Her quivering seemed to stop, a wary creature who was listening.
Encouraged, he said, “Did you get separated from your family? I can escort you back to the settlement.”
Her head lifted, her eyes inky pools swimming in a pale oval face of astonishing beauty. When she spoke, it was in a whisper so low that he had to ask her to repeat herself.
“Dead,” she rasped. “My family is all dead.”
Grim as it was, at this point in history, that wasn’t an unusual thing in this territory. “I’m sorry.” That the dreadful loss of life was a national tragedy didn’t make it any less painful. “But I don’t think they’d want you out here alone. Let’s walk to the stronghold.”
A jagged shake of the head, her body hunching in on itself. “The archangel is there.”
“Archangel Suyin means her people no harm.”
“No, her.” The girl’s voice was an urgent whisper. “She’s here. She walks in death.”
A shiver rippled up Illium’s spine. Fighting past it, he made his tone blunt. “I saw Lijuan die. I saw her be erased from existence by the combined might of many archangels. She’s not coming back from that.”
“Goddess,” the girl whispered. “Goddess can’t die. I wanted to go home. But the goddess can’t die. She can’t die.”
Rising to his feet, Illium decided it was time for harsh reality. “She’s not here, and the settlement moves tomorrow. If you don’t join them now, you’ll be left behind.”
A moment of motionless silence before his words seemed to penetrate. Unraveling from her tight curl in jagged movements, she stood—and he realized she wasn’t a girl after all, but a young woman. Nineteen or twenty mortal years perhaps. Her hair proved to be waist-length and was matted with leaves and other debris, and what he could see of her clothing was torn and dirty.
The smell that came off her was of old sweat and dirt. Nothing nasty. No indication of festering blood or putrefying wounds. Simply as if she hadn’t bathed for a few days.
“Did you go looking for greens and get lost?” He’d noticed any number of mortals scavenging in the forest for greens and mushrooms to supplement their diet of hunted meat. Yindi had told him that the mortals had also begun to preserve greens and fruits from the start.
“With farms lying fallow until we settle,” she’d said, “it’s a necessity. And the mortals want to contribute—they know they can’t fight off any predators, or scout for danger, and most have never hunted, so this—and donations of blood—are their contributions to our food supplies.”
But the young woman next to Illium seemed to not even hear his comment about the gathering of greens. Head down as she trudged beside him, she said, “Run. Run. Run. She walks.”
Her voice was an eerie monotone that raised all the hairs on the back of his neck. This was why he didn’t watch horror movies with Aodhan and Ellie. There were enough scary things in real life. Especially when it came to the megalomaniacal archangel who’d made the dead walk.
Deciding to leave the traumatized woman be for the time being, he led her to the stronghold, then around it to the large human encampment. It spread out for some distance, the area a bustle of activity in the daylight hours, but quiet now, as most people tried to catch a few hours of sleep before beginning the long migration home.
Most of the hearths had already been extinguished, with only a few left banked in order to provide hot drinks in the morning. Those last hearths would be safely extinguished after breakfast, the few permanent buildings locked against scavengers. The latter structures had been put up to house the very young and the very old. The rest was all temporary habitation that could be broken down within an hour, ready for transport.
The young woman looked around, her eyes wide, dazed.
Glimpsing the mortal named Rii, Illium caught his attention. “I found her coming out of the forest. She seems disoriented. Can you find her people?” Yindi had told him that the mortals were tight-knit, creating new families out of the wounded pieces of all who remained.
The man’s eyes were close-set with thick lashes, his salt-and-pepper hair buzzed close to his skull. “I don’t recognize her,” he said, his heavy accent telling Illium this dialect wasn’t his native one. “But no fear, my wife will know. My Lili knows everyone.” A hint of a chuckle in his tone. “I will take care of it, Angel.” He bowed.
Illium found the deference awkward. In New York, he’d land on a city street and people would grin and wave and the cheekiest would ask him to pose for a photograph with them. Venom was of the opinion that Illium was on more people’s social media accounts than the rest of them combined.
“That’s because I like people,” Illium had said with a grin. “I’m not a tall, dark, and brooding type like you. You know you have a hashtag.”
Viper green eyes glinting, Venom had slid on his sunglasses. “I’m not going to ask.”
“SuitPornV,” Illium had said, staying out of Venom’s viciously fast reach. “Full of sneakily taken ‘thirst’ pics of you.”
Venom had looked so utterly appalled that it had sent Illium into fits of laughter. Meanwhile, Venom’s love, Holly, had already been on her phone scrolling through the hashtag. “Your stalkers have good taste,” she’d said, then tugged a scowling Venom down for a kiss. “Don’t worry, cutie, I’ll chop off the hands of anyone who dares touch you.”
Illium hadn’t pointed out that tiny, fierce Holly had her own following. But that was the thing—in New York, immortals were part of the rhythm of life. Not the same as mortals, but still woven into the city. He knew the current levels of interaction had a lot to do with Ellie, but New York’s immortals had never been this remote from the rest of its people.
Here, a film of fear colored every contact between mortal and immortal. Even Rii, who appeared at ease with angels and vampires, had given the slightest flinch when Illium resettled his wings.
As if bracing for a blow.
Illium didn’t know how Aodhan had lived with it for so long; his friend’s personality was such that he tended to keep his distance from most strangers, mortal or immortal, but neither one of them was comfortable with obsequiousness. That wasn’t how you built a strong people, a strong city.
None of this, however, was Suyin’s fault. She couldn’t just erase the memory of her aunt’s heavy-handed rule. It would take time for the new culture to form and then permeate the population.
Leaving the young woman in Rii’s safe hands, Illium rose into the sky. When a flash of color caught his eye, he looked down to see Kai carrying out a tray of food to an angelic security team on break. It was the yellow scarf she’d used to tie back her hair that had caught his attention.