Chapter 16
You will always be welcome in my territory—and Jinhai could do no better than to have you as a man from whom he can learn. I thank you, too, for watching over this broken child rather than executing him at first sight.
—Archangel Suyin to Illium and Aodhan (Once, in China, in the Ruins of War)
The ball the next night was a cascade of power and beauty, held on the sprawling main roof of the stronghold as well as in the stunning desert garden below. There were lights strung everywhere, with standing lamps adding further color.
The large moon added its own illumination, bathing the world in silver.
But Raphael couldn’t focus, his attention on the sky.
Caliane had arrived in the territory two hours earlier, but wasn’t staying at the stronghold; she’d asked to stay at a location a short distance away that she particularly favored.
Knowing she’d have barely enough time for a quick rest before she readied herself for the ball, Raphael hadn’t flown out to see her.
The conversation they needed to have couldn’t be rushed.
He also knew her well enough to predict that she wouldn’t appreciate being cornered—his mother was both an ancient and a warrior, and he had to treat her as such.
“Raphael.” Suyin’s voice, her hair a sheet of white in his peripheral vision.
Shifting his attention from his watch for Caliane, he inclined his head in greeting.
“Suyin.” A tall and sharply handsome man stood by her side, his skin as cool a white as the hair he’d had cut in a short, crisp style, and his wings a soft dove-gray.
The wing coloring had only emerged after the amputation of the wings that had grown in twisted and incapable of flight after being clipped over and over again.
That he was the son of the Archangel of Death could not be disputed. But he’d been raised as the foster son of an archangel who was a maker, not a destroyer: Suyin, Archangel of China and Builder of Worlds.
“Jinhai.”
“Archangel Raphael.” Jinhai’s bow was precise to the nth degree, the eye contact he made polite without being confrontational.
“How was the flight from China?” he asked the younger angel.
“It was a good journey. The sire held her speed at a pace I could maintain.”
Raphael knew Jinhai was bonded to Suyin and not in the same way the Seven had bonded to Raphael. Jinhai’s attachment to Suyin wasn’t about loyalty but about a voracious need that knew no boundaries.
“It is also a leash,” Suyin had said to Raphael the last time he’d been in China, “and I wish it were not so.” Deep lines forming on her brow, her lips tight.
“I thought the problem would be controlling him as he grew into his power, but it turns out the problem is making him see himself as an individual with a right to his own future—he does not seem to understand that he isn’t simply an adjunct of me. ”
“Better that,” Raphael had said at the time, “than what we feared at the start.” That he would be a monster, Lijuan come anew through the child she’d abused and imprisoned.
“Yes.” A sigh, Suyin’s hands tight on the balcony railing that had been put in place outside a guest suite most often assigned to vampiric visitors. “At least Quon is gone. It has been at least three centuries since Jinhai has mentioned his ‘twin.’ ”
Her knuckles going white against her skin, she’d added, “I want to hope that signifies a permanent healing of the crack in his psyche. He didn’t regress even when he had disagreements with others in the stronghold, so perhaps. But time alone will give us the true answer.”
Tonight, Jinhai’s face stayed fixed in a polite, pleasant expression as Suyin and Raphael caught up; it raised the hairs on Raphael’s arms. There was, his instincts said, something still not quite right about the other angel, and it had nothing to do with his attachment to Suyin.
Then the other man’s face lit up, his eyes sparkling in a way that erased the eerily fixed nature of his expression. “Sire, if I may?”
“Of course.” Suyin watched as Jinhai—after a hasty but polite bow—wove his way to where Aodhan and Illium had just landed.
Raphael and Elena had already caught up with the two in private earlier that day. Whereupon Illium had sprawled on their sofa with his shoes off—after first raiding the snacks Marduk’s staff had provided—while Aodhan showed Elena the small sculpture he’d brought as a gift for their hosts.
No formality, no walls.
Because they were family, had long been family.
“He adores them,” Suyin murmured, her eyes on her ward. “He is bonded to me, but I am like his mother. Or what a mother is supposed to be. They are the interesting older friends who have ever treated him with kindness.
“They’re also the only two I trust to take him out without me—he listens to them, has never tried to bolt or to use the freedom they offer him to give in to the unspeakable urges within.”
The obsidian of her gaze meeting his, the tiny beauty spot just below the far edge of her left eye a constant visual reminder that she was not her aunt.
“Quon might be vanquished, but Jinhai yet dreams of doing things he knows are wrong.
I, together with the healers, have managed to teach him that such acts are wrong—but that is intellectual knowledge to him.
“The healers tell me he has no capacity to ever develop a conscience, the damage done to him when he was a child a permanent injury; the only reason he doesn’t act on his impulses is because he has given me the power to overrule him—and I do that each time he comes to me with his monstrous dreams.”
Despite that, she—a woman who had experienced the cruelty of captivity herself—had fought for a tortured and abused child’s right to exist, to live. “You’ve given him a life.”
Raphael had a sudden surge of understanding, realizing that Jinhai’s earlier fixed expression had been the other man defaulting to what he’d been taught was acceptable, like a child who had no idea what was going on but had been told to behave.
“And look, he’s happy now. He has the capacity to feel joy.
I would’ve once said that to be impossible, too. ”
Jinhai had managed to hover without intruding at the edge of Illium and Aodhan’s presence while they were greeted by Alexander and Zanaya, but he was now hugging Illium and being hugged in turn with an affection that he clearly understood and wanted.
No fixed expression, his face alive with excitement as he spoke to both men, while staying tucked under Illium’s arm.
“His mother was insane,” Suyin said, a haunted darkness to her.
“So was mine,” Raphael found himself saying, feeling a strange, unexpected kinship with Jinhai. “As was my father.”
The Archangel of China sucked in a breath. “I meant no insult, my friend.”
“I take none. It is a known fact.”
Elena’s laughter, his consort in conversation with Titus and Sharine. The ripple of sound undid the knots in his soul just as Caliane rose up from the ground to step onto the roof not far from him and Suyin.
“My son.” Her smile was awash in maternal love. “It has been too long.” A warm embrace, the ice-white of her gown—the shoulders held up with fine chains of diamonds—floating around his legs.
She smelled of the joys of his childhood…and of painful memories past.
When she released him to greet Suyin, he watched her with the eyes of a hawk.
“I slept well before my flight—and in the week preceding,” she said to him after Suyin was pulled away by another guest. “You were quite right to tell me even Ancients need sleep. It just took my body and mind time to get there.” Tucking her arm into his, she said, “Come, where is Elena?”
She was lying.
* * *
Elena turned just in time to see Caliane land, greet Raphael.
The Archangel of Amanat wore her midnight hair down, the strands studded with diamonds and her face dusted with cosmetics that made her skin shimmer.
Her gown echoed the styles favored by ancient Grecians, the simplicity of it elevated by the exquisite fabric and the diamonds at her shoulders.
As a whole, the effect was striking.
Elena couldn’t spot any reason for concern from a distance, or when Caliane came over to talk to her, but she also knew that her mother-in-law had been a political creature for eons before Elena was even a speck in existence.
Wearing a mask was no difficult task for her.
Later, after Raphael had fallen into conversation with Elijah, and Caliane was catching up with Lady Sharine—who wore a long, fitted gown in a champagne hue that picked up the color of her eyes and was stunning against the sunlight-dusted indigo of her wings—Elena looked around for Illium.
She was certain she’d caught a glimpse of his distinctive wings on the edge of the roof, so she headed that way through the glitter and glamour of the crowd.
Everyone had come best-dressed for this once-in-a-lifetime ball—that included Elena and Raphael.
Montgomery had made sure of it. She’d never had a gown as full of sparkle, the midnight blue of it like starlight on earth.
Long-sleeved with a high neckline, it hugged every curve all the way to the ankle.
The drama was in the back—a backline saved from scandalous by a mere inch; her back was covered only by a fine glittering mesh that echoed old-fashioned armor. It was designed to fit perfectly around her wings, and to display the slender ceremonial blade she wore down her spine.
Which was why she’d allowed one of Tiamat’s handmaidens to put her hair up into a sleek roll at the back of her head.
Not her usual style, but both the mesh “armor” and the ceremonial sword deserved to hold center stage.
Made by Zoe, the blade bore an intricate filigree of design that incorporated Raphael’s emblem—in which Elena was very much present.
But Zoe, child of a Guild director, had gone further and added in Elena’s Guild ID.
Elena loved it.
Raphael was in formal but flexible sleeveless black armor. The pants were sleek and simple, but the top boasted a single stripe of midnight blue starlight down the right side.
His heavy gauntlets bore a design that echoed the mesh on her back.
Montgomery knew exactly what he was doing.
Figuring Illium might have flown down to join those in the desert garden, she was about to step over and fly down when she caught a glimpse of wild blue in an unlit part of the garden.
Tiamat had told Elena the lack of lighting and ball decorations in that area was to provide a quiet buffer zone for the animals who often roamed around the stronghold.
Smiling, she went to reach for his mind…
and caught a hint of wings of deep green streaked with Illium-blue in his vicinity.
Fuck!
Glancing back, she saw that Raphael was still in conversation with Eli.
Good. She stepped over the edge of the roof to float her way down, wings open.
The minute she brought Raphael into this, it’d escalate.
Aegaeon had never, and would never, forgive Raphael for being the man his own son had chosen to serve even after Aegaeon rose from his Sleep.
Ellie? What are you doing? Aodhan’s voice in her head, the sound of it deeply familiar though they now lived on different continents.
Making sure no one starts a war tonight. Your task is to distract Raphael if he decides to head this way.
A dangerous pause. Where’s Illium? And Aegaeon?
We’re both consorts, Aodhan, but I’m a woman.
And Aegaeon is a chauvinist pig. Let me use that to defuse this.
Aegaeon tended to treat her with condescending charm, as if she were an adorable bunny—or a maiden with nothing but fluff in her skull.
She was surprised he hadn’t patted her on the head by now.
The only reason Elena hadn’t stabbed him in the eye at this point was because then Aegaeon would’ve declared war—and the asshole wasn’t worth a single drop of her archangel’s time or blood.
They haven’t been speaking long, Aodhan said at last, and she heard the rigidity of his control. Illium was on the roof only minutes past. Go.