Slender fingers brushing back his hair with maternal tenderness. “Do you see, Illium? I made a choice out of a deep-rooted fear that I’d never faced. I hid from my pain, and so a woman willing to accept crumbs from an archangel’s table is what I became. Don’t do what I did. Don’t hide. Don’t pretend. Confront what hurts you, know the shape and form of it so you can conquer it.”
Her words rang in his head as he entered the stronghold. Once under shelter, he took a few seconds to shake off the clinging snow, then strode into the warmth of the living area with the awareness of a dread truth heavy on his shoulders.
44
Jinhai wasn’t holding on to Aodhan, his eyes no longer trained on the snowy landscape. He sat on the sofa in front of the fire, intent on a string game that Aodhan must have taught him.
The two of them had played the same game as children, weaving shapes in the string with their movements. Aodhan had always made the most creative patterns, but Illium had been faster. Balance, he thought. Yin and yang. No strong one and weak one. No protector and protected.
Aodhan’s eyes went straight to Illium when he walked in the door. “Anything?”
Shaking his head, Illium grabbed a chair and carried it to in front of the fire. He sat so he faced Jinhai, but not so close that he was intruding into the boy’s space—more as if he was simply drying his wings. Angel feathers had a natural oil that couldn’t be felt to the touch, but that helped them repel water. It wasn’t foolproof, however.
That time Illium had crashed into the Hudson, Raphael had told him his wings had become waterlogged. Mostly due to injuries that had disrupted the normal rhythms of his body. Today, it wasn’t about that. The heat just felt good against his chilled body. His position also made him less threatening.
“Here.” Aodhan, who’d disappeared into the kitchen, returned to put a cup of hot mead in his hands. “I threw it on the stove to warm after you left.”
The first sip was nectar in his blood. “Thanks.” He sighed. “It’s good.” After taking a few more sips, he leaned forward, the drink held loosely between his hands—and reached for Aodhan’s mind. Adi, I need to ask Jinhai a few questions. I have a theory. Could be ass-backward wrong, but I won’t know until I ask.
Aodhan moved to sit on the arm of the sofa on Jinhai’s far side, in a pose that appeared more protective than guard-like. You think he’s behind the carnage at the hamlet. His jaw was a tense line.
Illium looked at his friend, met the clear blue-green so hauntingly beautiful. Yes.
A quiet exhale from Aodhan, his features tight. Ask. If he ignores you, I’ll nudge him along.
But when Illium shifted his attention to Jinhai and said, “Will you tell me about Quon?” the boy smiled.
“Quon protects me.” Putting aside the string, Jinhai hugged his legs to his chest with arms too skinny to fight off even a moderately strong adult—mortal or immortal. “Quon plays with me.”
“You like Quon?”
An enthusiastic nod. “He’s strong. Not like me. Quon can talk to Mother.” His face fell. “I just hide. I get scared and I hide, but he’s never scared.”
“He sounds like a good brother,” Illium said, while Aodhan sat motionless.
“Yes.” Jinhai rocked back and forth. “But Quon does bad things sometimes.” This last was a whisper. “Quon gets angry, and does bad, bad things.”
“Like steal other people’s skins?” Illium kept his voice even, not accusatory.
A jerking nod, Jinhai’s eyes going to the windows. “Quon wanted to have a family.” A soft confession. “So he wore the son’s skin. But the mother didn’t love him. She cried. It made him angry.”
Dear Ancestors, Illium. Horror in every syllable of Aodhan’s mental voice. He’s so small. How could he have done all that?
I think he’s older than we assumed—and he’s the son of an old archangel. Given how much he resembled Lijuan, Jinhai would’ve likely always been a slight man, his bones delicate, but his life had further stunted his growth. There was a good likelihood the physical damage could be reversed—the boy had immortal cells after all, and immortal cells could heal almost any damage that wasn’t congenital.
The same couldn’t be said for the mental harm done to him.
Instead of asking straight-on about the horrors he and Aodhan had unearthed, he said, “Did Quon not like the animals?”
“A dog tried to bite him. After that, he didn’t like them.” Jinhai’s eyes got wet. “I told him I still liked the dogs and the other animals, and I wanted to keep them, but he was so mad.”
That explained what had happened to the animals—but not how. Not when it came to the animals and not when it came to the mortals and vampires. “How did Quon clean up after himself? It must’ve taken a lot of work.”
Slow blinks of the boy’s eyes, followed by a sly smile. “Quon made them do it,” he whispered. “The ones who called him Son of the Goddess. Quon hates mess. He made them dig a big hole in the forest, then after, he made them cover it up like it was, with leaves and stones and dirt, so no one could see. Quon is smart.”
Illium’s skin prickled. “How did they know him? Because of how he looks?”
A tilt of Jinhai’s head. “They always knew him,” he said. “In the dark, they knew him.”
The guards, Aodhan said in Illium’s mind. He manipulated them into becoming his murderous army.
Illium could see Aodhan’s pain in the unyielding line of his spine, the way his gaze lingered on Jinhai. Others might condemn the boy, but Aodhan understood him in the way of another being who’d been to the black heart of the abyss.
His own chest tight, Illium said, “Didn’t Quon’s . . . acolytes have family in the hamlet? Didn’t they hesitate?”
“No. The Son of the Goddess told them the others were monsters only pretending to be their family.”
There had to be more to it than that, a subtle long-term manipulation—and perhaps even dangerous mental abilities developed young by a child whose physical growth had been so badly stunted. All that immortal energy would’ve redirected itself to the one part that could grow: Jinhai’s mind. “Did the worshippers set Quon free?”
Jinhai stared down for a while, then unfolded his legs to the floor and sat up straight. The eyes that met Illium’s now were harder, crueler, the smile on his lips a thing of slicing evil. “I had to get into their skins first.”
He even sounded different, older, more composed. “They were used to following Mother’s orders, but I heard them whispering that she was gone, that they didn’t know what to do. So quiet they whispered, but I can walk in silence—and I walked to the chains often to listen.”
Leaning forward in an echo of Illium’s position, he said, “So they just kept doing what they’d always done. Bringing me food from the village. That’s why Mother put that village there. For me.” Pride was a blaze that lit up the gray of his eyes and made his skin glow with a subtle power that should’ve been impossible.
Yes, this child was very, very dangerous.
“Did the others who lived in the village know about you? That you were Lijuan’s son?” Illium asked.
“Of course not. They were nothing.” He waved off all those lives in the same careless manner another man might wave off the extermination of a nest of insects. “My servants knew never to tell or their Goddess would punish them.”
“Were they all vampires?”
Another sly smile. “My blood, they love. So delicious. An addiction.”
The words raised every tiny hair on Illium’s body. “You convinced them you needed to be released.”
“I whispered to them from the chains, said things like Mother used to say. I put worms in their heads until they were mine.” His head jerked toward Aodhan, though Aodhan had done nothing to attract his attention. “The sunbright one,” he whispered. “That’s what Mother called you.
She wanted your wings.” Hard, envious eyes drilling into Illium now. “And yours. Pretty wings.”
Looking sideways, he fingered his own limp and faded feathers. “Ugly.” A spitted-out word.
“They’ll heal.” Aodhan’s voice was grit. “You are an immortal.”
“I am a god,” the boy said in the way of someone saying their hair was black or their eyes were brown. As if, to him, it was simple fact. “I am Mother’s son.”
“Where are your worshippers?”
A shrug. “I wanted to see what wearing their skins felt like.”
“Didn’t they fight?”
The boy frowned. “I was their god. They cut each other’s heads off for me. The last one knelt down so I could behead him.” He flexed his hands. “It took a long time. I’m weak.”
No one, no matter how loyal, would kneel without protest for such torture if they weren’t being controlled in some way.
Worms in their heads.
The boy’s features altered in front of Illium even as the eerie statement reverberated in his mind. “Quon shouldn’t have done that,” Jinhai whispered. “We were all alone after that.” Rubbing at his belly. “After a while, I couldn’t find anything to eat. I went back to my hole, but there was no food there, either, so I went back out.”
“Why didn’t you come toward the other angels in the area?” Illium knew the boy had to have spotted angels flying this way and that from the stronghold.
“Mother said,” he whispered. “Mother said I wasn’t to be seen. I was her secret. Her special secret.” A bright and horribly innocent smile. “I was to be her new skin, her new life.”
She was mad, so mad, Aodhan said. Why did we not see it until of late?
Because she was also very old and very clever. Her insanity had also been the kind of affliction that could look like nothing more than megalomania, or a hunger for power. Both of which were acceptable in the angelic world. “What will you do now?” he asked the son she’d doomed to the same madness. “And what will Quon do?”
A lost look. “Quon says he will be a god like Mother. He says I can stay with him. But he will be the god.”
Illium nodded, as if everything about their conversation was rational. “Will you stay here with us for the time being?”
“Yes.” Jinhai’s expression brightened. “Mother said you were strong. The sunbright angel and the bluebell angel. She would have you in her court. Quon says you can serve him now.” He looked out at the snow. “And it’s cold outside. It’s warm here. Quon likes it here, too. Quon says we can stay.”
* * *
* * *
“I have to tell Suyin first,” Aodhan said to Illium when the two of them moved into the hallway to discuss what to do next.
Illium scowled. “I’m not about to keep this from Raphael.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to—but beyond it being my duty as her second, it’s a thing of respect to go to her first. This is her territory, and sadly, this is her family.”
Illium folded his arms, but he didn’t have any good arguments to the contrary. It wasn’t as if Lijuan’s son posed any direct threat to New York. He was, however, a very real threat to China. “You have reception?”
Taking out his phone, Aodhan glanced at it. “Yes.”
While he remained in the hallway to make the call, Illium returned to the warmth of the room that held a boy whose mind had split in two. He’d heard of this type of mental wound, but had believed it to be a far less defined division—a blurring of personalities or a veil falling over the person’s mind, as had happened with his mother.
But this was nothing akin to that.
To all intents and purposes, Jinhai and Quon were two different people.
Having spotted an old game set on a bookshelf in the room, he grabbed it, set up the board on the low table in front of the fire. “A game?”
Jinhai jumped at the invitation.
He knew the game very well. It was one taught to most angelic children, to help them with their mathematical prowess. Partway through, he said, “I won’t wear your skin,” and his voice had shifted again, as if his mind couldn’t settle. “I don’t want to be all alone again.”
A child is not to be blamed for the actions of evil.
—Archangel Raphael
45
To say that Raphael hadn’t anticipated the reason behind Suyin’s call was a vast understatement.
“I wanted to tell you this myself, Raphael,” she said, her voice quiet. “You have been a good friend to me, and it was two of your Seven who unearthed this latest horror.”
Raphael understood exactly why Illium hadn’t come to him with the knowledge. This went beyond politics and into the complicated and emotional realm of family. “There’s no doubt the child is Lijuan’s?” He couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea that Lijuan, a being of death and rot and evil, had borne a child.
“Illium and Aodhan have agreed to bring Jinhai to me—they are fashioning a carrier as we speak, with what I’m told is the child’s enthusiastic agreement. So I have not yet seen him with my own eyes, but the images Aodhan sent . . .”
A shuddering breath. “He is hers. I’ve authorized Aodhan to send you the images, too, so you will see. Illium has informed me that there are scientific tests that can be done to confirm Jinhai’s bloodline, and we will do those, but I do not need them to know.”
“There were periods when Lijuan disappeared from public view,” Raphael murmured, “but none of us saw anything unusual in that. Even Michaela did that a few times.” And the former Archangel of Budapest had loved attention and adored being the muse of artists as well as the fantasy of millions, mortal and immortal.
“My aunt’s people were also so loyal to her that they would help her hide many things.”
“But to hide an angelic child? To allow that child to grow up alone in the dark?” Were Lijuan not already dead, Raphael would’ve killed her then and there. “That isn’t loyalty, Suyin. It’s the same kind of blind faith that led to so many of her people supporting her goal to shroud the world in death.”
“I won’t argue with you there,” Suyin said. “But I ask your advice—should I share this with the rest of the Cadre?”
Raphael paused, gave the question serious thought. By every measure, this was a private family matter. And judgmental eyes were already looking Suyin’s way. On the flipside, it appeared the boy could be a treacherous threat. “Can you control him on your own?”
“I can cage him.” Bitter words. “But a jailer is not who I want to be. And when I think of what was done to him . . . Where is the moral line, Raphael? I want him in the care of healers of the mind, not locked up like an animal.”
“I agree with you.” Despite the terrible darkness of the child’s crimes, Raphael struggled against the idea of simply imprisoning or executing a being who’d never been given a chance to become anything better.
Jinhai had to be given a choice—and a foundation on which to make that choice. “I think,” he said at last, “so long as you take the necessary measures to keep him from harming others, this isn’t Cadre business.”
Truth was, some on the Cadre would kill the boy rather than allow any piece of Lijuan to exist. But the child should not be judged by the crimes of his mother. “I can assist you. My mother will also help.” Raphael knew Caliane well enough to be certain of that. “Three archangels being aware of the problem is enough for now.”
“He will need to be caged, even as we seek to help him,” Suyin said, the bitterness back in her tone. “Lijuan has won there. Made me like her.”
“No, Suyin. You won’t consign him to the cold dark. You’ll contain him in the light. And once he has the power of flight, you’ll ensure he has the opportunity to take to the sky.”
“I thought to put him in an old stronghold half a day’s direct flight from my new citadel, wi
th a dedicated security and healing team,” Suyin said. “No vampires or mortals, only angels old enough to be immune to his strange abilities. I can fly to him often, speak to him.”
“Keir is currently in my city,” Raphael told her. “A short trip to check on a few of the war-injured who aren’t yet back to full health. Do you want me to alert him of this, and ask him to make plans to join you?” he said in an effort to take a little of the load off her shoulders. “You know he can be trusted.” The senior healer had worked with Suyin after her escape from Lijuan.
“Yes, I trust Keir.” Exhaustion in her voice as she said, “Do you think there is hope? Or am I just delaying the inevitable? Will I end up having to execute Jinhai when he transforms into a maddened adult with ever more deadly abilities?”
Raphael looked out over the lights of his city, thought of all he’d learned in his millennia and a half of life. “There are some that say a child damaged young will remain forever damaged.”
“I’ve heard the same.”
“But I’ve witnessed at least one child beat the odds and become far more than could be expected of them, did you only know the circumstances of their early childhood.”
Raphael’s spymaster had survived a childhood marred by his father’s obsessive jealousy—a jealousy that had ended in the viscous scarlet of his mother’s lifeblood, and the ashes of his father’s body. The murder-suicide on a lonely atoll had left behind a scared and grief-stricken child, the silence around him profound.
Jason had been thought mute when he first appeared in the Refuge.
But though the spymaster had plenty of scars, he was no monster and never would be. At times, Raphael thought that Jason’s deepest secret was that he felt too much, too strongly. That was why he strove to keep a certain distance between himself and the world.
Then there was Naasir, intelligent and unique and a favorite of all. He, too, had been born in a place cold and without love, a place teeming with the ghosts of the innocents who’d gone before him. Yet his heart was a thing magnificent, as wild and as ferociously protective of his people as the tiger that was his other half.
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