Chapter 43
43
The sun was bright overhead, the sky clear as Illium and Aodhan continued their flight to his new territory.
“Dmitri told me the rules of being an effective second,” Aodhan said aloud when they swung close enough to talk, the wind having died down. “The first one is to protect your archangel from idiots.”
Still laughing, Illium said, “Adi, do you think we have to follow the rules?”
“I was joking. There aren’t any official rules for seconds.”
“No, not that. I mean rules in general. About archangels.”
Aodhan glanced over. “What are you plotting?”
“Well, who made the rule that once you become an archangel, you can’t truly maintain friendships that have endured through time—even if those friendships are in the team of another archangel?” He scowled. “I don’t ever plan to be Raphael’s enemy, so what does it matter?”
Aodhan thought about it. “Right now, you have to follow the rules because it’s about appearance, about ensuring others see that you have your own power. That’s another thing Dmitri told me—sometimes, seconds have to advise their archangels to play the long game, as new archangels tend to be temperamental.”
Illium scowled. “I’m not sure I like your new advisor on all things second,” he said, no force in his tone—because Aodhan could find no better mentor. “He really told you Raphael was temperamental as a young archangel?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny,” Aodhan said piously. “That was a private second-to-second conversation.”
Yet, even as the two of them bantered, the sadness lingered, and when they landed for a break on a remote uninhabited island, they sat in silence while eating the food that Venom, Sivya, and Montgomery had packed for them.
When they did speak, it was about the people they’d left behind.
It wasn’t until the final break before reaching Illium’s new territory that they shifted focus and began to discuss those who might be enticed to join Illium’s team.
“You’ve already had several good approaches,” Aodhan told him as they sat on an isolated atoll, stunning white sands falling into an azure ocean. “I’m handling it, creating a short list. Dulce’s doing the same on her end, and talking to me when she’s not sure about credentials or reputation. There’s some I know you won’t be interested in off the bat.”
Illium didn’t question him on those calls—if anyone knew him, it was Aodhan.
“Oh, and Indri’s on his way.” Aodhan smiled. “He gave Marduk notice the instant he heard of your ascension. Told me that he expected me to exercise my powers in the pursuit of nepotism.”
“Excellent. Saves me having to steal him.” Aodhan’s nephew had grown into a whip-smart warrior-scholar who would be a vital asset.
“I forgot to tell you,” Illium added, “just before we left, I called Navarro and asked him to consider joining me as my interim first general. My plan is to lure him with a temporary post, then slowly make it permanent.” After a long time in Raphael’s forces, the highly respected angel had spent the last century as a trainer in the Refuge.
Aodhan chuckled. “Excellent choice. Let’s hope your lure works. I can’t think of a more stable head to have in that position.”
“Do you think we’ll have any trouble filling all the positions?” Illium played a piece of polished jet through his fingers—Aodhan had balanced it perfectly to his hand.
“No. Being at the ground floor of a new archangel’s territory is exciting. And Blue, you keep making friends everywhere you go. Xander’s already told Alexander that he’s sent through a request to join your team.”
Illium raised an eyebrow, recalling Raphael’s advice regarding the Ancient. “Alexander won’t like losing his grandson.”
“No, Xander has his approval—Alexander knows as well as anyone that you don’t stifle warriors as strong as his grandson. This is an opportunity Xander might not have again for centuries, perhaps even millennia.
“It matters even more because Alexander’s court was settled even after his waking, as so many of his people returned. Xander’s never experienced a new court, much less the work it takes to build it.”
“I’d be glad to have him at my side—he’s one hell of a commander.”
“You have any hesitation on his loyalty?”
Illium shook his head. “Raphael told me Alexander isn’t two-faced and he’s been a huge influence on Xander. Plus, Xander was fostered with Titus—we both know he’s as honest and openhearted as they come. And Rohan was an honorable man.” Xander’s father had died at Lijuan’s hands, but he’d held the line to the last.
“Yes.” Aodhan nodded. “Built of honor, all three of them.”
“If Xander vows loyalty to me, he’ll hold it even against his own—but I don’t intend to allow it to ever come to that.” Illium might enjoy irritating his asshole father, but he wasn’t planning on picking fights that could degenerate into war, no matter if the archangelic power within him pushed for aggression, for total dominion. Because that way lay megalomaniacal madness of the kind that had consumed Lijuan.
“There’s another applicant you might not be expecting.” Aodhan drank from the bottle of water between them. “Vivek.”
Illium snapped his head toward his lover. “I’m not poaching from Raphael and Elena.” Because not only was Vivek Jason’s right hand, he was also part of Ellie’s Guard. “I can’t believe you’d even consider it.”
“He’s over seven hundred years told, and spymaster-level experienced, but he’ll never be Raphael’s spymaster. That’s Jason’s position, and Vivek wouldn’t even think of jockeying for it.” A glance at Illium. “The spymaster position on your team, however, is wide open. And unlike all the other courts who’ve approached him over the years, Vivek wants to be part of yours.”
“Adi,” Illium began.
“I already spoke to the sire,” Aodhan said, before wincing. “To Raphael. I have to make that a habit or I’m going to get both of us in trouble.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be right there beside you.” The only difference was that the power inside Illium stirred each time he thought of Raphael, and it was a quiet warning not to slip. “What did he say?”
“That he knew it was a distinct possibility the instant you ascended. Vivek went to him twenty-four hours later.” Arms on his raised knees, he looked out over the water. “The s—Raphael is willing to let him go. Losing both you and Vivek at the same time will be a hit to the Tower’s tech arm, but you’ve both trained enough people that it won’t create a dangerous hole.”
“And Ellie?”
“You know she’d send her entire Guard with you if it would make your life safer,” Aodhan chided softly. “Vivek says she all but pushed him out the door the second he started telling her what he wanted to do. ‘Of course it has to be you, V. I thought you’d never figure it out!’ That’s what he said she told him.”
Illium would fucking miss Ellie.
“To have Vivek with us would make the transition a hell of a lot easier,” he admitted roughly, torn between his loyalty to Raphael, and his instinctive loyalty to the people of his new territory. Because that was what it meant to be Cadre—to spread your wings over those you claimed, keep them safe.
“I’ll talk to Raphael myself,” he said after watching the waves roll in to shore for several long heartbeats, the crashing sound of the ocean a quiet thunder. “I have to act like an archangel with another archangel, no matter how weird it feels.”
“You should talk to Elijah, too, after things settle down,” Aodhan suggested. “He was Lady Caliane’s general once, and now they stand on the Cadre together.”
Nodding, Illium pulled out his phone. While the communications device had undergone multiple iterations after the invention of this flat rectangle as thin as paper that could be folded up and put away in a pocket, this was the one that had eventually stuck. Sometimes, he’d realized over time, technology hit the perfect balance between form and function, and entered a long stasis period.
“No signal.” Not a surprise at this remote location in the middle of nothing but ocean and more ocean. Angelkind had blocked the expansion of connectivity even when it became possible. Some swathes of the world, they’d declared, deserved to remain free of any interference, even by so amorphous a thing as a signal. “I’ll call Raphael the minute I can—because if Vivek is coming with us, then I want him in on the ground floor, so he can set up the right systems from the get-go.”
Aodhan rose, stretched out his wings. “Agreed.” Arms up, he flexed, and for a moment, Illium was stunned by him, as if he hadn’t been waking next to him for hundreds of years. But what struck him most was how fucking lucky he was to have a best friend and lover whose loyalty was absolute and unquestionable.
“I couldn’t do this without you,” he said as he got up, the words husky. “You know that, don’t you?” His lover had a way of not seeing his own importance not just to Illium, but to the world. His art had changed futures, opened closed hearts, brought beauty in the most terrible times. “You make me braver because I know I always have you at my back.”
A bemused smile as Aodhan closed his wings back in. “What brought this on?” He nuzzled Illium’s temple, running his fingers through Illium’s hair. “The way you look at me…of course I know what I am to you.” A kiss to his cheekbone. “I also know I’m not good with compliments, but don’t ever think I don’t hear yours, hold them close.”
“Do you ever resent it?” Illium asked, his chest tight. “Not being able to devote all your time to your art?” Because the demands on Aodhan were only going to get worse going forward.
Shifting so he could look Illium in the eye, the other man shook his head. “No, never. If I did, I wouldn’t have picked up a sword to train with you in the first place.” He pressed his forehead to Illium’s. “Stop worrying, my darling Blue. I’ve made my own decisions all my life, and each time the urge to create art hits, I find a way.”
A kiss hard and firm. “Right now, I can think of no greater art than the creation of your rule. A blank canvas, beloved mine. What shall we paint on it?”
“A damn legend,” Illium said with a smile that was a touch shaky with all the emotion roaring through him. No one had warned him that becoming an archangel would dredge up every emotion he’d ever had, swirl it around in his gut, then punch him right in the softest places in his spirit.
Aodhan’s chuckles cut through the morass, anchoring him to the astonishing now. “Well, Illium, Archangel of Legend, I have another suggestion for you.” His eyes went to the extraordinary sword on Illium’s back.
Illium cocked his head; he’d been considering the same person, but—“She’s a weapons-maker not a weapons-master.”
“Only because that’s what she prefers—but she’s fully trained in how to handle all the weapons she makes. The knowledge in her head is probably in line with Galen’s when he took on the role of Raphael’s weapons-master,” Aodhan argued before digging out a handful of dried meat from his pack and handing it to Illium.
“A weapons-master has to fight, yes,” he continued, “but they have to be strategists and long-term thinkers most of all. First generals lead troops into battle, but it’s the weapons-masters who make sure the first general has the troops and the weapons to make that possible. Weapons-masters are the forge of a battle force.”
Illium chewed on the jerky as Aodhan dug out more for himself. “You think she’ll go for it?” The vampire who’d forged the sword Raphael had gifted Illium was someone Illium called a friend true, but despite her visceral connection to the Tower, she’d never given any indication that she wished for a more active martial role.
“No way to know unless you ask. Zoe might decide she likes the challenge.”
Zoe Elena Haziz-Grange was now heading toward completing her seventh century as one of the Made, but Illium remembered her as the chubby-cheeked mortal child of Elena’s best friend in all the world. He’d played with little Zoe back then, had shared a drink with her as she grew, and had helped her navigate the tough years after her transition to vampirism.
It hadn’t been a true choice, not as he’d have wanted for her, but it hadn’t been a thing of pain or violence, and Zoe had navigated it with her usual wit and grace. “Ash says she’s still going despite the insanity-inducing malformation in her brain—and that these days, she’s usually only insane on Tuesdays,” she’d said right before her transition, “so I’ve got nothing to worry about. Only a tiny aggressive cancer. Pfft.”
Knowing who Zoe’s mother was, Illium guessed that she was the one who’d asked Ashwini to talk to Zoe. Because Sara Haziz would’ve known about Ash’s medical history; her hunters had trusted her to the bone, had turned out for her in their hundreds when the time came.
Sara had been carried to her final resting place, beside Deacon, the weapons-maker she loved and who had taught Zoe all she knew, by an honor guard that included Zoe, Ashwini, and the consort of the Archangel of New York. But that day, she’d been just Ellie, Sara’s best friend and a woman whose heart was broken into a million pieces.
“I know it was what Sara wanted,” Ellie had said to Illium days later, while they sat on the Tower roof looking out at the sparkle of the city. Her voice had been hoarse with all the tears she’d shed and her eyes swollen because even angelic healing couldn’t keep up with her grief. “She never wanted to live forever. Neither did Deacon. I still hate that they’re gone. I’ll never again have a friend like Sara.”
Illium, with Lorenzo and Catalina forever a part of him, had needed no further words to understand her grief. What he’d also understood was that Ellie’s statement said nothing about her incredibly fierce and loving relationship with her sister and fellow hunter, Eve. Elena had always been—and always would be—Eve’s big sister, no matter that Eve was centuries into being a vampire.
Sara and Elena, by contrast, had begun and ended as equals.
Ellie had taken a shuddering breath that night they’d talked. “Zoe’s doing better than me. She told me she always knew they’d go together, and they did, didn’t they? Within a month of each other. Even though she’s a vampire, she has a faith that’s a song inside her—she believes with all she is that they’re together beyond the veil.”
A hard swallow. “I’ve decided to follow Zoe’s lead, imagine Sara and Deacon young and vibrant, hand in hand as they live a thousand adventures together.”
Zoe and her “aunt” Ellie remained family true and forever, their love for each other so deep that it shimmered in the air around them when they were together.
Today, Illium said, “I always figured she’d join Ellie’s Guard if she was inclined that way.”
“Ellie’s overprotective of her.” Aodhan handed him more food.
The man couldn’t help looking after Illium, and Illium adored him for it.
“To her, Zoe is forever the child she first knew—Sara’s precious baby girl.” Aodhan took a drink from his water bottle. “Zoe loves her, but being on Ellie’s team would drive her crazy. Ellie’s the same with Sam, but Sam’s so good-natured that he just rolls with it. Zoe’s more fiery, more like Ellie herself. They’d slam heads, then both feel bad about it.”
“Yes, I can see that. Explains why Eve refuses to become an official part of her Guard, too, even though we all know she’d decapitate anyone who dared hurt Ellie.” Of the six daughters sired by Jeffrey Deveraux, only two walked in this time, and they were linked by bonds of loyalty and love unbreakable.
“There’s a reason Titus refuses to let his older sisters near his court in any official capacity.” Aodhan scowled. “Older sisters can’t help themselves. Trust me, I have one—she just today told me I looked ‘tired and cranky’ on a call, and that she’s sending me treats via angelic courier.”
Illium laughed, continuously delighted by the relationship that had grown between Aodhan and Imalia over the centuries. “I’ll ask Zoe,” he said, decision made. “What about Eve? Do you think she’d consider it?”
Aodhan took a moment to think before nodding slowly. “It’s worth reaching out to ask. She’d make one hell of a ground commander in battle.”
“Let’s do it,” Illium said. “I’d much rather start my court with people I know and trust, even if some of them only decide to join for a temporary stint.” He made a face. “I don’t want an actual court. I want something like the Tower.”
Shifting to face him, Aodhan gripped the side of his neck. “You’ll do it. You’ll build something strong and beautiful because that’s who you are. A builder. A rescuer. A lover.” All heart, that was Aodhan’s Blue. So much so that Aodhan worried what being an archangel would do to him—because archangels had to make decisions dark and terrible over and over again.
Turning his head, Illium kissed his palm. “The power fuels me, but one thing I understand now,” he said. “I knew Raphael valued his Seven, but after ascension, I truly get the depth of his need for us, for Elena.”
He looked out over the ocean. “An archangel is an island of aloneness in his power—without friendships that endure, without love, that’s where the madness comes. Because the aloneness?” Eyes that glowed locked to Aodhan’s. “It has the capacity to build and build and build until it eats away all light, leaving only darkness in its wake.”
Fear gnawed at Aodhan, for the stark horror of what Illium was describing. And while Aodhan would never understand what it was to be Cadre, a being so removed from angelkind as to be another species altogether, he knew one thing. “I love you.” He kissed Illium with every ounce of the fury of his emotions. “I have loved you all my life in one form or another, and I will love you the rest of my existence in ever more complex and potent ways. But I will always, always , love you. You’ll never be alone.”
Illium’s wings began to glow with the same primal energy as his eyes. “I know,” he whispered, twining his hand around Aodhan’s neck to kiss him with passion slow and sweet as his power thrummed through Aodhan’s bones.
It sang of his Blue. Still his Blue, no matter that he was now archangel of an entire territory. Be that they could, Aodhan would’ve lingered in that kiss, in that moment forever, but when they drew apart, they lifted off without discussion. Because right now and for the foreseeable future, Illium’s territory had to be the priority.
“What will you call yourself as your official archangel name?” he asked once they were in flight.
“My mother suggested Illium, Archangel of Mischief.” A wicked grin. “She also told me not to pick a fight with Aegaeon the Asshole until I’m settled enough to handle it.”
“Eh-ma told me to smack you upside the head should you start to go in the direction of picking a fight.”
Illium’s laughter was wild and delighted. “She’s the most important being in angelic history, you know that?”
Aodhan asked the question with his expression.
Illium lifted up his hand and began ticking things off. “Mother of an archangel. Consort to an archangel even though she refuses the title. Best friend of another archangel. Foster mother to yet one more archangel.”
He lowered his hand. “She sits in the center of countless streams of power, and she handles it all so effortlessly that no one sees how much she holds in her hand. If she called, I would come. Raphael would come. Caliane would come. Titus, of course.”
“She’s the right person to hold all that power.”
“Yes.” Illium dove down, flew back up, his pleasure in flight untrammeled. “As for my name, I don’t know yet. I’ll just be Archangel Illium until I see my territory. Raphael’s first name wasn’t the one he holds now, remember? New York didn’t exist on his ascension. He was Raphael, Archangel Destined. He never used it himself, hated it—but it was how people started referring to him.”
“I’d almost forgotten that.” He and Illium had been so young then, children who’d tagged around behind their patient Rafa.
Now, as they flew on, they talked of the past, laughed over memories, were solemn in thoughts of friends and warrior compatriots lost and energetic in their discussions of those they intended to approach to join their court.
“Because it will be ours , Adi, your voice as important as mine.” A starburst of golden light as Illium threw power up into the air. “Now, let’s go make trouble.”