“Your wound is great,” the healer had said, his eyes too old for his age, and his face a delicate beauty of fine bones and soft lips. “But our lives are measured in millennia. This step is just the first one on your journey.”
That step was enough for now. It allowed him to do all his tasks as a member of the Seven—and it had kept him from faltering in his position as Suyin’s interim second. His muscles might be locked in painful tension, his head pounding from his awareness of being in a place that might turn into a tomb, but he could function.
Aodhan? A single word that held an entire question, as if Illium could feel his increasing inner panic even though Aodhan’s breathing hadn’t altered, his step steady.
I’m maintaining, he said, because Illium was his partner in this walk into the unknown, and needed to be aware of Aodhan’s status. But then he said other words, venturing into a past long shrouded in curtains he didn’t part for anyone. It helps that we’re moving. I couldn’t move then.
Then.
A single word to encapsulate the months of horror that had changed him in a way that could never be reversed. The Aodhan I am today, he found himself saying, isn’t the Aodhan I would’ve been without what happened.
Illium inhaled sharply. You’re still you, he insisted. Still the Aodhan who makes art that stuns people to silence, still the Aodhan who’s gentle with the vulnerable, still the Aodhan loyal to those you call friends and family.
Aodhan shook his head under the weight of the mountain pressing down on him. I used to be made of light, Blue. Now . . . now there are patches of indelible obsidian within. So strange, that he’d railed against his blazing presence as a youth, a presence that meant he could never walk in the shadows, and now the shadows lived and breathed inside him.
34
Illium fought to keep himself from stopping and turning to Aodhan. He’d never pushed Aodhan to talk about the twenty-three months when they’d lost him, or what had followed in the aftermath. Had he imagined Aodhan bringing it up one day of his own volition, he’d have guessed it would be in the brightest light, in a wide-open space.
Not in near-darkness in a tunnel dank and echoing.
Yet this was the location Aodhan had chosen, and Illium wasn’t about to push against the opening of a door that his friend had bolted shut for hundreds of years. Aodhan, he said. Trust me when I say you didn’t lose anything of yourself. You’re still—
You’re not listening. Hard, angry words. You’ve never listened, never accepted that I’m not who I was before I was taken. I can’t be your Aodhan. That Aodhan died over two hundred years ago and you can’t pretend he didn’t!
Illium’s heart shuddered at the blows Aodhan was landing, his first instinct anger that his friend would talk about himself this way. But then he remembered what his mother had said to him one of the times he’d talked to her about his and Aodhan’s disintegrating relationship.
“It’s like he’s put up a wall I can’t cross,” he’d said, angry and confused and hurt. So badly hurt.
“Has he, my heart?” Gentle eyes. “Or are you just seeing a newly awake part of him?”
At the time, emotional and wounded, Illium hadn’t really paid attention to the meaning behind her words. But now, under the silent whip of Aodhan’s anger, he forced himself to consider every aspect. Was it possible Aodhan’s current behavior was just a sign of growth . . . and that his friend had grown away from him?
Everything in him rebelled against that conclusion. Because even though the two of them had been fighting for more than a year now, even though he’d believed Aodhan wanted distance from him, there was no sense of distance in either one of them now. Naked emotion pulsed against the walls of the tunnel, angry and intense, with not even a hint of fucking remoteness.
You’re not listening to me, he argued back. I know what happened changed you. I fucking know! He’d witnessed it firsthand. But those monsters didn’t succeed in erasing you. They didn’t kill Aodhan.
If they had, he added before Aodhan could interrupt, you wouldn’t be capable of making whimsical art like those fairies everyone stole off the tree on the High Line, and you wouldn’t have played baseball with me in the sky, and you wouldn’t have allowed my mother to hold you when you rejected everyone else! That all means something.
A long pause as they trudged on into the darkness.
Sometimes, Aodhan said at last, I feel like I’m pretending to be the person that you want me to be.
Illium flinched. He hated that they were doing this in the dark, where he couldn’t see Aodhan’s face, where he couldn’t look into his eyes. But it was happening and he had to deal with it—only, the narrow passageway suddenly widened, the light in the walls brighter. Aodhan.
I see it. No anger or old pain in his voice now, just the acute alertness of a warrior.
Illium kept moving forward, reminded of how Elena had described finding the place of captivity of her grandparents. He didn’t allow himself to think of another cold, dark place that had been made a cell. That memory was too vivid, too painful, too much a thing that tormented him.
But why did immortals do this? Make hidden prisons underground where they did things terrible and evil? Or perhaps the tendency to go underground wasn’t so unexpected in a race known to Sleep for eons in secret places around the world, the pull toward the dark a primal impulse.
In some, however, that impulse had been badly twisted.
He looked from right to left as they emerged into a large cavern lit by the same sickly green bioluminescence. His attention was on scanning for threats, so it wasn’t until after he’d crossed the cavern to take a position by the passageway that seemed to lead deeper within that the horror of what he was seeing truly sank into him.
Aodhan had stayed at the opposite end, and now, the two of them looked at each other over the splintered remains of a table and four chairs. Playing cards lay scattered on the floor, their white backgrounds snapshots of light in this subterranean place.
At first glance, that was all there was to see: the remains of a single small table and four chairs.
No bodies. No blood. No other signs of violence.
But, when Aodhan stepped away from the tunnel through which they’d entered, and began to move around the room, he saw other things. A steel bowl lying upside down in a corner not far from a badly dented metal mug.
An instant later, his light glinted off another piece of metal: the remnants of a plate that had been twisted and torn apart from one corner to the other. He crouched over it, angling his hand so that the metal was bathed in light.
This is tough material, he said to Illium after examining it. It would’ve taken a good deal of strength to twist it into this state. Only the rare human could’ve done it. Most likely, it’d require vampiric or angelic power.