Archangel's Light (Guild Hunter #14)(86)

“But the worst, the absolute worst of it all was how Sachieri would sit with me and tell me how very beautiful I was, how much she loved me, and how she knew I’d love her back if she just gave me a little more time.”

He shook his head. “She was as sane as you or me—yet she seemed to believe every word she spoke. Bathar was sane, too. But he enjoyed coming up with new and cruel ways to hurt me. It made me wonder if I could ever trust the faces people wear, if I could ever believe what came out of their mouths.”

Wings stirring, he thrust both his hands through his hair. “Then what happened in the Medica . . .”

The memory sat between them, a living, breathing malevolence.

Keir’s assistant at the time of Aodhan’s rescue had been an angel named Remus. A healer held in high esteem and considered honorable. As such, all those who’d watched over Aodhan’s badly wounded body had taken Remus at his word when he’d told them that Aodhan was becoming stressed having them around all the time, that he needed space alone to heal.

Remus had made even Illium leave.

And then he’d whispered in Aodhan’s ear that Aodhan was a “broken doll” and that broken dolls needed masters. Lost in nightmares, Aodhan had nonetheless seen the man for the monster he was, and blanked him. Then Illium had caught Remus in the act—the end result of that had been a beating so bad that it had almost separated Remus’s head from his spine.

He would’ve died then and there if Aodhan hadn’t managed to call Illium back from the edge. His splintered bones and crushed organs, however, hadn’t been the end of Remus’s punishment. The instant he healed enough to walk, he was banished from the Refuge. The angel was a pariah among their kind, shunned and alone for all eternity.

But none of that erased what Remus had done, what he’d been.

“Remus was meant to be a healer. Keir, wise and perceptive, trusted him to look after me. And he did that? Try to break me? To make me into his puppet?”

Exhaling hard, he rose, his wing sliding out from under Illium’s. The sudden break in contact, the loss of the heavy warmth, it made his stomach clench, but he couldn’t sit still. Crossing to the mantel, he pressed his hands against the old and polished wood, staring down into the dance of the flames below. “It screwed me up for a long time.”

“Was that why you didn’t want me to touch you?” Illium asked, his voice gentle. “It’s okay if that’s how it was, Adi. I was never mad at you about that. I just wanted you to heal, any way it took.”

Aodhan swiveled, saw that Illium’s expression held no hurt, just worry . . . and love. A love that had stood beside Aodhan through time, through pain, through anger. “No,” he said very precisely. “You are one of the few people about whom I’ve never had a question in my mind.” No matter what else got screwed up between them, this, Aodhan would not do—ruin the trust that had bonded them since childhood.

So he told the truth, even though it scraped off his skin, left him raw and exposed. “I didn’t want you to touch me because I felt dirty and wrong and broken.”

Illium gripped at his own hair, his jaw clenched. “How could you—” A hiss of breath. “I want to shake you sometimes.” Releasing his abused hair, he took two deep breaths, then leaned back into the sofa. “Look at me, being all calm and civilized even though I’d rather wash your mouth out with soap.”

Aodhan felt his lips twitch. Such an unexpected moment of light in this walk into evil. So very Illium. “Your control is astonishing,” he said—and, if Illium wanted to shake him, he wanted to hold Illium right that moment.

The blue-winged angel had made this so much better, so much easier. “I know it was a stupid thing to think,” he muttered. “But I wasn’t exactly in a healthy mental space. Talking with the healers, that helped. And having Eh-ma around, ready to hold me at any time, that helped even more.”

Illium’s expression softened. “You permitted her touch because you knew she wouldn’t understand why you were flinching from her.”

“I think we both underestimated her, Blue. But yes, back then, that’s why I let her close even though I felt like I was contaminating her.” He’d had to fight every second not to pull away. “Then slowly, it became okay. She was Eh-ma and she was fractured, too, and it was all right.”

The heat from the fire glowed against his wings. “She was the reason I started to accept that while I wasn’t the same man I was before it all happened, being different wasn’t such a bad thing.

“The art I made after I could create again, it was different, too, and Eh-ma taught me that there was nothing wrong with that. ‘We grow, Aodhan’ she said to me. ‘Our scars change our brushstrokes.’?”

“She’s extraordinary, isn’t she?” Illium’s smile turned a little crooked. “Sometimes, I think that I must be biased, because I’m her son, but then I hear about another thing she’s done, and my pride expands all over again.

“Titus calls her his small but fierce sun, and she is that, don’t you think?” The light from the fire picked up the silver filaments in his feathers, this angel strong and courageous and as fierce a light in this world as his mother. “Even when she was at her most lost, she glowed with life and warmth.”

“Yes.” A simple answer, because it was all true. “But Eh-ma wasn’t the only reason I started to come back to myself.” He took a step toward Illium. “The—”