“This tea”—he held it up—“Lijuan drank that.”
“How do you know?” Aodhan’s forehead crinkled.
“She came to New York once, back before she lost her freaking mind,” Illium muttered. “She was a guest, and Raphael asked me to source some of this.” He’d forgotten that random piece of information until he laid eyes on the tin.
“So,” Aodhan said, “the child in this place might have nothing to do with her bloodline.”
“Makes sense if Suyin isn’t aware of anyone who’s missing.” Crouching down, Illium opened a small cupboard. “Empty. No food.” He stood. “Lijuan could’ve arranged for fresh meals to be sent through from the stronghold.”
“Signs are that she closed it up a while ago.” Aodhan’s voice held a creeping darkness. “The hamlet, Blue. In the middle of nowhere. It could’ve been started specifically as a kitchen for this child—and as the home of the guards. It’d also explain the rage behind the massacre. To the child, every resident of the hamlet was their jailor.”
The ugliness of an entire community conspiring to hide this unpardonable secret . . . Illium clenched his gut, fisted his hand. Raging would do no good, wouldn’t erase all that had been done. “If the guards deserted their post after Lijuan’s death, the child would’ve been left to starve.”
“That bread roll,” Aodhan murmured, “it’s old, but surely, it would’ve disintegrated or been in a far worse condition if it was lying there for a year?”
“Yeah, you’re right.” Illium chewed on that. “Could’ve been Suyin’s arrival in the region that spooked them.” Picking up another book, he flipped the pages to check the language. English. Another proved to be in French. “An angelic halfling could survive such a short starvation.”
“The guards who did this,” Aodhan murmured, “they would’ve had to be some of her most loyal people, must’ve considered her their goddess. They’d have clung to the hope of her return long after any hope was lost.”
“Yet to assist in the torture of a child?” Putting down the book, Illium shook his head, his jaw working. “That isn’t serving your goddess; it’s an embrace of evil.”
“Yes.” Nothing could ever justify this place, this act. “What have you found?” he asked Illium, well able to see the tic in Illium’s jaw, the whiteness around his mouth.
No quicksilver heat this, but a bone-deep rage that echoed Aodhan’s.
“The child had an extensive study schedule and, from the handwritten notes, kid’s smart.”
“So there’s reason to hope they aren’t responsible for the carnage.”
“Yes.” Despite his answer, Illium’s gaze was bleak. “I can’t imagine what this life would do to a child’s psyche. We have to be prepared for the worst.”
Neither one of them spoke again until they’d looked over every inch of the space, then—retrieving Smoke, who was now awake enough to hold on to Illium’s shoulder when he tucked her up there—made their way back outside. Illium was on alert for any sign of distress from Aodhan, but his friend’s simmering anger seemed to have pushed out every other emotion.
Illium was glad for it. Aodhan was slower to anger than Illium, but when he did reach that point, his anger burned for far longer than Illium’s own fury. The only living person against whom Illium had held a long grudge was Aegaeon. Even then, he was fairly certain Aodhan’s grudge on his behalf was a harder, darker thing.
Once outside, they flew up into the sky to speak, on the off chance the child was hiding out nearby, watching them. Hovering opposite Aodhan, the kitten held to his chest with one hand, Illium said, “I’ve been thinking about the lack of dust. Tidiness is one thing, but a place like that wouldn’t remain dust-free without maintenance. I think the kid’s been coming back on a regular basis.”
“It’s the only stable place in their universe,” Aodhan said, his voice gritty. “The only place that they know in great detail.”
Illium chewed the inside of his cheek. “Aodhan, any angelic child that grew up in there wouldn’t be able to fly.” Flight required muscle strength, and that strength developed over a childhood of trying to fly. Sunlight was also a requirement for much the same reason mortal children needed sunlight—it helped with bone growth and the health of the mind.
Aodhan’s shoulders were tight as he said, “It’s possible Lijuan did allow the child small trips outside. If so, that would make them even more inclined to madness. Because a child who grew up in there would know nothing else, but one who knew an outside world existed and had seen it? Then to become aware they were trapped?”
Nausea threatened to strangle Illium. He stroked Smoke’s warm, fragile body—all fur and bone, she was—in an effort to comfort both her and himself. “We need to come back here in the daylight.” With all that had occurred, it wasn’t far off now. “We’ll see more. And we need to bring food.”
Aodhan looked at him. “You want to lure the child here?”
“Think about it—if they’re used to being fed by others, it won’t seem unusual to them. They might even be comforted by the idea of being given food.”
Illium made himself take the next step. “I think they ate their way through the easy consumables that they could find in the hamlet, but don’t have the cooking skills to use the staples like rice. And if it was the child . . . it makes sense that they didn’t know how to make such a simple thing as soup.”
Aodhan looked in the direction of the hamlet. “Why would a child do such horrors, Blue? I can’t believe it.”
It wasn’t the first time this day that Aodhan had slipped into using Illium’s childhood nickname, and, to Illium, it was a measure of his friend’s mental struggle with all they’d seen and experienced today. He wanted desperately to wrap Aodhan up in his wings, protect him from the nightmares of the past, but he’d gotten the message there: Aodhan was in no mood to be protected.
It grated on Illium to not be able to do anything, but he kept a grip on himself. “We know Lijuan was a monster,” he said. “We have no way of knowing what she did to this child, what she raised them to be.”
Eyes of crystalline blue and green, shattered outward from a black pupil, as familiar as his own, looking into his. “Do you think she purposefully raised a child capable of such evil?” He shook his head on the heels of his question. “Why am I asking you questions you can’t answer?”
Shoving a hand through the glittering beauty of his hair, he said, “You go and get the food, take care of Smoke. I’ll keep watch here in case the child returns.”