came out rough, gritty. “What are you doing here?”
4
“Nice to see you, too,” Illium said with a smile that was false, didn’t reach his eyes. Then he dipped into a flamboyant aerial bow. “At your service, Second to Archangel Suyin.”
Aodhan barely heard words shaped to sound playful, but that held nothing of true emotion. He was fighting every muscle in his body not to slam into Illium and wrap him up in his arms and in his wings.
It had been so long since he’d had such intimate contact with another sentient being.
So long since he’d touched Illium.
His heart strained, threatening to burst. “Illium.” It came out harsher than he’d intended.
Illium’s smile didn’t fade, still that undemanding and playful thing he pulled out for strangers and acquaintances. If you didn’t know him, you’d think it real, think him amused and present.
To Aodhan, it was an insult.
“You going to keep me up here all night?” Eyes unreadable in the darkness, Illium reached up to massage one shoulder. “It’s been a long flight and I could do with landing.”
Aodhan narrowed his eyes; he wasn’t sure what was going on with his friend, but he’d get to the bottom of it. Of the two of them, everyone always said Illium was the more stubborn—no, not everyone. Eh-ma had more than once pointed out that Aodhan could hold his own on that battleground.
“Follow me.” It caused him physical pain to turn away from Illium and lead him to the far left corner of the stronghold.
He used his mental speech ability to warn the close sentries of their approach. He’d always been good at mental speech, but he’d grown stronger over the past year, after using it so much with people of far less power. In New York, he’d most often spoken this way with Raphael and others of the Seven. Bonded as they were by blood, it hadn’t stretched him.
Now, he told Suyin of Illium’s arrival.
Oh, Aodhan, I send you my apologies. Raphael did tell me he planned to send another one of his Seven to China to support you in your myriad tasks. It slipped my mind.
It is no matter, Aodhan said, well aware how mu
ch she was handling, and even though Illium’s sudden appearance had thrown his world off its axis. Of all the people Raphael could’ve sent . . .
He inhaled, exhaled.
They landed at almost the same time, on a large flat balcony outside the wing of the stronghold that held Aodhan’s small suite. He’d chosen it because it was private and offered him access to the sky at any time.
A rustle behind him as Illium folded in the distinctive silver-touched blue of his wings.
Aodhan turned, braced for the impact of the friend who was part of his very being, and yet who’d become a stranger to him in recent times. His eyes went first to those very wings. Elena’d had to amputate them during battle, to save Illium’s life, and though they’d all known they’d grow back, it had hurt to see Illium devoid of the dazzling feathers that were his trademark.
“Your wings?” he asked, though it was a foolish question; Illium had flown all the way to China on those wings.
“No problems,” the other man confirmed. “Though I probably should’ve stopped more than I did—that’s why I’m so stiff and tired.” After flaring out his wings in a wide stretch, he closed them with the slow control of a honed warrior.
The night wind riffled the blue-tipped black of his hair at the same moment, the strands overlong and falling over his eyes. Those eyes were aged gold, his eyelashes the same blue tipped black. None of it was artifice. Illium had been born with those eyes, those eyelashes, that hair, his skin a sun-kissed golden hue from childhood.
His wings, however, had once been pure blue.
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