Archangel's Light (Guild Hunter #14)(53)

A pause, then Illium said, You’re okay.

His relief was sandpaper over Aodhan’s senses. I’m not going to retreat back to my lair in the Refuge, he bit back, even though he knew, he knew he was being irrational. Illium had every reason to doubt Aodhan’s stability.

Fine. Stop arguing with me and get the fuck out of there.

I need to check the rest of the house. Now that he’d seen what he thought would be the worst of it, he took a deep breath—and only then realized he’d begun breathing again at some point. Autonomic reflex. Hard for even an angel to resist.

The scent of rot coated his nostrils now, familiar and ugly.

At least he could wash his hands. There was soap by the sink, and the water still ran. It wasn’t like he had to preserve the scene for a forensic team. He and Illium were it as far as any kind of investigation. But he did check the sink and the cupboard underneath for any clues before he ran the water.

One newly clean hand fisted so tight that his tendons ached, and his neck stiff from the tension in his spine, he then made himself look in the old fridge in the corner. Meat sat stacked up in neat piles in the fridge section, cut up and put into plastic containers, or wrapped up in paper.

The freezer compartment was also packed to the gills, as was the dented chest freezer that sat next to the fridge—and some of the pieces in the latter hadn’t been sliced into chunks. He recognized a human thigh, an arm, thought there might be a head at the very bottom.

Sweat broke out over his body, his pulse in his mouth. We need to check the fridges of all the nearby properties, see if there are any chest freezers in the garages. He couldn’t remember if they’d done that, being more interested in outward signs of violence and death. I think I know what happened to at least some of the bodies. The existence of the chest freezer inside the house was likely the reason the killer had chosen this otherwise ordinary house as their home base. The rest have to be buried in the forest. Where it would’ve been impossible for Vetra to spot the graves from the air.

Can you imagine what Ellie would say about now?

The distraction worked. Aodhan stepped away from the horror in the corner of the kitchen. Of course there are body parts in the freezer. Of course. Why should the land of Her Batshitness return to normal now that the wicked witch is dead? Because that would be far too easy.

Startled laughter from Illium that Aodhan heard both in his mind and in the real world. That’s good. You make me miss her even more.

Aodhan almost smiled, and that, he could’ve never predicted only a minute earlier. Fortified by the interaction, he carried on down the small hallway lined with what looked to be family photographs. An old woman, perhaps the grandmother, with a younger couple. No children.

“Thank you,” Aodhan whispered, though he didn’t know to whom he was speaking. Maybe the Ancestors. He was just glad he hadn’t had to face the remains of an innocent, though he knew some must’ve lost their lives during this neat and tidy massacre.

Then he saw it: image after image of a child from birth to about ten years of age, that last one with one foot on a soccer ball, the child dressed in a blue sports uniform.

Fuck.

Swallowing his rage, he carried on.

Another frame held a black-and-white photo of a middle-aged man. Probably the grandfather, passing away before he got to old age. He’d been lucky.

A few other photographs, then an amateur watercolor that had been lovingly placed inside a golden frame. Beside it was an equally nicely framed cross-stitch of a rabbit in a field.

People’s lives. People’s dreams.

It hurt him to know that something monstrous had ended those dreams. Another angel might not have reacted that way to the death of mortals, especially mortals he didn’t know, but another angel hadn’t grown up with Illium for a best friend.

Illium and his wonder about mortals, his respect for their short, bright lives.

It wasn’t linked to Kaia but rather the opposite way around. Illium had been fascinated by mortals since he and Aodhan were halflings.

“So many things they’ve invented, Sparkle,” he’d said more than once during their friendship. “Our kind gets lazy. We live such long lives that we think we have forever to solve problems and make discoveries—and so we rarely do anything. But mortals, their lives run so fast that they’re always racing to solve the next mystery, unearth the next secret.”

Illium’s wonder in the mortal drive to grow and change the world had opened Aodhan’s eyes to the same. Along with that had come a far deeper understanding of what it meant to have a human friend. It was why, for so long, he’d kept his distance from those brilliant firefly lives.

Because he’d known that one day those people would all be gone, nothing but memories that made his heart hurt. Then he’d come to New York and it had become impossible to ignore how much he liked certain mortals. So now he had friends who would one day break his heart by dying.

“Perhaps it’s a kind of insanity,” Illium had said a couple of years ago, after returning from the funeral of another mortal friend. “To keep on trying even though each loss puts another scar on my soul.”

Aodhan’s mind hitched on something important in that memory, but right then, his attention caught on an empty spot on the wall. It held the ghostly echo that forms when a picture has been hanging in the same place for a long time, a perfect rectangle of jarring brightness.