He saw, too, how the two weak angels had captured Aodhan in the first place. Brave of heart and kind of character, he’d gone to help her as Sachieri feigned distress—a desperate broken-winged angel stranded on an isolated stretch of land between two courier waystations. They’d stalked him long enough to know his favored flight path on this route, had been willing to try again and again until they succeeded.
Bathar, concealed in a hide that made it impossible to spot him from the air, had shot a heavy-duty crossbow bolt into Aodhan’s throat the instant he landed. In the interim, Sachieri had retrieved the crossbow on which she’d been lying, and followed that first devastating blow with one to his heart, while Bathar shot another two bolts into his wings.
The wounds—especially the heart-wound—had been enough to weaken him for the next assault: the total removal of his heart. An angel could survive that, especially an angel of Aodhan’s age, but he couldn’t regrow his heart and fight for his freedom at the same time.
It was while he was unconscious that they’d clipped his wings and put him in a box of cold iron that they’d then had a squadron of their staff fly home. Raphael made note of each and every one of those faces, for they, too, would pay. The squadron had landed twice during the journey, so Sachieri could brutalize Aodhan’s healing heart.
Once at the stronghold, they’d taken the iron box inside via a wall from which the bricks had been removed. They’d then rebricked it, and flooded the room . . . and the box.
A badly wounded angel couldn’t heal while his body fought the urge to drown. As an archangel, Raphael would feel no ill effects from being immersed in water—his cells had developed past that point. But Aodhan was only a few centuries old. He’d have been terrorized, his lungs searching for air and finding only water.
Too old to die and too young to survive without unrelenting agony.
Raphael’s eyes went to Sachieri’s chest, to the oval-shaped locket of bright yellow gold that sat against the lush cream of her skin.
Rising, he ripped it from her throat, leaving behind a line of wet red.
When he opened the locket, it was to reveal a single tiny feather of glittering diamond light. He slapped her with the back of his hand, so hard that blood flew out of her mouth, and bone cracked. Then he went to her coconspirator and broke one wing in a single movement.
A muffled, high-pitched scream, Bathar’s eyes rolling back in his head.
Returning to his seat, with Aodhan’s feather held carefully in hand, Raphael continued to trawl through their memories. Keir, he said when he realized the pattern of injuries, Aodhan’s heart has been removed at regular intervals. They allowed him to heal just enough that he’d remain conscious, but never enough to become strong enough to fight them.
It would’ve also left him too weak to slip into Sleep—not that Aodhan would’ve made that choice. In his situation, with Sachieri and Bathar slavering for his responses, it would’ve equaled suicide. And Aodhan would’ve never given his captors the satisfaction of thinking they’d broken him to the point of fatal surrender.
That explains the scarring I’m seeing, Keir replied, his voice curt in the way of a man who was busy doing another task. Angels don’t scar this way. Find out what they did to his skin and wings to make them rot. Immersion in fluid alone—even long-term immersion—doesn’t do this to our bodies.
Recalling Sachieri’s babbling at the start, Raphael dug through her mind for proof. He needs sunlight, Keir. Needs it in a way the rest of us don’t. He fought the urge to fly to the Medica, cradle Aodhan in his arms and fly him high up into the atmosphere, until not even a cloud stood between him and the sun.
As for Sachieri and Bathar, they’d figured out Aodhan’s need by a process of trial and error when his wings began to deteriorate. So, every six months, they’d torn down the brick wall to drag him out into the sunlight. Not enough to make him strong. Barely enough so he wouldn’t die.
Of course we wouldn’t know that, Keir muttered. Why would we? Our Sparkle has always had the sun on his skin. I’ll make sure his room is full of direct sunlight.
Raphael didn’t pass on the rest of what he’d learned: that the two evil cowards in front of him had used Aodhan’s weakened state to touch him in ways abhorrent and unwanted.
That healing would have to come after the physical. And it would take a lot longer. Because while Aodhan was affectionate with those he loved, he was exquisitely private with everyone else. He took care with even the most inconsequential touch. Perhaps because all his life, people had wanted to touch him, tried to touch him.
Aodhan valued his ability to decide who he wanted that close.
Sachieri and Bathar had stolen that choice from him, stolen it in a way that made Raphael’s hand glow, his need to annihilate them almost overwhelming. Almost. “Oh, I’m not going to kill you,” he said when a wet patch spread on the front of Bathar’s pants, and Sachieri began to snivel and plead all over again.
He smiled again. “First, I will ask master artisans to build an iron box for each of you, lined with spikes and infested with spiders and biting insects, so that you can never rest, never not be touched.” As they hadn’t permitted Aodhan to escape their touch. “They will crawl into your mouths, set up home in your orifices, dig their teeth into your eyeballs.”
Sachieri threw up.
Ignoring the stink of it, Raphael continued. “Then I will bury those boxes so far beneath a weight of soil and stone that only an archangel will be able to retrieve you. And I will retrieve you. I don’t intend for you to fall into a stupor and miss out on the experience of being buried alive.”
“Please!” Sachieri screamed, her beauty lost in a tracery of burst veins and smeared cosmetics. “We’re sorry! He’s so beautiful! We just—”
Raphael flicked out a hand and her lower mouth and jaw broke apart in a splatter of blood, bone, and flesh. Her head dropped. He raised an eyebrow at Bathar, then burned off his gag with a carefully modulated use of archangelic power . . . just enough to sear off the first layer of his skin. “Would you like to speak?”
A convulsive shake of his head, his eyes all but bulging out of his head as he fought not to scream at the agony around the red flesh of his mouth.
“A good choice. Now, to wake your lover.” Raphael dug his fingers into her mind, wrenched her out of the peace of unconsciousness.
After he had the full attention of her bloodshot, terror-filled eyes, he tapped a finger on the arm of his chair, Aodhan’s feather still curled safe in his other hand. “You took Aodhan from us for six hundred and ninety-nine days.
“Now, I’m not so severe that I’ll make you serve a year for each day.” A small smile of apparent boredom. “That would be tedious after a while, as you’d be so insane you wouldn’t understand what was happening.”