Archangel's Light (Guild Hunter #14)(52)

“No. Stay here.”

Illium’s jaw worked. “I should knock you out, you stubborn asshole.”

“Try it and see who comes out the winner.” Illium might be the better trained, but Aodhan was a fraction taller and had a little more heft to him. Enough to balance them out in a hand-to-hand combat situation. Because the two of them were never going to fight with angelic powers—it would always be hard and dirty, a thing of muscle and skin and bone.

“Don’t,” Illium said, the single word a request that stood on foundations laid centuries ago. “Don’t do this to yourself. Or to me.”

Aodhan gripped the side of Illium’s neck, pressed his forehead to Illium’s for a single potent second. “If I keep on hiding,” he whispered in a rough rasp, “I might as well still be in that box, Blue.”

Illium’s wings glowed, streaks of red on his cheekbones, but he didn’t try to get in Aodhan’s way this time.

Holding the warmth of Illium’s skin in the fingers he’d curled into his palm, Aodhan stepped into the center of the horror.





I am a goddess. I will rise and rise and rise into my reign of death.

    —Archangel Lijuan





29


Death had a smell pungent and old and putrid.

The skins might’ve been cured enough not to rot, but not enough to eradicate the smell associated with dead things. Or live things that had partially rotted.

Aodhan’s stomach wanted to eject all the food he’d eaten that day, eject itself, but he held his breath and forced himself to go on. An angel his age could survive a long time without breathing, though it was uncomfortable. Far better that, however, than to have the fetid scent in his nostrils.

Memories threatened to rise, threatened to hijack his thoughts.

I’m going to tell Mother you did this.

He clung to Illium’s voice, that thread of wild blue normality. I’ll tell Eh-ma you’ve been snapping at me since you arrived in China.

I have not.

It was a silly, juvenile conversation, and it was exactly what Aodhan needed to find his feet. Which Illium would well know.

Sometimes, of late, Aodhan wanted to strangle his best friend—but then Illium would do something like this, and all Aodhan wanted was to hold him close and fix what had broken between them.

Even as they continued their ridiculous back and forth that fixed nothing, and yet bolstered Aodhan’s ability to do this, Aodhan made himself count the skins. Only ten.

Even though he hadn’t specified to what the number referred, Illium said, Add in the one on the line and it’s still nowhere enough to account for the people who lived in this village.

No, Aodhan agreed. I’ll keep looking. His fingers feeling soiled from having had to touch the skins to count them, Aodhan kept them by his sides, not wanting them to come into contact with any other part of his body.

The room just beyond the back entryway was a kitchen that appeared to have been in use in the recent past. An onion sat badly chopped on a wooden board, tomatoes that looked foraged from the garden outside sat beside it, and there was a large pot on the unlit stove. Green mold furred the vegetables.

Aodhan didn’t want to look in the pot, but he knew he had to do this, had to finish it.

Blue? Talk to me about something, anything.

Demarco and his girlfriend held a party at their new place, and I went. Drunk guild hunters have nothing on drunk tattoo artists. I almost ended up with a rose tattoo on my butt.

Aodhan clung to the steady rhythm of his friend’s voice as he forced himself to approach the large pot. There’s a pot, he told Illium when he reached it. The state of the onions and tomatoes on the board says someone was here a number of days past. It could be nothing, just an abandoned meal. Except it was the first such scene they’d discovered. The rest of the village was almost pathologically neat and tidy.

Illium said, Venom swapped out Dmitri’s Ferrari for an old Mini as a joke.

Aodhan’s hand trembled as he lifted the lid off the pot. Dmitri called me after. He was pissed.

But laughing, too, right?

Yes. He had plans for Venom’s Bugatti. The word pink came up a lot.

Illium’s laughter in his mind, the strain in it unhidden—but it was enough to hold Aodhan steady as he looked in the pot.

Slamming the lid shut, he stumbled away from the stove.

“Aodhan!”

“Stay outside!” Aodhan yelled. “I’m fine!” I was just startled, he added, because he knew Illium, understood that for him to remain outside would push him to the edge of endurance.

“I hate this!” Illium’s voice was taut. “Hurry up and get the fuck out of there!”

His protectiveness raised Aodhan’s hackles, made him want to snap back—and the surge of frustration was exactly what he needed to deal with the ugliness of what he’d found. There are rotten human remains in the pot. He didn’t enumerate on what he’d seen—the hand floating in a watery soup, the chunks of meat that had probably come from a fleshier part of the body.

All of it putrefied to noxious green and crawling black.

Whoever this was didn’t know how to cook. It looks like they just put the remains in the water. Though his gorge roiled, he made himself finish the report. There was no sign of any kind of seasoning, no herbs. If not for the onion and tomatoes, I’d have said they were just boiling the flesh off the bones.