Illium’s wings glowed, streaks of red on his cheekbones, but he didn’t try to get in Aodhan’s way this time.
Holding the warmth of Illium’s skin in the fingers he’d curled into his palm, Aodhan stepped into the center of the horror.
I am a goddess. I will rise and rise and rise into my reign of death.
—Archangel Lijuan
29
Death had a smell pungent and old and putrid.
The skins might’ve been cured enough not to rot, but not enough to eradicate the smell associated with dead things. Or live things that had partially rotted.
Aodhan’s stomach wanted to eject all the food he’d eaten that day, eject itself, but he held his breath and forced himself to go on. An angel his age could survive a long time without breathing, though it was uncomfortable. Far better that, however, than to have the fetid scent in his nostrils.
Memories threatened to rise, threatened to hijack his thoughts.
I’m going to tell Mother you did this.
He clung to Illium’s voice, that thread of wild blue normality. I’ll tell Eh-ma you’ve been snapping at me since you arrived in China.
I have not.
It was a silly, juvenile conversation, and it was exactly what Aodhan needed to find his feet. Which Illium would well know.
Sometimes, of late, Aodhan wanted to strangle his best friend—but then Illium would do something like this, and all Aodhan wanted was to hold him close and fix what had broken between them.
Even as they continued their ridiculous back and forth that fixed nothing, and yet bolstered Aodhan’s ability to do this, Aodhan made himself count the skins. Only ten.
Even though he hadn’t specified to what the number referred, Illium said, Add in the one on the line and it’s still nowhere enough to account for the people who lived in this village.
No, Aodhan agreed. I’ll keep looking. His fingers feeling soiled from having had to touch the skins to count them, Aodhan kept them by his sides, not wanting them to come into contact with any other part of his body.
The room just beyond the back entryway was a kitchen that appeared to have been in use in the recent past. An onion sat badly chopped on a wooden board, tomatoes that looked foraged from the garden outside sat beside it, and there was a large pot on the unlit stove. Green mold furred the vegetables.
Aodhan didn’t want to look in the pot, but he knew he had to do this, had to finish it.
Blue? Talk to me about something, anything.
Demarco and his girlfriend held a party at their new place, and I went. Drunk guild hunters have nothing on drunk tattoo artists. I almost ended up with a rose tattoo on my butt.
Aodhan clung to the steady rhythm of his friend’s voice as he forced himself to approach the large pot. There’s a pot, he told Illium when he reached it. The state of the onions and tomatoes on the board says someone was here a number of days past. It could be nothing, just an abandoned meal. Except it was the first such scene they’d discovered. The rest of the village was almost pathologically neat and tidy.
Illium said, Venom swapped out Dmitri’s Ferrari for an old Mini as a joke.
Aodhan’s hand trembled as he lifted the lid off the pot. Dmitri called me after. He was pissed.
But laughing, too, right?
Yes. He had plans for Venom’s Bugatti. The word pink came up a lot.
Illium’s laughter in his mind, the strain in it unhidden—but it was enough to hold Aodhan steady as he looked in the pot.
Slamming the lid shut, he stumbled away from the stove.
“Aodhan!”
“Stay outside!” Aodhan yelled. “I’m fine!” I was just startled, he added, because he knew Illium, understood that for him to remain outside would push him to the edge of endurance.
“I hate this!” Illium’s voice was taut. “Hurry up and get the fuck out of there!”
His protectiveness raised Aodhan’s hackles, made him want to snap back—and the surge of frustration was exactly what he needed to deal with the ugliness of what he’d found. There are rotten human remains in the pot. He didn’t enumerate on what he’d seen—the hand floating in a watery soup, the chunks of meat that had probably come from a fleshier part of the body.
All of it putrefied to noxious green and crawling black.
Whoever this was didn’t know how to cook. It looks like they just put the remains in the water. Though his gorge roiled, he made himself finish the report. There was no sign of any kind of seasoning, no herbs. If not for the onion and tomatoes, I’d have said they were just boiling the flesh off the bones.
A pause, then Illium said, You’re okay.
His relief was sandpaper over Aodhan’s senses. I’m not going to retreat back to my lair in the Refuge, he bit back, even though he knew, he knew he was being irrational. Illium had every reason to doubt Aodhan’s stability.
Fine. Stop arguing with me and get the fuck out of there.
I need to check the rest of the house. Now that he’d seen what he thought would be the worst of it, he took a deep breath—and only then realized he’d begun breathing again at some point. Autonomic reflex. Hard for even an angel to resist.
The scent of rot coated his nostrils now, familiar and ugly.
At least he could wash his hands. There was soap by the sink, and the water still ran. It wasn’t like he had to preserve the scene for a forensic team. He and Illium were it as far as any kind of investigation. But he did check the sink and the cupboard underneath for any clues before he ran the water.
One newly clean hand fisted so tight that his tendons ached, and his neck stiff from the tension in his spine, he then made himself look in the old fridge in the corner. Meat sat stacked up in neat piles in the fridge section, cut up and put into plastic containers, or wrapped up in paper.
The freezer compartment was also packed to the gills, as was the dented chest freezer that sat next to the fridge—and some of the pieces in the latter hadn’t been sliced into chunks. He recognized a human thigh, an arm, thought there might be a head at the very bottom.
Sweat broke out over his body, his pulse in his mouth. We need to check the fridges of all the nearby properties, see if there are any chest freezers in the garages. He couldn’t remember if they’d done that, being more interested in outward signs of violence and death. I think I know what happened to at least some of the bodies. The existence of the chest freezer inside the house was likely the reason the killer had chosen this otherwise ordinary house as their home base. The rest have to be buried in the forest. Where it would’ve been impossible for Vetra to spot the graves from the air.
Can you imagine what Ellie would say about now?