Archangel's Light

by Singh, Nalini

  If they had, he added before Aodhan could interrupt, you wouldn’t be capable of making whimsical art like those fairies everyone stole off the tree on the High Line, and you wouldn’t have played baseball with me in the sky, and you wouldn’t have allowed my mother to hold you when you rejected everyone else! That all means something.

  A long pause as they trudged on into the darkness.

  Sometimes, Aodhan said at last, I feel like I’m pretending to be the person that you want me to be.

  Illium flinched. He hated that they were doing this in the dark, where he couldn’t see Aodhan’s face, where he couldn’t look into his eyes. But it was happening and he had to deal with it—only, the narrow passageway suddenly widened, the light in the walls brighter. Aodhan.

  I see it. No anger or old pain in his voice now, just the acute alertness of a warrior.

  Illium kept moving forward, reminded of how Elena had described finding the place of captivity of her grandparents. He didn’t allow himself to think of another cold, dark place that had been made a cell. That memory was too vivid, too painful, too much a thing that tormented him.

  But why did immortals do this? Make hidden prisons underground where they did things terrible and evil? Or perhaps the tendency to go underground wasn’t so unexpected in a race known to Sleep for eons in secret places around the world, the pull toward the dark a primal impulse.

  In some, however, that impulse had been badly twisted.

  He looked from right to left as they emerged into a large cavern lit by the same sickly green bioluminescence. His attention was on scanning for threats, so it wasn’t until after he’d crossed the cavern to take a position by the passageway that seemed to lead deeper within that the horror of what he was seeing truly sank into him.

  Aodhan had stayed at the opposite end, and now, the two of them looked at each other over the splintered remains of a table and four chairs. Playing cards lay scattered on the floor, their white backgrounds snapshots of light in this subterranean place.

  At first glance, that was all there was to see: the remains of a single small table and four chairs.

  No bodies. No blood. No other signs of violence.

  But, when Aodhan stepped away from the tunnel through which they’d entered, and began to move around the room, he saw other things. A steel bowl lying upside down in a corner not far from a badly dented metal mug.

  An instant later, his light glinted off another piece of metal: the remnants of a plate that had been twisted and torn apart from one corner to the other. He crouched over it, angling his hand so that the metal was bathed in light.

  This is tough material, he said to Illium after examining it. It would’ve taken a good deal of strength to twist it into this state. Only the rare human could’ve done it. Most likely, it’d require vampiric or angelic power.

  Rising, he continued to move around the room and soon discovered a bread roll encrusted in green mold. He tapped it. Hard as stone.

  In the end, he found enough other mugs, bowls, and plates to line up with the four broken chairs that lay sprawled on their backs on the pounded dirt of the cavern. Also among his discoveries were what looked to be the remains of more than one set of ceramic chopsticks.

  The most interesting item however, was a functioning battery-powered lamp. Should we use it? he asked after switching it on. My light doesn’t take much energy, but we may as well conserve it.

  Can it be dimmed?

  Aodhan worked the device again and the light turned from harsh to soft.

  Illium nodded. It’s not much brighter than using your power.

  After doing another sweep around the room, Aodhan joined Illium. Lijuan kept Suyin captive for thousands of years, but she did so in one of her strongholds. Why would she keep anyone in a place like this? Unless the inhabitant was meant to be kept in the cells beneath the stronghold, but it didn’t work for some reason.

  No question in Aodhan’s voice that this was a place of captivity, this outer cavern a guardhouse of sorts. Illium didn’t argue with the assumption—he’d seen what Aodhan hadn’t, knew the other man was right. Lijuan was quite mad in her final years, he pointed out. Who knows why she did anything?

  Then he shifted so Aodhan could take in the broken chains that lay by his feet. Each link in each chain was of such heavy metal that the entire thing would’ve been more than the weight of either one of them.

  A gate, he said, pointing out the places where the anchors for the chains had been embedded into the stone on either side of the passage entrance. You and I could break that, but there aren’t many angels as strong as us, even fewer vampires.

  There’s no blood, Aodhan pointed out. No skeletal or other remains.

  Illium had been thinking about that. Could be the guards abandoned their post after Lijuan’s defeat. Either out of fear or out of self-interest. No one would look kindly on them for taking part in the captivity of another immortal.

  Whether others in the Cadre had been guilty of similar outrages wasn’t the point—it was an undeniable fact that immortals could be cruel. Lijuan, however, had pushed it too far, and now all she’d touched was tainted with the odor of death, and of madness. And the latter was a quiet fear that lurked in the minds of most immortals.

  I can see that, Aodhan murmured. Especially if the captive was only kept under control by others more powerful—who Lijuan likely sucked into her army. Bad planning on her part.

  Illium thought of the wall of flyers that had come at New York. She had only one priority at that point. She must’ve thought this barrier would hold until her victorious return.

  If she thought about it at all, Aodhan said. I think she was so obsessed by then that she wasn’t thinking of anything beyond her desire to be a goddess. He nodded toward the unknown passageway.

  Illium stepped into it without further question, not wanting to drag out the experience. He hated that his friend was being subjected to this. At the same time, he was furiously proud of Aodhan’s refusal to bow down under the weight of what had been done to him. Which was why it so frustrated him that Aodhan thought the events of the past had destroyed all he’d been.

  You’ve never listened!

  The memory of Aodhan’s earlier response stung enough that he found himself picking at the wound. If I never listen, he said, it’s because you never talk. He wanted to kick himself even as he spoke the words. The two of them had danced around this topic for centuries; Illium had kept his silence because it was Aodhan’s pain. Aodhan was the one who needed to bring it up.

  Now he had, and Illium was sniping at him. Sorry, he said on the heels of his words. I’m being an ass.

  Stop it. Hard, angry words. I’m not a whimpering wounded animal to be scared off by plain speaking.

  Illium wanted to pull out his hair, but they’d reached the prison cell. A much larger cavern than the one outside, it was set up like a full living space. An area with seating—not just one, two seats made for angels, with the spinal column designed so wings would fall on either side of it.

  Seeing the space held no dangers to Smoke, he took the kitten out and put her on the bed to nap. That bed, too, was large enough to fit two angels, but when Illium checked the closet, he found clothing of a single size—no dresses, just tunics and pants. Going on rough average sizes, the clothing could’ve fit either an adult woman, a teenage boy, or a smaller man. Definitely a person shorter and slighter than Illium.

  He looked down, frowned. There are no shoes.

  Harder to escape barefoot, Aodhan said, a frigid cold in his tone.

  Unable to stand it, Illium moved to brush his wing over his friend’s. Pulling him back from the ice of the past with the warmth of today. Aodhan didn’t say anything, but neither did he put distance between them. Rather, he brushed his own wing over Illium’s before they parted to check other areas of this subterranean apartment.

&
nbsp; Illium’s soul hungered for more, but he also felt a wave of relief at this silent indication that, no matter what, Aodhan still trusted him. With that as a foundation, they could damn well sort out all the rest.

  Putting that aside for now, he focused on the situation.

  Angels fly, younglings. Never forget that danger can lurk above.

  Words spoken by the first weapons-master who’d had a hand in Illium’s training. Naasir, with his habit of prowling the rafters, had taught him that lesson long ago—but it had been good to have it spelled out. Driven by the memories, he looked up. But there was nothing and no one up there. However . . .

  Flaring his wings, he rose up and up. There are small holes in the rock. Sunlight probably lights this space up during the daytime. Press an eye to a hole and you could look outside, but there was no hope of escape. The holes weren’t close enough together to in any way weaken the fortress of stone.

  Enough to read with? Aodhan asked.

  I think so. Why?

  Come, have a look.

  Illium landed, walked over to Aodhan. Once again, he stood close enough that his wing touched Aodhan’s, and once again, Aodhan didn’t move away. Instead, he handed Illium a text, then held up the lamp so Illium could read it.

  “This is a teaching text.” He frowned. “I’m sure I saw something like this on Jessamy’s desk the last time I was in the Refuge.” The angel who’d taught Illium and Aodhan as children was now the love of another member of the Seven—but to them, she’d always be the teacher who’d been exasperated by them more than once, but who’d also taught them with love and grace.

  They both adored her and, back when she and Galen first got together, they’d told Galen they’d shun him forever should he hurt her. The weapons-master had threatened to beat them both bloody for daring to think he’d ever hurt his Jess.

  The two of them had kept an eye on him nonetheless—because while he’d become Raphael’s weapons-master and they’d given all respect to his position, and they’d liked him, he’d still been an unknown. Now, some four centuries later, they’d long known his promise for truth, were bonded to him in friendship.

  “I think it’s for an angelic teenager or teenagers,” Aodhan said. “The level of the calculations, that’s what I remember learning around sixty, seventy years of age.”

  That was what mortals and vampires often didn’t realize about angelkind. They grew very slowly as children, including in their mental development. Even at a hundred, they were considered callow youths at best.

  The last mortal to whom Illium had explained that—a baker named Catalina—had gasped and pressed a hand to her heart. “Dios mío, your poor mamá. I had sprouted endless gray hairs by the time my first child reached sixteen, and to think she had to keep you out of trouble for many times those years.”

  Illium had laughed. They were friends, he and Catalina, even though he knew she’d one day leave him, as all his mortal friends left him. As Catalina’s Lorenzo had already left them both. “No,” he’d said that day, “my mother would have been horrified at the idea of losing me after a mere eighteen years. Time moves differently for us.”

  It was hard to explain the passage of years to a mortal from an immortal perspective. But today, as he looked down at the study items, his gut churned. “If a child or children were kept in this darkness . . .” Time would’ve moved at the speed of sludge, a slow creep of nothingness, the only view of the outside world a pinprick that looked out into stone and green.

  Aodhan said nothing, and when Illium glanced at him, he saw that his friend had gone motionless, the pale hue of his skin making him appear a sculpture carved by an artist who had fallen in love with his subject.

  Beautiful but cold. Distant. Unreal.

  As Aodhan had become after healing from the physical wounds of his captivity. As if once he was no longer distracted by the injuries to his body, he needed to turn inward to escape the horrors that haunted him.

  Horrors far too near to what had taken place in this cavern.

  Illium didn’t even think about his next action. He slipped his hand into Aodhan’s and squeezed hard. “Whoever it was, they escaped,” he said, because that was the critical factor, the one that would smash through the remote ice of Aodhan.

  It took a long time for Aodhan’s fingers to curl slowly around his, his skin chilled from how far he’d gone, and his breathing so slow it was nearly imperceptible. “If it was a child, they will be insane, that much is certain.” His voice held the eerie echo of distance.

  “Then who better than us to find them?” Illium squeezed his friend’s hand again.

  At last, Aodhan turned his head to meet Illium’s eyes. His own were icy mirrors that reflected Illium’s face back at him. “Do you think this maddened, abused child is responsible for what we discovered in the hamlet?”

  “I don’t know.” Illium’s gut churned at the idea of it. “Either way, we have to find them.” If they had become monstrous after being kept enclosed in the dark the entirety of their life . . . that was a problem to consider later.

  Aodhan’s entire body shuddered as he exhaled, his hand clenching on Illium’s before he broke the contact. “Did you notice the neatness, the cleanliness?”

  Illium hadn’t, but now that Aodhan had pointed it out, you couldn’t miss it. No dust on any surface—which should’ve been impossible in a cavern—all the spines in the bookshelf aligned to a precise degree, the texts and scrolls on the desk positioned at exact right angles. The bed, too, had been made so that it bore no wrinkles, the sides the same length.

  It sent a chill up his spine—because the massacre had been as neat and tidy. “A form of control.”

  “Yes, I think so.” Aodhan picked up a scroll.

  Leaving him to examine that by the light of the lamp, Illium returned to check the door to a second closet. It proved to lead to a large area set up with bathing and sanitation facilities. Plumbed the modern way. So the residence had been upgraded at some point—while continuing to leave the occupant without light.

  Mouth tight, he exited, then returned to the clothes closet for a second look, his aim to find something that would give this child solid form in his mind.

  At first, he saw nothing. Just bland tunics and pants that gave no clue as to gender or personality, the colors brown and black. He was about to move on when the beam of his phone flashlight picked up glints of silvery white on the shoulders of a black tunic.

  Heart thudding, he reached out and picked up the fine, fine threads. Only, they weren’t threads at all. “Shit. Shit.”

  35

  Aodhan was by Illium’s side in a split second. “What?”

  Illium just held up the long hairs, the icy white hue a recognizable symbol to anyone in the angelic world. For white hair in immortals was a genetic marker. A thing of family, not of age.

  “Lijuan’s kin.” Aodhan took the hairs from Illium. “But Suyin knows of no other members of the extended family who have vanished or died in mysterious circumstances.”

  “How sure is she of that?”

  “Very. Tracing the members of her family was a task she took on while she healed after her rescue. Andromeda used her research skills to assist, while Lady Caliane put her in touch with genealogical scholars among our kind; the end result is that she managed to trace each and every individual.

  “Even the ones said to have gone into Sleep did so in a way that makes it impossible for Lijuan to have disappeared them. Not that she used such subterfuges. When she took Suyin captive, Suyin just vanished without a trace. And,” he added, “theirs is an old line. No new births for over a millennium. There is no one young enough for those texts.”

  It was a good reminder. Living as Illium did in the Tower of a young archangel, and surrounded as he was by relatively young immortals, he occasionally forgot that immortality was an endless thread.

&n
bsp; “Then maybe it’s not a relative.” He held his sword ready by his side even as he thought. “Hairs could belong to Lijuan herself.”

  “That would mean she came here.” Aodhan turned, examined the semidark space. “If you strip away the absence of sunlight and the lack of freedom, it’s a comfortable setup.” His voice was tight, and Illium knew he’d had to force himself to say the words.

  Because no prison was ever comfortable.

  But Illium saw his point.

  The bed was large and plush, the blanket and comforter folded at the end of fine fabrics. The rest of the furniture was equally well made, if in an antique style. There wasn’t any food, but when Illium walked over to examine the round table in one corner that held an empty metal pitcher, he found a couple of tins of high-quality tea.

  “This tea”—he held it up—“Lijuan drank that.”

  “How do you know?” Aodhan’s forehead crinkled.

  “She came to New York once, back before she lost her freaking mind,” Illium muttered. “She was a guest, and Raphael asked me to source some of this.” He’d forgotten that random piece of information until he laid eyes on the tin.

  “So,” Aodhan said, “the child in this place might have nothing to do with her bloodline.”

  “Makes sense if Suyin isn’t aware of anyone who’s missing.” Crouching down, Illium opened a small cupboard. “Empty. No food.” He stood. “Lijuan could’ve arranged for fresh meals to be sent through from the stronghold.”

  “Signs are that she closed it up a while ago.” Aodhan’s voice held a creeping darkness. “The hamlet, Blue. In the middle of nowhere. It could’ve been started specifically as a kitchen for this child—and as the home of the guards. It’d also explain the rage behind the massacre. To the child, every resident of the hamlet was their jailor.”

  The ugliness of an entire community conspiring to hide this unpardonable secret . . . Illium clenched his gut, fisted his hand. Raging would do no good, wouldn’t erase all that had been done. “If the guards deserted their post after Lijuan’s death, the child would’ve been left to starve.”