“You’re standing too close.”
Aodhan was not a man inclined to a hot temper. Except with Illium. So fine, Blue wanted to fight? They’d fight until they had this out!
41
“You know what?” he said. “You’ve had a fucking burr up your butt since you landed in China and I’m over it!”
Illium slammed the knife point down in the wooden chopping block and spun to face Aodhan. “I’ve had a burr up my butt?” His eyes glowed in a way that should’ve been impossible for anyone who wasn’t an archangel.
It terrified Aodhan—not for himself, but for Illium. He was too young, far too young. And it was crystal clear that the Cascade hadn’t fully reclaimed the gifts it had tried to force on him. Power lingered in his veins—those veins glowed softly against his skin even now.
But Aodhan was too angry to be distracted by the eerily lovely sight. “You’ve been snarling at me since the fucking minute you landed.”
“I. Have. Not.” Illium poked his chest with a pointed finger. “I have been extremely polite, you big, sparkling asshole.” Then he turned back to the board, pulled out the knife and began to slice the salami with such speed that Aodhan didn’t dare interrupt him, lest he injure himself.
He did, however, throw up his hands. “That’s your version of picking a fight with me and you know it!” he pointed out. “The last time you were polite to me like that was when I was with Ylir.”
“That’s because Ylir was a prick who treated you like a shiny trophy.” Illium’s voice caught for a second. “He’s the fucking reason we fought and you flew off alone that day. I was off duty for a week, was supposed to go on that courier run with you.”
Aodhan blinked, having never thought of it that way. “They would’ve just waited till the next time I was alone, you idiot! They were stalkers!” Sachieri and Bathar had told him all their plans, all they’d done to prepare to take him. “Don’t you tell me you’ve been carrying guilt over that or I swear I’ll kick your blue ass!”
“My ass is not blue. Unlike yours, it doesn’t sparkle, either.”
“Oh, very mature. I see how you’re avoiding the subject.” He’d deal with Illium’s misplaced guilt before this was done—because it was all part and parcel of the same thing.
Having finished slicing the salami, Illium now began to chop the defenseless meat into tiny, precise squares. “You were all ‘Oh, Ylir is so handsome,’ ‘Oh, Illium, he only calls me cutie because he loves me.’ ” A roll of the eyes. “You were a fucking blooded warrior and he was calling you cutie and patting you on the head!”
“He did not call me cutie!” Aodhan argued.
“Close enough.”
It was infuriating but Aodhan couldn’t actually argue with that. Because Illium was right. In the language they’d used at the time, it had been a “cute” sounding word. “Stop trying to distract me. We’re talking about you, not Ylir.”
“You’re talking about something. I’m just trying to make my goddamn sandwich.” He finally stopped chopping to stare down at his mass of pulverized salami. “Shit.” Grabbing a pan, he stuck it on the stove. “Guess I’ll have mince now.”
Fighting the urge to shake him, Aodhan stepped to the living area door and glanced out. Jinhai was still fast asleep, his breathing so deep and even that it was clear he was in no danger of waking up.
He returned to Illium’s side at the counter, picking up an onion from a basket along the way. When he threw it without warning, Illium shot out a hand and caught it, began to peel it with ruthless efficiency. The two of them could both cook—it was part of the training for all young angels, regardless of vocation.
“Still eating onions like they’re going extinct, I see,” he said when Illium didn’t speak.
“Maybe my onion breath will make you keep your distance.”
Wanting to scream, Aodhan began to slap together a sandwich. He put on cheese, pickle, whatever else came to hand without really thinking about it.
“Really?” Illium muttered. “You like black olives now? What? Suyin taught you how to appreciate them?”
Aodhan glanced down, saw that he had, indeed, added the hated black olives to his sandwich. Once, he might’ve stood his ground and forced down the olives just to prove to Illium that he didn’t know everything—but he’d grown out of that around the time he got his first wooden sword.
He picked off the seedless olives and put them on Illium’s plate.
Rolling his eyes, Illium ate two, then continued to make his monstrosity of a salami-onion-who-knows-what-else mixture—and not talk.
Aodhan had rarely seen his friend in this kind of a mood, but when it happened, it tended to blow over fast. Today, it showed no signs of fading.
This, Aodhan realized too late, was serious. “Are you going to tell me what I did?”
* * *
* * *
Illium’s shoulders knotted at the quiet question. He’d been ready to keep up their fighting as long as it took—it was easier to keep Aodhan at a distance with snark and bite than it was to face how much the other angel had hurt him.
He’d thought he was over it, that—given their renewed comfort with one another—they could just slide back into their previous relationship, but then he’d had to bite his tongue against his natural tendency to look after the people who mattered to him—as Aodhan mattered so deeply to him. And he’d realized that nothing was the same. He and Aodhan, they couldn’t just ignore the past year and more.
But the words stuck in his throat, too big to say.
He focused on his culinary creation with an attention that was all but blinding. Like most warriors, he could eat anything. Aodhan would eat even olives if he needed to do so to survive. So he wasn’t really thinking about what he was throwing into what he’d decided to call a stew.
Sounded better than “screw-it-all-salami.”
An echo of Ellie’s laughter in his mind, how she would’ve grinned and told him he should stick to that name for his mess of a creation. But the thought was a fleeting distraction, his skin burning from the force of Aodhan’s attention. “Stop staring at me.”
“I can’t even look at you now?” Aodhan was the one with a knife this time, and he whacked a giant hunk off the sourdough he’d broken in half. “What’s next, you’re going to banish me to my room? Won’t work. I banished myself for two hundred years and I’m not going back there.”
Illium’s hand squeezed the handle of the pan before he turned to pin Aodhan with a disbelieving gaze. “You’re making bad jokes about something you refused to talk about for fucking centuries? What’s changed? Let me guess. You and Suyin opened up to each other, had long heart-to-hearts.”