Archangel's Light

by Singh, Nalini

  Who’d been the water colorist?

  He took care as he opened the small closet, but it held no horrors, only the older woman’s clothing, and a few personal items.

  Leaving the room with a sense of melancholy heavy in his blood, Aodhan went to the next door down.

  It had once been part of a bigger room, but someone had put up a rough wooden partition at some point.

  The first room was of the couple, the one next door the child’s.

  There were no surprises in either, but Aodhan felt a heavy weight crush his chest as he stood in the doorway to the latter, and saw the small table beside the window. On it sat three toys, two pretty-colored stones, and a handheld device that he recognized as a cheap game player once advertised on huge billboards in Times Square.

  Cheap, but expensive when it came to a family who lived as did the one in this house. Everything neat and tidy, but nothing new, nothing extravagant. All the clothes worn and repaired, many of the dishes chipped. That game would’ve equaled weeks or months of saving up, and it was obvious the child had treated it with care. It was placed carefully in its open box, as if the boy put it back there after every use.

  Aodhan rubbed his chest, began to step out.

  The light changed outside, perhaps a cloud moving, and the shift caught his eye, brought it to the wooden flooring.

  There was something not quite right about it.

  Striding over, he flipped the bed so it leaned against the makeshift wall that had given the boy his own private space. He’d been loved, this child. And under his bed was a stain of blood so large that no child could’ve survived it.

  Forcing himself to keep going, Aodhan glanced at the slats of the bed. The bottom of the mattress was clearly visible . . . and it was soaked in rust red. Bringing the bed back down, he flipped away the hand-stitched quilt.

  The child’s bed is soaked in blood, he told Illium, his throat hurting from all that he didn’t say. Enough of it that the smell hasn’t fully dissipated. He’d caught the faint whiff of cold iron the same instant he flipped back the quilt.

  Rage against the child? Or was the mother there, trying to protect the boy?

  No way to tell. Aodhan left the room, and checked the only other doors. One led to a small but crisply clean toilet, the other to a shower that made him suck in his breath. Someone bloody showered in here and didn’t clean up.

  Dried blood flecked the plastic of the shower walls, while streaks of watery brown clung to the faded shine of the sink taps. A full handprint marked the wall next to the sink. The size said woman or a small man to him. Perhaps even a teenager. Definitely not a child as young as the one in the photo.

  He turned his attention to the characters written in blood on the mirror. His local language ability was good as far as speech went, but he wasn’t confident when it came to his writing skills. Taking an image using his phone, he sent it to Illium. Can you read what I just messaged you?

  No. I think it’s an older version of the language most often used in this region—see how complicated it is, how many lines? I don’t think most people these days use it.

  Aodhan nodded, though Illium couldn’t see him. It was obvious now that his friend had pointed it out. Suyin will likely recognize it. I’ll send it to the general to show her.

  A reply buzzed his phone just as he left the house.

  First, he took great gulping breaths of the clean air, while Illium stood on alert watch, the kitten sitting at his feet with its ears pricked and claws unsheathed. “It feels as if the scent of death is in my mouth, coated on my tongue.”

  “Here,” Illium said. “Had it in my pocket.”

  It was a small piece of hard candy, one of Illium’s little vices. Aodhan far preferred chocolate, but he took the candy with a grateful hand and, peeling off the wrapper, put it into his mouth. The flavor—a fresh mint—was a gift that cleared his nostrils and overwhelmed his senses.

  Shoving the crinkled paper of the wrapper in his pocket, he gave himself another moment—then looked at the message from Arzaleya. Unable to make it make sense in his mind, he just held out his phone to Illium.

  “ ‘Why doesn’t it work, Mother?’ ” Illium read out. “The same question repeated three times.”

  “Perhaps we’re wrong,” he said, “and it was the husband, and this is all about his mother.”

  “Humans are fully capable of committing a massacre,” Illium murmured. “And how hard would it be to wipe out a settlement if everyone knew and trusted you?”

  The other man rubbed his jaw. “Fifty or so people . . . it’s not that many, Aodhan. Especially given that a number were elderly, and a few children. A single man could have done it. Invite a whole bunch for dinner, poison or drug them, and take care of the others in the night.”

  “He’d have had to behead or remove the heart from the vampires.” Aodhan considered that. “Doable. Vampires sleep, especially the less powerful type of vampires who’d have made their home in a small town like this.”

  “Fei must’ve gotten lucky, seen something, run.” Illium’s voice was grim. “No wonder she’s all but mute: imagine seeing your neighbor skinning people you knew, perhaps loved.”

  “Could be she tried to find help, only to realize she was the sole survivor.”

  “Maybe,” Illium postulated, “she wasn’t in the village when this took place. She talked about wanting to go home. What if she was out foraging for mushrooms or checking rabbit traps in the forest, and ran late?”

  “And everyone was dead by then.”

  They both stood, thought that over.

  Awful as it was to imagine, a single mortal madman could have done this. It also made sense that, in his home, he’d cleaned up only enough so that the carnage wouldn’t be obvious to a visitor.

  All the better to lure people inside.

  Which made Aodhan think of another possibility. “He could’ve invited people over one by one. Time it well enough and the living residents would just assume they were out foraging, working inside their homes, or sleeping.”

  “Can you imagine the terror of the ones left at the end? They’d have known something was wrong but not what.”

  “Let’s go through the other places again now that we know he focused on hiding the evidence of what he was doing,” he said to Illium. “I think he got careless here because it was his home—a place where he had full control.”

  This time around, they found more evidence of a stealthy slaughter. A cushion placed over a small stain on a sofa, a kitchen rug thrown over evidence of blood, a door pushed back to the wall to hide the fact that the back of it was finely splattered in gore. You could easily dismiss it as nothing but dirt at first glance.

  Still, it wasn’t much, not given the scale of the slaughter.

  The two of them ended up back in the center of the street after completing their second inspection.

  “It took time and effort to clean up, skin, and butcher people.” Aodhan couldn’t believe he was saying those words, but they couldn’t hide from the ugliness of what had gone on here. “A lot of work for a single mortal.”

  “We don’t know the timeframe over which it took place,” Illium pointed out. “He could’ve also kept Fei captive—or she could’ve been wandering lost and disoriented in the forest. She was very thin.”

  Aodhan looked around again. “Do you believe it?”

  The gold of Illium’s eyes was bright even in the dull light of the day now that the sun had been totally eclipsed by clouds. “It all makes sense, but there’s an itch at the back of my neck, a feeling that it’s all too perfect.”

  “Yes.” Aodhan scanned the line of trees beyond the houses to his left. “Whoever it was, we need to track them down.”

  Illium bent to pick up Smoke, petted her as he followed Aodhan’s gaze. “He’s going to have the advantage if he’s hiding in th
e trees. We could do with ground support—Jae would be perfect.”

  Aodhan knew Illium was right about their wings making a search more difficult, but—“Suyin will send her back if we ask,” he said to his friend, “but we’d have to go out and escort her here.” He reached out to scratch the top of Smoke’s head—the kitten had followed him around earlier, now purred. “I don’t want anyone making that journey alone, even in a vehicle.”

  Illium’s expression went suddenly flat. “Aodhan, what are the chances the person or people behind this are trailing the resettlement caravan? What if that’s the reason for Fei’s continued fear?”

  The world turned silent, Aodhan’s mind a place of icy peace. “There’s no way he—or they—can get through the rear guard,” he said at last, then looked toward the skins again. “That’s a hoard. No one who went to all that trouble would just abandon it.”

  After putting Smoke on the ground so she could explore, Illium stared in the same direction. “Yeah, I have to agree with you there.”

  “I’ll warn Suyin regardless.” Aodhan proceeded to do just that. Afterward, he turned to Illium. “To be absolutely certain, one of us needs to fly toward the caravan, see if we can spot any signs of pursuit, while the other one stays on watch here.”

  Illium looked up at the sky now licked with a darkness heavier than the clouds—night was coming. “I don’t like the idea of splitting up. What if we’re totally off base and this was an angel? Either one of us could be ambushed.”

  “No feathers, no sign of damage caused by angelic wings crashing into things,” Aodhan said, but he didn’t like the idea of Illium flying off alone—because they both knew it made sense for the faster, more agile flyer to go.

  “On the flip side,” he said, “Suyin is with the caravan and will be able to take on any threat.” No angel, regardless of their strength or age, could stand up to the might of an archangel. “The vulnerable are well protected in the center of the caravan—and the fact this assailant avoided the stronghold tells me they aren’t confident enough to take on people more powerful.”

  Hands on his hips, Illium glanced over to where Smoke was pouncing on invisible prey. “Aerial sweep? Then we decide on our next step.”

  After Aodhan nodded his assent, Illium said, “I’ll go to the right.” Striding over, he picked up the kitten and put her inside his tee—after tucking the hem into his jeans.

  “She’ll claw you bloody.”

  Illium stroked the small creature who’d poked her head out of the neckline, a furry little growth with twitching whiskers. “Nah. She likes me.” Another stroke. “Stay in contact.”

  “Don’t take chances.”

  Illium gave a small salute and they took off in a rush of air, their wings powerful in flight. Neither one of them blended into the dark gray of the sky, but that was a risk they’d have to take. Aodhan’s section included the stronghold, and he took care to check every corner of it. If the killer or killers had been watching events unfold, they could now believe the stronghold empty, open for squatting.

  He saw no signs of an attempted incursion. No shards of glass glittering in the dying light of day, no damage to the areas with shutters. Regardless, he landed and spoke to Li Wei. “Stay inside until we return,” he told her.

  “If a vampire or mortal comes to the door asking for sanctuary, don’t allow them inside. Throw out food or bedding from a higher floor if you judge it safe. If not, or if it’s an angel, hide in the most secure place in the stronghold—underground.” No one who didn’t know of the nexus would ever find it.

  Li Wei nodded, her cream-hued skin holding the smooth beauty of an old vampire and her eyes sharp. “Our work is inside regardless. I’ll make sure my staff understands.”

  Aodhan spotted Kai in the background as he left, found himself irritated by the way she smiled at him. What was wrong with him? His and Illium’s problems had nothing to do with the mortal woman who wore Kaia’s face . . . but he still wished she weren’t here, in this time and place.

  Her mere existence threatened to derail any healing Illium had done, to throw him right back into an agonizing moment that had almost broken Aodhan’s bright, blue-winged best friend.

  Love has a way of crushing a man until nothing remains.

  —Dmitri, Second to Archangel Raphael

  32

  Yesterday

  Aodhan went looking for Illium as soon as he found out what had happened. Even though he knew all the places his best friend went to when he wanted to be alone, it still took him hours to track him down.

  Eschewing all his favored locations, Illium had gone to a cold and craggy outcropping on the far edge of the Refuge, a place overhung by spears of ice above a carpet of shattered boulders. Nothing thrived here, not even the tiny frost-resistant succulents that grew in other icy places. It was often called The Cold because no matter the season it was a place of no warmth, all hardness and jagged shards.

  Illium hated it.

  Now he sat hunched over on one of the rocks, the stunning blue of his wings violent slashes of color against all that grim gray and ice. He wore only his faded boots and an old pair of pants that he used for training, his upper body bare.

  Landing, Aodhan sat down next to him and immediately wrapped a wing around his exposed upper half. Angels didn’t feel the cold as mortals did, but Illium was barely beyond his majority. The cold might not kill him, but it could cause vicious hurt.

  “Your skin is like ice.” Aodhan curled his wing tighter even as he curved his other wing around in front of them, to better conserve the heat in the space in between—where Illium sat cold and silent. “We have to get you off this mountain.”

  Illium said nothing—and he didn’t move. And while Aodhan was strong, he wasn’t strong enough to carry an unwilling Illium down into the warmer zones. Instead he tried to use his nascent power to warm up his friend. That power was less than nothing in immortal terms, but as young as he was, Aodhan wasn’t complaining.

  The only angel similar to his age he knew of who had even a hint of power sat mute beside him. And mere droplet or not, it was enough to add a whisper of heat to the air, enough to bring a little color to Illium’s skin. But still he didn’t move or show any other sign of life.

  “I know you’re proud of your coloring,” Aodhan said, as his heart squeezed, “but trying to turn yourself blue is taking it too far.”

  Illium didn’t react to Aodhan’s attempt to lighten the moment—of the two of them, it was Illium who was the one forever trying to make people smile. Aodhan didn’t do jokes except for rare low-voiced pieces of aggravated sarcasm that sent Illium into choked laughter.

  “Warn me next time, why don’t you?” he’d said the last time around, after he’d nearly lost it in public.

  “Sorry,” Aodhan had muttered. “I can’t predict when someone will be idiotic enough to set off that part of me.” Because it took a lot.

  Illium had grinned and thrown an arm around his shoulders. “If only your legions of admirers knew the things you think in that pretty, sparkling head.”

  Today, there was no laughter, no gentle ribbing, no sound at all from the friend who usually spoke a hundred words to every one of Aodhan’s.

  Aodhan had never seen Illium so broken—and it broke him. His heart hurt. He’d do anything to fix this, make Illium smile again, but he couldn’t bring back Illium and Kaia’s love.

  “She’s fine,” he said, hoping it wasn’t the worst possible thing to say. “I flew over the village to check on her.” Aodhan had spotted her in the act of taking the washing out to the cold, clear waters of a nearby stream, laughter in her pretty and lively face as she spoke to another young woman.

  Illium stirred at last, eyes dark with anguish looking at Aodhan. “She is?”

  Aodhan’s lungs expanded on a rush of air. “You know she feels no pain.” That was the sting in the tail of
Illium’s punishment—his lover would feel no torment, suffer no loss. Because her mind had been erased of all memories of Illium, as had the minds of everyone else in the village.

  To them, he wasn’t even a ghost; he’d simply never existed.

  Illium’s voice shook as he said, “I’m glad.” Brokenhearted love in his words. “It was my fault. I told her something I shouldn’t have.”

  The secrets of angels were not for mortal ears. A truth—a law—drummed into them from childhood. To tell a mortal such secrets was a crime that could lead to execution for all involved—but Kaia’s life had never been in danger. “You know Raphael—”

  “I know.” Shuddering, Illium leaned forward with his elbows on his thighs. “He never threatened her life. Not once. ‘All I’ll take are her memories of you,’ that’s what he said.” Illium’s body hunched in on itself. “The look on his face, Aodhan. I hurt him by making him do that, making him punish me.”

  Aodhan stroked his hand down Illium’s back and wings. It was a good sign that his friend was already thinking about Raphael’s reaction to his transgression rather than the fact he’d lost the lover with whom he’d been obsessed. Illium had courted Kaia with gifts and acts of romance, run to her every day that he could, dreamed of her when he slept.

  Aodhan had never said anything against her, but he hadn’t liked how she made Illium act, how she’d pushed him and pushed him and pushed him for more and still more. Never had she been satisfied with the gift of him. Illium, who was so beloved of so many, hadn’t been good enough for her without all the gifts and the romantic gestures, and the public devotion.

  She’d treated Aodhan’s friend like a trophy—the angel who was in thrall to her.

  Aodhan’s reticence had been for more than one reason. The first was that while he’d had small romances, he hadn’t yet fallen in love himself. As such, he was aware he had no real experience to inform his opinions. He’d also received advice from an unexpected source: Dmitri.