“No,” Illium said at once, his eyes staring off into the distance. “In simple terms, they weren’t a part of your life or your duties—you had no reason to pay them any special attention. You know of Priya Anjalika, don’t you? She’s shy and small and hides away in her office, but you know of her because she’s part of your world.
“But if I asked a senior squadron commander in Titus’s court about her, he’d just look at me blankly. She might be an important component of the Tower’s internal machinery, but she’s not a threat he has to monitor—and is otherwise not in the orbit of his attention.”
“You put it so clearly.” Cutting through the fog. “Priya Anjalika, however, is critical to the Tower.” A specialist in accounts, she could do sums in her head faster than anyone else Aodhan knew. “Sachieri and Bathar were only tied to Elijah in the most nominal way, and otherwise just lived their lives.”
Aodhan thought back to all he’d learned of his captors in the aftermath. “Sachieri had lands that mortals and vampires farmed for her, and Bathar managed a small number of properties he’d acquired over the years. Pooled together, their income allowed them to live a life comfortable and settled.”
“Normal,” Illium murmured. “Ordinary angels living an ordinary life.”
“Not people who rode into battle, or people who picked fights or started controversies. They might’ve been the neighbors of my parents or a strolling couple I ran across in an art gallery—immortals who found happiness in a calm walk through eternity.”
He realized he was leaning forward, his hands fisted on his thighs. “That’s why I felt no sense of threat when Sachieri waved me down from the sky. It was gray that day, but she was wearing a gown of vivid yellow—impossible to miss.”
He’d seen her before he realized she was in distress, and for a heartbeat, his mind had noticed only the beauty of the composition, that splash of shining yellow against the craggy rocks and sky-piercing forest.
“The way she was collapsed on the ground under a huge tree with broken branches,” he told Illium, “I thought she’d tangled her wings on a sharp branch that she hadn’t noticed and fallen, needed help . . .”
Lifting his hand, he pressed it over his heart, rubbed. “The crossbow bolt struck my throat before I knew what was happening. And her face . . . right in front of me as I staggered and bled, this greedy, triumphant look to her as she punched a bolt into my heart.” A memory of blinding shock, his brain struggling to comprehend what was happening. “I should’ve moved, acted faster, but—”
“Screw that, Adi.” Having put aside his sandwich, Illium leaned forward in an echo of Aodhan’s pose—so he could turn and glare at Aodhan. “They might not have been angels of power, but Sachieri was four thousand years your senior, Bathar not much younger.
“You were only three hundred, with nothing of their life experience—and none at all with evil that wears a friendly face. Hell, even Raphael would go down if you took out his heart. Maybe only for a second, but that blow is a massive shock to our systems.”
Aodhan looked down at the ground. “I know you’re right, but for so long, I kept running those moments in my head, kept telling myself that there was a way I could’ve escaped—even though I knew full well I was close to collapse the instant they destroyed my heart.” Sachieri had chosen the heaviest possible bolt, fired it with a precision she’d honed over constant practice—all for that one brutal instant.
“After she hit my heart,” he continued because now that he’d started, he’d tell Illium all of it, “he shot me in each wing. Then he sliced off half of one wing.” Aodhan couldn’t remember the pain of that, his mind already shutting down as his young body struggled to heal catastrophic damage.
“Fuckers.” Illium hissed out the word, his eyes wet. “Fuckers. I wish we could make them rise from the dead so we could torture them over and over again.”
Jerking up his head, Aodhan gripped the back of Illium’s neck, squeezed. “No.” He held the angry, devastated gold of his friend’s gaze. “I won’t have it, Blue. I won’t have their evil reaching out from beyond death to take hold of you. Don’t you let them do that.”
Illium’s jaw worked. “I can’t not hate them.”
“Fine. But don’t you allow their poison to seep into your blood.” He squeezed the strong column of Illium’s neck once more, Illium’s skin hot and smooth under his touch. “They were punished. They’re dead, and worse, forgotten by the vast majority of our kind. If you give them residence in your head, then you keep them alive.”
Illium stared at the fire . . . but gave a jagged nod.
No doubt, it’d come up again in the future—if and when it did, Aodhan would deal with it. He could deal with it because he’d long moved past hate, banishing his captors to the oblivion they deserved. But he knew that had their roles been reversed, had his laughing, playful Illium been the one taken and tortured, he would’ve hated, hated hard and for a long, long time.
“Their very normalcy,” he said, picking up the thread of the story, “it broke my trust in the world.”
Illium’s wings began to glow, his body rigid, but he didn’t interrupt.
Aodhan ran his knuckles down his friend’s spine regardless, pulling him back from the edge of the abyss on which he walked. “I didn’t trust my instincts after returning to the Refuge. How could I? When these two people who seemed so normal had done that to me? When the ordinary, everyday people who were their staff had helped them? How could I trust anyone?”
Illium’s body remained a thing of granite, but he reached out to place one hand over Aodhan’s knee. As if anchoring him to the here and now so that he wouldn’t fall into the past. Or perhaps anchoring himself from falling into a rage. They sat that way, one hand on the other, as Aodhan kept on speaking.
“You know what they did to me.” Sachieri and Bathar had created panels in the box that they could unlock and lift at will, so that they could reach in and touch him . . . possess him. “I couldn’t escape them, they made sure of it.” Whether that meant starving him, or wounding him over and over again.
“But the worst, the absolute worst of it all was how Sachieri would sit with me and tell me how very beautiful I was, how much she loved me, and how she knew I’d love her back if she just gave me a little more time.”
He shook his head. “She was as sane as you or me—yet she seemed to believe every word she spoke. Bathar was sane, too. But he enjoyed coming up with new and cruel ways to hurt me. It made me wonder if I could ever trust the faces people wear, if I could ever believe what came out of their mouths.”
Wings stirring, he thrust both his hands through his hair. “Then what happened in the Medica . . .”