Archangel's Light (Guild Hunter #14)(4)

The change had felt like a slap to the face.

Aodhan had called Elena to check that Illium was fine, that his silence had nothing to do with the sudden waking of his asshole of a father. He’d learned that his friend was hale and hearty and just ignoring Aodhan. So Aodhan had ignored him right back.

It was the longest they hadn’t spoken to each other in his memory.

Even during his lost years, when he’d gone silent and withdrawn almost fully from the world, Illium had been there, a spark of light in the enveloping blackness of Aodhan’s existence.

You are being childish, said a voice in his head that sounded like his mentor, Lady Sharine. The woman Aodhan affectionately called Eh-ma, a term of respect and love used for the mother of a friend who had become cherished of the speaker. Lady Sharine was gentle and kind and, of late, with a new steel to her. Not that Aodhan had spoken to Eh-ma of this.

He would never put her in the middle of this fight.

“If I wish to be childish,” he said to the cloud-heavy night, “I will be childish.” Moonless nights such as this were his favorite time to fly, for he could be a shadow as he couldn’t be in the sun. His body refracted far too much light.

Yet he missed Manhattan with its spiking towers of steel and light. So strange, that after a lifetime of solitude and distance, he should find such joy in a city that never slept. China, too, had once been that way in places. Shanghai had been a faceted jewel of technological marvels despite Lijuan’s preference for the past, Shenzhen a glittering mecca where mortals and immortals alike came to source objects, clothing, and curios found nowhere else in the world. Just two of China’s once-great cities.

Someone in Lijuan’s court had obviously had some sway with her. Enough for her to permit such high-tech developments—though never in Beijing, which had been the heart of her empire until the loss of the Forbidden City. In Shanghai, her people had gone so far as to erect a hyper-modern glass and steel structure meant to function as her citadel there.

Aodhan had seen it. It was striking, with glass that shimmered a silvery blue, its lines clean and precise as it flowed into an elongated pyramid. Suyin, an architect born in a far different age, had spent their rest break in the city staring at it. “I can build akin to this,” she’d murmured at last. “I understand it, see the beauty in its unadorned clarity.”

Her smile—of delighted happiness—had been unlike any he’d seen on her face till that moment. “I was afraid, you see,” she’d admitted to him. “That I’d been too long away from the world, that my art had moved on into places I couldn’t follow. Today, I know different. Perhaps I will meld old and new when I build my own citadel in a future where it is possible.”

She’d started the sketch for her future citadel that very day. As for Lijuan’s Shanghai residence, Jason had told Aodhan that the Archangel of China had never once stayed there. Her dismissal had left Shanghai to languish as a third-rate city populated heavily by mortals and vampires. But that Shanghai was lost, its colors erased and its technology coming to a stuttering halt as its wide streets and tall apartment blocks stood hauntingly empty.

So many dead to feed the dreams of power of a megalomaniacal archangel, so many lives and futures destroyed. All for nothing. Lijuan was dead and so were the vast majority of her people. Those who remained were living ghosts with broken hearts and haunted eyes. Nearly all had migrated to the place that Suyin had chosen as her interim base—a small stronghold hidden within the verdant green forests and strange stone pillars of Zhangjiajie.

“I would build anew,” she’d said at the time, “a place without any of my aunt’s dark stain, but that would be a foolish waste of energy and power when we have so little.” She’d looked at the neat stone edifice surrounded by lush green jungle, the air damp and humid then. “This will do. All signs are that she spent little time here—it wouldn’t have been grand enough for her.”

She’d made the decision before they’d discovered the secret beneath the stronghold, had decided to hold to it in the aftermath. Because by then, Suyin’s people had already begun to cluster around her, and she welcomed them.

“I would not uproot them again,” she’d said, strands of her hair flying across her face as they stood atop one of the pillars carved by time and nature, so high that it felt as if they could touch the clouds. “Not until it is time to move to my permanent citadel.”

She was a good archangel, would become better with time. And Aodhan could be by her side as she grew into her power. He could be to her what Dmitri was to Raphael. Dmitri, too, had grown with Raphael, rather than coming into the position after Raphael was already an established archangel. It built a different—deeper—bond between archangel and second.

More than that, Suyin needed him as Raphael and the Seven didn’t.

There was much Suyin didn’t know about the ways of the Cadre. Aodhan didn’t say that as an arrogant judgment—it was simple fact, the inevitable result of her eons-long captivity and abrupt rise to power. Young as he was, he’d stood beside Raphael for centuries, could assist her as she anchored herself in her new—

His nape prickled.

Halting in the air, his wings balanced in a silent hover, he looked around. His eyes had long acclimated to the dark, but the world was a stygian blackness tonight, the lights of the stronghold and settlement too small and few to make any difference to the sky. The suffocating weight of the night put him in mind of Lijuan’s death fog, a thing of whispering evil that had murdered by its mere presence.