“That’s good to hear, Lady Sharine. You probably know him best, even more than his parents.”
“The trouble,” Illium’s mother had added, “will come with those who can’t see beneath the unique beauty of his outer skin. They will hurt him—and so we must focus on teaching him that their blindness takes nothing away from his light and his gifts.”
Illium had thought a lot about that. Often, he had too many thoughts in his head and couldn’t sit still, but that day, he’d gone off to a favorite spot and really thought about just that one thing—and he’d come to a conclusion.
Today, he spoke that conclusion aloud: “There are stupid people in the world—but them being dumbos doesn’t change that you’re my friend, or that you’re an artist, or anything else about you.” He was pretty sure that was what his mother had meant. “You have to learn to ignore the stupids.”
Then he added a thing he’d thought up on his own. “Those people are still going to be stupid tomorrow, but you’re going to be getting better and better in your art and in your warrior training—until one day, you’ll be in an archangel’s court”—with Illium, because the two of them were always going to be friends—“and they’ll still be here, being stupid in stupid world.”
Aodhan snorted out a small laugh . . . that grew and grew and grew. Illium grinned. Nobody else could make Aodhan laugh that way, and it was one of his favorite things in the whole world when it happened.
When he stopped laughing at last, Aodhan held out the strands of grass with which he’d been fussing. He’d woven the strands into a perfect star. Illium stared at it, turning it this way and that, fascinated by the intricate work. “Can you do other shapes?”
“What do you want?” Aodhan pulled out more grass. “Stupids in stupid world.” He laughed again. “Yes, they are. They’re not my people. I don’t care about them.” Then he began to weave again without waiting for Illium to choose a shape.
Illium didn’t mind. He was just happy that Aodhan was smiling again, his shoulders no longer weighed down and his wings no longer limp. They arched against the sky as he lay on his stomach, shards of light falling off them to hit Illium’s face in a shower of stars.
23
Today
Illium rubbed at his wrist, but he couldn’t rub away the feel of Aodhan’s hand. The memory of the contact burned, ice against the fire of his skin. He knew his response had been graceless; he just hadn’t been ready and the anger that had been simmering inside him ever since that night in the Enclave—the night it all began to go wrong—had burst out.
So go, be free, Aodhan.
Shit, shit, shit! Why had he said that? He hadn’t meant it. Not in the way he’d made it sound. He didn’t want to cut bonds with his best friend, had never wanted that. And it wasn’t why Raphael had sent him here. He’d been sent to support Aodhan, not to make life difficult for him.
Shooting high into the sky, he allowed himself a scream, then dove back down toward Aodhan.
His friend scowled when he made a high-speed landing. “Trying to turn yourself into paste?”
“If I was, I’d be paste,” Illium said lightly, his heart thudding. “I’m no turtle. Want me to showcase my precision turns?”
Returning to his survey of the area, Aodhan said nothing.
“Sorry about earlier,” Illium said, because he’d never had a problem apologizing when he’d got it wrong. “You startled me.” That was as far as he could go.
Aodhan shot him an unreadable glance before returning to his task.
Before, when they’d argued and Aodhan got like this, Illium knew to leave him alone for a few hours. Aodhan wasn’t built for quick changes of mood like Illium; he needed that quiet time to work out things in his own head. Then he’d either accept Illium’s apology—if Illium was the one who’d screwed up—or he’d apologize himself. And they’d be over it.
It had never taken longer than half a day at most.
But things weren’t like how they’d always been. Their relationship had altered—no, Aodhan had altered—to the point that Illium couldn’t predict his reaction to any given situation. And right now, it wasn’t only about their relationship. “What are you searching for?”
“Anything,” Aodhan said. “If we put aside the nexus—”
“Because of its age?”
“Exactly. It wasn’t constructed during Lijuan’s age of madness, and Xan’s team found no evidence it had been in recent use.”
Illium nodded as a crisp morning wind brushed over their bodies like an affectionate pet, the world in front of them shaded in that cool color between gray and yellow that only exists in the moments when the sun has just begun to emerge.
“Once we take the nexus out of the equation,” Aodhan said, “so far all we’ve found are the odd starving reborn, bursts of trapped fog, and the toxic patches, but we know that Lijuan must’ve left more behind. She was arrogant but she was also intelligent. She didn’t hold on to her territory for millennia through blind luck.”
Folding his arms, the pale dawn sunlight welcome on his bare skin, Illium scowled. “I don’t know. She was a raving lunatic by the end even if she fooled most people into believing otherwise. She was greedy for power and certain that she could hold on to it. My opinion? Her Evilness didn’t have a backup plan.”
Lijuan had once been a respected archangel—Illium could accept that. He’d seen her from a distance more than once as a youth, witnessed how Raphael, Elijah, even Michaela interacted with her. As they would with a senior whose life and experience they held in value. But that Lijuan had begun to vanish long before her public descent into power hunger and madness.
It was Jason who’d said the latter to Illium, after the spymaster returned home following a postwar survey of China. Illium had ended up beside Jason while Dmitri, Venom, and Raphael looked over a map on which Jason had marked points of interest in Lijuan’s former territory.
New York’s damaged buildings spread out below them in a broken carpet of light, Illium had said, “How long do you think she was on this track? Lijuan, I mean. Her madness. Her fever for power.”
“Centuries.” No hesitation in Jason’s response, the pure black of his wings motionless and the curves of his facial tattoo standing out against skin that had lost some of its warm brown tones over the cooler months.
“The Cascade might have accelerated her descent,” Jason had explained, “but the more I look, the more I uncover of her belief in herself as a goddess. Prior to Caliane’s waking, she’d already begun to believe herself not just the most senior member of the Cadre, but the most powerful archangel of all time.”