Aodhan rolled his eyes. “I have the light, you idiot.”
“Which is quite wide enough for me to stand in. You also can’t focus on that and still focus on attack or defense.”
Aodhan shrugged. “I can see over your head anyway. I’ll just shoot bolts of power at anything that comes.”
He could all but hear Illium’s narrowed eyes in his response. “You’re exactly one and a half inches taller than me. Don’t try to convince anyone otherwise.”
Oddly happy with their bickering—normal, so fucking normal—Aodhan didn’t argue any further as Illium stepped in front of him and they began to move toward the door that shouldn’t exist. His heart was quiet, his breathing calm. He’d moved into full combat mode, with no room for extraneous emotion.
It wasn’t how all soldiers worked, but it was how Aodhan worked.
Having reached the strange pattern in the rock, Illium pulled, pushed, and had no success whatsoever in opening it. “Well, phew, false alert.”
Aodhan blinked out his light . . . and there it was, the faintest glow emanating from the rock . . . in the shape of a rounded door.
“Fuck.” Illium followed up the harsh expletive with words far quieter—and far more potent. “Adi, you can’t go in there.”
Aodhan bristled against what sounded like an order. “I got over my fear of confined spaces a long time ago.”
Raphael had never pushed him, never made overcoming his phobia a condition of his position in the Seven. It was Aodhan who’d been desperate to shake off the chains left behind by his captors. He’d gone to Keir, and the healer had worked with him over a period of a decade to patch over that broken piece inside him.
“Don’t snarl at me,” Illium muttered, his face invisible in the pitch-black of the night. “I know you can do it. I also know you hate it beyond anything else in the entire world.”
“No,” Aodhan said. “I don’t hate it beyond anything else. It would have to be underwater for that.”
The words fell between them like bullets fired point-blank.
A slight movement, as if Illium had staggered back.
“Blue?” Aodhan went to reach out, but a noise from the forest had them both going motionless.
When the noise came again, Aodhan recognized it as the rustling made by a small nocturnal predator. Two glinting eyes low to the ground confirmed his supposition. The kitten hissed. “There,” he said to Illium, “your new love will protect us.”
“I swear to—” Biting off whatever he’d been about to say, Illium moved again, and Aodhan brought back his light.
It took them over ten minutes to trigger the door open, both of them just pressing and pushing at various points on and around the door until the mechanism finally clicked. Aodhan half-expected a groan as he pulled back the door while Illium stood guard, but it moved smoothly . . . and he caught a hint of cooking oil.
He moved his light toward the hinges to check. They gleamed; there were also stains on the floor that could’ve come from oil. He swiped a finger over a hinge to confirm. “Recently oiled.”
“Those hinges would need it—they’re ancient.”
Aodhan saw his friend was right. The hinges weren’t simply old, they were from a different time. “What was Lijuan keeping inside?” Because he had no doubts, none, that this was the doing of the Goddess of China, the archangel who’d believed herself above life, above death.
Illium stepped forward, stopped. “Aodhan, are you sure?”
Aodhan fought back his aggressive response. “I won’t break,” he said, the words stiff. “I can watch your back.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about and you know that.” It was a dangerously quiet statement.
The kitten hissed again.
“She’s going to give us away,” Illium muttered, “but I can’t exactly leave her outside. What if whatever this thing is eats her? She’ll be scared in the dark, too.”
That was Illium, forever a collector of the lost and the weak, forever the angel who protected those who couldn’t protect themselves. Aodhan was his most long-lasting project.
“I can put her into a doze,” he said past the knot that final thought put in his chest.
“New power?”
“No, just an extension of the butterfly entrancement.” He didn’t often bring up his ability to call butterflies to him, since it wasn’t exactly the most practical power, but it turned out it had hidden depths. “I worked out that butterflies are kind of hypnotized around me, and before I left New York I accidentally called five kittens, who all laid around languidly and watched me, so . . .”
Illium took Smoke from his shoulder, held her out. Scared by the situation, she bared her teeth at Aodhan, but was soon heavy-lidded, her mouth opening in a yawn before she curled up on Illium’s hand. As he placed her back into her safe spot against his chest, Illium said, “Can you affect larger animals?”
“Not as far as I know. Just butterflies, tiny birds, cats, and”—he sighed—“bats.”
He saw Illium’s shoulders shake, his eyes brighten, but he didn’t tease Aodhan about his strange little side ability. Instead, he focused on the barely lit passage they’d exposed. “You’re really sure?”
“Go before I fry your hair for asking again.”
“How would you explain my bald head to my mother?” Illium muttered on a snarl before they stepped into the passage.
Aodhan couldn’t see any lights, but the tunnel wasn’t dark. Bioluminescence?
Could be. We survive this, the scientists can run tests. Or, you know, Lijuan figured out how to lock her energy into external things. Maybe she did a Uram and left behind a batshit piece of herself.
Aodhan was not even going to entertain that idea. All her lingering energy died with her. The biggest evidence of that was the mass “death” of her black-eyed automaton soldiers. They’d fallen from the sky, rotting from the inside out.
I don’t trust even my own eyes when it comes to Lijuan, Illium muttered. But yeah, it’s probably bioluminescence. I can see what looks like moss on the walls—glow seems to be coming off that.
A part of Aodhan was fascinated by this living thing that thrived without sunlight—an act impossible for Aodhan—but the rest of him was hyperfocused on watching Illium’s back. Despite his earlier teasing, their height difference was minimal, and he couldn’t see over Illium’s head, so he had to watch and listen with all of his sensory energy to ensure he didn’t miss a threat.
But there was nothing to miss, not for a long time as they went steadily downhill. He had to fight every step of the way not to turn back and run screaming into the night. That was what his work with Keir had done—taught him to feel the fear and go forward anyway.