“Shit.” Aodhan spun to slam his hands down on the counter. “You kept looking after me.” He glanced at Illium to see incomprehension on his face. “I needed looking after for a long time, I’ll accept that.”
He hated what he’d allowed himself to become in those years after his capture, hated it, and he’d finally taken responsibility for his actions. Only, Blue refused to see that. “But I don’t need that kind of care anymore,” he bit out. “I’m a warrior angel you trust to watch your back in any battle, but in anything else? You second-guess me, try to double-check my instincts, attempt to wrap me up in cotton wool.”
“Looking after you is a crime now?” Illium snapped, his hand fisted on the counter, and his wings bunched in.
It devastated Aodhan to hurt Illium, but they had to lance this boil, clear the slow-acting poison of it. “Remember that fight we had—I had information about the Luminata through my contacts, and you came down on me like a ton of bricks.”
Aodhan could still remember the rage that had scalded him in the aftermath. “As if I was still that broken angel in the infirmary, unable to defend myself, my mind so wounded that I was nothing but prey.”
Illium swallowed, his gaze bruised—but the spark, it had reignited. “Do you know how hard it was for me to watch you fight your way back to yourself?” Raw emotion in every word. “Now you’re pissed at me for being protective?”
“Yes.” Aodhan wasn’t going to back off, not on this point. “If you want us to stay friends, you can’t pull the protective shit, Blue. I don’t have the capacity to deal with it anymore.” It was as if he’d woken out of a long sleep and any hint of being coddled or protected enraged him. “It reminds me of who I was for a long time—and I fucking hate that pathetic creature!”
Eyes afire, Illium stepped closer. “Don’t you dare talk about yourself that way!” He scowled, no longer in any way distant now that he was defending Aodhan. “You survived an evil that would’ve killed other angels!”
Aodhan had been told that over and over, and it made no difference. “I let those bastards scar me to the point that I put myself in a cage.” He slammed a fist against his chest, his anger a hot, hard thing that cut. “But I’ve broken free at last—and I won’t let anyone else put me back in a box. Any fucking kind of a box.”
Illium folded his arms, his biceps flexing. “Caring for you enough to look out for you isn’t trying to control you,” he argued, red slashes of color on his cheekbones. “It’s what normal people do for those they love.”
“Oh?” Aodhan rose to his full height, faced his friend. “When was the last time you allowed me to do anything protective for you?”
“When my asshole father decided to reappear like a bad smell,” Illium shot back. “Or was that another sparkling angel who dropped out of the sky onto my mother’s rooftop?”
“Listen to yourself. You had that on the tip of your tongue because it’s one of the very few times in two hundred years where I haven’t been taking but giving.”
Illium’s eyebrows lowered. “You’re not a taker, Aodhan. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that. You give away your art. You give away your time. You moved to the cauldron of death because Suyin needed a second!”
“Cauldron of death?”
A one-shoulder shrug. “It was all that came to me. But my point stands. You don’t take, Aodhan. You give.”
“Except when it comes to you,” Aodhan whispered, suddenly exhausted. Bracing both hands on the counter, he shook his head. “We’ve fallen into a pattern where you protect and shield me from the world, Blue, and I won’t have it.”
This time when he raised his hand and touched the side of Illium’s face, his friend didn’t push him away. “We were never unbalanced before I broke. That’s why we worked. Each as strong as the other.”
Illium’s throat moved. “Adi, I can’t help looking after my people.” A frustrated plea. “That’s who I am.”
“Is it? Or is it someone you’ve had to become?” Lady Sharine was now awake, but she’d been asleep for a long, long time, Illium her caretaker as much as her son. Then had come Aodhan.
Two of the most important pillars of Illium’s life had shattered, and he’d used his wide shoulders to prop them up. “It’s time for me and Eh-ma to stand on our own two feet.” He gripped Illium tighter. “It’s time for us to be your support rather than the other way around.”
“I never minded,” Illium said, raising his hand to grip Aodhan’s wrist with a strong hand callused from relentless sword work. “Not for a single instant. Not when it came to you, and not when it came to Ma.”
“I know.” That just made their crime all the worse. They’d corrupted Illium’s generous nature, exacerbating his tendency to give until he had nothing left for himself.
That it had been without intent didn’t alter the damage done.
“I know,” he repeated. “But my need for that kind of protection is in the past now. The man I am today? What I need is for you to treat me as an equal, as you did before Sachieri and Bathar.”
Illium sucked in a breath. “You really are ready to talk about that.” He made a face. “I guess I should stop sniping at Suyin and thank her.”
Illium’s protectiveness toward his people had always been laced with a big dose of possessiveness. If he had a flaw, it was that. And in the grand scheme of things, with his giving heart to balance it out, it was nothing.
“I haven’t said a word to Suyin about this.” Aodhan squeezed the side of the other man’s face. “If I was ever going to talk to anyone, it was always going to be you. Always.”
The simple, honest words lay between them, a peace offering.
Releasing his wrist, Illium turned back to his aborted meal. “Want a bowl of angry stew? We can sit by the fire and eat and you can talk if you want.”
Aodhan fought his urge to bristle, because there Illium went, taking care of him again . . . but they did have to talk about this. It was time.
Our memories make us. Even the darkest of them all.
—Archangel Raphael
42
The fire was still going, the large room warm, but Aodhan stoked it up further after glancing at their sleeping guest—and prisoner. The boy was huddled into himself. Possibly because of cold, but more likely as a result of a life lived in the dark.
“He’s sleeping peacefully despite that tight fetal position,” Illium said in a quiet tone after he put their food on a low table Aodhan had carried over to place in front of a large sofa that faced the hearth.
It had been a popular seat while Suyin’s people were in residence—but only among the mortals and vampires. The winged members of the household tended to default to the armchairs. No official stance, just a thing of comfort—it was difficult to create sofas with backs and cushions that allowed egress for wings as well as personal space.
To share a sofa often meant an inevitable brush of wings against another.
That might’ve been a point of difficulty for him and Illium when Illium first arrived, but they were past that now . . . though nothing was back to normal. A tension hovered between them, a knowledge of drastic change.
So be it.
He’d been stuck in amber far too long. He needed to grow, to break out of that rigid shell. That it’d leave behind shattered debris was manifest—and a fact he hadn’t considered enough.
Not once, however, had he thought of Illium as a piece of that debris. No matter how angry he’d been, how angry he still became at times, Illium was as much a part of his life as the sky and the air. A necessity.
He couldn’t imagine—didn’t want to imagine a life without his Blue.
“Here.” Illium thrust a bowl of stew into his hand. “I tasted a spoonful. It’s weirdly delicious.”
Taking it, Aodhan sat. Illium followed, half his wing lying atop Aodhan’s. With every other person i
n this world, Aodhan was always aware of any such contact. Even with those whose touch he welcomed, some small part of his brain was always conscious of the physical contact.
The sole exception was Illium.
Any contact between them felt natural, just the way it should be. Today, however, he found himself conscious of the warmth and weight and strength of Illium’s wings. Another time, he’d have thought nothing of reaching out and examining a feather, checking a tendon. But . . . things had changed.
Aodhan had changed them.
Sitting back, he forced himself to eat a bite of the salami concoction. “This is the strangest stew I’ve ever eaten, but it’s good.”
“Told you.” Illium propped his feet up on an ottoman he’d dragged over, then leaned forward and grabbed a hunk of the bread that Aodhan had chopped. Chopped, not sliced. The weird shapes went well with the angry stew.
They ate in silence for a while, until Aodhan found himself speaking. Jinhai was too far away to hear them, even had he been feigning sleep. Which he wasn’t. That kind of almost-not-breathing only occurred when an angel was in a deep resting state so profound it was close to the healing rest of anshara.
“I think,” he said, “what scarred me most of all was the mundanity of Sachieri and Bathar.”
Putting down his empty bowl, Illium picked up half of the enormous olive-free sandwich that Aodhan had prepared. And he listened.
“They were so ordinary,” Aodhan continued, his food forgotten. “It wasn’t like with Lijuan—and seeing her megalomania in full bloom really brought that into focus for me. She was evil on a grand scale. A being of power and age who either chose to use that power in a terrible way—or who lost herself over the course of her long lifetime.”
Illium snorted. “You’re being too kind.” A glance at the window nook. “She was evil. She chose evil. Over and over again, she chose evil.”
Aodhan couldn’t do anything but agree. “She was also what we think monsters should be—a storm of malevolence. Not an angel you’d walk past and not notice except as a fleeting passerby. Not dangerous. Not a threat.”
When Illium nudged at his bowl to remind him to eat, Aodhan snapped, “Leave me be.” He knew he was being irrational, but at this point in time, even the smallest hint from Illium that he needed care of any kind was sandpaper on his skin.
Illium’s chest expanded as he took a deep breath, but rather than arguing, he returned to demolishing his half of the sandwich.
Aodhan put down his bowl. He had too much inside him, needed to release it. “But Sachieri and Bathar, I never really noticed them. I knew of them in a vague way because they were a limited part of Elijah’s wider court, but otherwise, they were just ordinary angels going about their business.” He looked at Illium. “Does that make me sound arrogant?”
“No,” Illium said at once, his eyes staring off into the distance. “In simple terms, they weren’t a part of your life or your duties—you had no reason to pay them any special attention. You know of Priya Anjalika, don’t you? She’s shy and small and hides away in her office, but you know of her because she’s part of your world.
“But if I asked a senior squadron commander in Titus’s court about her, he’d just look at me blankly. She might be an important component of the Tower’s internal machinery, but she’s not a threat he has to monitor—and is otherwise not in the orbit of his attention.”
“You put it so clearly.” Cutting through the fog. “Priya Anjalika, however, is critical to the Tower.” A specialist in accounts, she could do sums in her head faster than anyone else Aodhan knew. “Sachieri and Bathar were only tied to Elijah in the most nominal way, and otherwise just lived their lives.”
Aodhan thought back to all he’d learned of his captors in the aftermath. “Sachieri had lands that mortals and vampires farmed for her, and Bathar managed a small number of properties he’d acquired over the years. Pooled together, their income allowed them to live a life comfortable and settled.”
“Normal,” Illium murmured. “Ordinary angels living an ordinary life.”
“Not people who rode into battle, or people who picked fights or started controversies. They might’ve been the neighbors of my parents or a strolling couple I ran across in an art gallery—immortals who found happiness in a calm walk through eternity.”
He realized he was leaning forward, his hands fisted on his thighs. “That’s why I felt no sense of threat when Sachieri waved me down from the sky. It was gray that day, but she was wearing a gown of vivid yellow—impossible to miss.”
He’d seen her before he realized she was in distress, and for a heartbeat, his mind had noticed only the beauty of the composition, that splash of shining yellow against the craggy rocks and sky-piercing forest.
“The way she was collapsed on the ground under a huge tree with broken branches,” he told Illium, “I thought she’d tangled her wings on a sharp branch that she hadn’t noticed and fallen, needed help . . .”
Lifting his hand, he pressed it over his heart, rubbed. “The crossbow bolt struck my throat before I knew what was happening. And her face . . . right in front of me as I staggered and bled, this greedy, triumphant look to her as she punched a bolt into my heart.” A memory of blinding shock, his brain struggling to comprehend what was happening. “I should’ve moved, acted faster, but—”
“Screw that, Adi.” Having put aside his sandwich, Illium leaned forward in an echo of Aodhan’s pose—so he could turn and glare at Aodhan. “They might not have been angels of power, but Sachieri was four thousand years your senior, Bathar not much younger.
“You were only three hundred, with nothing of their life experience—and none at all with evil that wears a friendly face. Hell, even Raphael would go down if you took out his heart. Maybe only for a second, but that blow is a massive shock to our systems.”
Aodhan looked down at the ground. “I know you’re right, but for so long, I kept running those moments in my head, kept telling myself that there was a way I could’ve escaped—even though I knew full well I was close to collapse the instant they destroyed my heart.” Sachieri had chosen the heaviest possible bolt, fired it with a precision she’d honed over constant practice—all for that one brutal instant.
“After she hit my heart,” he continued because now that he’d started, he’d tell Illium all of it, “he shot me in each wing. Then he sliced off half of one wing.” Aodhan couldn’t remember the pain of that, his mind already shutting down as his young body struggled to heal catastrophic damage.
“Fuckers.” Illium hissed out the word, his eyes wet. “Fuckers. I wish we could make them rise from the dead so we could torture them over and over again.”
Jerking up his head, Aodhan gripped the back of Illium’s neck, squeezed. “No.” He held the angry, devastated gold of his friend’s gaze. “I won’t have it, Blue. I won’t have their evil reaching out from beyond death to take hold of you. Don’t you let them do that.”
Illium’s jaw worked. “I can’t not hate them.”
“Fine. But don’t you allow their poison to seep into your blood.” He squeezed the strong column of Illium’s neck once more, Illium’s skin hot and smooth under his touch. “They were punished. They’re dead, and worse, forgotten by the vast majority of our kind. If you give them residence in your head, then you keep them alive.”
Illium stared at the fire . . . but gave a jagged nod.
No doubt, it’d come up again in the future—if and when it did, Aodhan would deal with it. He could deal with it because he’d long moved past hate, banishing his captors to the oblivion they deserved. But he knew that had their roles been reversed, had his laughing, playful Illium been the one taken and tortured, he would’ve hated, hated hard and for a long, long time.
“Their very normalcy,” he said, picking up the thread of the story, “it broke my trust in the world.”
Illium’
s wings began to glow, his body rigid, but he didn’t interrupt.
Aodhan ran his knuckles down his friend’s spine regardless, pulling him back from the edge of the abyss on which he walked. “I didn’t trust my instincts after returning to the Refuge. How could I? When these two people who seemed so normal had done that to me? When the ordinary, everyday people who were their staff had helped them? How could I trust anyone?”
Illium’s body remained a thing of granite, but he reached out to place one hand over Aodhan’s knee. As if anchoring him to the here and now so that he wouldn’t fall into the past. Or perhaps anchoring himself from falling into a rage. They sat that way, one hand on the other, as Aodhan kept on speaking.
“You know what they did to me.” Sachieri and Bathar had created panels in the box that they could unlock and lift at will, so that they could reach in and touch him . . . possess him. “I couldn’t escape them, they made sure of it.” Whether that meant starving him, or wounding him over and over again.
“But the worst, the absolute worst of it all was how Sachieri would sit with me and tell me how very beautiful I was, how much she loved me, and how she knew I’d love her back if she just gave me a little more time.”
He shook his head. “She was as sane as you or me—yet she seemed to believe every word she spoke. Bathar was sane, too. But he enjoyed coming up with new and cruel ways to hurt me. It made me wonder if I could ever trust the faces people wear, if I could ever believe what came out of their mouths.”
Wings stirring, he thrust both his hands through his hair. “Then what happened in the Medica . . .”
The memory sat between them, a living, breathing malevolence.
Keir’s assistant at the time of Aodhan’s rescue had been an angel named Remus. A healer held in high esteem and considered honorable. As such, all those who’d watched over Aodhan’s badly wounded body had taken Remus at his word when he’d told them that Aodhan was becoming stressed having them around all the time, that he needed space alone to heal.
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