“You’re sad.”
Illium nodded. “How come he went to Sleep? Papas don’t go to Sleep.”
Aodhan remembered what Raphael had said and he didn’t say anything about Aegaeon being a bad papa. He just said, “I’m sorry. But Eh-ma is here, and Raphael is here. And I’m here.”
Illium put his head on Aodhan’s shoulder. “Do you think he didn’t like me? Was I bad?”
“No,” Aodhan said at once. “Even Brutus said he’d be proud to have you for his son, and he doesn’t like any kids.” Aodhan was careful to shape the words as the old warrior had said them, with a kind of half smile in his voice. “He yells at any other little angels who land in his garden, but he doesn’t yell at you.”
“My papa didn’t stay. He didn’t want me.”
Aodhan couldn’t stand that tone in his friend’s voice. Illium was always laughing, always playing jokes—never nasty ones, just funny ones. He wasn’t sad like this. “Your papa is old,” he said. “Maybe he was just so tired he couldn’t stay awake anymore.”
Illium chewed on a piece of dried fruit. “Do you really think so?”
“Yes,” Aodhan said, and it was a lie he didn’t mind telling—not when it made some of the sadness fade from Illium. “He played with you all the time when he came to the Refuge. My mama says that sometimes, angels just get old and tired. That’s what happened to my grandma. Remember? I told you.”
“My papa is old,” Illium murmured, but he was frowning. “Mama is old, too, and she’s not Sleeping.”
Aodhan shrugged. “Eh-ma is different. Special.”
No hesitation from Illium. “Yes, she’s special.” He sighed. “Do you think my papa will wake up soon and not be tired anymore?”
“I don’t know,” Aodhan replied. “But I know he’ll come to see you when he wakes up.”
The faintest hint of a smile on Illium’s face. “He will, won’t he? Because I’m his boy.”
19
Today
Illium. An archangel’s voice in his head. Vetra is here. She will meet you and Aodhan in the stronghold.
Yes, Archangel Suyin.
Switching direction, he landed on the cobblestones of the main courtyard, then made his way inside to the large gathering room with huge windows where they’d had dinner. Aodhan was already there, pouring Vetra a drink as she ate.
She was as he remembered from Titus’s court: a tall, leggy woman with a tumbled cap of mahogany-dark hair streaked with bronze, her skin the kind of white that tanned to a pale gold, and her wings as rich a brown as her eyes. She had the type of mobile face that seemed to mark spymasters—distinctive and vivid when she was with friends, she could turn it bland and forgettable while she was working.
It was a trick he’d seen Jason pull to great effect, and he had no idea how either did it. Jason had a tattoo that covered half his face and people still didn’t see or remember him when he didn’t want to be seen or remembered.
When Vetra lifted a hand in a silent apology aimed at Illium, he said, “Eat. You must be exhausted.” He grabbed a seat on the other side and took the tumbler of mead Aodhan passed across.
Their fingers brushed for a second.
He jerked back without meaning to, the mead sloshed—and Aodhan went motionless. Shit. It was just that he hadn’t expected it . . . and that Aodhan meant too much to him.
Vetra spoke before he could attempt to say something. What, he didn’t know.
“I didn’t find much else on my second glance,” she said. “Just the abandoned hamlet, everything neat, no rotting food in the fridges, no signs of people having packed up and left, no blood, no bodies.”
It was a haunting image she’d placed in their minds, of a place just waiting for its people to come home. “Fifty residents, right?” he said.
It was Aodhan who answered. “I checked with the scholar who did the headcount for our records—he puts the exact number at fifty-one. The woman you found? She told Rii her name is Fei. If she’s from the hamlet, that means we’re missing fifty. Thirty-nine mortals, eleven vampires.”
“High percentage of vamps. Unless they were getting blood shipped in before everything went to hell, each of the adult mortals would have to be a regular donor.”
“Yes.” Vetra took another bite, swallowed it down after a cursory chew. “I planned to look into that on my return but . . .”
She put down her sandwich, deep grooves in her forehead and lines flaring out from her eyes. “I looked for tracks, for burial places, didn’t find any. But there’s a lot of forest and I couldn’t do an in-depth search. If they’ve been dumped at the bottom of even a shallow ravine and covered with foliage, they’d be invisible from the air.”
She looked at the curved wall of windows at the front of the generous space in which they sat, beyond which lay the main courtyard. “Soon, the snow will come.”
Burying the dead in their forgotten grave.
A bleak and sad image that would haunt Illium until he found these lost people.
But though he and Aodhan spoke to Vetra for another quarter of an hour, she had precious little to add to what she’d already told them.
“It infuriates me that I’m so in the dark.” Her hand tightened on the tumbler. “I left the task unfinished, secrets hidden. More than that, I didn’t assign anyone to keep an eye on the place from the start, check regularly on the residents.”
“You have but a small team, Vetra,” Aodhan murmured, his deep voice soothing. “And the hamlet appeared well-established, its residents happy to stay outside the borders of the stronghold—you had no reason to expect a mass vanishing.”
“I should have,” Vetra muttered, her eyes like flint. “This is still Lijuan’s land.”
“No.” Aodhan’s tone was unbending. “She may have left behind some echoes, but it’s Suyin’s land now.”
A pink flush under the tanned gold of her skin, Vetra dropped her head. “You’re right. I’m just frustrated. How can fifty people vanish without a trace? Even when the black fog erupts out of the earth like pus ejected from a rank wound, it leaves behind shriveled bodies, bones.”
That was another horror of which Illium had become aware—that every so often, remnants of the black fog seeped out of the earth. As if it had been trapped in some pocket.
“None of it makes sense.” Vetra shoved both hands through her hair, then looked from Aodhan to Illium and back again. “I need you two to solve this. I must go with my archangel, but I won’t sleep easy until I know what could’ve possibly happened to so totally erase fifty living, breathing people.”