“Where are your worshippers?”
A shrug. “I wanted to see what wearing their skins felt like.”
“Didn’t they fight?”
The boy frowned. “I was their god. They cut each other’s heads off for me. The last one knelt down so I could behead him.” He flexed his hands. “It took a long time. I’m weak.”
No one, no matter how loyal, would kneel without protest for such torture if they weren’t being controlled in some way.
Worms in their heads.
The boy’s features altered in front of Illium even as the eerie statement reverberated in his mind. “Quon shouldn’t have done that,” Jinhai whispered. “We were all alone after that.” Rubbing at his belly. “After a while, I couldn’t find anything to eat. I went back to my hole, but there was no food there, either, so I went back out.”
“Why didn’t you come toward the other angels in the area?” Illium knew the boy had to have spotted angels flying this way and that from the stronghold.
“Mother said,” he whispered. “Mother said I wasn’t to be seen. I was her secret. Her special secret.” A bright and horribly innocent smile. “I was to be her new skin, her new life.”
She was mad, so mad, Aodhan said. Why did we not see it until of late?
Because she was also very old and very clever. Her insanity had also been the kind of affliction that could look like nothing more than megalomania, or a hunger for power. Both of which were acceptable in the angelic world. “What will you do now?” he asked the son she’d doomed to the same madness. “And what will Quon do?”
A lost look. “Quon says he will be a god like Mother. He says I can stay with him. But he will be the god.”
Illium nodded, as if everything about their conversation was rational. “Will you stay here with us for the time being?”
“Yes.” Jinhai’s expression brightened. “Mother said you were strong. The sunbright angel and the bluebell angel. She would have you in her court. Quon says you can serve him now.” He looked out at the snow. “And it’s cold outside. It’s warm here. Quon likes it here, too. Quon says we can stay.”
* * *
* * *
“I have to tell Suyin first,” Aodhan said to Illium when the two of them moved into the hallway to discuss what to do next.
Illium scowled. “I’m not about to keep this from Raphael.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to—but beyond it being my duty as her second, it’s a thing of respect to go to her first. This is her territory, and sadly, this is her family.”
Illium folded his arms, but he didn’t have any good arguments to the contrary. It wasn’t as if Lijuan’s son posed any direct threat to New York. He was, however, a very real threat to China. “You have reception?”
Taking out his phone, Aodhan glanced at it. “Yes.”
While he remained in the hallway to make the call, Illium returned to the warmth of the room that held a boy whose mind had split in two. He’d heard of this type of mental wound, but had believed it to be a far less defined division—a blurring of personalities or a veil falling over the person’s mind, as had happened with his mother.
But this was nothing akin to that.
To all intents and purposes, Jinhai and Quon were two different people.
Having spotted an old game set on a bookshelf in the room, he grabbed it, set up the board on the low table in front of the fire. “A game?”
Jinhai jumped at the invitation.
He knew the game very well. It was one taught to most angelic children, to help them with their mathematical prowess. Partway through, he said, “I won’t wear your skin,” and his voice had shifted again, as if his mind couldn’t settle. “I don’t want to be all alone again.”
A child is not to be blamed for the actions of evil.
—Archangel Raphael
45
To say that Raphael hadn’t anticipated the reason behind Suyin’s call was a vast understatement.
“I wanted to tell you this myself, Raphael,” she said, her voice quiet. “You have been a good friend to me, and it was two of your Seven who unearthed this latest horror.”
Raphael understood exactly why Illium hadn’t come to him with the knowledge. This went beyond politics and into the complicated and emotional realm of family. “There’s no doubt the child is Lijuan’s?” He couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea that Lijuan, a being of death and rot and evil, had borne a child.
“Illium and Aodhan have agreed to bring Jinhai to me—they are fashioning a carrier as we speak, with what I’m told is the child’s enthusiastic agreement. So I have not yet seen him with my own eyes, but the images Aodhan sent . . .”
A shuddering breath. “He is hers. I’ve authorized Aodhan to send you the images, too, so you will see. Illium has informed me that there are scientific tests that can be done to confirm Jinhai’s bloodline, and we will do those, but I do not need them to know.”
“There were periods when Lijuan disappeared from public view,” Raphael murmured, “but none of us saw anything unusual in that. Even Michaela did that a few times.” And the former Archangel of Budapest had loved attention and adored being the muse of artists as well as the fantasy of millions, mortal and immortal.
“My aunt’s people were also so loyal to her that they would help her hide many things.”
“But to hide an angelic child? To allow that child to grow up alone in the dark?” Were Lijuan not already dead, Raphael would’ve killed her then and there. “That isn’t loyalty, Suyin. It’s the same kind of blind faith that led to so many of her people supporting her goal to shroud the world in death.”
“I won’t argue with you there,” Suyin said. “But I ask your advice—should I share this with the rest of the Cadre?”
Raphael paused, gave the question serious thought. By every measure, this was a private family matter. And judgmental eyes were already looking Suyin’s way. On the flipside, it appeared the boy could be a treacherous threat. “Can you control him on your own?”
“I can cage him.” Bitter words. “But a jailer is not who I want to be. And when I think of what was done to him . . . Where is the moral line, Raphael? I want him in the care of healers of the mind, not locked up like an animal.”
“I agree with you.” Despite the terrible darkness of the child’s crimes, Raphael struggled against the idea of simply imprisoning or executing a being who’d never been given a chance to become anything better.