Jinhai had to be given a choice—and a foundation on which to make that choice. “I think,” he said at last, “so long as you take the necessary measures to keep him from harming others, this isn’t Cadre business.”
Truth was, some on the Cadre would kill the boy rather than allow any piece of Lijuan to exist. But the child should not be judged by the crimes of his mother. “I can assist you. My mother will also help.” Raphael knew Caliane well enough to be certain of that. “Three archangels being aware of the problem is enough for now.”
“He will need to be caged, even as we seek to help him,” Suyin said, the bitterness back in her tone. “Lijuan has won there. Made me like her.”
“No, Suyin. You won’t consign him to the cold dark. You’ll contain him in the light. And once he has the power of flight, you’ll ensure he has the opportunity to take to the sky.”
“I thought to put him in an old stronghold half a day’s direct flight from my new citadel, with a dedicated security and healing team,” Suyin said. “No vampires or mortals, only angels old enough to be immune to his strange abilities. I can fly to him often, speak to him.”
“Keir is currently in my city,” Raphael told her. “A short trip to check on a few of the war-injured who aren’t yet back to full health. Do you want me to alert him of this, and ask him to make plans to join you?” he said in an effort to take a little of the load off her shoulders. “You know he can be trusted.” The senior healer had worked with Suyin after her escape from Lijuan.
“Yes, I trust Keir.” Exhaustion in her voice as she said, “Do you think there is hope? Or am I just delaying the inevitable? Will I end up having to execute Jinhai when he transforms into a maddened adult with ever more deadly abilities?”
Raphael looked out over the lights of his city, thought of all he’d learned in his millennia and a half of life. “There are some that say a child damaged young will remain forever damaged.”
“I’ve heard the same.”
“But I’ve witnessed at least one child beat the odds and become far more than could be expected of them, did you only know the circumstances of their early childhood.”
Raphael’s spymaster had survived a childhood marred by his father’s obsessive jealousy—a jealousy that had ended in the viscous scarlet of his mother’s lifeblood, and the ashes of his father’s body. The murder-suicide on a lonely atoll had left behind a scared and grief-stricken child, the silence around him profound.
Jason had been thought mute when he first appeared in the Refuge.
But though the spymaster had plenty of scars, he was no monster and never would be. At times, Raphael thought that Jason’s deepest secret was that he felt too much, too strongly. That was why he strove to keep a certain distance between himself and the world.
Then there was Naasir, intelligent and unique and a favorite of all. He, too, had been born in a place cold and without love, a place teeming with the ghosts of the innocents who’d gone before him. Yet his heart was a thing magnificent, as wild and as ferociously protective of his people as the tiger that was his other half.
“And,” he added, “I’ve seen an archangel so lost in madness that she turned two thriving cities into silent graveyards.” In eliminating the adult populations of those cities, Raphael’s mother had also created thousands of orphans with broken hearts, many of whom had curled up and died of that heartbreak.
Raphael had helped dig their small graves, his tears lodged in his throat and his scream a keen in his head.
“I call that same archangel a friend now,” Suyin whispered, “and she is one of the calmest heads on the Cadre.”
“Exactly so.” Caliane made no effort to hide from or obscure her past. It was a silent shadow she carried with her always. All those deaths, all those souls, they haunted his mother, and in so doing, they made her a better ruler and a better archangel—while creating in her a weakness that could be exploited by the unscrupulous.
Better that than the bringer of death she’d once become.
“We are not mortals,” he said to Suyin. “Our lives are endless in comparison to theirs—as a result, our minds and hearts have a far longer period over which to heal. I think, if this child has spent decades in the dark, we should give them that same time in the light, to find a better path.”
“You speak what is in my heart, Raphael.” Suyin’s quiet voice held untold agony. “I will hope for him—and I will ensure that those who died at his hands have a respectful burial according to their rites. I will not simply ignore their lives as Lijuan might’ve done.”
A solemn pause before she said, “Jinhai didn’t—doesn’t—truly grasp what he did. He knows people are dead, but he seems to have no comprehension of such being a bad thing. And to orchestrate that while yet a boy? Not only murder, but the rest.”
“Yes.” Raphael, too, worried about what lived in the boy. “I won’t stand in your way if you decide he can’t be permitted to live—but, Suyin, I think I know you well enough to predict that such a decision will haunt you.”
“No, I will not let Lijuan make me an accomplice to the murder of a child.” This time, it was rage that vibrated through Suyin’s voice. “Jinhai never had a chance, did he? It’s as if he grew up surrounded by toxic sludge. The cancers were inevitable.”
After Suyin hung up to deal with the situation, he turned to his hunter, who’d arrived while he was speaking to the other archangel, but had stayed quiet. Damp tendrils of hair curled at her temples, the near white of it dark with sweat, and her body clad in black hunting leathers bristling with weapons.
Her wings were a magnificence of midnight and dawn.
A vampire had gone bloodborn a couple of hours to the south, and she’d volunteered to handle it. “Got to keep my hand in,” she’d said. “Being a hunter is part of who I am.”
He’d caught a slight panic in her gaze, tied to her awareness of just how much her life had changed since they’d fallen together. In her lived the knowledge that one day in the future, she might no longer have the right to call herself a hunter. Raphael didn’t believe that to be a true threat—she was hunter-born, the hunt in her blood. She could no more stop being a hunter than he could stop being an archangel.
She would, however, one day lose the friends with whom she’d grown into her hunter self. But that day existed in a far distant future. Her compatriots were currently in the prime of their lives. Her partner today had been the irreverent Demarco, a mortal who reminded Raphael of Illium.
He didn’t know Demarco well, but he would remember him long after he’d passed beyond the veil immortals so rarely crossed.