“I do not aspire to be his second.” Aodhan already had another, equally critical position—to be one of Raphael’s Seven was to be part of a group unlike any in all of angelkind.
Suyin had smiled, the sadness that lingered always in her easing for a fraction of a second. “You have honored me with your fidelity and courage, given me counsel wise and patient, and so I ask you to take more time, consider my offer in more than the moment.”
And because Suyin was an archangel he respected, he was giving her offer the solemn thought that it deserved. To be the second of an archangel at just over half a millennium of age? It was unheard of; Aodhan would be the youngest second in the Cadre by far.
But, despite Raphael’s promise, he would never again be one of the Seven. They would become the Six until and unless they accepted another into their ranks. Because no matter how friendly the relationship between two archangels, there existed a distance nothing could bridge. A thing of power and age, for two alpha predators could never successfully occupy the same space.
Even Caliane and Nadiel, beloved of one another, hadn’t been able to always be in the same physical space. Aodhan hadn’t been born when they were together, but their tragic love story was legend. Prior to Nadiel’s madness and subsequent execution at Caliane’s hand, however, they’d simply been two archangels in love. But never had they been able to spend all their time together.
Power was a gift that demanded sacrifice.
Should Aodhan accept Suyin’s offer, Dmitri, Venom, Galen, Jason, Naasir . . . and Illium would be lost to him in a way that stabbed a stiletto blade straight into his heart, the cold steel severing their unseen bond even as it made him bleed. But was his vehement negative reaction not a bad sign? Could he say he was growing as a man, as an angel, if he clung to them with such fierceness? Or was he simply playing at freedom while keeping himself inside the cage that had altered the course of his life?
Then there was his tiredness. It was of the heart. He missed New York. He missed working by the side of his sire and the others of the Seven. He missed watching horror movies with Elena, both of them with their bare feet up on an ottoman and a bowl of popcorn in between.
He missed the new friends he’d begun to make in the Tower and in the Hunters Guild, those bonds one of the few good things to come out of Lijuan’s obsession with New York. He even missed the noisy chaos of the city’s streets, its drivers often yelling at each other as if for sport.
Wild blue flashed on the insides of his eyes.
Aodhan set his jaw and dived to do a wide sweep. He would not think about the person he missed most of all—because that person seemed to have forgotten him. Illium had sent him regular packages of items from New York alongside art supplies—only to come to a sudden screeching halt three months earlier.
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.