“Here.” Aodhan, who’d disappeared into the kitchen, returned to put a cup of hot mead in his hands. “I threw it on the stove to warm after you left.”
The first sip was nectar in his blood. “Thanks.” He sighed. “It’s good.” After taking a few more sips, he leaned forward, the drink held loosely between his hands—and reached for Aodhan’s mind. Adi, I need to ask Jinhai a few questions. I have a theory. Could be ass-backward wrong, but I won’t know until I ask.
Aodhan moved to sit on the arm of the sofa on Jinhai’s far side, in a pose that appeared more protective than guard-like. You think he’s behind the carnage at the hamlet. His jaw was a tense line.
Illium looked at his friend, met the clear blue-green so hauntingly beautiful. Yes.
A quiet exhale from Aodhan, his features tight. Ask. If he ignores you, I’ll nudge him along.
But when Illium shifted his attention to Jinhai and said, “Will you tell me about Quon?” the boy smiled.
“Quon protects me.” Putting aside the string, Jinhai hugged his legs to his chest with arms too skinny to fight off even a moderately strong adult—mortal or immortal. “Quon plays with me.”
“You like Quon?”
An enthusiastic nod. “He’s strong. Not like me. Quon can talk to Mother.” His face fell. “I just hide. I get scared and I hide, but he’s never scared.”
“He sounds like a good brother,” Illium said, while Aodhan sat motionless.
“Yes.” Jinhai rocked back and forth. “But Quon does bad things sometimes.” This last was a whisper. “Quon gets angry, and does bad, bad things.”
“Like steal other people’s skins?” Illium kept his voice even, not accusatory.
A jerking nod, Jinhai’s eyes going to the windows. “Quon wanted to have a family.” A soft confession. “So he wore the son’s skin. But the mother didn’t love him. She cried. It made him angry.”
Dear Ancestors, Illium. Horror in every syllable of Aodhan’s mental voice. He’s so small. How could he have done all that?
I think he’s older than we assumed—and he’s the son of an old archangel. Given how much he resembled Lijuan, Jinhai would’ve likely always been a slight man, his bones delicate, but his life had further stunted his growth. There was a good likelihood the physical damage could be reversed—the boy had immortal cells after all, and immortal cells could heal almost any damage that wasn’t congenital.
The same couldn’t be said for the mental harm done to him.
Instead of asking straight-on about the horrors he and Aodhan had unearthed, he said, “Did Quon not like the animals?”
“A dog tried to bite him. After that, he didn’t like them.” Jinhai’s eyes got wet. “I told him I still liked the dogs and the other animals, and I wanted to keep them, but he was so mad.”
That explained what had happened to the animals—but not how. Not when it came to the animals and not when it came to the mortals and vampires. “How did Quon clean up after himself? It must’ve taken a lot of work.”
Slow blinks of the boy’s eyes, followed by a sly smile. “Quon made them do it,” he whispered. “The ones who called him Son of the Goddess. Quon hates mess. He made them dig a big hole in the forest, then after, he made them cover it up like it was, with leaves and stones and dirt, so no one could see. Quon is smart.”
Illium’s skin prickled. “How did they know him? Because of how he looks?”
A tilt of Jinhai’s head. “They always knew him,” he said. “In the dark, they knew him.”
The guards, Aodhan said in Illium’s mind. He manipulated them into becoming his murderous army.
Illium could see Aodhan’s pain in the unyielding line of his spine, the way his gaze lingered on Jinhai. Others might condemn the boy, but Aodhan understood him in the way of another being who’d been to the black heart of the abyss.
His own chest tight, Illium said, “Didn’t Quon’s . . . acolytes have family in the hamlet? Didn’t they hesitate?”
“No. The Son of the Goddess told them the others were monsters only pretending to be their family.”
There had to be more to it than that, a subtle long-term manipulation—and perhaps even dangerous mental abilities developed young by a child whose physical growth had been so badly stunted. All that immortal energy would’ve redirected itself to the one part that could grow: Jinhai’s mind. “Did the worshippers set Quon free?”
Jinhai stared down for a while, then unfolded his legs to the floor and sat up straight. The eyes that met Illium’s now were harder, crueler, the smile on his lips a thing of slicing evil. “I had to get into their skins first.”
He even sounded different, older, more composed. “They were used to following Mother’s orders, but I heard them whispering that she was gone, that they didn’t know what to do. So quiet they whispered, but I can walk in silence—and I walked to the chains often to listen.”
Leaning forward in an echo of Illium’s position, he said, “So they just kept doing what they’d always done. Bringing me food from the village. That’s why Mother put that village there. For me.” Pride was a blaze that lit up the gray of his eyes and made his skin glow with a subtle power that should’ve been impossible.
Yes, this child was very, very dangerous.
“Did the others who lived in the village know about you? That you were Lijuan’s son?” Illium asked.
“Of course not. They were nothing.” He waved off all those lives in the same careless manner another man might wave off the extermination of a nest of insects. “My servants knew never to tell or their Goddess would punish them.”
“Were they all vampires?”
Another sly smile. “My blood, they love. So delicious. An addiction.”
The words raised every tiny hair on Illium’s body. “You convinced them you needed to be released.”
“I whispered to them from the chains, said things like Mother used to say. I put worms in their heads until they were mine.” His head jerked toward Aodhan, though Aodhan had done nothing to attract his attention. “The sunbright one,” he whispered. “That’s what Mother called you. She wanted your wings.” Hard, envious eyes drilling into Illium now. “And yours. Pretty wings.”
Looking sideways, he fingered his own limp and faded feathers. “Ugly.” A spitted-out word.
“They’ll heal.” Aodhan’s voice was grit. “You are an immortal.”
“I am a god,” the boy said in the way of someone saying their hair was black or their eyes were brown. As if, to him, it was simple fact. “I am Mother’s son.”