Archangel's Light (Guild Hunter #14)(64)

You’ve never listened!

The memory of Aodhan’s earlier response stung enough that he found himself picking at the wound. If I never listen, he said, it’s because you never talk. He wanted to kick himself even as he spoke the words. The two of them had danced around this topic for centuries; Illium had kept his silence because it was Aodhan’s pain. Aodhan was the one who needed to bring it up.

Now he had, and Illium was sniping at him. Sorry, he said on the heels of his words. I’m being an ass.

Stop it. Hard, angry words. I’m not a whimpering wounded animal to be scared off by plain speaking.

Illium wanted to pull out his hair, but they’d reached the prison cell. A much larger cavern than the one outside, it was set up like a full living space. An area with seating—not just one, two seats made for angels, with the spinal column designed so wings would fall on either side of it.

Seeing the space held no dangers to Smoke, he took the kitten out and put her on the bed to nap. That bed, too, was large enough to fit two angels, but when Illium checked the closet, he found clothing of a single size—no dresses, just tunics and pants. Going on rough average sizes, the clothing could’ve fit either an adult woman, a teenage boy, or a smaller man. Definitely a person shorter and slighter than Illium.

He looked down, frowned. There are no shoes.

Harder to escape barefoot, Aodhan said, a frigid cold in his tone.

Unable to stand it, Illium moved to brush his wing over his friend’s. Pulling him back from the ice of the past with the warmth of today. Aodhan didn’t say anything, but neither did he put distance between them. Rather, he brushed his own wing over Illium’s before they parted to check other areas of this subterranean apartment.

Illium’s soul hungered for more, but he also felt a wave of relief at this silent indication that, no matter what, Aodhan still trusted him. With that as a foundation, they could damn well sort out all the rest.

Putting that aside for now, he focused on the situation.

Angels fly, younglings. Never forget that danger can lurk above.

Words spoken by the first weapons-master who’d had a hand in Illium’s training. Naasir, with his habit of prowling the rafters, had taught him that lesson long ago—but it had been good to have it spelled out. Driven by the memories, he looked up. But there was nothing and no one up there. However . . .

Flaring his wings, he rose up and up. There are small holes in the rock. Sunlight probably lights this space up during the daytime. Press an eye to a hole and you could look outside, but there was no hope of escape. The holes weren’t close enough together to in any way weaken the fortress of stone.

Enough to read with? Aodhan asked.

I think so. Why?

Come, have a look.

Illium landed, walked over to Aodhan. Once again, he stood close enough that his wing touched Aodhan’s, and once again, Aodhan didn’t move away. Instead, he handed Illium a text, then held up the lamp so Illium could read it.

“This is a teaching text.” He frowned. “I’m sure I saw something like this on Jessamy’s desk the last time I was in the Refuge.” The angel who’d taught Illium and Aodhan as children was now the love of another member of the Seven—but to them, she’d always be the teacher who’d been exasperated by them more than once, but who’d also taught them with love and grace.

They both adored her and, back when she and Galen first got together, they’d told Galen they’d shun him forever should he hurt her. The weapons-master had threatened to beat them both bloody for daring to think he’d ever hurt his Jess.

The two of them had kept an eye on him nonetheless—because while he’d become Raphael’s weapons-master and they’d given all respect to his position, and they’d liked him, he’d still been an unknown. Now, some four centuries later, they’d long known his promise for truth, were bonded to him in friendship.

“I think it’s for an angelic teenager or teenagers,” Aodhan said. “The level of the calculations, that’s what I remember learning around sixty, seventy years of age.”

That was what mortals and vampires often didn’t realize about angelkind. They grew very slowly as children, including in their mental development. Even at a hundred, they were considered callow youths at best.

The last mortal to whom Illium had explained that—a baker named Catalina—had gasped and pressed a hand to her heart. “Dios mío, your poor mamá. I had sprouted endless gray hairs by the time my first child reached sixteen, and to think she had to keep you out of trouble for many times those years.”

Illium had laughed. They were friends, he and Catalina, even though he knew she’d one day leave him, as all his mortal friends left him. As Catalina’s Lorenzo had already left them both. “No,” he’d said that day, “my mother would have been horrified at the idea of losing me after a mere eighteen years. Time moves differently for us.”

It was hard to explain the passage of years to a mortal from an immortal perspective. But today, as he looked down at the study items, his gut churned. “If a child or children were kept in this darkness . . .” Time would’ve moved at the speed of sludge, a slow creep of nothingness, the only view of the outside world a pinprick that looked out into stone and green.

Aodhan said nothing, and when Illium glanced at him, he saw that his friend had gone motionless, the pale hue of his skin making him appear a sculpture carved by an artist who had fallen in love with his subject.